Charles Selin Davis
Captain Charles Selin Davis died after the Battle of Ringgold Gap, in northwest Georgia. The battle, also called Taylor’s Ridge, was really more of a heavy skirmish when compared to other Civil War engagements. But the Union men who survived it noted that this was a particularly nasty affair.
The battle took place on November 27, 1863. The Union force was under the command of Joseph Hooker, whose orders were to push the Confederates, under Patrick Cleburne, from their perch on a high ridge above a key railroad line. The Confederates had just been beaten badly at the Battle of Missionary Ridge, forcing them from their positions around Chattanooga and into northern Georgia. If they could hold Ringgold Gap for another day, they had a chance to get much-needed supplies and artillery southward to safety before the Union controlled the entire territory.
As captain of Company G of the 147th Pennsylvania infantry, Davis was in command on the extreme left flank of the Union line. (34.923697, -85.099465) The brigade of which his regiment was part launched the final attack of the day, and it was as unsuccessful as the rest. The men charged up a steep ravine that brought them into contact with troops from Tennessee, Arkansas, and Alabama on their front and both flanks. A survivor of the assault later wrote that the killed and wounded rolled back down the hill, such was the steepness of the ravine.
The journalist Charles Dana, working for the War Department as an investigator/correspondent, argued that the ferocity of the fight was purely Hooker’s fault. Dana called Hooker’s choice to attack the ridge frontally, instead of via a flanking maneuver, the “first great fault” of the Union’s breakout of Chattanooga. Roughly 500 men were killed, wounded, or missing at the end of the fight, and Dana stated that “there was no necessity of losing 50.” Henry Hayward, who had fought farther down the line in the 28th Pennsylvania, wrote “I experienced more fear & dread at Taylors Ridge than at either Chancellorsville, Antietam, or Gettysburgh” [sic].
When Grant reported to Union General-in-Chief Henry Halleck about the engagement, he was brief: “a severe fight, in which we lost heavily in valuable officers and men.” Hooker reported 65 men dead. The 37-year-old Captain Davis died in a field hospital after being carried from the ridge.