Rebel guns now were firing from a distance of hardly more than five hundred yards. This was canister range, and the Rebel gunners were chocking their guns to the muzzle with anything they could lay their hands on, including some twelve-inch pieces of old railway iron which they happened to have with them. Amid the whirring fragments that filled the air there was a file which struck in a tree beside General Caldwell. The general looked at it coolly and was quite unable to resist the temptation to remark to his staff that this was real file firing.
28
The parallel lines of Hancock's eleven regiments were being hit from in front, from the rear, and from the flank.
Into an orchard in the open space between the lines came Lieutenant Stevens with the 5th Maine battery, unlimbering and going into action in desperate haste. Confederate guns from all around the arc opened on the battery with fury, getting the exact range at once, exploding shells overhead, firing canister and solid shot to hit just short and go ricocheting in off the hard ground at waist height.
Horses were killed, caissons blew up, limber chests were smashed, men were slain, and Stevens made his gun crews fire slowly so that every shot would count, with half the guns detailed to fire at Rebel artillery and the other half under orders to shoot only at infantry. Ammunition ran low and the battery was a wreck. Stevens was down, all the officers were down, and Couch detailed an officer of regulars, Lieutenant Kirby of the 1st U. S. Artillery, to come in and take charge. Kirby went down with a mortal wound and was carried to the rear. (He survived in hospital for a fortnight and did not die before he received a lieutenant colonel's commission from Abraham Lincoln in recognition of his valor.)
29
The dusty plain around the crossroads was covered with smoke from the guns and the exploding shell and the burning woods. The old mansion was all aflame, and a dense blanket of fumy, stifling smoke from the pine thickets was rolling across the open space, where the men and equipment for whom Hancock's men were buying time moved to the rear. In the thickets, wounded men were burned to death, and corpses were consumed, and all the debris left behind by retreating troops took fire. A fearsome stench came down with the smoke, and a Confederate brigadier leading troops up to the clearing wrote: "The dead and dying of the enemy could be seen on all sides enveloped in flames, and the ground on which we formed was so hot as at first to be disagreeable to our feet." A Federal officer noted soberly: "Fortunate were those that had to die, that they did so before the holocaust began," and cavalry far in the rear could see great plumes of soiled white smoke rising from the reeking woodland.
30
It was getting on toward noon now, and Confederate troops were sweeping out into the open around Fairview Cemetery, setting up an enormous cheer, Lee himself visible in their midst. Hancock's guns were out of ammunition and almost out of men, and word came up from headquarters that he could leave now—the army was established in its new lines closer to the river. The advanced skirmish line where Miles had taken his wound came back first, withdrawing in good order except for a few companies which missed their direction and marched smack into the middle of the Confederate advance and were captured.
It was time to get the guns out, but most of the horses were gone and hardly any gunners were left. Hancock sent to the rear for a detail of infantry, and men from the Irish Brigade came up to the wrecked battery. The Irishmen found just one gun left in action, directed by a corporal who was firing his last shot. All of the battery's limber chests had either been exploded by enemy action or were now empty. If the guns got out they would have to be taken out by hand, and so prolonges were attached—long ropes fastened to the trails of the gun carriages, the men tailing onto the ropes three dozen at a time—and the lumbering, ungainly weapons were hauled slowly to the rear. Rebel skirmishers were barely 150 yards away when the guns began to move.
Now the infantry could leave—and high time, too, with the Rebel fire heavier than ever and enemy skirmishers coming in for pot shots at point-blank range. When the word to retire came through, the outfit nearest the enemy about-faced and started off at a trot. Hancock, who always saw everything, spotted them and came storming over at a gallop to demand: "Why are these men running?" Immediately the regiment slowed down to a walk, and at a walk the men left the field. One man who made this march admitted afterward that although they went out at a walk it was a good
brisk
walk.
31
The new lines covered a wide angle of ground enclosing the Rappahannock bridgehead, and the flanks were firmly anchored, left flank running down to the Rappahannock and right flank running clear to the Rapidan. Hooker had more than enough troops, seventy thousand altogether, a good half of whom had not been in action, and his trench line was substantial. On the right and left the Confederates followed with inquisitive patrols, probing forward through the Wilderness to find out just where the new Yankee line might be.
In the center, coming from the Chancellorsville crossroads, a solid mass of Rebels was advancing as if Lee planned to break through the angle by sheer weight and drive the whole Union Army into the river. This part of the line was held by Meade, and he rode up to his divisional commander, General Charles Griffin, pointed to the approaching enemy column, and told him to drive it back.
Griffin was an old artillerist, one of the numerous excellent generals contributed to the Union Army by the regular artillery, and he still liked his guns. (One of his men once remarked that Griffin would have run his guns out on the skirmish line if he had been allowed to.) He now asked Meade if he might use artillery instead of infantry to check the Rebels. Meade told him that would be all right if he thought gunfire alone would do the job.
To an old gunner there could be just one answer to that.
"I'll make 'em think hell isn't half a mile off!" cried Griffin. He wheeled a dozen guns up into line. Dismounting, he told the gunners to load with double charges of canister, to wait until the assaulting column was within fifty yards, "and then roll 'em along the ground like this," stooping and swinging his arm forward like a bowler. The gunners did as directed. The head of the Confederate column was smashed in, and the rest drew back. For the time being, at least, the army was safe.
32
Indeed, the high command that afternoon seems to have nourished some final shred of hope that perhaps a victory was being won. Half an hour after noon, with the army snugged down at last in this purely defensive position, Quartermaster General Rufus Ingalls wired an encouraging progress report to Dan Butterfield, who was back at the old headquarters at Falmouth:
"I think we have had the most terrible battle ever witnessed on earth. I think our victory will be certain, but the general told me he would say nothing just yet to Washington, except that he is doing well. In an hour or two the matter will be a fixed fact. I believe the enemy is in flight now, but we are not sure."
33
3. Go Boil Your Shirt
Out in front the Wilderness smoldered, and a drizzling rain dampened the thickets and caused the smoke to drift in heavy spiritless clouds that hung low over the woodlands. Hooker's men held a line in the shape of a vast horseshoe, five miles or more from end to end, cleverly posted on high grourfd with ravines and bogs in front. Throughout the night the men were kept busy digging dirt and felling trees, and by the morning of May 4 the entire line was fortified. There were trenches four feet deep, with a solid breastwork of logs and earth facing the Rebels, heavy slashing of fallen timber out in front, a "head log" lying atop the breastworks with a four-inch slot under it for the riflemen. Brigadier General Thomas Kane, who as a patriotic amateur had helped organize the famed Bucktails in the first summer of the war and who now capably led a brigade in Slocum's corps, noted that "any force that the nature of the ground would allow the enemy to bring against us would meet with a certain and disastrous repulse," and said that his men were confident of success and were looking forward to a renewal of the fighting. In a letter to his wife Hancock wrote that "the battle is not through yet by a long ways."
Yet the fighting was not renewed. The Confederates pushed skirmishers forward, and there was a bit of long-range artillery fire, but for the most part the army sat in its trenches, peered out at a dull inactive landscape of charred brush and smoking flatlands, and waited to see what would happen next. Far away to the east there was a sound of gunfire, but nothing much seemed to come of it. Rain came down harder, and in places the trenches were flooded so badly that details were put to work cutting gaps in the breastworks so that the water might drain away.
1
Hooker had left General John Sedgwick and his overstrength VI Corps at Fredericksburg to beguile the foe, and when disaster took place around the Chancellorsville crossroads Hooker sent word that Sedgwick must advance, brushing aside any Rebels who opposed him, and come over to join the rest of the army. Sedgwick had close to twenty-five thousand men, and on paper his job looked easy: one quick lunge up over the heights back of Fredericksburg and then a straight hike of ten or twelve miles to Hooker's lines, and the job would be done. In actual practice, as Sedgwick realized perhaps too well, it was far from simple.
Lee had left Jubal Early, the army's reserve artillery, and some ten thousand infantry to oppose Sedgwick's passage, and Early was a stubborn character who never retreated unless he had to. He had his men dug in along the line which had proved so impregnable when Burnside assaulted it the previous December, and although this line now was held by a skeleton force, the memory of the December tragedy was strong and Sedgwick was very cautious. He got his men up through town, sparred at long range during most of the morning, and at last sent ten regiments out across the Fredericksburg plain, over the ground where so many men had died in the last great battle.
Early's men were posted on Marye's Heights and in the sunken road, and they proposed to stay there. The Federals charged twice and were driven back with losses, and for a time it looked as if this particular nut would be just as hard to crack as it had been when all of Lee's army was on hand. The 5th Wisconsin was finally shaken out as a skirmish line, and its Colonel Allen, who commanded the advanced column of assault, addressed the men briefly: "When the signal
forward
is given you will advance at double-quick. You will not fire a gun, and you will not stop until you get the order to halt. You will never get that order."
2
The men raised a cheer and went in on the run, the rest of the assaulting column at their heels. The charge wavered when it got close to the wall. Rebel defenders here were few, compared with last December, but they were firing fast and the position was all but invulnerable. Then the Federals at the right of the line swept in through a complex of kitchen gardens and board fences, vaulted over the wall, bayoneted the men who barred the way, and got a killing enfilade fire on the rest.
3
The surviving Confederates fled, guns were abandoned, and five months after Burnside had first imagined it the United States flag waved on top of the heights and this part of the battle had been won.
Sedgwick paused and took thought: plain, unassuming, weathered John Sedgwick, greatly liked by his troops, broad-shouldered and heavy-framed, an unmilitary-looking character with muddy boots, red shirt under his blue coat, old slouched black hat on his head, and a tangled brown beard, one of the best of the Yankee generals but not the man for daring decisions and rapid movement.
4
If he pursued Early's beaten detachment he might be able to wipe it out, but his orders said that he was to move straight on to Chancellors-ville, and anyway, he had no cavalry to beat the bushes for fleeing enemies, so he reorganized his command and put it on the turnpike. He was methodical about it, and today he was being very cautious, and the afternoon was well along when he finally got the column moving.
If Hooker had been wide awake now Lee's army might have been crushed, but all of this was happening only a few hours after Hooker had been stunned by the cannon ball which fractured the pillar on the Chancellorsville mansion, and while Sedgwick's corps was tramping forward along the turnpike Hooker was meekly pulling his seventy thousand men back into the bridgehead entrenchments and was leaving Sedgwick to look out for himself. As a natural result, Lee posted a detachment to watch Hooker's trenches and took most of his army back to deal with this new threat to his rear.
Sedgwick's leading division ran into the Rebel battle line at Salem Church, half a dozen miles east of Hooker's inactive army. The division attacked gallantly and for a few moments had things all its own way. But Sedgwick had opened the fight without waiting for the rest of his corps to come up. The attacking division found itself outnumbered, and before long it was splintered and broken and forced to retreat, with the balance of Sedgwick's command reaching the field just in time to round up stragglers and form a new defensive line. When night came down the men found themselves drawn up in a ragged quadrangle near Banks Ford with Rebels on three sides of them and the river on the fourth, and the big question was not whether they could get to Chancellorsville to help Hooker but whether they themselves could get out of this fix without being captured in a body.