Calamity at Chancellorsville

by Mathew W Lively

  30 Robertson, Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend, 721.

  31 Smith, “Stonewall Jackson’s Last Battle,” 208.

  Chapter Four

  They Never Run Too Fast

  As the evening sun set behind the Wilderness thicket, the Union soldiers of Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard’s XI Corps were leisurely sitting around campfires cooking dinner and listening to a regimental band, when their attention was suddenly drawn to a deer that bounded through the Federal camp. An entertaining chase ensued as several soldiers quickly ran after the animal in a vain attempt to catch it. Those watching the amusing footrace were surprised when a second deer unexpectedly bolted past them. Looking toward the Wilderness, they were astonished to see numerous wild animals charge out of the brush and into the open field.

  What the men of the XI Corps did not know at the time was that Jackson’s advance had begun beyond the edge of the woodlands, and “its first lively effects,” General Howard wrote, “appeared in the startled rabbits, squirrels, quail, and other wild game flying wildly hither and thither in evident terror, and escaping, where possible, into adjacent clearings.”1

  The arrival of the terrified animals was quickly followed by the cracking sound of musketry as the few Union pickets stationed in the woods began firing at an advancing mass of Confederate gray. The next sound that emerged from the bushes was unmistakable to veteran Yankee soldiers, but one many of the new men in the regiments were hearing for the first time: “that demonical huntsman cry” known as the “Rebel Yell.” As one Union colonel recalled, the roar from the woods broke forth “so suddenly upon the stillness of a summer afternoon and so unexpectantly, that it almost chilled my blood.”2

  Jackson’s men, although bleeding and tattered from the thick briers of the Wilderness, flowed forth from the woods like an avalanche. The surprise was so overwhelming that Union Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz said the entire Yankee line was “rolled up and swept away in a moment.” Confederate General Robert Rodes described the chaotic scene in his official report: “So complete was the success of the whole maneuver, and such was the surprise of the enemy, that scarcely any organized resistance was met with after the first volley was fired. They fled in the wildest confusion, leaving the field strewn with arms, accouterments, clothing, caissons, and field pieces in every direction.”3

  As the attack progressed, desperately hungry Confederates took the opportunity to “pluck and eat” by pausing momentarily at campfires to steal part of a cooking dinner or to take a drink of real coffee before renewing their chase of the fleeing Yankees. Small pockets of Union resistance did spring up, but none were able to stem the Rebel tide.

  Hearing the clash of muskets, General Howard rode up from his headquarters at Dowdall’s Tavern to discover his troops in “a blind panic and great confusion.” In an act of personal courage, he grabbed an abandoned Union flag and rode headlong into the fight, attempting to rally his men, but to no avail. The men of his corps would not regroup until three hours later, after they had scurried to the other side of Chancellorsville two and a half miles to the east.4

  An 1865 photograph of Dowdall’s Tavern.

  Library of Congress

  The Confederates achieved their first objective of Talley’s Farm within half an hour of beginning the attack and quickly continued their drive toward the second at Dowdall’s Tavern. Just east of the tavern, Union forces under the command of Col. Adolphus Buschbeck attempted a gallant stand along a line of rifle pits facing west and extending to each side of the Plank Road. His position being easily outflanked after a brief fight, this “Buschbeck Line” was also forced to withdraw toward Chancellorsville with the rest of the Union forces.

  As his troops raced eastward “with the velocity of a meteor and the fury of a thunderstorm,” Stonewall Jackson rode closely behind, relentlessly encouraging his men to continue their pursuit. Every few minutes, one staff officer recalled, he would repeat the order “Press forward! Press forward!” as he leaned over and extended a hand beyond his horse’s head, “as if he was trying to push forward the column with his hand.”5

  At one point, an excited young officer ran up, shouting, “General, they are running too fast for us; we can’t come up with them.”

  “They never run too fast for me, sir,” Jackson tersely replied.6

  Captain Richard E. Wilbourn, Jackson’s chief signal officer, had never seen the general as pleased with success as he was that evening. “He was in unusually fine spirits,” Wilbourn wrote in a letter, “and every time he heard the cheering of our men which is ever the signal of victory—he raised his right hand a few seconds as if in acknowledgement of the blessing and to return thanks to God for the victory.”7

  Pausing occasionally to say a prayer over dead Confederate soldiers along the road, Jackson continued his own pursuit of the retreating Federal army. A battery of horse artillery under the direction of Maj. Robert F. Beckham was on the Plank Road maintaining a continuous fire in support of the advance when Jackson rode up to the surprised officer. “Young man, I congratulate you,” Jackson said as he shook Beckham’s hand.8

  * * *

  Two miles to the east of Stonewall Jackson’s position, Joe Hooker and two staff members were sitting on the veranda of the Chancellor house around 6:30 p.m. enjoying the spring evening. Due to an odd acoustical shadow, sounds from the hour-long struggle on his right flank never reached Hooker’s location. As the three officers chatted, something to the west caught the attention of Capt. Harry Russell. Stepping off the porch, he took out his binoculars and gazed down the Plank Road. “My God!” he exclaimed, “Here they come!”9

  Running down the road was a stampede of men, horses, and mules from the broken XI Corps. Hooker and his officers jumped on their horses and rode into the melee in a vain attempt to stop the flight. Assuming the Confederate army was on the heels of his retreating forces, Hooker ordered the III Corps, held in reserve near the Chancellor house, into the breach.

  In a short two hours’ time on the evening of May 2, 1863, Jackson’s army had managed to surprise 12,000 soldiers anchoring the Union right flank and drive them back nearly two miles toward Chancellorsville. But as the light faded with the setting sun, the Confederate assault began to lose steam. The speed of the advance combined with the dense entanglement of the Wilderness had led to as much disorder among the attackers as it had in the Union army. The two Confederate forces leading the attack, Robert Rodes’ division in front and Brig. Gen. Raleigh E. Colston’s in back, had become “mingled together in inextricable confusion.”10

  An unexpected appearance by the 8th Pennsylvania cavalry also added to the chaos of the situation. Stationed near the Union artillery position at Hazel Grove, men in the unit were leisurely playing cards, since the sounds of the fight to the west had not reached them through the thick woods. Ordered to report to General Howard, the men mounted and slowly rode up the Hazel Grove Road toward the Plank Road, completely unaware that the position toward which they were heading had been overrun by the Confederates.

  Reaching the main road, the members of the lead element abruptly found themselves surrounded by Rebel soldiers. The path being too narrow to turn the column around, the men had no choice but to continue forward. “Draw sabers and charge!” shouted the commanding officer. A “perfect frenzy of excitement” then ensued as the Pennsylvanians galloped for safety. “The enemy were as thick as bees,” another officer recalled. “We were in columns of fours and on the dead run, and when we struck the enemy there occurred a ‘jam’ of living and dead men, friends and enemies, and horses, and the weight of the rear of our squadron broke us into utter confusion, so that at the moment every man was for himself.” Although the Confederates suffered few casualties from the charge, the encounter caused a warning to go out to be prepared for surprise attacks by enemy cavalry.11

  At 7:15 p.m., Rodes finally halted the attack. “Such was the confusion and the darkness that it was not deemed advisable to make a farther advance,” he expla
ined in his official report. The Rebel soldiers were also exhausted and hungry. In one day they had marched 12 miles around the enemy flank, and had followed that with a two-mile chase of the Union army through the woods and fields around Chancellorsville. Rodes sent word to Jackson asking him to send forward Maj. Gen. Ambrose P. Hill’s division, currently in the rear, to continue the advance while his men regrouped.12

  A. P. Hill, who went by his middle name of “Powell,” was Jackson’s best divisional commander. He was known for wearing a black slouch hat and calico shirts made by his wife. Despite his fine capabilities as a general, Hill and Jackson had a contentious working relationship. Jackson’s strict sense of military order (he once instructed an officer, “You must obey my orders first and reason about them afterwards”) clashed with Hill’s tendency toward “being too quick to resent a seeming overstepping of authority,” as Hotchkiss described him. Their animosity reached a crescendo after the battle of Second Manassas in 1862 when Jackson had Hill placed under arrest on a charge of “Neglect of Duty.” Hill, who once referred to Jackson as “that crazy old Presbyterian fool,” then filed countercharges against Jackson. It would take Lee’s direct involvement in a meeting between them before the charges were dropped on both sides.13

  Jackson was near Dowdall’s Tavern, sending couriers to artillery and infantry units with orders to continue the advance, when he received Rodes’ message that the attack had been halted. Sending orders for Hill to move rapidly ahead and relieve Rodes, Jackson rode off for the front, determined to resume the attack on the fleeing Federals. “General Jackson and staff came thundering down the road by us,” remembered Roland S. Williams of the 13th North Carolina Regiment. “Press the enemy until night-fall!” Jackson shouted as he went past.14

  Arriving at the front, Jackson witnessed firsthand the extent of the confusion and disorganization in the Confederate forces. “Men, get into line, get into line!” he shouted as he rode among the units. “Whose command is this? Colonel, get your men instantly in line!”15

  He eventually found General Rodes, who was obviously pleased with his men’s performance. “General Jackson,” Rodes beamed, “[m]y division behaved splendidly this evening and you must give them a big name in your report.”

  “I shall take great pleasure in doing so, and I congratulate you and your command for it,” Jackson replied as he continued his ride forward.16

  Positioned a quarter of a mile south on the Hazel Grove Road, Maj. Norvell Cobb of the 44th Virginia Regiment took a squad of men forward into the woods to reconnoiter during the lull in the attack while the Confederate units reorganized. Just beyond a line of log earthworks that had been abandoned by the Union army, Cobb encountered a large group of Federal soldiers who immediately surrendered to his small force without a fight. While marching the prisoners to the rear, the major happened upon Jackson trying to organize troops near an old schoolhouse at the junction of the Hazel Grove and Plank roads. Cobb stopped for a moment to inform the general of the abandoned works he had discovered in the woods. The works extended south, paralleling the Union line, and consisted of log barricades with abattis (a line of sharpened sticks set in the ground with points outward) on the western side.

  “Major,” Jackson replied, “I need your help a while, this disorder must be corrected. Find General Rodes and tell him to occupy that barricade with his troops. Then go along the right and tell the troops from me, to get into line and preserve the order.”17

  The lead elements of Hill’s division rushing forward to relieve Rodes’ exhausted troops were a brigade of North Carolina soldiers led by Brig. Gen. James H. Lane. Small in stature but large in fighting spirit, Lane was a Virginia native who had graduated from VMI and taught military tactics at the institution before leaving prior to the outbreak of the war to become an instructor at the North Carolina Military Institute. As Lane’s men were marching to the front down the congested Plank Road, a sudden, unexpected artillery barrage from the Union side sent them running for cover into the adjacent woods.

  The cascade of shells into the Confederate ranks was the result of an action by Jackson’s former pupil, Capt. Marcellus Moorman, who had charged his horse artillery forward with Rodes’ initial assault. Moorman’s three cannon were advanced and unlimbered in the middle of the Plank Road just before an important intersection with the Bullock Road to the north and another path from Hazel Grove to the south.

  The Bullock Road stretched northeasterly from the Plank Road toward the U.S. Ford. Sixty-five yards north of its origin from the Plank Road, it crossed a more narrow and isolated dirt path known as the Mountain Road. Traveling east, the Mountain Road ran parallel to the Plank Road for approximately half a mile before curving down and connecting back to the main road nearly half a mile west of the Chancellor house. A road from Hazel Grove also entered the Plank Road opposite the start of the Bullock Road and was one of three outlets from the farm to the main road. The primary route from the grove connected with the Plank Road one and a half miles west of Chancellorsville at the location of the old schoolhouse. South of the old schoolhouse, two branches split off the main trunk, one path running northeast and entering the Plank Road at the intersection where Moorman had his artillery, and another traveling northwest and emerging at the corner of a field east of Dowdall’s Tavern.18

  While Lane’s men were moving to the front to relieve Rodes, Moorman fired his three guns in the direction of the Union lines. His shots were immediately answered by 37 Federal cannon posted three-quarters of a mile away on a cleared elevation around the Fairview homestead, slightly west of Chancellorsville. The massive Union response sent Lane’s men scrambling for cover and brought an abrupt halt to the Confederate reorganization.

  Noticing that the deployment had ceased, A. P. Hill sent his adjutant, Maj. William H. Palmer, to inquire about the reason for Lane’s delay. Lane told Palmer he was not eager to lose his command during an attempt to form a line in dark woods under a “terrific and murderous artillery fire.” Lane thought the Union fire was simply a response to the Confederate artillery, and if the Rebels stopped firing, so too would the Yankees. Palmer relayed the message to Hill, who ordered the firing to cease and, as Lane predicted, the Union shelling also stopped.19

  With the artillery now quiet, Lane proceeded to form his men into line of battle. He stretched the 33rd North Carolina regiment across the Plank Road and sent the men forward as skirmishers past an unfinished building known as the Van Wert house, a small, wood-frame structure located on the south side of the road. At the intersection of the Bullock and Plank roads, Lane deployed the 7th and 37th North Carolina regiments south of the road and the 28th and 18th North Carolina regiments to the left, or north side, of the Plank Road. The right end of the 18th and the left end of the 37th rested on the road.20

  Back near the old schoolhouse, Jackson was continuing his ride to the front when he was stopped by a courier delivering a message from Jeb Stuart. Private David J. Kyle of the 9th Virginia Cavalry handed Jackson a large, sealed envelope, and sat quietly on his horse as the general read the dispatch. Kyle was a 19-year-old local boy who, before the war, had lived in the Bullock farmhouse located on the road that bore its name. After reading the message, Jackson looked at Kyle and asked the young private whether he knew the surrounding country. Kyle assured him he did, to which Jackson replied, “You keep along with me.”21

  Jackson, accompanied by his staff and several couriers, quickly rode to the intersection where his new battle line was forming. Lane, who had just finished deploying his men, was on the Plank Road calling out in the darkness for A. P. Hill. Recognizing Lane’s voice, Jackson asked what he wanted. The brigadier said he was looking to obtain further orders from Hill, but since Jackson was present, he would ask him. “Push right ahead, Lane,” Jackson responded, while simultaneously gesturing with his right hand in a pushing motion toward the enemy. After ordering the 28th and 18th North Carolina to move forward a short distance, Lane proceeded down the right side of the line
to advance his other two regiments while Jackson continued his ride forward.22

  Jackson had ridden ahead only a short distance when he encountered Hill and his staff on the Plank Road. The impatient Jackson asked his divisional commander how long it would be until he was ready to advance. Hill answered but a few more moments, as he was just then finishing the relief of Rodes. Jackson also asked Hill whether he was familiar with the road from Chancellorsville to the U.S. Ford. “I have not travelled over it for many years,” Hill responded, saying a guide, if available, would be helpful.

  “Captain Boswell,” Jackson said as he turned toward his chief engineer, “report to General Hill.” Then, staring back at Hill, he directed, “When you reach Chancellorsville, allow nothing to stop you. Press on to the United States Ford.”23

  North of the road, the 18th North Carolina regiment had completed a short advance toward the Confederate skirmish line and was now in a position alongside the forward location of Jackson and Hill on the Plank Road. The men and officers of the 18th regiment never noticed as Jackson and his escort quietly left that spot and continued ahead down the Plank Road, followed a few moments later by Hill and his staff.24

  1 Oliver O. Howard, “The Eleventh Corps at Chancellorsville,” in B&L, vol. 3, pt. 1, 197.

  2 George C. Eggleston, A Captain in the Ranks: A Romance of Affairs (New York, NY, 1904), 7; Ed Malles, ed., Bridge Building in Wartime: Colonel Wesley Brainerd’s Memoir of the 50th New York Volunteer Engineers (Knoxville, TN, 1997), 141.

  3 OR 25, pt. 1, 655, 941.

  4 Ibid., 630.

  5 C. C. Sanders, “Battle of Chancellorsville,” in SHSP (1901), vol. 29, 169; Richard E. Wilbourn to Robert Dabney, December 12, 1863, in Charles William Dabney Papers, Southern Historical Collection (SHC), University of North Carolina.

  6 William F. Randolph, “General Jackson’s Mortal Wound,” in SHSP (1901), vol. 29, 332.