II
Important as they were, Grant's achievements in Mississippi took second place in public attention to events in the Virginia theater. The Union ultimately won the war mainly by victories in the West, but the Confederacy more than once came close to winning it in the East. During the spring and summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee scored his greatest success in this effort—followed by his greatest failure.
That Lee could take any initiative at all seemed unlikely in April 1863. Food and forage for his army were in such short supply that men hunted sassafras buds and wild onions to ward off scurvy while horses died for lack of grass. Longstreet had taken two divisions to confront
22. CWL, VI, 409. Lincoln's felicitous phrase was not entirely accurate, for Confederate guerrillas continued to vex Union traffic on the Mississippi.
23. CWL, VI, 230; T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York, 1952), 272.
Federal thrusts from Norfolk and the North Carolina coast. These Union movements amounted to little in the end, but Longstreet remained in southeast Virginia through April to harass the enemy and gather supplies from this unscarred region. Without these two divisions, Lee had only 60,000 men along the Rappahannock to watch double that number of bluecoats under their new and dynamic commander, Joseph Hooker. The Confederate cavalry had to disperse over a wide area to find grass for the horses, further weakening southern forces at a time when Hooker had reorganized his cavalry into a single corps better armed and mounted than Jeb Stuart's troopers. The days of easy rebel cavalry superiority were over.
Nevertheless, morale remained high in Confederate ranks, the supplies sent by Longstreet improved their rations, and the elaborate network of trenches they held along twenty-five miles of the Rappahannock near Fredericksburg gave them confidence that they could hold off any number of Yankees. But Hooker had no intention of assaulting those trenches. Having reinvigorated the Army of the Potomac after the Burn-side disasters, he planned a campaign of maneuver to force Lee into the open for a showdown fight. Brash and boastful, Hooker reportedly said: "May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none."24
For a few days at the end of April, Hooker seemed ready to make good his boast. He divided his large army into three parts. Ten thousand blue horsemen splashed across the Rappahannock far upstream and headed south to cut Lee's supply lines. Seventy thousand northern infantry also marched upriver to cross at fords several miles beyond Lee's left flank, while another 40,000 feigned an advance at Fredericksburg to hold Lee in place while the flanking force pitched into his left and rear. The Army of the Potomac carried out these complicated maneuvers swiftly. By the evening of April 30 Hooker had his 70,000 infantry near a crossroads mansion called Chancellorsville, nine miles west of Fredericksburg in the midst of a dense second-growth forest called locally the Wilderness. For once the Yankees had stolen a march on Lee and seemed to have the outnumbered rebels gripped in an iron pincers. "Our enemy must ingloriously fly," declared Hooker in a congratulatory order to his men, "or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him."25
Despite his nickname of Fighting Joe, Hooker seems to have expected—
24. Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, 232.
25. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 25, pt. 1, p. 171.
and hoped—that Lee would "ingloriously fly" rather than "give us battle." When Lee instead showed fight, Hooker mysteriously lost his nerve. Perhaps his resolve three months earlier to go on the wagon had been a mistake, for he seemed at this moment to need some liquid courage. Or perhaps a trait noted by a fellow officer in the old army had surfaced again: "Hooker could play the best game of poker I ever saw until it came to the point where he should go a thousand better, and then he would flunk."26 Whatever the reason, when Lee called his bet on May 1, Hooker gave up the initiative to the boldest of gamblers in this deadliest of games.
Guessing correctly that the main threat came from the Union troops at Chancellorsville, Lee left only 10,000 infantry under feisty Jubal Early to hold the Fredericksburg defenses, and put the rest on the march westward to the Wilderness on May 1. At mid-day they clashed with Hooker's advance units a couple of miles east of Chancellorsville. Here the dense undergrowth gave way to open country where the Federals' superior weight of numbers and artillery gave them an edge. But instead of pressing the attack, Hooker ordered his troops back to a defensive position around Chancellorsville—where the thick woods evened these odds. Thunderstruck, Union corps commanders protested but obeyed. Years later General Darius Couch of the 2nd Corps wrote that when Hooker informed him "that the advantages gained by the successive marches of his lieutenants were to culminate in fighting a defensive battle in that nest of thickets . . . I retired from his presence with the belief that my commanding general was a whipped man."27
Sensing his psychological edge, Lee decided to take the offensive despite being outnumbered nearly two to one. On the night of May 1, Jackson and Lee sat on empty hardtack boxes and conferred by firelight. The Federals' entrenched line on high ground around Chancellorsville seemed too strong for a direct assault. The Union left was anchored on the Rappahannock and could not be turned. While the two generals discussed how to get at "those people," Stuart brought reports from his scouts that Hooker's right flank was "in the air" three miles west of Chancellorsville. Here was the opportunity Lee needed, and Jackson was the man to seize it. The only problem was to find a route through the wilderness of scrub oak and thorny undergrowth by which a force could get around to this flank unobserved. One of Jackson's staff officers
26. Alexander K. McClure, Recollections of Half a Century (Salem, Mass., 1902), 348.
27. Couch, "The Chancellorsville Campaign," Battles and Leaders, III, 161.
solved this problem by finding a local resident to guide them along a track used to haul charcoal for an iron-smelting furnace.
Screened by Stuart's cavalry, Jackson's 30,000 infantry and artillery left early May 2 for a roundabout twelve-mile march to their attack position. Lee remained with only 15,000 men to confront Hooker's main force. This was the most daring gamble Lee had yet taken. Jackson's flank march across the enemy's front—one of the most dangerous maneuvers in war—left his strung-out column vulnerable to attack. Lee's holding force was likewise in great peril if Hooker should discover its weakness. And Early still faced nearly three times his numbers at Fredericksburg (from which Hooker had called one more corps to Chancel-lorsville). But Lee counted on Hooker doing nothing while Jackson completed his march; the Union commander fulfilled expectations.
Hooker could not blame his cavalry for failure to detect Jackson's maneuver, for he had sent nearly all of it away on a raid that threw a scare into Richmond but otherwise accomplished little. Besides, Federal infantry units spotted Jackson's movement and reported it to Hooker—who misinterpreted it. Two of Daniel Sickles's 3rd Corps divisions moved out and attacked the tail of Jackson's column. Sickles was a character of some notoriety, the only political general among Hooker's corps commanders, a prewar Tammany Democrat with a reputation for philandering. His wife, perhaps in revenge, had taken a lover whom Sickles shot dead on a Washington street in 1859. He was acquitted of murder after the first successful plea of temporary insanity in the history of American jurisprudence. Rising from colonel to major general in Hooker's old division, Sickles was one of the army commander's favorites. His probing attack on May 2 alerted Hooker to Jackson's movement toward the southwest. Fighting Joe momentarily wondered if the slippery Stonewall was up to his old flanking tricks, but the wishful thought that the rebels must "ingloriously fly" soon convinced him that Lee's whole army was retreating! Hooker therefore failed to prepare for the blow soon to fall on his right.
Commander of the 11th Corps holding the Union right was Oliver O. Howard, the opposite in every respect of Sickles. A West Point professional whose distinguished combat record included loss of an arm at Fair Oaks, Howard was a monogamous teetotaling Congregationalist known as the Christian Soldier. He had little in common with the German-American soldiers who constituted a large part of his corps. This "Dutch" corps, only 12,000 strong, had a poor reputation, having turned in mediocre performances under Frémont in the Shenandoah Valley and Franz Sigel at Second Bull Run. What happened at Chan-cellorsville did nothing to improve that reputation. All through the afternoon, alarmed pickets sent word to Howard that the rebels were building up to something off to the west. Howard assured Hooker that he was ready for an attack. Yet most of his regiments were facing south, for Howard considered the thick woods to the west impenetrable. And like Hooker he also thought that this enemy activity was designed to cover a retreat. As suppertime approached, many of Howard's troops were relaxing or cooking.
A few hundred yards to the west, Jackson's rugged veterans—their uniforms torn to worse tatters than usual by briars and brush—were deployed for attack at 5:15. Coming through the woods from the west on a front two miles wide and three divisions deep, the yelling rebels hit the south-facing Union regiments endwise and knocked them down like tenpins. Despite wild confusion, some of the 11th Corps brigades and batteries maintained discipline and fought desperately, slowing the Confederate advance but being forced in the end to join the stampede of routed regiments fleeing to the rear. By dusk Jackson had rolled up the Union right for two miles before Howard and Hooker improvised a new line out of troops from four different corps to bring the jubilant but disorganized southerners to a halt. The two divisions remaining with Lee had joined the attack on their front. For several hours, sporadic and disordered fighting flared up in the moon-shadowed woods, with some units firing on their own men in one of the rare night actions of the Civil War.
Misfortune beyond the usual tragedies of war struck the Confederates during this moonlit melee. Determined to keep the Yankees on the run, Jackson and several officers rode ahead of their lines to reconnoiter for a renewed attack. Returning at a trot, they were fired on by nervous rebels who mistook them for Union cavalry. Jackson fell with two bullets in his left arm, which had to be amputated. Stuart took command of his corps and led it well for the rest of the battle. But the loss of Jackson proved to be permanent and irreparable. Pneumonia set in, and the inimitable Stonewall died eight days later.
The morning after Jackson's wounding, May 3, saw the crisis of the battle. Some of the war's hardest fighting took place on two fronts separated by nine miles. During the night Hooker had ordered "Uncle" John Sedgwick (so named by his men for his avuncular manner), commander of the 6th Corps at Fredericksburg, to carry the heights back of the town and push on toward Lee's rear at Chancellorsville. At daybreak
Uncle John hurled his three divisions against the trenches and the stone wall below Marye's Heights where Burnside's troops had come to grief the previous December. History appeared to repeat itself as Jubal Early's division threw them back twice. But on the third try, in one of the war's few genuine bayonet charges, the first wave of blue attackers carried the heights, captured a thousand prisoners, and sent the rebels flying.
Meanwhile Hooker at Chancellorsville had remained strangely passive, seeming to expect Sedgwick to do all the army's offensive fighting. Hooker had even ordered Sickles's corps to fall back at dawn from a salient on high ground at Hazel Grove, a mile west of the Chancellorsville crossroads. This allowed Lee and Stuart to reunite the two wings of their army and to mass their artillery at Hazel Grove, one of the few places in the Wilderness where it could be used effectively. The Confederates pressed an all-out attack on the three corps holding the immediate area around Chancellorsville. Hooker kept three other Union corps idle despite openings for them to fall on Lee's flanks. Hooker seemed in a daze even before a cannonball hit his headquarters and knocked him unconscious in mid-morning. He recovered in time to retain command—a pity, in the eyes of several subordinates, who had hoped that the ranking corps commander would take charge and launch a counterattack. Instead, Hooker ordered withdrawal a mile or two northward to a contracted defensive line.
The exhausted but exultant rebels, who had fought with an elan unprecedented even in this victorious army, cheered wildly as Lee rode into the clearing around the burning Chancellor mansion. It was the Virginian's greatest triumph—but the battle was not yet over. While the two armies around Chancellorsville broke off fighting as if by mutual consent to rescue hundreds of wounded men threatened by brush fires started by exploding shells, Lee received word of Sedgwick's breakthrough at Fredericksburg. Here was a serious threat to his rear even though Hooker seemed cowed in his front. Without hesitation Lee dispatched a division which blunted Sedgwick's advance near a country church midway between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Next day Lee took yet another division from his front to attack Sedgwick. This left only 25,000 Confederates under Stuart to face Hooker's 75,000, but Lee seemed to know that his benumbed adversary would remain passive. In the late afternoon of May 4 a disjointed attack by 21,000 rebels against Sedgwick's equal force was repulsed. Aware that Hooker had given up, however, Sedgwick pulled his troops back over the Rappahan-nock during the night.
At a council of war that same night, a majority of the Union corps commanders with Hooker voted to counterattack. True to form, Hooker disregarded this vote and decided to retreat across the river. The Army of the Potomac accomplished this difficult task during a rainstorm the next night. Aggressive as ever, Lee had planned another assault on the morning of May 6 and expressed regret, as he had done the previous summer, that the Federals escaped destruction. But by any standard he had won an astounding victory, recognized as such in both North and South. Without Longstreet and with little more than half as many men as an enemy that had initially outmaneuvered him, Lee had grasped the initiative, gone over to the attack, and had repeatedly divided and maneuvered his forces in such a way as to give them superiority or equality of numbers at the point of attack. Like a rabbit mesmerized by the gray fox, Hooker was frozen into immobility and did not use half his power at any time in the battle.
The triumph at Chancellorsville, however, came at great cost. The Confederates suffered 13,000 casualties, 22 percent of their force (the Union figures were 17,000 and 15 percent). The most grievous loss was Jackson, who had done so much to make the victory possible. And the boost that the battle gave to southern morale proved in the end harmful, for it bred an overconfidence in their own prowess and a contempt for the enemy that led to disaster. Believing his troops invincible, Lee was about to ask them to do the impossible.
During the battle Lincoln haunted the War Department telegraph office. For several days he received only fragmentary and contradictory reports. When the truth became clear on May 6, the president's face turned "ashen," according to a newspaperman who was present. "My God! my God!" exclaimed Lincoln. "What will the country say?" It said plenty, all of it bad. Copperheads saw in the outcome further proof, if any was necessary, that the North could never cobble the Union together by force. Republicans expressed despair. "Lost, lost, all is lost!" cried Charles Sumner when he heard the news.28
Northern morale descended into the slough of despond in the spring of 1863. Reports of Grant's advances in Mississippi were slow in coming and uncertain in meaning, especially after the failure of assaults at Vicksburg on May 19 and 22. Rosecrans had done nothing in middle Tennessee since his bloody and ambiguous New Year's victory at Stones
28. Noah Brooks, Washington in Lincoln's Time (New York, 1896), 57–58; Diary of Gideon Welles, ed. Howard K. Beale, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), I, 293.
River. On April 7 an attack on Fort Sumter by eight supposedly irresistible Monitors had been repulsed in a manner that gave the Union navy a black eye. The attack had been the first step in an effort to capture Charleston, whose symbolic significance was greater than its strategic importance. The failure of the Monitors proved again that these ironclads could take an enormous amount of punishment but that their offensive punch was limited. Rebel artillery got off more than 2,200 shots, scoring some 440 hits on the eight ships and sinking only one. But most of the Monitors suffered damage to their gun turrets that limited their firing capacity, and the fleet was able to get off only 140 shots and inflict limited damage with about forty hits. The high hopes for naval conquest of the citadel of secession were dashed. Union army troops began a slow, frustrating, and ultimately unsuccessful advance along the coastal islands and through the swamps in an attempt to starve or pound Charleston into submission.