This Great Struggle (35 page)

Hooker had boasted publicly all winter of what he would do when he finally got at the enemy. “May God have mercy on General Lee,” he had blustered, “for I shall have none.” Now, as for the first time his main army came to grips with Lee’s, Hooker began to wilt. From his headquarters, located at a Wilderness crossroads called Chancellorsville, the rest of that day and throughout most of the next proceeded a stream of messages to his corps commanders, alternately urging them to assume strong defensive positions and to be prepared to pursue the enemy, who, Hooker asserted, must soon retreat. Hooker may have hoped that Lee would stage a doomed frontal assault like the one the Federals themselves had launched at Fredericksburg or, better yet, that the Confederate commander would see the futility of the situation and retreat without fighting at all. The Army of the Potomac’s commander, who had always had a reputation for aggressiveness, now confused the advantages of the tactical defensive with the helplessness of complete passivity.

Feeding Hooker’s wishful thinking that Lee would soon go away were reports on May 2 from one of his favorite generals, Third Corps commander Daniel Sickles. A Tammany Hall politician, Sickles had finagled a general’s commission in the army when the war had broken out. His previous claims to fame had been a censure by the New York state legislature for escorting a notorious prostitute into its chambers and later an acquittal, on the nation’s first-ever plea of temporary insanity, after ambushing and fatally shooting his wife’s paramour. After Sickles had joined the army, he had gotten along well with Hooker since both men’s tastes in recreation ran to whiskey and prostitutes. As the Army of the Potomac waited in its new defensive position in the depths of the Wilderness to see what its commander or the enemy would decide to do next, Sickles sent several dispatches to Hooker’s headquarters claiming that, through gaps in the foliage created by the scanty local road network, he and his men had actually seen the Rebel army moving in retreat. Hooker ordered him to pursue, and Sickles probed forward and skirmished ineffectively with a Confederate column moving along one of the few, narrow woodland tracks in the area.

In fact what Sickles had seen and briefly encountered was not a retreat at all but one of the boldest offensive movements in American military history. Lee had thrown away the tactical rulebook, figuratively speaking, and for the second time in as many days had divided his army in the face of a much larger enemy force. This time Lee sent Stonewall Jackson with 70 percent of the Army of Northern Virginia’s remaining available troops on a roundabout march along little-known roads that Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, some of them local boys, had discovered, leading to a position squarely athwart the Army of the Potomac’s right flank. There by the late afternoon of May 2 Jackson had, with much difficulty in the dense underbrush, deployed his twenty-eight-thousand-man corps ready to launch a flank attack on the unsuspecting troops of Hooker’s flank, which Stuart had assured Jackson and Lee was “in the air,” that is, not anchored on any natural feature such as a river. The Union officers, thinking the tangled thickets of the Wilderness impassable for a military formation, considered them a sufficient anchor.

Jackson struck at about 5:30 p.m., and the Union flank crumpled. Over the next two hours Jackson’s men advanced two miles and took four thousand prisoners as one Federal unit after another struggled desperately to redeploy in the thickets and face the attackers, only to be engulfed and overrun by Jackson’s yelling Rebels, beating their way steadily forward through the brush. By nightfall the Confederates had paused to regroup. Their success had been phenomenal, but a substantial part of Hooker’s larger army still stood between Lee’s and Jackson’s separate Confederate forces, offering the Union commander the opportunity to inflict an annihilating defeat if he somehow regained his nerve.

Jackson hoped to forestall any such prospect and maintain Confederate momentum by launching a moonlight attack. With his staff he rode forward to see whether the new Union right was still “in the air” or whether the Yankees had succeeded in anchoring it to the Rapidan River. Jackson and his entourage completed their scout and turned back toward Confederate lines. As they approached along the narrow track between the darkened woods, nervous pickets (outpost guards), several hundred yards down the battle line from them, exchanged a few shots, a common occurrence when the armies lay only a short distance apart at night. This time, as was also not usual, the outburst of firing by the pickets set off a general volley that rolled along the main battle line for several hundred yards as jittery soldiers fired blindly into the darkness whence they suddenly suspected the foe might be approaching. Caught only a few dozen yards downrange, Jackson’s entourage was riddled. Several officers fell. Jackson took a bullet in the right hand and another in the left arm. The latter was a serious wound that shattered the bone not far below the shoulder and necessitated amputation. The surgeons did not consider his injuries life threatening, but Jackson was out of the fight. Command of his wing of the army fell to cavalry commander Jeb Stuart.

With his ablest general down and the larger Union host standing between the still-severed wings of his own army, Lee was in a very dangerous position despite the dramatic success his troops had enjoyed during the final hours of daylight. That night, however, Hooker came to the rescue by withdrawing his troops to a tighter defensive perimeter, opening the way for Lee to reunite his army. Instead of counterpunching, the Union commander called for help from Sedgwick, still back at Fredericksburg with a single corps. So the next day Sedgwick brushed aside the Confederates at Fredericksburg and struck out to join Hooker, approaching from Lee’s rear. Lee left a small force to watch Hooker’s still-enormous army and with the bulk of the Army of Northern Virginia turned and pounced on Sedgwick while Hooker remained cowed and inert. The lone Union corps did well to escape back across the river.

Lee then turned his attention back to Hooker. Hooker’s withdrawal to form a tighter perimeter had given up a clearing of high ground that formed one of the only decent artillery positions in the Wilderness. From that vantage point the usually inferior Confederate artillery had a heyday, pounding the Federals around Hooker’s headquarters at Chancellorsville. A shell hit one of the porch columns of the Chancellor house while Hooker was leaning against it, leaving the Union commander stunned and confused, though his subsequent conduct of the battle was no worse than before. Beaten back from the Chancellorsville clearing by relentless Confederate attacks and bombardment, Hooker had his men take up another line still farther to the rear and finally ordered a retreat across the Rapidan, ending what would be known as the Battle of Chancellorsville.

The battle would go down in history as the greatest achievement of the Lee–Jackson partnership. It was also the last. Like thousands of Civil War soldiers, Jackson suffered the amputation of a limb, in his case the left arm. His recovery progressed well for several days, but then pneumonia set in, and Jackson died a week after the battle. His loss crippled the previously superb command system of the Army of Northern Virginia and was a severe blow to Confederate morale.

Yet although the Battle of Chancellorsville would be studied and celebrated for more than a century to come, the clash in the Virginia Wilderness had accomplished nothing beyond killing and wounding some thirty thousand men and persuading Fighting Joe Hooker to take his army back to the camps it had left when the campaign started. No territory changed hands for more than a few days, and when the campaign was over the Confederacy was no closer to victory than it had been before, unless that victory could be brought by means of attrition, a dubious proposition by which the Confederacy could only hope to counter the Union’s greater numbers with its own supposedly greater devotion to its cause. Like every other battle in the eastern theater of the war up to that time, Chancellorsville had been a bloody but ultimately indecisive clash, full of heroism and mighty feats of arms but offering little realistic chance of changing the course of the war.

LEE MOVES NORTH

It was different in the West. There the Union forces, chiefly those under Grant’s command, were steadily draining the life out of the Confederacy, not through attrition but rather through well-conceived operations with increasingly skillful and confident troops within a theater of the war that, unlike Virginia, offered the Union genuine opportunities to inflict serious strategic damage on the Confederacy. Almost each western campaign thus far in the war had cost the Confederacy territory, population, agricultural production, transportation facilities, and sometimes even some of the South’s scarce industrial capacity. By late spring 1863 it was becoming increasingly clear that unless something could be done to break Grant’s grip on Vicksburg, he would soon deliver the most damaging blow yet by capturing the fortress town and its thirty-thousand-man garrison and cutting the Confederacy’s already tenuous connection with its trans-Mississippi states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, with their abundant supplies of beef, leather, and other commodities much needed in the rest of the Confederacy, especially by its armies.

How to do this was a question much on the mind of Jefferson Davis and his advisers that May. As Grant’s lightning campaign through Mississippi began to unfold disastrously for the Confederacy, Davis had ordered Joseph Johnston to the state, but the western theater commander proved little help. By the time he arrived in Mississippi, Grant was already between him and Pemberton. Thereafter Johnston had assembled a small army from troops in the area and reinforcements Richmond sent him, but he held his force north of Jackson and did nothing. Davis and Secretary of War Seddon sent him reinforcements from Bragg’s army and from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts until Johnston had about thirty thousand men. They begged him to move aggressively against Grant, but Johnston demurred, claiming that he had only twenty-three thousand men and urging Richmond to send him enough troops to make success certain.

In this situation Davis and his advisers considered sending Lee and/or some of his troops to Mississippi. One proposition they entertained was sending Longstreet’s corps, most of which had been in North Carolina on detached duty during the Battle of Chancellorsville. Lee, not surprisingly, disagreed. Instead, in conference with Davis and the cabinet in Richmond, he advocated an operation that he and Jackson had been planning since that winter for carrying the war into Pennsylvania as soon as the army’s artillery horses had eaten enough spring grass to regain their strength. They were ready now, and Lee wanted to go north. The summer heat and diseases of the lower Mississippi Valley would, Lee claimed, force Grant to give up his siege of Vicksburg and retreat north. The general was persuasive, and, after long discussions, both cabinet and president agreed. Lee’s army would remain intact and would march north while the Confederates in Mississippi would fend for themselves.

Lee began his movement on June 3, shifting units of his army successively west along the south bank of the Rappahannock while its rear guard continued to confront Hooker across the river at Fredericksburg. By June 8, two of Lee’s three corps had reached the neighborhood of Culpeper Court House, Virginia, about thirty-five miles northwest of Fredericksburg. The next day, Hooker, suspicious that the Rebels were in motion on the other side of the river, launched his cavalry, under Major General Alfred Pleasonton (West Point, 1844), on a reconnaissance-in-force across the Rappahannock. The result was the Battle of Brandy Station, the largest cavalry fight of the war.

The chief duties of Civil War cavalry were gathering information about the enemy army and preventing enemy cavalry from gathering information about one’s own. Stopping Pleasonton’s probe was therefore the duty of Jeb Stuart and his Confederate cavalry. Stuart and his troopers had enjoyed great success thus far in the war, partially because southern culture made it easier to raise effective volunteer cavalry there than in the North, partially because Stuart was a flamboyant but highly effective commander, and partially because the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry had been saddled with commanding generals like McClellan, who had kept the army sitting still while Stuart literally rode circles around it. He had done so twice thus far in the war.

By June 1863, the situation was changing. The Yankee troopers had been steadily gaining skill and confidence and were now more or less the equals of Stuart’s horsemen and more numerous. Pleasonton was no Stuart, and Hooker was certainly no Lee, but the two Union officers now managed to give the Union riders a fair shot at Stuart’s troopers. Stuart himself unwittingly helped by being preoccupied with a grand review of his cavalry he had staged the day before for the admiring ladies of Culpeper. Pleasonton’s probe took him and his riders completely by surprise. The result was a daylong battle of galloping horses and swinging sabers. Stuart finally drove back Pleasonton’s squadrons but not before being forced to call on Confederate infantry for assistance. The appearance of those gray-clad foot soldiers on the battlefield at Brandy Station tipped Lee’s hand and gave Pleasonton the information for which he had come. Such military information is only as good as the analysis of the general who receives it, in this case, Hooker.

In the century and a half that has passed since the Civil War, some historians have criticized Lincoln for being too ready to sack a defeated general. If anything, Lincoln was too patient with the succession of generals who commanded the Army of the Potomac. Hooker’s case is an example. He had lost his nerve the moment his army had contacted Lee’s at Chancellorsville, but Lincoln had patiently allowed him a second chance. Now as the evidence indicated Lee was moving north, Hooker showed once again that he lacked the nerve to come to grips with the renowned Confederate general and his army. First he misinterpreted the news of Brandy Station. Then he hesitated, unwilling to accept the situation that was developing in front of him. When Lee’s lead corps reached the Shenandoah Valley and turned northeast toward the Potomac, it was no longer possible to mistake the Confederate general’s purpose. Hooker responded by coming up with a series of plans, each of which involved having someone else, perhaps a subordinate with a corps or two, deal with Lee while Hooker and the main body of the Army of the Potomac went elsewhere, perhaps to Richmond. Lincoln wisely rejected Hooker’s schemes, one after another, reminding his general that Lee’s army and not Richmond was the proper target and urging him to strike aggressively at that army while it was stretched out and vulnerable during its northward march.