by Bruce Catton
Yet there would be a test that would go beyond a counting of battalions and a weighing of metal. What really lay ahead, as the serpentine body of the Army of the Potomac moved out of its camps and flowed purposefully down to the river crossings — while the bands played, and the endless length of the artillery columns jolted over the uneven roads, and new blossoms and young leaves touched the bleak woods with delicate color — what would matter the most in all of this would be the result of a searching inquiry into the character of two men — two men, in all of these scores of armed thousands — Lee and Hooker. These two men would not see each other. In all the wild battle shock of colliding armies they would not come within miles of each other. Yet they were the real antagonists. More than any other campaign in the Civil War, the campaign that began when Hooker put his army in motion at the end of April would depend on the stamina of the rival commanders.
It would be a moral issue, finally — a test of inner integrity and manhood. In this test Hooker would be so badly overmatched that it would be no contest.
Hooker’s plans were excellent, and so was his execution of them … up to the moment of testing.
He was far too intelligent to cross at Fredericksburg, as Burnside had done, and so commit his army to the impossible task of driving Lee’s army from its impregnable trenches. Instead he would go far up the river, crossing both the Rappahannock and the Rapidan twenty or twenty-five miles northwest of Fredericksburg, and then he would swing down and come in on Lee’s flank and rear. Hooker had created an effective cavalry force and he would use it to screen this march, so that Lee would not know about it until it was too late for him to make an effective reply. The Army of the Potomac was in perfect condition, stripped for action, wagon trains cut to a minimum; it would move fast, it would fight where all the chances would be in its favor, and, fighting so, it ought to win.
So went the plan. So went the execution, too, until the time came when everything depended on Joe Hooker. Then the whole business fell apart like a sheet of soggy blotting paper, and the South won a spectacular victory … from which, finally, it could gain no lasting advantage.
Hooker’s troops began to march on April 27. (Grant was nearly ready to put his men across the Mississippi; Grierson was riding hard for Baton Rouge.) Three army corps crossed the two rivers and drove swiftly in toward Fredericksburg, marching through a confusing and almost roadless jungle of second-growth timber known as the Wilderness, and going into bivouac on the last day of April at a crossroads by a pillared brick mansion: Chancellorsville. Two other army corps, left in Fredericksburg in the competent hands of General John Sedgwick, began to cross the river there, as if the Burnside fight were to be repeated, and two more Federal corps waited at the river fords a few miles upstream from Fredericksburg, where they could quickly join either wing of the army. Hooker himself went to Chancellorsville, and as April ended he could boast that he had done — so far — exactly what he set out to do and that he had done it very well.
He had at Chancellorsville very nearly as many soldiers as there were in Lee’s entire army, and they were hardly more than ten miles from Fredericksburg, right behind the great crescent of trenches with which the Confederates had surrounded that town. Abundant reinforcements were close at hand, and Sedgwick with forty thousand men was squarely in Lee’s front — a solid rock against which Hooker’s force could smash the Army of Northern Virginia. On the morning of May 1, Hooker put his men on the roads and they started east, moving in to make a finish fight of it. Hooker was confident, and the soldiers were confident. Even crusty George Meade, commander of one of the three army corps at Chancellorsville — a man who rarely bubbled with enthusiasm for anything — was showing his elation. “Hurrah for old Joe!” he cried to a brother officer. “We’re on Lee’s flank and he doesn’t know it.”1
Lee knew it well enough, but he refused to let it bother him. Technically he was in a desperate fix. If he stayed where he was he would be crushed between Hooker and Sedgwick. If he turned to meet the Chancellorsville thrust he would have to strike at a force that could quickly be made much stronger than his, and John Sedgwick would be right on his heels. If he tried to retreat toward Richmond, Hooker could easily cut across, strike him in flank, and cut off his escape. All of the choices open to him were bad, and it did not seem that there was very much that he could do about it.
Yet he seemed quite unworried. He left some ten thousand men to hold the line against Sedgwick, and with everybody else he set out for Chancellorsville to meet Hooker. Somewhere around noon on May 1, Confederate and Federal skirmish lines collided three miles east of Chancellorsville. When Federal battle lines came up behind the skirmishers they met a line of Confederate infantry, well posted, with field artillery in action. The commanders of the Federal advance confidently prepared to shoulder this roadblock aside and get on with the war, and they sent news of the encounter back to headquarters.
That put it up to Hooker, and he immediately began to wilt. Things were going precisely according to plan. Only the night before he had issued a big-talk statement to his troops, announcing that the enemy “must either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him.” The enemy was following the script; he had come out from behind his defenses and he was giving battle, and it was on Hooker’s own ground at that. But instead of going on to apply the bit about certain destruction, Hooker began to wonder if there might not be something ominous about this development. He concluded, apparently, that there was; and he called off the advance and ordered his army to retire into improvised trench lines around Chancellorsville. And in those lines, as May Day came to an end, his army prepared to spend the night.
Hooker was still talking it up. He told his ranking officer, General Darius N. Couch: “It’s all right, Couch, I’ve got Lee just where I want him.” To other officers he remarked that Lee’s army was now “the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac”; to still others he boasted that not even God Almighty could deprive him of the victory that he was about to win. But Couch concluded that under all of this fine talk Hooker was already a beaten man, and no one since that time has seen any reason to think that Couch was mistaken.
While Hooker made windy brags and put “the finest army on the planet” on the defensive, Lee sat on a cracker box a few miles away and held a conference with Stonewall Jackson. They had, by the most favorable estimate, fewer than forty-five thousand men with them; except for the force left at Fredericksburg, that was all the army there was, and they were in the immediate presence of eighty thousand Federals. But Lee was in charge of the battle now, and not Hooker, and what Lee wanted to discuss was the best way in which Hooker’s army might be wiped out. He and Jackson talked and they made a plan, and promptly the next morning they set about putting it into execution.
The plan was the distilled and concentrated essence of extreme daring.
Jackson would take twenty-five thousand men, march the length of Hooker’s front, circle around until he was due west of him, and attack his exposed right flank. The march would take the better part of the day, and to form line of battle in the trackless wilderness where Hooker’s flank rested might take hours; it would be early evening before Jackson could make his fight. Until then Lee with fewer than twenty thousand men would have to confront Hooker and his eighty thousand. Indeed, merely to confront him would not be enough; he would have to pretend to be fighting an offensive battle, and the pretense would have to be convincing, because if Hooker ever found out what Jackson was up to or learned how small Lee’s force really was he could destroy the Army of Northern Virginia before the sun went down.
Hooker would find out nothing, for Lee had him in his hands and was toying with him. Jackson made his march (it was discovered, but in the paralysis that had come upon his spirit Hooker was quite unable to interpret the meaning of his discovery; he concluded finally that part of Lee’s army must be retreating, and he sent out a couple of
divisions to prod the fugitives along). Lee gave a masterful imitation of a general who is about to open a crushing attack all along the line, and kept Hooker looking his way without inducing him to look so attentively that he could discover anything. And a little while before sundown Jackson struck Hooker’s exposed flank like the crack of doom.
One Federal army corps was driven off in rout, the right half of Hooker’s line was disrupted, and Jackson believed that if the attack could be pressed the Federals could be cut off from the Rappahannock crossings and destroyed utterly. But effective woods fighting in the darkness was impossible, the Confederate battle line was all confused … and Jackson himself, at last, was shot down and had to be carried to a field hospital with a wound that would kill him within the week. The fighting died out, with a confusing and malignant sputter of picket-line firing and sudden, meaningless cannonades, around midnight. In the streaky moonlight that lay on the narrow lanes and the crowded clearings, one Federal division collided with other Federal troops and fought a savage battle. Massed Federal artillery, hastily dug in on high ground near the Chancellorsville house, sprayed the landscape with gunfire; Yankee cavalry blundered into marching columns of Confederate infantry, and there were blind slashing and firing; and neither Hooker nor any of his generals quite realized that although their army had been jarred off balance it nevertheless lay between the separate pieces of Lee’s army, with an excellent chance to turn Lee’s victory into defeat when daylight came.
With daylight the Confederate attack was renewed. Jeb Stuart, the jaunty cavalryman with the plumed hat and the floating cloak lined with scarlet, was called away from his mounted men and given control of the fight Jackson had commenced, and while he desperately reorganized the mixed-up southern infantry elements his gunners moved fieldpieces into an open meadow which the stumbling Federals had abandoned, and from this vantage point his artillery hammered at the Federal guns and blanketed Chancellorsville clearing with a storm of shell. One missile knocked down a pillar of the Chancellorsville mansion. Hooker, who was lounging against the pillar, was thrown down and stunned. The will to strike a counterblow flickered and died in the Federal commander, and by noon his troops were fighting a rear-guard action, pulling back to form a great defensive horseshoe covering the Rappahannock bridgeheads. The two wings of Lee’s army came together again, and the huge northern army was shoved and huddled into its new lines, all notion of an offensive fight gone forever. Hooker was not thinking of anything larger than the hope that the army might avoid annihilation.
Back at Fredericksburg, John Sedgwick came into action. His men hit the Confederate trenches on the high ground west of town, captured the heights that Burnside had been unable to take in December, and started off to rescue Hooker. But Lee, as calmly as if he had been directing maneuvers back in the Richmond training fields, left a few brigades to keep an eye on Hooker’s host and with the rest of his army turned, boxed Sedgwick’s tough soldiers up in a bend of the Rappahannock halfway between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and after a wearing day’s fighting compelled them to retreat across the river, glad enough to escape alive. Then — as smoothly as if this shuttling back and forth against impossible odds were all part of the normal routine — Lee regrouped his army in front of Hooker’s horseshoe bridgehead and prepared for a new blow that would complete the rout of the Army of the Potomac.
This blow he never had to make, for Hooker had had enough. His men occupied a powerful position, with good trenches on high ground and abundant artillery. He greatly outnumbered Lee, and nearly half of his soldiers had not yet been in action at all; by the book, any Confederate attack now could lead to nothing but a Confederate defeat. But Hooker folded up, once and for all, and on a dark and rainy night he pulled his troops back, crossed to the north side of the Rappahannock, and marched back to his camps opposite Fredericksburg, abandoning the campaign that had been planned and begun so ably. He had been hopelessly beaten, he had lost seventeen thousand men, some of his generals were almost in a state of mutiny — tough little Couch was declaring that he would never serve under Hooker again and was asking the War Department for a transfer — and his soldiers were angrily inquiring how they had lost a battle in which so many of them had not even had a chance to fight.
By any standard, this was a personal triumph for Lee. It had been the story of the Seven Days’ all over again, with all of the highlights and the shadows intensified; the man with all the odds against him had taken desperate chances and had seen them pay off, while the man with everything in his favor had gone nervous and had seen his chances evaporate like the gun smoke shredding out over the forests of spiky pines and saplings. At no other time in the Civil War did the moral superiority held by one general over another stand out so clearly as a decisive factor in battle.
And yet this dazzling victory was sterile. Not only had it cost the Confederacy more than the Confederacy could afford to pay — it killed Stonewall Jackson, who was literally irreplaceable, and it put twelve thousand of other ranks out of action to boot — but it left the high command facing a problem that proved finally to be beyond solution.
Hooker had been whipped, and the spring invasion of Virginia had been canceled. But the war was not a duel between generals, and the enormous forces it had set loose would not finally dispose of themselves just because one man was stronger than another. Chancellorsville with its great flame and smoke and noise had done little more than give the Confederacy time to take a second look at its desperate predicament.
Destiny lay in the West. Grant had Vicksburg surrounded now. His army held a great semicircle that ran east of town from the Chickasaw Bluffs and curled around to the banks of the Mississippi a few miles downstream. Within this semicircle Pemberton and his thirty-one thousand were locked up, helpless; outside the semicircle Joe Johnston and an inadequate army tried in vain to find some way to crack the shell. Grant had been reinforced, he was receiving all the supplies the North could send to him, and he was able without effort to hold Johnston off at arm’s length while he waited for Vicksburg to fall. Three hundred miles to the northeast, Rosecrans was beginning to move with his Army of the Cumberland. Bragg, who opposed him, was outnumbered. In Mississippi and Tennessee the doom of the Confederacy was beginning to take visible form. Against long odds, battles might be won in Virginia, and the Yankee invader might be made to retreat across the Rappahannock, perhaps even across the Potomac; but Vicksburg would fall and Tennessee would be lost, and if these things happened the Confederacy would be a cut flower in a vase, seeming to live for a time, but cut off forever from the possibility of independent existence.
This was the reality that demanded the attention of the Confederate government as the spring of 1863 drew on toward summer.
Perhaps there was no really good answer. General Longstreet, who had missed Chancellorsville and who was consulted by President Davis in Richmond, urged that troops be taken from Lee’s army and sent to Tennessee; given such reinforcements, Bragg could perhaps defeat Rosecrans and compel Grant to draw back from in front of Vicksburg. Secretary of War Seddon believed that reinforcements from Lee’s army might go direct to Mississippi, so that Johnston could smite Grant’s iron ring directly. There was no certainty that either of these expedients would work; they were just cards that might possibly be played.
Lee could read the future no better than anyone else. He did point out that the government must in effect decide whether to hold the line in Mississippi or to hold it in Virginia. To give up Virginia would be to give up Richmond, national capital, symbol of nationhood, source too of essential munitions and manufactures; loss here would probably mean speedy loss of the war itself, whereas the doom that would descend in the West would at least come more slowly. Furthermore, it would not do to wait and defend Virginia passively. Chancellorsville had humiliated Hooker’s army but had not crippled it; in a month or two the Federals would inevitably be ready to invade Virginia anew. Better (argued Lee) to defend Virginia by fighting in the North. A
battle won above the Potomac might convince war-weary Northerners that the Confederacy could never really be beaten; it might induce the government at Washington to recall Grant and Rosecrans for home defense; it might even bring reality to that will-o’-the-wisp of southern dreams, recognition of the Confederacy by England and France. It might, in short, be the stroke that would change everything, and at the very least it would take the contesting armies out of ravaged Virginia for a time.2
Few soldiers called on by government for advice are ever able to speak with the overpowering prestige that was Lee’s in the spring of 1863. When he proposed that he take the Army of Northern Virginia and march into Pennsylvania, the issue was settled. Only Postmaster General Reagan, of all the Cabinet, continued to argue for a troop transfer to the West; President Davis and everyone else backed their winning general, as they were humanly bound to do, and by the middle of May the invasion of the North was ordered.
Probably no other decision could have been made, given all of the circumstances. Yet once again there had been profound miscalculation: the latest in a series of miscalculations, all of them fatal.
It had been calculated that in the concept of the Union of the states there was not anything so compelling that men would fight and die for it; that the institution of slavery could be made to live on in a world that was dreaming broader dreams; that this war (which itself had come against calculation) could be waged as a formalized contest that would go by familiar rules and not as an upheaval of terrible infinite forces that would go by no rules ever heard of and would forever change the people who were fighting it. Of these miscalculations the Confederacy was dying a slow death; to them, now, there was added the hopeful belief that if the brilliant stroke that had been so dazzling at Chancellorsville could just be repeated in Pennsylnia, all that had been lost could be happily redeemed.