Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (61 page)

At first Lincoln thought he had found such a man in another of McClellan’s corps commanders, Major General Ambrose Burnside. A floridly bewhiskered, six-foot-tall midwesterner, Burnside was admired by one reporter as “the very
beau ideal
of a soldier.” A West Point graduate of 1847, Burnside had served briefly in the Mexican War (he arrived the day Mexico City fell, so he saw no action) and then resigned from the army in 1853 to go into the arms business, where he patented a breech-loading rifle known as the Burnside carbine. When the war broke out, he was appointed to command the 1st Rhode Island Volunteers and led the expedition that captured Roanoke Island in February 1862. The Roanoke Island expedition made Burnside’s reputation as an aggressive leader, and when McClellan’s Peninsula campaign collapsed that July, Lincoln offered Burnside command of the Army of the Potomac on the spot. But Burnside had known McClellan since West Point, counted him as a friend, and felt too much personal gratitude to McClellan for past favors to take advantage of McClellan’s failure. By November, however, there was no question that McClellan had to leave the army, and Burnside reluctantly obeyed Lincoln’s summons to replace him.
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That reluctance should have warned Lincoln that all was not what it seemed with Burnside. Despite the reputation he had won as a fighter in the Roanoke expedition, Burnside was actually hesitant and unsure of himself as a general, and the higher he ascended the ladder of command responsibilities, the more hesitant and unsure he grew. At Antietam, McClellan had ordered Burnside to send the four divisions of Burnside’s 9th Corps across a bridge on the Antietam Creek and attack Lee’s right flank. Burnside found getting across the creek and across the bridge far more difficult than anyone had imagined, and not until after noon did the Federals finally storm across and drive off the thin curtain of Confederate skirmishers who had been defending it. He then paused for two hours to straighten out the alignment of his divisions, allowing just enough time for a full Confederate division under A. P. Hill to arrive pell-mell from Harpers Ferry and knock the 9th Corps back to the creek. Caution and uncertainty caused Burnside to throw away a golden opportunity to crush Lee’s army, and he escaped criticism only because so much of Lincoln’s disappointed wrath after Antietam was poured out on McClellan’s head instead. Replacing McClellan with Burnside, Lincoln imagined, would give the Army of the Potomac an aggressive commander, but it would also placate any unrest among McClellan’s stalwarts in the senior officer ranks by selecting someone who was supposed to be one of McClellan’s friends.
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Burnside was aware that despite the lateness of the year, Lincoln and the War Department would expect him to mount a campaign as soon as possible to make up for the time McClellan had wasted in the fall. He also understood that there would be no patience with any plans for another flanking campaign down to the James River peninsula, with a careful and bloodless siege of Richmond. Lincoln wanted confrontation and he wanted it now, and anything less than a head-on overland drive would be interpreted politically as weakness of will. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, not Richmond, must be the real object of attack. So within a week of taking over the Army of the Potomac, Burnside called the army’s major generals together and unveiled his plan. Abandoning McClellan’s James River route, he would march overland, cross the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg, and draw Lee into a knock-down, drag-out fight in the flat country somewhere between Fredericksburg and Richmond. Since the bridges across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg had been destroyed as the city changed hands through 1862, Burnside would surprise Lee by building bridges of pontoon boats there, and be on the south side of the Rappahannock before Lee knew what was happening.
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The critical point in this plan was getting across the Rappahannock quickly, for if Lee got wind of what was going on and moved the Army of Northern Virginia to Fredericksburg first, the Army of the Potomac would have to fight its way across the Rappahannock and out of Fredericksburg at a decided disadvantage. Unhappily for Burnside, this was precisely what happened. Although Burnside took only three days, from November 14 to November 17, to march the Army of the Potomac down to the Rappahannock opposite Fredericksburg, his pontoons were nowhere to be found. By the time the first elements of Burnside’s pontoon train finally arrived from Washington on November 24, Lee had frantically assembled the scattered parts of the Army of Northern Virginia and dug them in along a ridge known as Marye’s Heights, just below Fredericksburg, covering the approaches south toward Richmond. Burnside had lost the advantage of surprise.
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In any other circumstances, a commander of the Army of the Potomac would have been well advised to give up the campaign as lost and gone into winter quarters until spring brought fairer weather. Burnside was under too much pressure from Washington to stop now, though, and as if to prove that he really was the aggressive general everyone thought he was, Burnside ordered the river crossing forced and the pontoon bridges built under fire. Remarkably, his soldiers and engineers pulled it off, and by December 12, 1862, a shaky trio of bridges was thrown over the
Rappahannock through a curtain of harassing rebel fire, and the town of Fredericksburg was secured. But the Confederates remained on the heights beyond the town. Burnside planned to tackle them on December 13 by staging a large-scale demonstration in front of Marye’s Heights, while swinging a third of his army around Lee’s right flank.
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Planning an operation of this scale, however, proved beyond Burnside’s grasp. The flanking maneuver was checked by “Stonewall” Jackson, and, as if to annihilate all memory of any hesitancy at Antietam, Burnside ended up making not one or two but
six
perfectly formed but ghastly frontal assaults on Marye’s Heights. From behind a stone wall at the foot of the heights, the Confederates mowed down the thick, slow-moving Federal formations all day, until more than 12,000 Union soldiers were dead or wounded, 6,000 of them piled in front of Marye’s Heights alone. “We had to advance over a level plane, and their batteries being on high ground and they being behind breastworks, we had no chance at them, while they could take as deliberate aim as a fellow would at a chicken,” wrote George Washington Whitman to his brother three weeks after the battle, “The range was so short, that they threw percussion shells into our ranks that would drop at our feet and explode, killing and wounding Three or four every pop.” The next day Burnside wanted to make one more attack, which he would lead personally, but his disgusted corps commanders talked him out of it.
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Burnside withdrew to the north bank of the Rappahannock, hoping for a second chance to get at Lee. However, when he started a new campaign on January 20, 1863, to get across the Rappahannock several miles further west, winter rains turned the roads into bottomless morasses, and Burnside’s infamous “Mud March” slopped to a halt. It “was the meanest… the most ‘ornery’ time the Army of the Potomac ever had,” remembered one Maine captain. “For mud, rain, cold, whiskey drowned-out men, horses, mules, and abandoned wagons and batteries, for pure unadulterated demoralization… this took the cake.” With soldiers demoralized and deserting in record numbers, with most of Burnside’s corps commanders publicly criticizing his ineptitude, Lincoln had no choice but to relieve Burnside.
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Lincoln’s second choice for a general for the Army of the Potomac was yet another soldier with a reputation for aggressiveness, Major General Joseph Hooker, a handsome, happy-go-lucky brawler with an alcoholic’s red nose and an awesome command of old army profanity. By appointing Hooker Lincoln showed that he
had lost patience with the army’s McClellan loyalists, since Hooker was one of the few anti-McClellan officers in the upper echelons of the Army of the Potomac and one of the even fewer to have endorsed the Emancipation Proclamation. He was also a surprisingly good administrator, and he spent the first three months of 1863 restoring the shattered morale and organization of the Army of the Potomac until, by April 1863, Hooker was able to invite Lincoln down to the army’s camps on the Rappahannock for a grand review. While Hooker was an uncommon organizer and a popular division and corps commander, there was some question in the mind of Darius Couch, the senior corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, about whether he possessed “the weight of character” needed to “take charge of that army.” Hooker was, in fact, a braggart and a show-off. Henry Slocum, who commanded the 12th Corps in the Army of the Potomac, had “no faith whatever in Hooker’s ability as a military man, in his integrity or honor.” Instead, “whiskey, boasting, and vilification have been his stock in trade.” Nevertheless, Hooker deliberately played up to the press to swell his image as a stern, remorseless campaigner, and he reveled in the nickname the newspapers happily bestowed upon him, “Fighting Joe.”
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Despite the image, Hooker grew unsteady and unsure under pressure. “He could play the best game of poker I ever saw,” commented Hooker’s chief of cavalry, George Stoneman, “until it came to the point where he should go a thousand better, and then he would flunk.” Far worse than this, Hooker was also grasping and loyal only to his own ambitions. “Gen. Hooker,” wrote Colonel Theodore Gates of the 20th New York, “is reputed a very ambitious & some what unscrupulous man.” Hooker had privately damned McClellan behind the general’s back to members of the Cabinet, and undercut Burnside’s authority so often by criticism and innuendo that the normally placid Burnside beseeched Lincoln to have Hooker court-martialed for insubordination. He liked to hear himself talk, whether it was about how he intended to thrash Lee—“May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none”—or how the country needed to get serious about winning the war and, like the old Roman republic, create a temporary dictatorship to finish things up.
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Lincoln struggled to bring Hooker to heel by reminding him that it was only with serious reservations that he had been appointed to command the Army of the Potomac. “I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator,” wrote Lincoln in a letter he quietly handed to Hooker after summoning the general to the White House to appoint him as commander of the Army of the Potomac.

Of course it was not
for
this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. … I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the Army, of criticizing their Commander, and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you.
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Hooker now proceeded to confirm every one of those reservations. To begin with, his plans were little more than a variation on Burnside’s: the Army of the Potomac would again attempt to cross the Rappahannock and force a fight with the Army of Northern Virginia above Richmond. Since the Fredericksburg crossing was obviously too dangerous, Hooker left two of his infantry corps opposite Fredericksburg as decoys under Major General John Sedgwick and actually crossed the Rappahannock about twelve miles to the west with his remaining five corps (between 70,000 and 80,000 men). In theory, this would bring the bulk of the Army of the Potomac across the Rappahannock and down onto Lee’s left flank at Fredericksburg before the Confederates could act; Lee would be forced to fight pinned against the Rappahannock or else fall back on Richmond. In that case, Hooker trumpeted, “our enemy must either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his defences and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him.”
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When Hooker crossed the Rappahannock on April 29, 1863, the country on the other side of the river turned out to be a dark, unsettled tangle of woods and scrub underbrush, crisscrossed by few usable roads. Hooker plunged firmly into this impassable and spooky terrain, known as the Wilderness, and within twenty-four hours had managed to penetrate all the way to a little country crossroads called Chancellorsville (which was not much of a town at all, but actually a large, rambling hostelry owned by the Chancellor family). “This is splendid,” cried George G. Meade, the commander of the 5th Corps, “Hurrah for old Joe; we are on Lee’s flank, and he does not know it.” If Slocum and the 12th Corps would “take the Plank Road toward Fredericksburg,” Meade claimed, “I’ll take the Pike, or vice versa, as you prefer, and we’ll get out of this Wilderness” and hit Lee before he knew what was coming. Hooker’s real plan was nothing so venturesome. He hoped that his advance through the Wilderness would entice Lee to attack
him
rather the other way round, and so Hooker decided over the protests of his corps commanders to entrench the army around Chancellorsville. Slocum was aghast: “Nobody but a crazy man would give such an order when we have victory in sight!” But Hooker was convinced that “I have got Lee just where I want him; he must fight me on my own ground.” So he waited
to see what would happen—which was usually a fatal thing to do in the vicinity of Robert E. Lee.
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Lee had been as surprised by Hooker’s move as by Burnside’s back in December, but he took full advantage of Hooker’s hesitancy the same way as he had of Burnside’s difficulty with his pontoon bridge. While Hooker pulled back to Chancellorsville, Lee left only a thin line of Confederate troops to guard Fredericksburg and pulled the rest over to confront Hooker in the Wilderness. He had only 43,000 men (one entire corps of the Army of Northern Virginia was absent on detached service) to face Hooker. Yet Lee scarcely hesitated before throwing the single most dramatic gamble of the Civil War. Dividing his already understrength army into two parts, he yielded to the prompting of “Stonewall” Jackson to allow him to march his 29,000-man corps entirely around the right flank of Hooker’s army and use the advantage of surprise to crumple Hooker’s line like a piece of paper.
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