After Chickamauga, the Army of Tennessee settled onto the heights around Chattanooga to starve out the Union army inside. It did not work. Grant arrived in October, opened a supply line, and gathered reinforcements. By late November he was ready to break the siege.
On the night of November 24, Strahl's brigade climbed onto Missionary Ridge. The 4th and 5th Tennessee were placed in a line of rifle pits about two hundred yards down the slope, as a reserve behind the skirmishers of the 31st and 33rd Tennessee. About three o'clock on the afternoon of the 25th, the Union army came across the valley in three lines of battle. Carlin's brigade of Johnson's division was coming straight at them.
They held their fire until the skirmishers fell back past them. Then, Luke Finlay wrote, three hundred rifles opened on the advancing Federals, and the line broke. A Union color bearer stepped out to rally his men; Private W. C. King, the regiment's best shot, was told to bring him down, and he fell forward onto his flag. When the color parties of the broken regiments tried to gather their men off to the right, the 4th turned its fire on them and scattered them too.
But the Federals were climbing the ridge on both sides of them, and the order came to fall back to the crest. Not a man had been badly hurt in the rifle pits. Nearly a third were killed or wounded going up the slope, though they kept turning to fire on the way. At the top they fought on until the Union troops broke through to their right and began to come in on their flank. With the brigade alone on that part of the ridge, General Strahl ordered it off. The 4th and 5th Tennessee lost 63 men, most of them on the climb to the crest.
The army fell back into Georgia. The 4th helped cover the retreat, wading Chickamauga Creek on a cold November morning, and reached Dalton on November 29, where it went into winter quarters.
The Wigfall Grays at Missionary Ridge. Joe Pullison was wounded and captured. R. C. Smith and C. Wiley were wounded. Corporal Merritt Brown was present.
Sources: Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park tablet, Strahl's Brigade, Missionary Ridge; Luke W. Finlay, "Fourth Tennessee Infantry," Military Annals of Tennessee (1886); Tennesseans in the Civil War (1964); compiled service record of Merritt R. Brown, National Archives; Morton Museum of Collierville History, master roster of the Wigfall Grays.
The story of Corporal Merritt R. Brown, the Wigfall Grays and their town is told in An Honor Unearned: From the Streets of Collierville, Tennessee, to Edgefield, South Carolina, by Michael Louis Meece. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. More about the book at anhonorunearned.org.