A Thousand May Fall

by Brian Matthew Jordan

  CHAPTER 4

  “COMPLETELY AND SCIENTIFICALLY FLANKED”

  April to May 1863

  BY EARLY SPRING, rumor had become the official currency of the army camps. “What shall become of us, God only knows,” one Eleventh Corps soldier mused. “There is any amount of what we call ‘camp rumor’ amongst the boys, but nothing certain.” But on the last Sunday in April, suspense at last yielded to movement. From Hooker’s headquarters the men received word that they would march “at day light” the next morning. “Positive marching orders for the morrow,” Captain Samuel Surbrug announced in his diary. As was typical, the men had not the slightest inkling where they were headed. “What our ultimate destination is has puzzled many a head without the problem being solved,” Surbrug confessed, adding, “general officers keep their plans to themselves.” Nonetheless, trust in those officers, together with faith in providence, prevailed over any remaining misgivings. Confidently, the rank and file resolved that the war’s final campaign had begun.1

  That evening, as the men made preparations to move out, drum taps announced a mail call. In his capacity as regimental postmaster, Alfred Rider made his rounds. Among the letters he delivered was one “from an old democratic friend,” urging its addressee “to quit murdering his southern brethren.” The soldier indignantly tossed the letter into a campfire, though not before it provoked heated discussion. “What is more criminal than to incite your own soldiers to insubordination and rebellion?” one of his comrades demanded. “Behold the graves on yon hill side of our brave comrades and of southern union men who were cruelly butchered by these ‘brethren’ and whose bones now moulder far away from home.”

  So it was that on the eve of a mission certain to produce even more graves, the men of the 107th Ohio—feeling forsaken by those at home—resolved that the task of preserving “this once great, glorious and happy nation” was theirs alone.2

  APRIL 27 DAWNED “clear & warm.” With sixty rounds squeezed into their cartridge boxes and “eight days’ rations” stowed in their haversacks, the men trudged up the Rappahannock. After a diligent march of thirteen miles, they bivouacked just west of Hartwood Church, the tiny, red brick Presbyterian chapel that, in February, lent its name to a sharp clash between blue- and gray-clad cavalrymen. “Sore in every muscle,” the men did everything possible to lighten their loads. “Even the strongest and toughest begin to fear they will give out,” one soldier explained, “and can not stand it.” Before long, a trail of discarded canteens, blankets, overcoats, and knapsacks indicated the day’s progress. So too did the “occasional” sight of “some poor fellow worn out by the heat,” lying “helpless and uncared for by the roadside.”

  With precious little rest, the wearied column (“seemingly more dead than alive,” in the estimation of one Ohioan) pushed farther west before dawn; a drizzly trek delivered them to Kelly’s Ford by early evening. Later that night, the men forded the river; feeling their way through the darkness for nearly two miles, they established the camp that they would abandon the next morning en route to Germanna’s Ford.

  A dozen miles more and the troops waded the swift-flowing Rapidan River. Once more, darkness proved their only “serious opposition.” William Koch “missed the ford” on this unusually dark night; after “plunging” into the river, he lost his balance and was swept away by the current. “Not much the worse for his involuntary bath,” the lieutenant’s frenetic attempt to reunite with the regiment ended successfully. The next morning, Koch and his sleep-deprived, blistered, and footsore comrades threaded their way along a plank road toward the ramshackle Dowdall’s Tavern, the home of a Baptist preacher named Melzi Chancellor.3

  Below the Rapidan extends a crowded forest of dogwood, “scraggy oaks, bushy firs, cedars, and junipers, all entangled with a thick, almost impenetrable undergrowth, and crisscrossed with an abundance of wild vines.” Locals referred to these seventy square miles—which, for many decades before the American Revolution, fueled the region’s busy iron furnaces—as “the Wilderness,” an appellation as understated as it was forbidding. Hooker’s chief topographical engineer thought it difficult to “conceive a more unfavorable field for the movements of a grand army.” Dowdall’s Tavern stood in a clearing (a rare respite from the surrounding acres of scrub) astride the worn and rutted Orange Turnpike, one of two east-west thoroughfares that stabbed through the woods, conveying travelers between the steeples of Fredericksburg and the undulating foothills of north-central Virginia. The other artery, the Orange Plank Road, surfaced with sturdy timbers, made a sharp intersection with the Turnpike just west of high ground around Dowdall’s. The Eleventh Corps would pull up along the Orange Turnpike, holding the extreme right of the Union line slowly coiling itself about a crossroads in the Wilderness called Chancellorsville.4

  THE NEW COMMANDER of the Eleventh Corps seized Melzi Chancellor’s place as his headquarters. Thirty-two years old, sporting a thick beard and an empty sleeve (the latter a souvenir of the May 1862 fight at Fair Oaks, a sharp contest during McClellan’s ill-fated drive toward Richmond the previous spring), Oliver Otis Howard was a priggish Mainer whose antislavery creed and teetotal ways rendered him something of a curiosity, both at West Point and in the army. Stern, erudite, and introspective—a New Englander through and through—one did not have to spend much time with Otis Howard before detecting the faint whiff of sanctimony; on occasion, however, an untamed ambition allowed his piety to yield to pragmatism.5

  Otis Howard’s ascent to command invited considerable grumbling from the German-Americans in the Eleventh Corps. He replaced Franz Sigel who, chafing under Joe Hooker’s command and growing distrustful of the army brass in Washington, had tendered his resignation in early March. “The free-thinking element of the corps took but little stock in the ministerial reputation of the new commander,” one Ohioan noted, and “felt that a representative countryman had been unjustly deprived of his command.”6

  Major General Oliver Otis Howard commanded the Eleventh Corps at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Library of Congress

  Yet preparations for forward movement quickly drowned out these protests. It required nearly two months of toil in the shadow of Burnside’s disappointments, but Joseph Hooker choreographed a truly dazzling plan. After dispatching his newly consolidated cavalry corps, now led by General George Stoneman, on a raid slicing deep into the enemy’s rear, Hooker would march three infantry corps up the Rappahannock. These forty thousand men—with the Eleventh Corps in the van—would cross the river and its tributary, the Rapidan, before banking sharply east to gain the left flank of an unsuspecting and outnumbered Robert E. Lee. Hooker would distract his nemesis from the main action by directing a pair of Second Corps divisions to stalk up the Rappahannock as far as two upriver fords and in plain view of the Confederates. Hooker would also instruct two infantry corps to cross the Rappahannock a few miles downriver from Fredericksburg; there, they would stage a holding action on Lee’s right. “Bold and daring,” the general supposed that his stratagem—a “left jab, right punch,” as one modern historian put it—would render the rebels’ position indefensible. Lee would “have no other course than to flee south in full retreat.” “The only element which gives me apprehension with regard to the success of this plan,” Hooker assured a tetchy Lincoln, “is the weather.”7

  As the 107th Ohio shook out along the Orange Turnpike on the evening of April 30, the atmosphere at Hooker’s headquarters was one of jubilation. The immodest general’s gambit had succeeded, and even more splendidly than he could have imagined. “The selection of the places for crossing the Rappahannock, the maneuvers by which the army was thrown across the river, and the placing it in position for battle,” the cigar-chomping General Daniel Sickles applauded, “were all conducted with perfect success, and without any considerable loss on our part.” Spontaneous ovations erupted in camp upon receipt of a communiqué from army headquarters: “Our enemy must either ingloriously fly,” Hooker declared, “or come out from behind
his defenses and give us battle on our own ground.” If the latter, he confidently predicted, “certain destruction awaits him.” Given the boastful tones emanating from headquarters, it is not at all surprising that accounts of the operation left behind by the rank and file were exercises in hyperbole. “The march,” one soldier reported, “was the most remarkable one of this war, or any other.” “We [have] the darned rebels cornered in,” reveled one Buckeye soldier in McLean’s Brigade, eager for battle. The commanders of the Eleventh Corps, however, would leave nothing to chance. They forbade the men from building campfires that evening, lest distant flickers of orange or wreaths of smoke betray their position to the enemy.8

  The Chancellorsville Campaign, Spring 1863

  ROBERT E. LEE was eager for battle, too. From his purple-plumed cavalry commander James Ewell Brown Stuart on April 29 he received word that Hooker’s army was maneuvering across the Rappahannock. About to find himself in the jaws of an army that outnumbered his own more than two to one, the Gray Fox blinked, but he did not flinch. Intuiting that “Fighting Joe” intended to deliver his knockout blow on the Confederate left (“the enemy in our front near Fredericksburg continued inactive”), Lee daringly divided his army to confront the threat. That evening, he ordered Major General Dick Anderson to march his division to the crossroads of Chancellorsville. Anderson and his men arrived at midnight, but the discerning general opted to button his troops on the brow of a ridge farther east, stretching lines of gray across the Orange Turnpike. On April 30, Lee directed Major General Lafayette McLaws’s Georgians and South Carolinians to steady Anderson’s lines. Lieutenant General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson’s troops (with the exception of one division left to hold the works before Fredericksburg) completed the Confederate buildup on the morning of Friday, May 1.9

  “Stonewall” Jackson would evidence his earnestness this day, moving with great speed and vigor. He assumed command of Anderson’s and McLaws’s soldiers, shook out a skirmish line, and ordered the gray-clad men to advance down the Orange Turnpike and Plank Road. “Cheers” erupted along the line, punctuated by the rattle of musketry and the occasional growl of artillery. Once again feeling as though they had been moored on the margins, the 107th Ohio cupped their ears and, miles away, made out the crackle of musketry fire. “Disappointment,” Howard’s assistant adjutant general Theodore Meysenburg recalled, “could be read on every face.”10

  BY MID-AFTERNOON Hooker’s subordinates not only registered disappointment, they dripped with disgust. Unnerved by the unexpected Confederate buildup, “Fighting Joe” ordered his men to fall back to a defensive position at the Chancellorsville crossroads. “To hear from his own lips that the advantages gained by the successful marches of his lieutenants were to culminate in fighting a defensive battle in that nest of thickets,” Major General Darius Couch fumed, “was too much.” Foolishly, Hooker had squandered the initiative, paying little heed to his position and advantage in numbers. “I retired from his presence,” Couch explained, “with the belief that my commanding general was a whipped man.”11

  The federal retreat left the rebels slack-jawed, too. After dark, once the blue lines coiled themselves in a loose arc around Chancellorsville, Lee and Jackson met at an intersection in the woods. “Seated on old cracker boxes,” the generals considered the situation as smoke from a tiny “fire of twigs” curled into the air. Although no longer on the offensive, Hooker’s men had “assumed a position of great natural strength,” ensconced in sturdy breastworks that laced behind an “almost impenetrable” skirt of felled branches and limbs. Too, Hooker’s left flank was “well anchored” on a curl in the Rappahannock. “It was evident,” Lee conceded in his official report, “that a direct attack upon the enemy would be attended with great difficulty and loss.”

  The federal right flank, on the other hand, was a different story. “Completely in the air, with nothing to lean upon,” Otis Howard’s troops marked time more than two lonely miles west of Chancellorsville. “Our rear was at the mercy of the enemy,” an Eleventh Corps division commander later confessed. And so for the second time in as many days, Lee rolled the dice. Dividing his forces yet again, he dispatched Jackson to steal through the woods on a looping flank march of a dozen miles. The stealthy trek would deliver twenty-six thousand Virginians, Georgians, Alabamians, Louisianans, and North Carolinians to the right and rear of the Union army—right to the men of the 107th Ohio.12

  AT THE DIRECTION of Howard’s chief engineer, the troops swung spades throughout the night of May 1, burrowing rifle pits and mounding the earth around old John Hatch’s farmhouse (a modest, whitewashed log cabin flanked by two large chimneys) into hasty field works. Hatch—an old Connecticut Yankee who lived with his daughter and son-in-law, Lucy and James Talley—watched in astonishment as blue-coated swarms turned his property into a battle zone. Captain Julius Dieckmann parked the rifled guns of the 13th New York Light Artillery in an open field east of the farmhouse, while Charles Devens (the burly brigadier general who commanded the division to which McLean’s Brigade had been assigned) annexed the house as his headquarters and, after reconnoitering the area, extended a picket line. Linking hands with the 17th Connecticut on their left and the 55th Ohio on their right, the 107th Ohio hunched in rifle pits just west of the Hatch house, holding a key segment of the “long, weak line” that stretched along the Orange Turnpike. The remaining Buckeye regiments in the brigade—the 25th Ohio and 75th Ohio—formed up slightly to the rear, in reserve. Meanwhile, Devens’s First Brigade, under the command of Colonel Leopold von Gilsa, filed into line on the right of the 55th Ohio. Nearly perpendicular to the Ohio men, von Gilsa’s rightmost regiments—Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ashby’s 54th New York and Colonel Charles Glanz’s 153rd Pennsylvania—faced west.13

  The distant pop of muskets was kept up throughout the night and after daybreak, providing an odd accompaniment to what many of the soldiers described as a “beautiful” morning. “Gradually,” however, the clamor “died away.” By noon, “an ominous calm pervaded the whole line.” It was around this time that some Eleventh Corps pickets first detected the enemy through the fingers of the pines. “In plain sight,” Brigadier General Nathaniel McLean protested, “large bodies of troops with trains of some kind could be seen passing on our front.” The warnings quickly multiplied. Detailed to McLean’s picket line from the 17th Connecticut, William Warren “could not see much,” but he “could hear artillery moving in front of us.” Abe Heed, a sergeant from the 25th Ohio, dutifully informed his colonel that, “large bodies of troops had passed in our front to the right during the night.”14

  Stonewall Jackson’s Flank March, May 2, 1863

  Remarkably, Charles Devens was unmoved; the thickly bearded, Harvard-educated lawyer and former Massachusetts state senator waved off McLean’s initial report, unable to register even the slightest hint of concern. Just an hour later, growing increasingly uneasy, McLean returned to General Devens’s headquarters with Colonel John Calvin Lee, the “first rate” commander of the 55th Ohio, and Colonel William Pitt Richardson, the Mexican War veteran who led the 25th Ohio. But the division commander had a tin ear, insisting that “the proper place” for McLean’s colonels was “with their regiments.” “You are more scared than hurt,” he snarled dismissively. Hanging their heads, the men obediently returned to their worse than hopeless position, stung by the general’s rebuke and aghast at his “unpardonable stupidity.”15

  Devens’s fellow division commander Carl Schurz, on the other hand, was alarmed. The old Forty-Eighter who commanded the Eleventh Corps troops stacked north of the Orange Turnpike dashed off to Dowdall’s to share the avalanche of disturbing reports with Otis Howard. Only if the southward-facing corps turned to the right and faced west, Schurz persisted, could they buy time for Hooker to rustle up much-needed reinforcements. By forming up perpendicular to the Turnpike, the outnumbered federals could at least level their muskets directly into the ranks of the oncoming rebels. But Otis Howard was frus
tratingly noncommittal, paying “no attention to the advice of his officers.” Hopeless and forlorn, Schurz pounded back to his command and, without orders, directed two of his regiments to face west. “This was all, literally all, that was done to meet an attack from the west,” Schurz recollected decades later, still raw with anger.

  As the sun began to fade, painting the sky a regal auburn, anxiety seized Schurz and McLean. It is impossible to know how many among the rank and file were privy to the enemy’s movements; many soldiers who “reported” knowledge of Jackson’s maneuver in later years doubtless “larded their testimony with what they learned and understood only after the fact.” Still, in the uneasy expressions worn by their colonels, even the most unsuspecting privates must have sensed something amiss. Colonel Robert Riley of the 75th Ohio not only announced to his men that he anticipated a fight, but also his conviction that the ensuing battle would require “every man.” “If there is a man in the ranks who is not ready to die for his country,” he instructed his troops, “let him come to me, and I will give him a pass to go to the rear.”16