AT the end of April, the opposing eastern armies approached each other west of Fredericksburg along the Rappahannock and the Rapidan. “Fighting Joe” Hooker marched the “finest army on the planet,” as he called it, the Federal Army of the Potomac, westward away from Falmouth, hoping to hit Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army from the side and rear. Lee split his force, leaving part of it facing the Federal troops positioned along the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg and marching the other westward to face Hooker’s main force, near the crossroads of Chancellorsville.
On April 29 Federal troops crossed the Rappahannock. At first the situation looked poor for Lee’s Southerners, who were in danger of being crushed by the pincer movement. Lee’s army of sixty thousand, much undersupplied, faced both Hooker’s seventy-five thousand and Sedgwick’s slowly advancing forty thousand. One-third of the enormous Union army would assault Lee’s flank and rear; another third, under Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, would repeat Burnside’s maneuver of attacking across the river at Fredericksburg and plowing westward. The final third of the Federal army lay in reserve.
Rather than a Confederate disaster, however, Chancellorsville would be Lee’s masterpiece. The bold commander gambled by splitting his army and relying on Stonewall Jackson’s corps in a crucial role. Jackson’s men smashed directly into the Union army on May 1, unleashing a tremendous firefight. That evening Lee and Jackson held a war council, and the following day Jackson led his troops on a fourteen-mile flank march around the Federal right. Late in the afternoon Jackson’s men struck, crushing Hooker’s lines. “The events of the few hours of this afternoon and evening are imprinted on my memory in a grand picture,” wrote Capt. Thomas L. Livermore of the Eighteenth New Hampshire Infantry. “I can now, and probably always shall be able to again bring before my eyes the dusty plain bounded by long lines of men on all sides; the smoke of musketry and batteries, whose thunders still reverberate in my ears.” 7 On the other side jubilation and confidence were the order of the day. Johann August Heinrich Heros von Borcke, a staff officer of Maj. Gen. Jeb Stuart’s, noted, “A more magnificent spectacle can hardly be imagined than that which greeted me when I reached the crest of the plateau, and beheld on this side the long lines of our swiftly advancing troops stretching as far as the eye could reach, their red flags fluttering in the breeze, and their arms glittering in the morning sun; and farther on, dense and huddled masses of the Federals flying in utter rout toward the United States Ford.” 8
But the emerging victory would come at a great cost to the Confederacy. While reconnoitering his troops and riding into a patch of woods alongside the Orange Turnpike, Jackson was fired on accidentally by his own men. As described by Jackson’s chaplain, James Power Smith, “Under this volley, when not two rods from the troops, the general received three balls at the same instant. One penetrated the palm of his right hand and was cut out that night from the back of his hand. A second passed around the wrist of the left arm and out through the left hand. A third ball passed through the left arm half-way from shoulder to elbow. The large bone of the upper arm was splintered to the elbow-joint, and the wound bled freely.” 9 Jackson was carried off the field, his left arm amputated, and plans made to transport him by ambulance to a railroad station and on to Richmond.
While Lee directed the battle and worried over Jackson, Hooker was having a disastrous day on the field. Not only had he ignored the admonitions of his corps commanders regarding Confederate troop movements, convincing himself that Jackson’s men were retreating, but the next day, leaning on a column at the Chancellorsville Tavern, which he employed as a headquarters, Hooker was knocked to the ground when the column was hit by a shell. “General Hooker was lying down I think in a soldier’s tent by himself,” wrote Maj. Gen. Darius N. Couch following the incident. “Raising himself a little as I entered, he said: ‘Couch, I turn the command of the army over to you.’ . . . This was three-quarters of an hour after his hurt. He seemed rather dull, but possessed of his mental faculties.” 10
The Confederate victory was complete. Although Sedgwick had fought his way westward from Fredericksburg and a sharp clash erupted about Salem Church, Hooker’s force was demoralized, and he was discredited completely. With the Union army on the retreat, Lee could celebrate a terrific triumph.
Eight days after his wounding at Chancellorsville, Jackson died at Guinea’s Station, Virginia, his last words reputedly being, “No, no, let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” The South had lost its most celebrated general of the hour. Much later, the Federal general Oliver O. Howard wrote, “Stonewall Jackson was victorious. Even his enemies praise him; but, providentially for us, it was the last battle that he waged against the American Union. For, in bold planning, in energy of execution, which he had the power to diffuse, in indefatigable activity and moral ascendancy, Jackson stood head and shoulders above his confrères, and after his death General Lee could not replace him.” 11
And of course there were other casualties. Back in Richmond many women had become nurses and administered to the sick and wounded. One such nurse, Kate Mason Rowland, served at Winder Hospital just outside the city. In early May casualties streamed in from the Chancellorsville battlefield. Rowland wrote:
The sick and wounded are pouring in. We all went out to the wards with lanterns, tin buckets of water and sponges and wet the wounds, we carried a supply of lint and bandages, but with only two surgeons it was a long while before all could be attended to. Sounds of misery greeted our ears as we entered, some groaning, others crying like children, and some too weak and suffering to do anything but turn a grateful look upon us as we squeezed the cold water from the sponge over their stiffened and bandaged limbs. 12
Meanwhile, in the western theater, the Confederate military situation appeared alarming. Along the Mississippi River the Rebel bastion at Vicksburg was the target of Federal military operations that moved north from New Orleans and south from Tennessee. The campaign for Vicksburg originated in the autumn of 1862, when Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant struck south along the railroads following the battle of Corinth. The approach didn’t work, and Grant discovered that attempting to maintain long and imperiled supply lines over this route was too problematic.
In April 1863 the stubborn Federal commander opened a second campaign to control the Mississippi. This time Grant marched his troops south of Vicksburg, crossed the Mississippi River, and prepared to attack eastward. It was one of the most daring military maneuvers attempted to that time, as Grant relied on long, tenuous lines of communication and planned to fight “behind enemy lines” without sources of fresh supplies. Union Brig. Gen. Benjamin H. Grierson led a diversionary raid from La Grange, Tennessee, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, confusing the Confederate response to the impending assaults. “Much of the country through which we passed was almost entirely destitute of forage and provisions,” wrote Grierson. “It was but seldom that we obtained over one meal per day. Many of the inhabitants must undoubtedly suffer for want of the necessities of life, which have reached most fabulous prices.” 13
Confederate forces consisted of the garrison at Vicksburg under Lt. Gen. John Pemberton, a Northern-born officer who, nonetheless, enjoyed the good graces of Jefferson Davis; and an army near Jackson commanded by Joe Johnston, back in commission but not in his old post. During the first two and a half weeks in May, Grant’s men accomplished amazing feats: marching eastward following a battle at Port Gibson, they fought and won four battles, separating the two Confederate forces, casting off Johnston into a northward retreat, capturing the city of Jackson, and turning to attack Vicksburg from the east. It was a stunning beginning to what became a siege of Vicksburg itself.
The fierce determination of the Federal campaign was reflected in a letter Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote toward the end of the siege. “Vicksburg contains many of my old pupils and friends,” wrote Sherman. “Should it fall into our hands I will treat them with kindness, but they have sowed the wind and must reap the
whirlwind.” 14
In the city itself Pemberton and his strong defensive lines held off the Yankee juggernaut. Life in the city for the soldiers and the civilians was slowly becoming unbearable, however. Food was scarce and matériel was dwindling rapidly, and the Rebel army’s ability to fight off attacks was diminishing. The psychological effect on the Southerners was disastrous. In March a civilian who happened to be a Northerner caught in the city wrote this diary entry: “The slow shelling of Vicksburg goes on all the time, and we have grown indifferent. It does not at present interrupt or interfere with daily avocations, but I suspect they are only getting the range of different points; and when they have them all complete, showers of shot will rain on us all at once.” Soldiers and townsfolk lived in cellars, caverns, or earthen caves carved out of the landscape, approximating crude bombproof shelters. The same diarist later penned, “The cellar is so damp and musty the bedding has to be carried out and laid in the sun every day, with the forecast that it may be demolished at any moment. The confinement is dreadful. To sit and listen as if waiting for death in a horrible manner would drive me insane.” 15
The suffering continued through May and June as the siege dragged on with infrequent attacks but scattered, intense fighting along the lines north, east, and south of the city. One of the most notable attempts to break the lines occurred on May 25, three days after the siege began. Engineers working under the supervision of Union capt. Andrew Hickenlooper, chief engineer of the Seventeenth Army Corps, had constructed a mine under the Third Louisiana Infantry Redan, the principal fort protecting the Old Jackson Road approach into town. On May 25 Hickenlooper exploded twenty-two hundred pounds of black powder set along the mine, as a prelude to a massive attack.
Later Hickenlooper recalled the scene:
At the appointed moment it appeared as though the whole fort and connecting outworks commenced an upward movement, gradually breaking into fragments and growing less bulky in appearance, until it looked like an immense fountain of finely pulverized earth, mingled with flashes of fire and clouds of smoke, through which could occasionally be caught a glimpse of some dark objects—men, gun-carriages, shelters, etc. 16
But still this attempt to break through the lines, and another attempt six days later, failed. The siege at Vicksburg ground on, not one Yankee certain of the competency of the Federal commander Grant. Nor did the Confederates’ faith rest in the abilities of Pemberton.
BACK in Richmond many in the government worried greatly over the fate of Vicksburg, but the people of the South were more distracted and heartbroken over the death of Stonewall Jackson. Charlotte Wigfall, wife of Louis Wigfall, relayed the country’s lament over the fallen leader. “We are all saddened to the heart to-night by hearing [of] the death of our hero Jackson,” she wrote. “It will cause mourning all over our land and each person seems to feel as if he had lost a relative. I feel more disheartened about the war now than I have ever felt before. It seems to me it is to be interminable, and what a wretched life of anxiety it is to look forward to!” 17
“We had great excitement here on account of Gen. Jackson’s death, and a long procession passed by Mama’s house,” wrote the youngest Wigfall daughter, Fannie, just ten years old. She continued:
And just before it passed 3 thousand Yankees arrived [prisoners of war], and I had to walk by them nearly the whole way from the capitol square to Mama’s house, and then as I was on the wrong side of the pavement I had to pass right through them. Directly after the hearse went his horse came with his coat pantaloons boots, and spurs, and the flag all draped in black crepe, and Gens. Longstreet, Elzey, and Pickett, and President Davis, and all of General Winder’s staff. 18
The Confederate president attempted to boost hopes for victory that spring. Davis told the Confederacy:
At no previous period of the war have our forces been so numerous, so well organized, and so thoroughly disciplined, armed, and equipped as at present. Disaster has been the result of their [Union forces’] every effort to turn or to storm Vicksburg and Port Hudson, as well as of every attack on our batteries on the Red River, the Tallahatchie, and other navigable streams. Within a few weeks the falling waters and the increasing heat of summer will complete their discomfiture and compel their baffled and defeated forces to the abandonment of expeditions on which was based their chief hope of subjugation. 19
Privately, however, the president knew how fragile the war standing was on several fronts. Joe Johnston, having returned to the field, reported from Tennessee. “Should all, or a large part of [Grant’s] troops, come into middle Tennessee,” he wrote the president, “this army would be forced to leave it. We can not attack now with probability of success & should strong reinforcements arrive, we could not hold our ground against the Federal army.” 20
Davis also received alarming news from governors, none more so than from Zebulon Vance of North Carolina. “I receive information from our Generals in the field that desertion is alarmingly on the increase in the army,” Vance wrote, and went on,
I do not believe that one case in a hundred is caused by disloyalty—have no apprehensions whatever on this score. Homesickness, fatigue, hard fare, &c., have of course much to do with it. The promise of the law of Conscription, that they should have furloughs, which has never been redeemed, is one principal cause beyond a doubt. . . . Another great cause—in fact almost the only one assigned by the last class of conscripts, is that they were refused permission to enter the regiments of their choice with their neighbors and relations. Large numbers actually threaten to desert before they leave camp and generally make good their threats. 21
Davis replied that he did not believe calling out the militia to force the return of Confederate troops to the field, as Vance suggested, was the answer.
Generals in the field went right on with meddling in Richmond politics, as they had for months. “There is a fair prospect of forward movement,” wrote James Longstreet, Lee’s senior corps commander, to his old friend Louis Wigfall. The letter was headed: “None of these matters are mentioned to anyone but Genl. Lee and yourself.” “That being the case,” Longstreet continued, “we can spare nothing from this Army to re-enforce in the West. If we could cross the Potomac with one hundred & fifty thousand men I think we could demand of Lincoln to declare his purpose. If it is a Christian purpose enough of blood has been shed to satisfy any principles. If he intends extermination we should know it at once and play a little at that game whilst we can.” 22
Wigfall also heard from his old friend Beauregard. “Knowing your zeal, energy, and enlarged views on all military matters,” wrote the Little Creole, from Charleston, “I send you herewith the copy of a hastily written letter to my friend Genl. J. E. Johnston, proposing to him the plan of a campaign in his Department, which I feel confident, if it met with the cordial support of the War Department, would soon give us back Tennessee, Kentucky, and Louisiana, relieve the States of Mississippi and Arkansas of the presence of every Yankee in them—and probably give us Missouri also.” 23 Beauregard’s enthusiasm for Johnston’s ideas may have been overzealous, but it would give Wigfall more ammunition to interfere with Davis and the War Department as the war dragged on.
Davis, for his part, became frustrated not only with officers who seemed to be fighting the War Department, but also with his old favorites. The foggy communication between Davis and the field generals, not always transformed into clarity by Samuel Cooper, the adjutant general of the army, gave rise to Davis venting to his most trusted field officer. “It is embarrassing to be called on for orders,” he wrote Robert E. Lee, “and when they are given to be met with opinions previously invited but withheld.” 24
For its part the Confederate Congress continued on with arguments over a great array of topics big and small. They debated the merits of a Confederate motto at length, the House desiring an improvement on e pluribus unum (“one from many”), which several members thought should be “translated” as “The eagle’s flight is out of sight.” The p
roposed motto, to be placed on the official seal, was Deo duce vincemus (“With God as our leader, we will conquer”). After much discussion, however, the motto was changed to Deo vindice (“Under the protection of God”) and placed below the equestrian statue of George Washington on the official seal of the Confederacy. 25
In the House Henry Foote proposed moving the seat of government away from Richmond. “Richmond is no place for the capital of the Confederacy,” he shouted. Foote complained of “a lack of supplies” and “a spirit of extortion manifested here which I hope to never encounter elsewhere.” Charles Conrad of Louisiana said that moving the government would appear to the Yankees like “Congress was taking steps for the evacuation of Richmond” and that “nothing [would be] more dangerous than a transfer of the seat of government during war.” 26
Many of the squabbles seemed petty. Davis wrote the Senate regarding an act to authorize newspapers to be mailed to soldiers free of postage. Davis objected to the bill, claiming it would be “unconstitutional” for the post office’s charges to become a burden on the Treasury. Nevertheless, Davis believed that the official mail of the government being sent for free was a different matter. This infuriated some senators, who saw the verdict as an attack on the little people, while privileges were held fast for wealthy officials. 27
In the Senate arguments erupted over the requirements for the chief of ordnance, and—once again the issue of rank—whether he should be a brigadier general in the provisional army. Several senators believed that all bureau chiefs should be made brigadier generals. But the problem, according to Albert Brown of Mississippi, was that “many [incumbent bureau chiefs] never led a squadron in the field, and knew no more of battle than a spinster. . . . By what justice should high military rank be conferred upon them?” 28 The bill was postponed indefinitely.
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