Hooker now proceeded to confirm every one of those reservations. To begin with, his plans were little more than a variation on Burnside’s: the Army of the Potomac would again attempt to cross the Rappahannock and force a fight with the Army of Northern Virginia above Richmond. Since the Fredericksburg crossing was obviously too dangerous, Hooker left two of his infantry corps opposite Fredericksburg as decoys under Major General John Sedgwick and actually crossed the Rappahannock about twelve miles to the west with his remaining five corps (between 70,000 and 80,000 men). In theory, this would bring the bulk of the Army of the Potomac across the Rappahannock and down onto Lee’s left flank at Fredericksburg before the Confederates could act; Lee would be forced to fight pinned against the Rappahannock or else fall back on Richmond. In that case, Hooker trumpeted, “our enemy must either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his defences and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him.”16
When Hooker crossed the Rappahannock on April 29, 1863, the country on the other side of the river turned out to be a dark, unsettled tangle of woods and scrub underbrush, crisscrossed by few usable roads. Hooker plunged firmly into this impassable and spooky terrain, known as the Wilderness, and within twenty-four hours had managed to penetrate all the way to a little country crossroads called Chancellorsville (which was not much of a town at all, but actually a large, rambling hostelry owned by the Chancellor family). “This is splendid,” cried George G. Meade, the commander of the 5th Corps, “Hurrah for old Joe; we are on Lee’s flank, and he does not know it.” If Slocum and the 12th Corps would “take the Plank Road toward Fredericksburg,” Meade claimed, “I’ll take the Pike, or vice versa, as you prefer, and we’ll get out of this Wilderness” and hit Lee before he knew what was coming. Hooker’s real plan was nothing so venturesome. He hoped that his advance through the Wilderness would entice Lee to attack him rather the other way round, and so Hooker decided over the protests of his corps commanders to entrench the army around Chancellorsville. Slocum was aghast: “Nobody but a crazy man would give such an order when we have victory in sight!” But Hooker was convinced that “I have got Lee just where I want him; he must fight me on my own ground.” So he waited to see what would happen—which was usually a fatal thing to do in the vicinity of Robert E. Lee.17
Lee had been as surprised by Hooker’s move as by Burnside’s back in December, but he took full advantage of Hooker’s hesitancy the same way as he had of Burnside’s difficulty with his pontoon bridge. While Hooker pulled back to Chancellorsville, Lee left only a thin line of Confederate troops to guard Fredericksburg and pulled the rest over to confront Hooker in the Wilderness. He had only 43,000 men (one entire corps of the Army of Northern Virginia was absent on detached service) to face Hooker. Yet Lee scarcely hesitated before throwing the single most dramatic gamble of the Civil War. Dividing his already understrength army into two parts, he yielded to the prompting of “Stonewall” Jackson to allow him to march his 29,000-man corps entirely around the right flank of Hooker’s army and use the advantage of surprise to crumple Hooker’s line like a piece of paper.18
Jackson began his flank march late on the morning of May 2, 1863, and after twelve hours of marching under the shadows of the Wilderness’s impenetrable tree cover, his men were in position on the edge of the unsuspecting flank of the Army of the Potomac. Shortly after five o’clock, Jackson pulled his watch from his pocket and serenely informed his lead division commander, Robert Rodes, “You can go forward, then.” As Jackson’s men came bounding through the woods, yip-yipping their dreaded rebel yell, the unprepared Federals fell to pieces. The Army of the Potomac’s entire 11th Corps dissolved into “a dense mass of beings who had lost their reasoning faculties, and were flying from a thousand fancied dangers… battery wagons, ambulances, horses, men, cannon, caissons, all jumbled and tumbled together in an apparently inextricable mass, and that murderous fire still pouring in upon them.” Only the fall of darkness prevented Jackson from rolling right over Hooker’s headquarters. Over the next two days, Lee pressed home his attack again and again, while Hooker simply drew his lines in tighter, abandoning a position at Hazel Grove, which allowed Confederate artillery to bombard his own headquarters in the Chancellorsville tavern. One solid shot smashed into a porch pillar that Hooker was leaning against, temporarily concussing Hooker, and drawing a veil of paralysis over his decisions.19
Finally, on May 5, Hooker had had enough and pulled his army back over the Rappahannock. He had lost nearly 17,000 men and a major battle; what was more, he had lost them to a force nearly half the size of his own, and had done it while nearly one-third of his own army stood idle for want of orders from its confused and vacillating commander. It was now Hooker’s turn to fall prey to the same rumor mill he had so often turned himself, and on May 13 Lincoln informed Hooker that his corps and division commanders were already muttering loudly behind the general’s back. Not that Lincoln intended to do anything about it. The grim news from Chancellorsville crushed Lincoln. “One newly risen from the dead could not have looked more ghostlike,” wrote the correspondent Noah Brooks. Lincoln vetoed a proposal for a new crossing of the Rappahannock that Hooker telegraphed to him on May 13, and the following month, seeing the handwriting on the wall, the exasperated Hooker resigned.20
By this time a certain paranoia had begun to set in among the officers of the Army of the Potomac: could the Army of Northern Virginia ever be beaten? By the summer of 1863, it seemed not. “Everywhere but here success crowns our arms,” complained Theodore Gates. “The Army of the Potomac which has been petted & lauded ad nauseam & drilled & dressed more and better than any other in the service has accomplished absolutely nothing. … So our Generals rise & fall one after another.”21 Even the Army of Northern Virginia was becoming convinced of its own invincibility. George Henry Mills of the 16th North Carolina went cheerfully into camp with his regiment after Chancellorsville, “where we put in the time drilling on the beautiful fields of the Rappahannock and waiting for Halleck to put up another General for us to whip.”22
The magnetic pole of that confidence, beyond any question, was the figure of Lee himself, and by the summer of 1863, Lee enjoyed a degree of adulation from his own army that few generals have ever seen. Confederate propagandist Edwin De Leon met Lee briefly in Richmond in 1862 and was struck by the “stately figure” who “induced one who passed by to turn and look again.” At Chancellorsville, Lt. Francis Hillyer of the 3rd Georgia saw Confederate “troops opened to the right and the left” around Lee and his staff, “and as the old Hero passed through, the line greeted him with tremendous cheers.”23 Wesley Lewis Battle of the 37th North Carolina watched Lee return the salute of his regiment at a review on May 29, 1863, and Lt. Battle’s reaction surprised even himself:
After the review was over & we were marching back to Camp, Gen. A. P. Hill rode up to Col. Barbour & told him to make his Regt. give three cheers for Gen. Lee. It is impossible for me to describe the emotions of my heart as the old silver-headed hero acknowledged the salute by taking off his hat, thereby exposing the most noble countenance I ever beheld. I felt proud that the Southern Confederacy could boast of such a man. In fact I was almost too proud for the occasion, for I could not open my mouth to give vent to the emotions that were struggling within.24
Actually, Lee’s success as a commander was due to more than just the inspiration he generated. The first important factor in that success was clearly his adroit choice and management of his subordinate officers. Lee succeeded in gathering around him a remarkable collection of military talent, especially “Stonewall” Jackson and James Longstreet, and he communicated with them on an almost intuitive level. With officers such as this on hand, it became Lee’s style only to give general shape to plans for a campaign or battle and to leave the actual execution to his subordinates, confident that they understood his intentions so perfectly that on-the-spot decision making could be left entirely to their own discretion. He told one of his corps com
manders, “I only wish you therefore to keep me advised of your movements that I may shape mine accordingly, and not to feel trammeled in your operations, other than is required by the general plan of operations.” “I think and work with all my powers to bring my troops to the right place at the right time; then I have done my duty,” Lee explained to the Prussian observer Justus Scheibert. “My supervision during the battle would do more harm than good. I would be unfortunate if I could not rely upon my division and brigade commanders.”25
It was just as well that he could, for few of Lee’s senior officers—Jackson, Hill, Longstreet, Richard Ewell—showed much capacity to get along with each other. Jackson and Hill in particular carried on a spiteful and venomous vendetta against each other, culminating in 1863, when Jackson attempted to have Hill cashiered. Lee alone seemed exempt from the friction of the talented and prickly personalities in the upper command levels of the Army of Northern Virginia, partly because of his own personal reticence and partly because Lee could rely on his immaculate prewar service record and his membership in one of the preeminent families in Southern society to quell the flood of argument around him. For Lee, unlike his senior officers, was the only major representative of the planter aristocracy in the top hierarchy of the Army. “Stonewall” Jackson was an orphan, raised in the yeoman farmer counties of western Virginia, and most observers were struck by how much he looked like a farmer rather than a general. Captain William Seymour of the Louisiana Tiger battalion noticed that Jackson regularly wore nothing more impressive than “an old rusty, sunburnt grey coat and a faded blue cap of a peculiar pattern, the top of which fell forward over his eyes.” From his appearance, wrote George Henry Mills, “no one would have suspected that he was more than a Corporal in a cavalry company.”26
James Longstreet, another son of yeoman farmers, also lost his father at an early age and labored under the added disadvantage (in this army) of having no Virginia connections (born in South Carolina, Longstreet had grown up in Georgia under the tutelage of his slave-owning uncle, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet). Richard Ewell, a pop-eyed eccentric who lisped vulgarities and profanity, was the son of an alcoholic physician from a once-prosperous Virginia family. Only Ambrose Powell Hill’s family came close to conferring any kind of recognizable social status on any of these subordinates, and even then, Powell Hill’s father was a townsman and a merchant rather than a landholder. Hill was also known to be as rakish and irreligious as “Stonewall” Jackson was a severe and devout Presbyterian.27
Lee, by contrast, came from the elite of Virginia Tidewater society and low-church Virginia Episcopalianism (even though much of his land and slaves had come from his wife’s family and not through Lee’s spendthrift and bankrupt father). Although Lee had repeatedly expressed before the war his personal preference for seeing slavery brought to an end at the right time, like most Virginia slaveholders Lee found that the right time was never within the foreseeable future, and Lee began the war as committed to the defense and preservation of slavery as any other slaveholder. In every respect, Lee was the embodiment of the ideal Virginia planter—decent, gentlemanly, religious, and immovably convinced that slavery was, for the unending present, the best of all possible worlds for black people.28 And he expected, demanded, and received from his subordinate officers precisely the unarguable deference that his middle-class lieutenants were conditioned and expected to give.
Another key to Lee’s successes on the battlefield was his cultivation of good relations with Jefferson Davis. The Confederate president originally intended to use Lee in much the same way that Lincoln used Henry Halleck, as a general military adviser and liaison between the army and the government, and from March to June 1862 Lee worked behind a desk in Richmond as an informal military chief of staff to the Confederate President. Although Joseph E. Johnston’s wound in the Peninsula campaign forced Davis to put Lee into field command, the two remained in very close communication throughout the war, and Lee’s victories in the Peninsula convinced Davis to yield to Lee’s strategic judgment throughout the ensuing eighteen months. By 1863, Lee had become indispensable to Davis: as Davis wrote to Lee, to find “someone in my judgment more fit to command, or who would possess more of the confidence of the army, or of the reflecting men of the country, is to demand an impossibility.”29 Thus, Lee was able to exercise, through Davis, an outsize influence over the shape of Confederate military operations and logistics.
The most important key to Lee’s successes was his aggressiveness. Beneath the marble-like calm and dignity that his soldiers and enemies so admired, Lee was a volcano of aggressive impulses. The “evenness and self-control in General Lee’s bearing and habits of thought… prevented the ordinary observer from realizing the boldness and energy held reserve under cover of his composed demeanor,” warned William Preston Johnston, one of Jefferson Davis’s military aides (and the son of the fallen Albert Sidney Johnston). “Lee was the most aggressive man I met in the war,” wrote John Singleton Mosby, “and was always ready for an enterprise.” In the spring of 1862, when Lee was still a relatively new and untried article, one man asked Colonel Joseph Ives, who knew Lee, whether the general possessed sufficient vigor and audacity to defend Richmond. “If there is one man in either army, Confederate or Federal, head and shoulders above every other in audacity it is General Lee. His name might be audacity. He will take more desperate chances, and take them quicker than any other general in this country, North or South; and you will live to see it, too.”30
Ives’s prediction was amply borne out, for Lee easily turned into a different man on the battlefield than he was in the drawing room. In the early months of the war, Lee favored a cautious, defensive strategy. “Our policy should be purely on the defensive,” he advised in the first two weeks of the war, believing that it was still possible that “Reason” will “resume her sway” and convince the Lincoln administration to turn to negotiations rather than conflict. That confidence melted away before the end of the year, and he soon came to realize that the South’s resources were too feeble to prevent the Northern juggernaut from gradually crushing a passive Confederacy. Nor did he look for salvation from Britain or France. “You must not build your hopes on peace on account of the United States going into a war with England,” he warned in 1861, “Expect to receive aid from no one.” Only by quickly meeting the Yankee armies straight on, using surprise and dexterity to defeat and embarrass them, and thus rapidly depressing Northern war morale to the point where disheartened Northerners would declare the war unwinnable, did the Confederacy stand a chance. “I am aware that there is difficulty & hazard in taking the aggressive,” he warned the Confederacy’s Secretary of War in 1863, James A. Seddon. Apart from inducing a swift Northern collapse, however, Lee privately considered the Confederacy to be doomed. “He knew [in 1861] the strength of the United States Government,” wrote William Preston Johnston.31
On the other hand, Lee knew that democracies do not easily bear the burdens of long wars. Democracies are geared to peace, and public opinion in a democracy cannot be regimented and drummed up repeatedly. If the Confederates were wise, they would “give all the encouragement we can, consistently with truth, to the rising peace party of the North.” Let Lincoln’s Northern opposition declare the war to be lost, let them wax eloquent about their desires for an armistice and negotiations “for a restoration of the Union,” and let their constant yammering for peace talks finally compel Lincoln to agree to an armistice. Once a truce was announced and the talks begun, Lincoln would never be able to convince war-weary Northerners to restart the war; the Confederates could then dismiss any talk about “bringing us back to the Union” and demand a “distinct and independent national existence.” That, of course, meant allowing Lincoln’s Northern opposition to think that the goal of peace talks would be reunion when in fact the Confederates never intended any other outcome than independence, but “it is not the part of prudence to spurn the proposition in advance, merely because those who wish… to believe that
it will result in bringing us back to the Union.” Cynical, perhaps, but “should the belief that peace will bring back the Union become general, the war would no longer be supported, and that after all is what we are interested in bringing about.”32
Looking to wear down Northern morale before Northern numbers could overwhelm him, Lee leaped to the attack at every opportunity he could, invading the North twice in 1862 and 1863 and taking the tactical offensive in every major battle he fought in those years (except for Antietam and Fredericksburg). The cost in lives for this aggressiveness was not cheap—Lee’s men sustained 42,000 casualties in his first four months in command of the Army of Northern Virginia (almost as many men as Albert Sidney Johnston commanded at Shiloh)—but Lee at least achieved in the process the most extraordinary combat victories of the war, and at Second Bull Run he came as close as any other Civil War general to the complete annihilation of an opposing army. Lee was prepared to fight the Civil War in Virginia as a great Napoleonic conflict, and even after the terrible pounding his army took at Antietam, Lee was ready four days afterward to “threaten a passage into Maryland, to occupy the enemy on this frontier, and, if my purpose cannot be accomplished, to draw them into the [Shenandoah] Valley, where I can attack them to advantage.”33
Ultimately, though, it was not in Virginia that Lee wanted to fight Yankees. “Stonewall” Jackson began pressing Lee in the summer of 1862 to take the war northward, across the Potomac, “and transfer this campaign from the banks of the James to those of the Susquehanna” in Pennsylvania. Lee could not have agreed more. “After much reflection,” he told Jefferson Davis, “I think if it was possible to reinforce Jackson” and send him to “cross Maryland into Pennsylvania,” it would relieve the pressure on northern Virginia’s threadbare farms and pastures, and “call all the enemy from our Southern coast & liberate those states.” When Joe Johnston’s wounding put command of the Army of Northern Virginia into his hands, Lee wasted little time in taking his own advice, and the 1862 Maryland campaign would have been a Pennsylvania campaign had it all not ended so abruptly at Antietam.34
Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Page 47