Darkness at Chancellorsville

by Ralph Peters

  Third, and not least, there was Lee himself. It does not slight Jackson’s gifts, commitment, or ferocity to note that every major decision at Chancellorsville was Lee’s. Certainly, Lee made mistakes—he almost made a tragic one at the battle’s end, saved only by the weather and Hooker’s retreat—but his tenacity, his refusal ever to give in to fear, and his canny appraisals of those who opposed him made him the antithesis of Hooker. Whatever the sources of Lee’s unbreakable will, that quality rendered him peerless until Grant came east. Indeed, had Robert E. Lee, rather than Jackson, died at Chancellorsville, the Confederacy would have collapsed by midsummer 1864.

  Today, as Lee’s statues are torn down by a generation gorged on its self-righteousness, his reputation as a soldier endures. If Jackson was greater than the sum of his parts, Lee was greater by far than the sum of his failings.

  * * *

  This book began with the offhand remark “I’ve been thinking about Chancellorsville,” to which Bob Gleason, my editor, responded: “Jackson!”

  I had shied from writing about “Stonewall” Jackson for years because he remains the only major Civil War figure more enigmatic than Grant. Today’s culture of internet snark, had it been extant in 1861, would have dismissed the two of them as “a failure and a freak.” Yet Grant became the war’s visionary strategist and Jackson its finest tactical commander.

  I’ve grown convinced that Jackson suffered from a form of spectrum disorder, which he largely overcame by strength of will. Others will have their own views, and none of us will ever know for certain what made this forbidding, compelling, and contradictory man—who would not have survived in today’s politically correct military—the brilliant, beyond-the-rules leader he became. What shall we make of a man who defied his neighbors to open a Sunday school for free blacks and slaves and who disregarded Virginia law to teach them to read, but who advocated killing Union prisoners en masse? Jackson’s religiosity is unfashionable; his cause is deemed reprehensible; and his profession is disdained by the fortunate and finely educated. Yet he remains as exemplary to those who defend us as he is anathema to those who know nothing about him beyond the color of the last uniform he wore.

  How difficult is it to “know” Thomas Jonathan Jackson? While writing about him I thought, at various times, of St. John of the Cross (he of the “dark night of the soul”); of Simon de Montfort (he of the Albigensian Crusade); of Erwin Rommel; of John Calvin; of Oliver Cromwell; and of those special souls who delight unconditionally in children.

  Yet I do not know him. He cannot be known.

  Some readers may have been disappointed that I did not recount the oft recited, drawn-out, high-Victorian version of Jackson’s death, with its absence of sickroom smells and lurking archangels. The portrayals of Jackson’s final days in hagiographic memoirs and pseudo-histories, in popular novels and films, put me in mind of the most saccharine Baroque paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin. Such frilly, pastel nonsense slights Jackson’s suffering, sacrifice, and bewildering complexity, while evoking Oscar Wilde’s comment on the death of Little Nell.

  Jackson is best remembered on horseback, leading his men in battle, not mooning sentimentally on a tidied-up deathbed.

  * * *

  Joseph Hooker is another matter. He did his best, but it was not good enough. As for the hoary tales of his drunkenness during the Chancellorsville campaign, the evidence from the most dependable sources (not all of them well-disposed to Hooker) is overwhelmingly in favor of his sobriety during that tragic week.

  Hooker was indeed a heavy drinker (nor was that his only vice), but he appears to have made a conscientious and firm decision to abstain for the duration of the campaign. Indeed, the wisest contemporary observation may have been that it wasn’t Hooker’s drinking that impaired him but the sudden withdrawal from alcohol.

  As for the reports of him lying about in a drunken stupor on May 3, 1863, they rely on glimpses from a distance. Hooker certainly did take to a cot at times that day, but he’d just suffered an ill-timed concussion—as Napoléon knew, luck, good or bad, matters on a battlefield. And speaking as someone who suffered a concussion, got up, did a television panel, attended a banquet, flew home, and then collapsed, I assure the reader that the effects of concussions are not identical, nor do they arrive on a schedule, but they can be devastating.

  Joe Hooker wasn’t drunk. He was just too small.

  * * *

  In the ultimately mysterious—even mystical—act of creating life on the page, sometimes a writer is ambushed by ghosts with gripes. This time, Dan Sickles showed up midbook to tell me why he defied expert advice and disobeyed orders to thrust his guns out to the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg. Exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke, the one-legged rascal smoothed his mustaches and snapped, “Hazel Grove, you dunce! Remember what happened when Hooker made me give up Hazel Grove to the Johnnies? I wasn’t going to give them the best ground again.”

  It was no use countering that the no-man’s-land position at the Peach Orchard lacked the dominance and defensibility of Hazel Grove. Sickles called me “as pigheaded as George Meade” and disappeared.

  He was not about to repeat the same mistake. So he made another.

  * * *

  In every book I have written on our Civil War, I have adhered to the agreed facts. Where there have been unresolved issues, I have applied my own experience as a soldier to make sense of things. I have done my best to reflect characters accurately as I elaborated their thoughts and sentiments. Usually, the only conscious alterations I made were to translate the exaggeratedly formal and purified speeches set down decades after events into realistic dialogue. Few officers in midbattle hold forth in florid sentences and sculpted paragraphs, and soldiers talk as soldiers talk, whether Roman legionaries on a barbarous frontier or enlisted men in Afghanistan today.

  Still, there have been rare instances when I found it useful to invent appropriate details, and I feel obliged to alert the reader when I supplement the facts. In this book, I did it twice. The instances may seem minor, but the reader should be aware of them.

  First, there is no evidence of Hooker romancing a ranchero’s daughter when down on his luck in Sonoma. I inserted that bit for two reasons: first to illustrate how far Hooker, the former officer, had fallen in society—the father is appalled at Hooker’s presumption—and also to deepen in yet another way the reader’s sense of how complex American society already had become on the eve of the Civil War. Much of this book has that underlying purpose.

  The second fabrication is, literally, a footnote: In his illuminating letters home, the “real” Sam Pickens made no mention of suffering from bad feet at Chancellorsville (although the details of his battle experience are rendered faithfully). As a former Army private and, later, a junior officer in an infantry battalion, I have an appreciation of the importance of feet that would outdo the wisdom of any podiatrist. I inflicted that curse on Pickens to drive home, yet again, what campaigning truly was like for the grunts of yesteryear.

  I’m allergic to attempts to romanticize war.

  * * *

  My thanks, as ever, to my wife, Katherine, who has a quick eye for the errant word, and to my editor, Bob Gleason, who takes a patient view of errant authors. Thanks also to the troops of all ranks at Forge; to Sona Vogel, the most talented copy editor I have encountered; and, not least, to veteran mapmaker George Skoch. I also am indebted, not for the first time, to Peter G. Tsouras and John Horn for sharing their research with me.

  On the administrative side, I chose to spell out the numbers assigned to Union corps this time—“Sixth Corps” rather than the traditional “VI Corps,” for example—because I’ve found that younger readers, especially, have not been taught Roman numerals (as they have not been taught history, either). The “correct” numerals are assigned on the maps.

  As always, it’s essential to recognize and recommend key books that shaped my interpretation of Chancellorsville, but even obeying my rule not to cite books praise
d in previous works of mine, I can include only a small selection of the hundreds of volumes exploited over a near lifetime of study. My apologies to anyone whose work I appear to have slighted.

  Beyond the indispensable Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, countless books bear on Chancellorsville in full or in part. Of the available campaign accounts, three stand out as enduring. First, Major John Bigelow, Jr.’s compendious account, The Campaign of Chancellorsville, published in 1910 (within the lifetimes of many veterans), will remain a Civil War classic, its fine maps unrivaled. Later historians may have corrected minor points, but Bigelow’s remains the seminal work.

  Of later campaign histories, Stephen W. Sears’ Chancellorsville unsurprisingly remains the best single volume for the modern reader. (Any work by Sears is well worth reading.) That said, I also found great value in Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave, by Ernest B. Furguson. To me, the two books complement each other.

  The U.S. Army War College battlefield guides are always useful and instructive, and the Guide to the Battles of Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg equals the best.

  Under the Crescent Moon with the XI Corps in the Civil War, volume 1: From the Defenses of Washington to Chancellorsville, 1862–1863, by James S. Pula, fills an inexcusable gap in Civil War history. Despite a near lifelong interest in the unlucky Eleventh Corps and its colorful assortment of generals and colonels, I learned much from Dr. Pula’s book and turned to it often. Overall, his academic crusade to give fair credit to the various immigrant groups who ultimately won the war for the Union has been as revolutionary as the men about whom he has written. He’s a myth buster and a booster of justice.

  Of the countless books on Jackson, two recent accounts are not only masterful but a pleasure to read. Coming in at 950 pages, Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend, by James I. Robertson, Jr., is exhaustive but never exhausting. For those particularly interested in the military aspects of Jackson’s life, this book is the choice. General readers can turn to Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, by S. C. Gwynne, which comes in at a mere 672 pages. Gwynne is a fine writer and he captures Jackson the man with consummate skill. But this is quibbling: Each book offers a full and enthralling picture of this unique figure. I profited from both.

  For those inspired to search even deeper into Jackson’s psychology and the environment that shaped his maturity, The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston, compiled by Elizabeth Preston Allan, is an excellent window into a lost world and gives a glimpse of Jackson’s “impossible” love.

  Beyond that, many who touched Jackson and survived the war left written accounts of the man and their experiences serving under him. I have listed the best of those memoirs elsewhere.

  On Hooker, the best available account is Fighting Joe Hooker, by Walter H. Hebert. It’s a first-rate book about a second-rate man.

  On Carl Schurz, of whom I am a pronounced admirer, there is a dearth of modern biographies, but The Autobiography of Carl Schurz: Lincoln’s Champion and Friend, edited by Wayne Andrews, and the Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841 to 1869, compiled and edited by Joseph Schafer, serve as excellent and inspiring portraits of a genuinely good man.

  For more details on O. O. Howard’s eventful life, the best choice is Sword and Olive Branch: Oliver Otis Howard, by John A. Carpenter. For more on Howard’s postwar campaign for minority rights, see The Good Man: The Civil War’s “Christian General” and His Fight for Racial Equality, by Gordon L. Weil.

  M. Gambone’s Major-General Darius Nash Couch: Enigmatic Valor is a valuable work on that largely forgotten leader, while Darrell L. Collins’ Major General Robert E. Rodes of the Army of Northern Virginia pays suitable tribute to a leader the South could not afford to lose but did.

  Finally, there were two books from which I took particular pleasure. The first was Voices from Company D: Diaries by the Greensboro Guards, Fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment, Army of Northern Virginia, edited winningly by G. Ward Hubbs. Sam Pickens was not the only neighborhood boy to write wonderful letters home. Likewise, Sharpshooter: The Selected Letters and Papers of Maj. Eugene Blackford, C.S.A., volume 1, edited by Fred L. Ray, offers a vivid sense of a very American life. In the end, I did not feature Blackford as a leading character, but he would have served well in those ranks.

  Again, many other works related to this campaign have been cited in the notes to my previous Civil War books. All deserved to be named a second time, but even the most generous publisher applies the brakes at some point.

  I remain in debt to many, living and dead.

  —Ralph Peters

  August 24, 2018

  RALPH PETERS’ NOVELS PUBLISHED BY FORGE

  Cain at Gettysburg (Boyd Award)

  Hell or Richmond (Boyd Award)

  Valley of the Shadow (Boyd Award)

  The Damned of Petersburg

  Judgment at Appomattox

  Darkness at Chancellorsville

  The Officers’ Club

  The War After Armageddon

  The Hour of the Innocents (writing as “Robert Paston”)

  RALPH PETERS’ CIVIL WAR MYSTERIES PUBLISHED UNDER THE PEN NAME “OWEN PARRY”

  Faded Coat of Blue (Herodotus Award)

  Shadows of Glory

  Call Each River Jordan

  Honor’s Kingdom (Hammett Prize)

  Bold Sons of Erin

  Rebels of Babylon

  and

  Our Simple Gifts: Civil War Christmas Tales

  Ralph Peters is also the author of numerous books on strategy, as well as additional novels.

  About the Author

  RALPH PETERS is renowned for the accuracy, authenticity, and literary quality of his Civil War writing, both under his own name and as Owen Parry. His recent “dramatized histories” and earlier Abel Jones novels have won numerous literary prizes, including three awards of the American Library Association’s W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for military fiction, the Hammett Prize, and the Herodotus Award among others.

  The five books of his Battle Hymn Cycle are widely considered the finest Civil War novels ever written, offering an unprecedented, richly human portrait of our past that draws on a lifelong study of history and the author’s own past as an enlisted soldier and then a career U.S. Army officer.

  The Battle Hymn Cycle encompasses Cain at Gettysburg, Hell or Richmond, Valley of the Shadow, The Damned of Petersburg, and Judgment at Appomattox. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Ralph Peters’ Novels Published by Forge

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  DARKNESS AT CHANCELLORSVILLE

  Copyright © 2019 by Ralph Peters

  All rights reserved.

  Maps by George Skoch

  Cover art by Don Troiani

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

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enue

  New York, NY 10010

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  Forge® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8173-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-8403-8 (ebook)

  eISBN 9781466884038

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  First Edition: May 2019