The following day, the bulk of Hooker’s force completed a ten-mile march, crossed the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers, and arrived in the area appropriately called the Wilderness. It was a seventy-square-mile region of dense, second-growth timber, tangled underbrush, creeks, bogs, and few roads, and here Hooker’s army was poised to attack the western flank of Lee’s forces. Letterman, however, had already been restricted by Hooker’s battle plan.
It had been Union army doctrine since 1861 that pre-battle priorities were ammunition, commissary, medical supplies, and general baggage in that order. Over Letterman’s objections, Hooker allowed no more than two ambulances to accompany each division when it crossed the Rappahannock and entered the Wilderness to the south. Letterman could establish hospitals only north of the river, several miles from where he expected the battle to take place. He also had to establish his medical supply depot on the far side of the river, about six miles from the expected battlefield. Alarmed, Letterman appealed to the general and convinced him to allow a few medicine wagons to cross the river (he also filled the limited empty ambulances with medical supplies), but nearly all stretcher bearers were kept on the far side of the river. While Letterman never directly criticized Hooker for this, his subsequent description of the battle almost always included a reference to how Hooker limited his options by sometimes delaying the arrival of medical supplies to allow troops and ammunition to be brought forward first.15
As the rain resumed on April 29, Hooker felt almost ready to attack a badly outnumbered Lee. However, he turned cautious like McClellan. He halted his force of three corps near the Chancellor family’s two-story brick home and tavern, grandly called Chancellorsville, to await reinforcements despite his significant numerical advantage. That single decision perhaps dictated the course of the battle and determined the number of casualties Letterman would face.
For Lee used the delay to his advantage. He split his troops, leaving some at Fredericksburg and positioning approximately 36,000 men to blunt Hooker’s position at Chancellorsville. Lee took a huge chance, dividing his already outnumbered force and sending most of it to confront Hooker’s 50,000 men (with more on the way), who were supported by approximately one hundred artillery pieces. As Hooker dallied on April 29 and again on April 30, Lee’s men dug fortifications in the forest. For their part, Letterman’s medical officers utilized the lull to establish aid stations. Letterman focused on the evacuation routes back to the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers and constructing hospitals on the far side.
April 30 ended with Hooker arriving at the Chancellor house at 6:00 p.m. As was his custom, Letterman had established a hospital at Hooker’s headquarters and planned to stay there as long as battle conditions permitted. That would enable him to receive field reports as quickly as possible so he could make necessary and timely medical decisions. It also allowed him to take advantage of Hooker’s couriers and telegraph operators, who sent and received battlefield reports. Hooker rejoiced that night. He believed Lee had been caught in a trap.
On May 1, early morning ground fog delayed Hooker’s attack. When it cleared, 30,000 men attacked the Confederates at 11:00 a.m. Stiff resistance produced more casualties than expected. As they began arriving at Chancellorsville, Hooker again took a cautious route. He confounded many of his officers when he ordered lead units to fall back. As his men withdrew into a more consolidated position and as Confederate reinforcements reached the battlefield, Letterman began transferring as many patients as possible north and across the rivers. The battle had hardly begun, yet limited resources near the battlefield and Hooker’s cautious tactical decisions already were influencing Letterman’s medical decisions. Although Hooker claimed to be pleased with the day’s battle, he had lost momentum, which forced Letterman to react from a position of poorly equipped weakness.
Then it got worse. On the night of May 1, Lee took another gamble by splitting his force a second time. He assigned 28,000 men to General Stonewall Jackson and ordered him to march double-quick to the west in an attempt to flank Hooker’s army, just as Hooker had done to Lee. That left about 12,000 men, commanded by Lee, to face Hooker in the woods surrounding Chancellorsville.
At about the same time that night, Letterman also made a strategic decision. He had planned to evacuate the wounded over a good road to Fredericksburg, about ten miles away. But enemy positions now threatened that route, so Letterman decided to evacuate patients the next day to hospitals established north of the river and beyond, over twenty-five miles of bad roads, to Potomac Creek. Heartbreaking gasps of pain marked each wagon’s progress toward the patient depot. Men wrapped in bandages that oozed red dreaded every roadbed rut, ridge, and rock in wagons that jolted over every obstacle. While Letterman felt he had managed to get enough supplies onto the battlefield, evacuation to remote hospitals became a major concern.
Late on the afternoon of May 2, Jackson attacked. In less than an hour, General Hooker’s original grand plan of flanking and attacking unraveled. The Confederates had seized the initiative. Hooker’s right flank, commanded by General Otis Howard, crumbled under Jackson’s assault as the sun set. The enemy overran Union positions and casualties began streaming into Letterman’s Chancellorsville hospital. Thousands of Union troops fled toward the army’s headquarters. As forward aid stations were abandoned, the enemy captured Union surgeons, patients, and medical supplies. The battle turned into a rout. Within an hour, the Confederates advanced one-and-a-half miles to within four miles of Letterman and Hooker. For the second consecutive day, Hooker’s position had become more concentrated around Chancellorsville. Heightened protection of retreat routes north to the Rappahannock became a priority.
By late afternoon, enemy artillery fire pounded Hooker and Letterman at Chancellorsville. Letterman’s wry sense of humor, or perhaps frustration, surfaced when he later wrote, “[T]his building came within range of the enemy’s guns, planted on his left, centre (sic), and right, being the centre of a converging fire—a location for which Commanding Generals of the Army of the Potomac seemed to have a peculiar partiality.”16 As night settled on the forest, Letterman’s medical corps struggled to carry wounded men off the battlefield while its ambulances sat idle miles away on the far side of the Rappahannock and Rapidan.
Horror struck on May 3. The Confederates attacked a thin section of the Union line at 5:30 that morning. Within two hours they broke through. More casualties arrived at Chancellorsville. When Hooker inexplicably ceded an open area called Hazel Grove to the Confederates, enemy artillery fire from that region soon landed at Chancellorsville. The Union army’s headquarters came under direct attack.
As Hooker stood on the Chancellor house’s expansive veranda, which held a broad view of the battlefield, an aide handed him a field report. Letterman stood nearby. At that instant an artillery shell hit the base of the pillar next to Hooker. The wood pillar hit him squarely, knocking him to the floor and unconscious. Letterman ordered him taken to his room inside the house. Hooker likely had suffered a severe concussion when he fell to the ground. He was unconscious for nearly an hour. After he revived, he tried to mount his horse to reassure nearby troops but promptly collapsed and vomited. For the rest of the day, he appeared stunned and was at times incoherent. Just as the Battle of Chancellorsville reached its climax, Hooker had been knocked senseless.
What could Letterman do? Hooker’s respected chief of staff, Major General Daniel Butterfield, was in the field and could not be reached. Other officers at headquarters at the time lacked seniority and experience. With Hooker obviously incapacitated, Letterman did not have the authority to require transfer of command. In his postwar writings, he never indicated whether he thought Hooker so incapacitated that command could or should have been transferred, He left it to others to speculate on whether the battle’s outcome might have been different if a less-cautious general had taken over.
As the eastern side of the Union’s line at Chancellorsville disintegrated and Hooker lay senseless at midmorning, Sedgwick attacked Lee’s
remaining men at Fredericksburg. Once again, Union soldiers stormed Marye’s Heights east of the town. Within one hour, Letterman’s medical department delivered more than 1,000 wounded men to the same hospitals in town that his officers had established the previous December. “Such sites are too much for the human eyes to behold. Dying, screaming and groaning in every quarter and the blood almost running on the floor,” wrote hospital steward John Hieber.17
Sedgwick’s men were too far away to reinforce Hooker, and vague orders had left Sedgwick unclear on whether he had authorization to proceed to Chancellorsville after clearing the enemy off Marye’s Heights. At Chancellorsville, chaos reigned. Hooker abandoned the Chancellor house and ordered the Army of the Potomac to pull back toward the river crossings. As the army retreated, the enemy overran some of Letterman’s field hospitals. Union doctors and wounded soldiers were taken prisoner. Meanwhile, those who had been wounded and evacuated the day before were transferred to hospitals at Aquia Creek and Potomac Creek to make room for fresh casualties.
By nightfall on May 3, most of Hooker’s troops had dug in along the retreat route back to the Rappahannock River. More than 1,000 wounded men and medical officers had been taken prisoner. Letterman faced more than 9,600 wounded soldiers. Nearly 1,700 had been killed. The much smaller Confederate army had suffered nearly the same number of casualties. Taken together, only the Antietam casualty total exceeded the 21,000 casualties at Chancellorsville.18 In the course of eight months, Letterman had been the senior medical officer in two of the Civil War’s ten bloodiest battles.
After months of preparation, after accumulating an overwhelming manpower and firepower edge and seizing the initial advantage, General Hooker and the Army of the Potomac had been beaten in less than a week. On the night of May 4, Hooker ordered a retreat back across the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers. Again the orders crippled Letterman’s ability to take care of the wounded. Letterman learned on the morning of the 5th that all wounded were to be taken across the rivers. But he could use only the ambulances already south of the river. Worse, when an ambulance took wounded men across to the northern bank, it would not be allowed to return.
Once more, Letterman appealed to Hooker, arguing the impracticality of using only those ambulances already south of the rivers and using each ambulance just once. “[A]fter much solicitation I was permitted, late in the day, to manage the matter in my own way. I then ordered a sufficient number of ambulances from the north side of the river, and all the wounded were taken across before the troops began to pass the stream,” he later wrote.19 The wounded were ferried in a steady rain, much like the rain that had soaked the army when it marched around Fredericksburg to outflank Lee nine days earlier.
They were deposited at temporary field hospitals in the wet forest, little more than patient depots comprised of crude huts, pine boughs, and sometimes canvas. They waited, many in pain, for comprehensive care that came later, when they reached larger hospitals in the north and east. “I found many of their wounds had had no attention whatever since the first dressing on the battlefield, the limbs in many instances had become so swollen that the stopping of the circulation by the bandages resulted in the most intense pain. I worked until my materials were exhausted,” wrote William Stewart, who had graduated from medical school two months earlier.20
Although Lee had not been able to prevent the Army of the Potomac from escaping, once again he had outwitted its commanding officer with guile and daring. He had inflicted massive casualties on an army that routinely had held a significant manpower and firepower advantage. When President Lincoln received word of Hooker’s defeat, he was stunned at the news, asking, “Oh God! What will the country say?”21
Letterman turned his attention to the nearly 1,200 men and nineteen surgeons who remained prisoners of war. Fiercely loyal to his captured men and their patients, he grew more and more frustrated in the days following the battle as negotiations for their return dragged on. Finally, on May 8 and 9, Letterman received authorization to send twenty-six medical officers, five army wagons filled with supplies, and 2,500 rations of bread, beef, coffee, sugar, salt and candles to the wounded men held captive. That brought only temporary relief to the captured Union wounded.
Lee’s agreement on May 11 to allow the return of some of the Union’s wounded soldiers to Letterman’s field hospitals across the river proved to be a hollow victory. The men, wounded more than a week earlier, desperately needed medical care. Letterman asked that a pontoon bridge be erected across the Rappahannock to enable enough ambulances to cross and collect the wounded in one trip. Hooker’s chief of staff, Butterfield, denied the request. Instead, he directed Letterman to use pontoon rafts, which carried only two ambulances at a time. Letterman needed hundreds of ambulances to cross the river for the more than 1,000 wounded soldiers who were waiting. The ambulances could not cross the river without bridge or raft, due to its depth, steep bank, and rocky bottom. So the bloodied and maimed soldiers remained out of his reach.
Letterman sought and finally received permission to negotiate directly with Lee’s medical director, LaFayette Guild, for the return of remaining surgeons and wounded prisoners. The Alabama native had graduated one year ahead of Letterman at Jefferson Medical College in 1848. Given the relatively small size of the student body, it’s entirely possible they had known each other as medical students. Guild was among the Union surgeons who had been dismissed from the service in 1861 for refusing to take an oath of allegiance at the outbreak of the Civil War. He went to Richmond to join the Confederacy and within a year became medical director of the Army of Northern Virginia during the Peninsula campaign in 1862.
It must have been an awkward meeting between former classmates dedicated to saving lives, who now found themselves in opposing armies sworn to destroy each other. Within one day the two surgeons reached an agreement. Letterman prepared 450 ambulances for the trip to the Chancellorsville area. He then went over Butterfield’s head, asking Hooker (who had traveled to Washington to face the president’s disappointment) to authorize a pontoon bridge. Hooker agreed. The bridge was completed on May 13. The following day Letterman’s medical corps collected and returned 1,160 patients and their captive surgeons to Union-held territory.
Intrigue gripped a defeated Army of the Potomac. Some generals under Hooker’s command sought another coup, aiming to position General George Meade as their preferred replacement. But when Meade declined to cooperate, the plot dissipated.22 Hooker, for his part, did little to strengthen his questionable standing. Worse, he ordered Letterman and others not to reveal the number of casualties the Army of the Potomac had suffered, a decision that weakened his position in the eyes of some in Washington. It also placed Letterman in an impossible position. How could he order adequate medical supplies for wounded who did not officially exist?
Secretary of War Stanton ordered Surgeon General Hammond to determine how many men the Army of the Potomac had lost. Hammond ordered a surgeon who knew Letterman and who held Hammond’s respect and trust to find out. His written order to John Brinton ostensibly was to “collect pathological specimens” at Chancellorsville, but on the back was the real mission: “Order in reality to ascertain the number of casualties at Chancellorsville which had been concealed.”23
Brinton thought that might be an easy task when he learned that Letterman was in Washington having dinner with Hammond one night shortly after the battle. He went to Hammond’s house and asked if he could talk to Letterman directly. But Hammond said no, and added that Brinton would have to travel to Chancellorsville because Letterman was not authorized to discuss “specimens.” Letterman obeyed Hooker’s gag order, and Brinton set forth.24
Letterman’s position was untenable. After having been hampered in his duties by Hooker when the general kept most ambulances on the north side of Rapidan River, away from the battlefield, he was now ordered to conceal the Army of the Potomac’s losses. However, in his post-battle reports and written recollection, he made clear that he tho
ught Hooker’s decision about ambulance deployment had caused additional suffering. He wrote: “Great difficulty was experienced in removing the wounded, for want of ambulances (plenty of which were parked on the north bank of the river). . . . That portion of the field under our control was searched and all the wounded were brought in and every wounded man was safely removed across the river before the Army commenced its march for camp. . . . I have seen no battle in which the wounded were so well cared for; and had not military necessity deprived us of the use of our ambulance train on the south side of the river, nearly every man could have been comfortably placed in our corps hospitals (near Potomac Creek) within twenty-four hours of receipt of his wounds.”25
Meanwhile, Lee sought to parlay his victory at Chancellorsville into another advance into Maryland. He withdrew two corps of the Army of Northern Virginia from Chancellorsville beginning on June 3. The following day, Hooker admitted in writing that he had no idea where they were headed. A week later, intelligence reports confirmed that another advance into Northern territory by the Confederates appeared likely. The following day, Letterman began preparing for the second major campaign of the year, probably in Maryland, in two months.
Once again, Letterman supervised the post-battle flow of wounded from the battlefield to general hospitals in Washington while the Army of the Potomac chased General Lee. His army’s march, covering up to twenty-five miles a day, was exhausting. It had not rained in nearly a month. Giant clouds of dust hung in the sultry summer air as tens of thousands of Union soldiers tramped through the Maryland countryside. Many collapsed from a shortage of water as the army crossed the state line into Pennsylvania.
In his haste to counter Lee’s advance, Hooker once more made Letterman’s supplies a second priority. As rain finally brought relief and then turned roads into mud, Hooker reduced the number of medical supply wagons allowed to accompany the army, once more over Letterman’s objections. “On June 19 while the army was on the march, as it were, from before Fredericksburg to some unknown point north of the Potomac River, the headquarters being near the Fairfax Court-House, Va., the transportation of the (medical) department was cut down by Major-General Hooker, on an average of two wagons in a brigade, in opposition to my opinion, expressed verbally and in writing.”26
Surgeon In Blue Page 18