By May 2, the men of Dan’s corps had moved down into the right point of the V. General David Birney’s division of Dan’s corps, for example, was in position among the woods two miles from Chancellorsville on a hilly farm named Hazel Grove, and his scouts and skirmishers in the thickets to the south reported seeing Confederates making their way west by an overgrown road. Dan sent a message to Hooker, asking him to permit an attack. Hooker, in his headquarters in the Chancellor family’s house, gave cautious approval.
Though he did not know what the Rebel movement to his south meant, the potentialities of that day, now advancing toward evening, excited Dan. In this terrain choked with vegetation, he sent out a thick screen of pickets made up of the Colonel Berdan’s notable Sharpshooters, two entire regiments of marksmen. He also ordered General Amiel Whipple to bring his soldiers down the foliage-choked lanes to join General Birney in whatever was afoot. It was, in fact, Jackson’s rear guard against which Dan sent the Sharpshooters and the men of Birney’s division. When these troops of Dan’s came howling down on the tree-clogged road that Jackson’s men were marching along, three hundred Confederate prisoners were instantly captured. Many of them were brought to Dan, where he waited at the Hazel Grove farm. Uncowed, they told him and other officers during interrogation that Jackson was on his way to flank the Yankees on the far, shallower side of the V, and that soon there would be havoc. These men were so assertive in their claim that Dan believed they had been ordered to tell this story and were being deliberately misleading. He and his friend and aide Harry Tremain wrongly came to the conclusion that what he had detected was the enemy fleeing west. He begged Hooker to let him pursue them, and was surprised that the best Joe Hooker did was to tell all his corps commanders, including Dan, to be ready to move in the morning. So Dan’s pickets stayed in place, and he ate his rations near the farmhouse, occasionally interrupted by the arrival of reports and dispatch riders.
Even today and on the most modern of mediums, on Civil War sites on the Internet, the merits of Dan’s pushing out against Stonewall’s men and even of his clinging to the higher ground at Hazel Grove are debated. Most historians squarely blame Hooker’s inertia for the failure at Chancellorsville, but many, with some unfairness, see Dan’s blowing out the base of the V as creating a dangerous bulge, a “salient,” as military historians call it, that allowed the Confederates to attack him from both sides. It also separated his wing of the V from the other wing. A break existed in the line between his and Howard’s corps, say his critics, and this led to the ultimate rout of Howard’s men.16
For it was one-armed and godly General Oliver Howard’s heavily German Eleventh Corps to the west of Dan, in the farther arm of the V. Dan’s scouts had already reported that as Dan committed his men southward, wanting to chase and destroy Stonewall, a gap had opened between the Third and Howard’s men, and Dan had sent David Birney’s division to try to fill it. But as the Confederate prisoners had told Dan, Jackson was not in flight, and his Confederates came screaming down on Howard’s Eleventh Corps—many of them were brewing their evening coffee at the time—and sent them fleeing blindly eastward through the dense forests toward Sickles. Dan would ever afterward remember the crazed, unreasoning fugitives of the Eleventh Corps running out of the woods to the west, dodging through the lines of Birney’s soldiers and swarming over the cleared fields of Hazel Grove where Dan’s artillery batteries were parked. “The exulting enemy,” wrote Dan, “at their heels mingled yells with their volleys.” Dan turned the Maine man Hyram Berry’s division around westward to face them. Dan’s other men were out of visual contact, and, for a time, a sea of fleeing Eleventh Corps troops separated him entirely from them.
Jackson’s attack from the west, in the last week of Jackson’s life, was stopped here by Sickles and the fashionable General Alfred Pleasonton, the West Point cavalry general assigned to cooperate with Dan’s infantry. Dan’s batteries at Hazel Grove shelled the howling lines of Stonewall’s men, frightfully rending them apart. The Confederates stopped, fired once more, then returned to the woods and brought their artillery to bear on the fields of Hazel Grove. The fall of shells in Dan’s lines was brutal and shocking, and the Union gunners who survived each volley went on working in a stunned, hollow-eyed terror that would revive in their dreams for the rest of their lives. The reliable Pleasonton would always believe that there at Hazel Grove, if Sickles’s corps had been reinforced, they could have defeated the whole Rebel army.
The moon came up brightly, and Sickles had authorization for a midnight attack on the Confederate right. Given that screens of woods obscured a clear view of the battlefield even by daylight, many men felt a night attack was as good as a day one. Birney’s men rolled forward and recaptured many of the rifle pits abandoned by the Eleventh Corps, together with a number of cannon. Dan seemed to have had a glittering success.
Early the next morning, the Sabbath, May 3, Hooker visited Sickles and looked over the position at Hazel Grove. Dan urged Hooker to let him hold this higher ground, but Hooker told him he would be cut off if anything went wrong between here and the main force around Chancellorsville. Dan believed he was being ordered to retreat from the best position on the entire battlefield. But because of his respect for Hooker, he was not moved by rancor as his men gave up Hazel Grove and retreated. Immediately, the Confederates planted at the farm thirty-one cannon, which at once began deadly work. Dan’s men were by now vulnerably lined out in fields around the Chancellorsville crossroads, on a slight rise at Fairview Crest. Here they were reissued ammunition. The night before, Stonewall Jackson had been struck by his own fire, scouting a position near Chancellorsville, and now the Rebels, screaming “Remember Jackson,” were about to hurl themselves on the crossroads.
This was the obscene day, ever to be remembered for horror, when artillery fire set the woods ablaze in front of Chancellorsville, the ground becoming fearsomely hot beneath soldiers’ feet as the thickets took flame. The wounded of both sides screamed as they were overtaken and burned by walls of fire. The mobile wounded and burned, with blackened faces, were continually passing through the lines, shrieking as they ran toward the ambulances.
Colonel de Trobriand made his contribution to the Sickles dossier of calm courage by telling others how he saw Sickles ride by, smoking his cigar, amid the jarring concussion of Confederate shells. “Everything is going well,” said Sickles. Then he confided to de Trobriand that he had handled his troops so well the previous evening that the Frenchman could expect to be promoted and receive a brigadier general’s star.17
But the Confederates were squeezing Dan’s position at Fairview Crest. “The attack came in from the west again as Jackson usually did,” wrote Dan succinctly (though Jackson was twelve hours dead), “in heavy columns.” They pressed forward in crowds rather than in regular formations. Berry’s men stood up and shot them as they roared into the slaughter area in a communal frenzy. Berry himself was fatally shot by a Confederate sharpshooter, and Dan, seized by the massive battle fervor that hung over that place, became crazed when he saw General Joseph Revere, Berry’s successor, leading the whole of the 2nd Brigade and portions of two others to the rear, “thus subjecting these proud soldiers, for the first time, to the humiliation of being marched to the rear while their comrades were under fire.” Dan rode to intercept Revere, and furiously relieved him of his command. The man would ultimately be court-martialed for misbehavior and sentenced to dismissal. Merciful Lincoln would suspend the sentence to enable Revere to resign.
The experience of giving up high ground and then seeing his men torn apart by guns placed there was a significant one that would explain much of Dan’s later behavior. He had an investment in Hooker’s succeeding here, since an appropriate glory would be reflected one level down from Hooker to his corps commanders, at least to those heavily engaged in the battle. But it was obvious that Hooker was not succeeding. By this time Confederate shells were landing at the Chancellor house, one of them seeking out Hooker where he s
tood on the veranda and knocking him senseless for a time. Already his dazed but partially reviving mind was set upon withdrawal. He had been contemptuous of McClellan and every other temporizer, he had been a fire-eater as a divisional and corps commander, but now, to Sickles’s private bemusement, timidity claimed Fighting Joe. Even though, back in Fredericksburg, Marye’s Heights had fallen to the Union—one end of his planned pincer thus working—Hooker believed his chief duty was what McClellan had believed it his duty to do on the Peninsula: save the army. Dan was disappointed, not least because the formation of the Confederates “was entirely broken up, and from my headquarters they presented to the eye the appearance of a crowd, without definite formation; and if another corps had been available at the moment to have relieved me . . . my judgment was that not only would that attack of the enemy have been triumphantly repulsed, but that we could have advanced on them and carried the day.”
Dan’s plaint was an echo of a plea the President had uttered: he had said to Hooker that he should commit all his troops, yet two corps, some thirty thousand soldiers, sat by unused that Sunday, since all martial creativity had abandoned Joe Hooker. Driven off Fairview, Dan proposed to retake it with his corps, and his men still felt fury enough to achieve it. But, Hooker having been disabled, the staff told Dan he could not be permitted to go forward again. The losses of the Third Corps in the battle of Sunday were the bulk of that day’s casualties.
As Dan withdrew his men into a diminishing salient of Union troops around the Chancellor house, General Amiel Whipple was also shot dead. Dan had now lost two of his three divisional commanders. That night, the revived Hooker invited all his corps commanders to his headquarters tent pitched along the road north of Chancellorsville, the Chancellor house having been abandoned. Hooker had already resolved to withdraw the way he had come, by the fords of the Rappahannock, but he nonetheless consulted his generals. Oliver Howard, George Meade, and John Reynolds argued for an advance. Darius Couch was not sure, but thought an advance could be successfully made. Dan Sickles, still convinced that the position had been lost when he was not supported at Hazel Grove, told the other generals that he argued more from a political than a strategic standpoint. There were sound military reasons for advance, he said, and he did not want to put his opinion against that of men trained in the profession of arms. But the political horizon was dark. Success by the Army of the Potomac was secondary to the avoidance of a disaster. If this army was destroyed, it would be the last one the country could raise, since the great days of recruiting were over. Washington might be captured, and the effect of that loss upon the country and upon Europe was to be dreaded. The rations with which the men had started had already given out. There was no provision for resupplying the troops against a possible advance by Lee and Jackson. On top of all that, in a week, on the next Sunday, in fact, the three years for which men had enlisted would expire for thirty-eight regiments of the army. Better to cross the river again and recuperate, said Dan.
Hooker declared that although the majority of his generals wanted to advance, he intended to withdraw. General Reynolds, lolling on a camp bed in the corner, asked what was the use of calling us together at this time of night when he intended to retreat anyway?18
Dan knew that the withdrawal would plunge Abraham Lincoln into a greater melancholy than the Princess Salm-Salm had read on the President’s face in April. But a retreat to the safe side of the Rappahannock began, with Sickles’s men as part of the rear guard.
Dan’s corps, which would now be consolidated into two large divisions, had suffered a loss of 4,039 men killed, wounded, or missing at Chancellorsville. General Amiel Whipple, killed near the Chancellor house, had been a friend of Old Buck’s whom Teresa had occasionally met in Washington and thus known since she was a girl. She read of his death in the newspapers, and must have known by the time of Chancellorsville that generals could be killed. Another few inches, and Hooker might have been killed by a shell at the Chancellor house. To what extent Teresa toyed with the idea of a life after Dan, to what extent she was consumed by anxiety over losing Dan, by fear of widowhood, or even by its possibilities, she did not confess in any letter. Later, there would be such manifestations of desperate love from her that one can only conclude that she still fretted over the matter of his safety. Even so, none of the ceremony and glory of being a major general’s wife, the spouse of such a glorious creature as a Union corps commander, seemed to attach itself to Teresa. She still walked along the river with her dogs and applied herself to the education of ten-year-old Laura, who loved to paint watercolors so precocious that she could depend on grandparents and other visitors to exclaim and praise them. She derived from her paintings some of the companionship she could not achieve among her peers. Her talent as a painter was handy for a child who needed to be solitary for considerable stretches of time.
The isolated Teresa, and Laura’s fond grandmothers, had not been able to prevent her from acquiring the habits of an indulged and pitied single child. These habits were accentuated by her lack of contact with other children and her dawning sense of bearing some questionable history, and of fatherly neglect. She also showed that same prepubescent willfulness which George and Susan had experienced years before in their son. Her father, as her mother and grandfather both told Laura, was a great man, and though it was patently true—it was in all the newspapers, and particularly after Chancellorsville—the idea evoked in Laura ambiguous feelings, as much darkness as pride.
The Herald, which had lambasted Dan throughout the 1840s and 1850s, now applauded his conduct at Chancellorsville and advanced his name for command at the highest level, the level for the moment occupied by Hooker. “General Sickles,” said his old enemy Bennett, “displayed that quickness of perception, that promptness in action, and that never-failing self-possession which distinguished the great commander. . .. We therefore would call the attention of President Lincoln to General Sickles as the man for this position.” The Herald also added to Dan’s reputation by reporting that a Union officer, taken prisoner and later released, could tell that Jackson’s men held a particular spite against General Sickles, and cried, “We’ll hang him, Goddamn him, when we catch him.”19 These were the newspaper items, suitably amended for her ears, that George Sickles was pleased to read to Laura, and that fostered in her a bemused sullenness.
Tom Meagher had also fought well in the rear guard at Chancellorsville. His men were now so reduced in number, however, that he demanded they be taken out of the line for rest and to enable recruitment to refill their ranks. When Secretary of War Stanton did not respond to his demand, Meagher offered his resignation, believing that would bring the War Department to its senses. In fact, it made them punish him all the more, by keeping him out of action for most of the remainder of the war. Chancellorsville, which exalted Dan enormously, diminished brave Meagher.20
Hooker’s dispirited army occupied again the camps at Stafford Heights. Dan’s corps was located in an area named Boscobelle, where, as summer came on, sickness took a toll of the men. Dan himself was given medical leave in June after having suffered persistent enteritis in the camp. He took with him to New York, to which he returned lean, fierce, and feverish, two bouquets of pressed flowers that he gave as a present to Laura. Teresa had them framed with a text written by Laura: “Flowers gathered and prepared by my dear Papa—at his camp at Boscobelle—May 25, 1863.” Along with a book called The May Queen, which Dan had the year before asked Mary Todd Lincoln to sign to “Miss Laura Sickles,” these pressed bouquets became dominant artifacts in Laura’s adolescence, tokens of who her father was and why he was so much absent.
Feted by the New York Board of Councilmen, Dan kept an eye on movements in Virginia, from which Lee was advancing again into the North. Hooker’s army, moving closer to Washington, tracked Lee, expecting an inevitable huge, winner-take-all battle. The New York Times was worried about Dan’s being too long on leave, because it flatteringly felt that his services could not be dispensed w
ith. “Whether it be in organization and discipline of men,” George was proud to read, “or in their cool and skillful handling, from a brigade to an army corps in battle, General Sickles has proven himself a thoroughly competent and complete master of himself and of his position.” In the present emergency, the imperiled North could not do better than have him raise and command an army based on the populace of New York, who were “familiar with his successful career as a soldier.”21
In between official duties downtown, Dan rested at Bloomingdale with Teresa and Laura. For the devoted Teresa, this period was a gala spring, as a shirt-sleeved, thinned-down, convalescent Dan rowed his wife and daughter across the mouth of Striker’s Bay on the broad and tranquil Hudson. He found, however, for the first time that Laura did not take him entirely on trust, even though she was frequently taken in by his habitual charm and fascinated by his aides and the sentries on the road above the house.
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