{Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}
Chancellorsville, April 29–May 5, 1863
Without Longstreet’s divisions Lee had only 43,000 men in addition to Stuart’s cavalry, to confront an enemy with more than three times that number and with almost four times the number of his guns. Lee’s audacity was extraordinary. He knew that retreat in the face of such a powerful enemy would be fatal. His instinct was to attack at once. Leaving behind Major General Jubal Early’s division, reinforced by one brigade, to hold Fredericksburg against four Union divisions, he marched boldly toward Chancellorsville to meet the three Union corps converging there.
Hooker was by no means as bad a general as he is often considered, although his reputation was not improved by his blustering manner. It was, for example, a mistake for Hooker to inform President Lincoln, “My plans are perfect, and when I start to carry them out, may God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.” Hooker’s bravado, moreover, did not conceal his lack of resolve on the battlefield. His plan was certainly an ambitious if complex one, and his intelligence about the size of Lee’s army was relatively accurate—unlike Pinkerton’s extravagant estimates, which had virtually immobilized McClellan. Hooker hoped that by attacking Fredericksburg with almost 30,000 men, he would be able to join Lee’s army in place. He then would march about 73,000 men straight west and cross the Rappahannock at the United States Ford and the Rapidan at Ely’s Ford, and march straight toward Fredericksburg, crushing the Army of Northern Virginia as if it were a nut in the jaws of a nutcracker.
He did not take into account that Lee’s first instinct was always to maneuver swiftly and attack. Hooker also underrated the difficulty of maintaining his advance across the Wilderness, an area of dense second growth about twelve square miles between the Rapidan and the outskirts of Fredericksburg. Early settlers had felled the trees to make charcoal. When the trees ran out they just abandoned the area to scrub pine, small oak saplings, tangled vines, and thick brush, producing an almost impenetrable thicket with few roads and a large number of meandering creeks with muddy banks. In this dark, depressing, sparsely habited, and largely unmapped region, there was no way to openly deploy large numbers of troops, or to make good use of long-range artillery. Your troops—or the enemy’s—might be out of sight only a few yards from where you were standing. Also, in the absence of any visible landmark commanders could get hopelessly lost. Years later General Fuller wrote that “the thickly wooded country” would make it almost impossible to control divided forces.
It turned out that Hooker’s plan was simply too ambitious. A competent division or corps commander, he was now responsible for more than 133,000 men spread out over miles of thick forest and tangled brush. He had divided his forces into three powerful columns: one, his far left, advancing along the southern bank of the Rappahannock; and two advancing through the middle of the Wilderness toward Chancellorsville, the small town where Hooker made his headquarters. It was little more than a tavern and a house or two. He then added to his difficulties by sending his entire cavalry, under Major General Stoneman, on “a raid towards Richmond.” He intended to disrupt Lee’s lines of communication. Not only did this attack fail, but it left Hooker virtually blind in the face of the enemy.
All three of Hooker’s columns managed to get through the Wilderness, and Meade’s corps, on the far left, advanced within five miles of Fredericksburg, but Hooker had altogether misjudged Lee. Far from clinging to his lines on the heights above Fredericksburg, which his men had been reinforcing all winter, he had already split his army in two and attacked the Federal troops the moment the right and center emerged from the Wilderness onto Orange Plank Road and Orange Turnpike. “The enemy in our front near Fredericksburg,” Lee wrote, “continued inactive, and it was apparent that the main attack would be made upon our flank and rear. It was, therefore, determined to leave sufficient troops to hold our lines, and with the main body of our army give battle to the approaching column.”
Splitting his army in two in the face of an enemy almost three times larger was one of Lee’s typically audacious moves. It threw Hooker badly off balance. Although two of his corps had advanced almost two miles to the east of Chancellorsville into fairly open country, and were well situated to hold their own, Hooker ordered them to withdraw back to Chancellorsville. Already engaged with the enemy, his commanders were furious, since this order plunged them back into the Wilderness.
22. Position of the Army of Northern Virginia and assumed position of the Army of the Potomac, about 5 a.m., May 3, 1863.
{Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}
“The retrograde movement had prepared me for something of the kind,” one of them—Major General Darius Couch—wrote later, “but to hear from [Hooker’s] own lips that the advantages gained from the successful marches of his lieutenants were to culminate in fighting a defensive battle in the midst of the thickets was too much, and I retired from his presence with the belief that my commanding general was a whipped man.”
Major General Couch believed that Hooker had lost confidence in himself before the battle had even begun. Despite Couch’s opinion, however, Hooker was not yet whipped. He apparently had second thoughts about his own order, and proceeded to make matters worse by contradicting it, telling his generals to hold their present positions until 5 p.m. Most of them received this new order after they had already abandoned their positions in obedience to the first one. The generals, and their troops who eventually formed up for the night to dig trenches and build log breastworks and abatis* around the Chancellorsville mansion, were understandably confused and embittered.
Hooker’s intention was to force Lee into attacking his army once it was concentrated at Chancellorsville and to inflict the same bloodletting that Lee had inflicted on Burnside. But Hooker’s contradictory orders had confused his troops. From the moment on May 1 when Hooker issued his counter order, he lost the confidence of his generals, just as Napoleon would have predicted.
Jackson’s troops cautiously followed the Union withdrawal. At first there was some suspicion that it might be a trap, but by late afternoon the general informed Lee “he was checked by the enemy.” If nothing else, Hooker had created a formidable position, with the bulk of the Union army on higher ground in well-prepared lines. Why Hooker supposed that Lee would attack it head-on, like Burnside at Fredericksburg, remains unclear, but it was wishful thinking.
Lee rode forward to meet Jackson at twilight. Together they went to where Orange Plank Road met a narrower country lane that led to Catherine Furnace, at which point they were less than a mile away from Hooker’s headquarters and came under fire from a Federal sharpshooter. They sensibly walked back to the cover of the woods, and quietly discussed the situation. Jackson thought that Hooker would continue to retreat, and would probably recross the Rappahannock in the morning. Lee was less optimistic. He knew the pressure Washington must be putting on Hooker to produce a victory. Just then Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh messaged the information that although Hooker’s center and left were strongly planted, his right was “in the air”—that is to say, “it did not rest on any natural barrier” and could therefore be turned. In addition there were few signs that Federal cavalry was covering the country beyond Hooker’s right. It seemed General Stoneman was still “joyriding” with the bulk of the Federal cavalry toward Richmond.
Lee decided on his favorite tactic—a swift and unexpected flanking attack. Stuart, who had joined him, promised to search for roads that would take a Confederate force around the Federal left undetected. In addition, he would find a local who knew the area and who sympathized with the Confederacy. At some point before midnight, Lee’s mind was firmly made up. He asked, “How c
an we get at those people?” He may have asking Jackson, or he may have simply been thinking out loud as he studied his map, but the sheer audacity of his plan, which has been described by Fuller as his “masterpiece,” was breathtaking, even to such daring soldiers as Jackson and Stuart.
Lee, who had already split his army in the face of a larger enemy, was now, on the eve of battle, going to divide it into three, leaving only 13,000 men to hold Fredericksburg and protect his rear. He kept 14,000 men under his own direct command “to hold Hooker’s 72,000” in the center, and sent Jackson into the Wilderness with 32,000 men to march over fourteen miles on doubtful roads and turn Hooker’s right. It is hard to think of anything further from the principle of “concentration.” “Lee’s strokes flashed like lightning,” said General Fuller.
Stuart, as good as his word, produced a clergyman from his corps, the Reverend B. Tucker Lacy, who had lived in the area and confirmed that the roads Lee had proposed were passable for men and horses. With a grim smile, Jackson said he would get his troops moving at four o’clock in the morning. At that Lee lay down under a tree, unfolding his overcoat for a blanket and using his saddle for a pillow. Within minutes he was asleep.
Jackson was not altogether happy about the route. He thought it was too close to Hooker’s right for him to pass unnoticed. He sent Lacy off, together with his topographical genius Major Hotchkiss, to seek a road that would take Jackson’s corps farther away from Hooker’s right. They located a recent logging trail through the woods, and rousted “the proprietor of [an] iron furnace” who had opened the route and who volunteered his son to serve as a guide if needed. It was a slightly longer and more difficult route than the one Lee had proposed, but it was more likely to produce surprise, and would also bring Jackson’s corps closer to Hooker’s rear, causing the maximum disruption.
By all reports, Jackson was not feeling well that night. He was shivering in the damp, cool night air, possibly suffering from a cold. He lay down on the ground to rest in the small clearing among the pines that Lee had made his headquarters for the night. One of his staff offered to cover him with his greatcoat but he “politely but firmly declined” it, although he consented to be sheltered with a rain cape. Jackson had unbuckled his sword and placed it, hilt upright, against a tree. At some point while he rested it fell to the ground with a loud clatter, which Lee’s aide Colonel Long later decided had been a bad omen—though that does not seem to have occurred to him or anyone else at the time. Jackson’s intense faith precluded any belief in superstition, but in any case he did not rest for long.
It was still pitch dark when Hotchkiss returned with the local guide, but Lee and Jackson were already awake and seated on empty cracker boxes, presumably left by the Federal troops, around the dying embers of a campfire. Jackson seemed to have been revived by a hot mug of coffee and listened intently as Hotchkiss drew up another cracker box, sat down beside them, and produced a rough map of the route he proposed. Jackson and Lee discussed it briefly—there was never any argument between the two men, although Longstreet argued with each. “I have but to show him my design, and if it can be done, it will be done,” Lee would say of Jackson. “Straight as the needle to the pole he advanced to the execution of my purpose.” By way of an order, Lee merely said to Jackson, “Well, go on,” and Jackson went off into the darkness to get his men moving.
Lee saw Jackson again for a brief moment as he rode off with his staff, and paused to exchange a few words with him.
Lee would never again see Jackson alive.
Throughout the day on May 2 Lee relied on two assumptions: the first was that Hooker would fail to detect the fact that his center faced 14,000 soldiers, and the second was that Major General John Sedgwick’s corps at Fredericksburg would remain inactive. Both were wild gambles, but they paid off. Hooker made no attempt to advance against Lee, and the orders he telegraphed to Sedgwick were so garbled that Sedgwick decided to wait on events. His gift for unfortunate decisions in battle was already well known. He later would meet his end with one of the most famous lines of the Civil War. Chiding his men as they ducked from a sharpshooter’s fire, he said, “I’m ashamed of you dodging that way, why they couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance,” and promptly was killed by a bullet in the forehead. On May 2 Sedgwick’s decision that Hooker’s ambiguous orders had left it up to him whether or not to attack saved Lee from being overwhelmed from the rear before Jackson’s flank had attacked the enemy.
Lee’s judgment about his adversary was as correct as Hooker’s was wrong. By midmorning, the Union commander was told of the Confederate movement to his far right, but for reasons best known to himself decided that this was proof that the Confederates were retreating. Hooker ordered his troops to attack, but with no sense of urgency, perhaps thinking he would speed up the Confederate retreat. Also by midmorning, an intense, nasty little fight had engulfed Jackson’s rear guard, the Twenty-Third Georgia Infantry, at Catherine Furnace. Reinforcements were sent forward to support the Georgians, but not in time to prevent most of them from being surrounded and overwhelmed.
If Hooker had visualized his situation correctly, he might have realized that although his right was in mortal danger, a bold attack on the Confederate center, given its weakness in numbers, might still have carried the day. But he was immobilized by the size and complexity of the battles, and unable to form a clear picture of what was really happening. Although he did warn Major General Oliver Howard that he might be attacked, he did so without conveying any sense of urgency or alarm. He never bothered to ride three-quarters of a mile to the southeast and see for himself what Howard was doing.
At 2 p.m. Fitzhugh Lee reported to Jackson that he had found a hill from which there was a panoramic view of the Union right. Fitzhugh’s tone made Jackson aware of the importance of this discovery, because he halted his column and followed “Fitz” through dense woods up to a partly cleared hill. Jackson, to his relief, saw Howard’s men resting, their arms neatly stacked, apparently unaware that over 20,000 Confederate troops, as well as most of Stuart’s cavalry, were marching past them less than a mile and a half away. Jackson was so pleased at the sight that he decided to march his men two miles farther and attack Howard’s troops from behind, which meant that he could not carry out his attack until after five o’clock.
As at Shiloh, the first warning that Howard’s men had of the impending attack was the sudden appearance of panicked wildlife emerging from the Wilderness, as the Confederate lines advanced through the forest. Moments later Jackson’s men “exploded out of the woods screaming the Rebel Yell.” As Lee put it in his report, “Position after position was carried, the guns captured, and every effort of the enemy to rally defeated by the impetuous rush of our troops.” At first it was a rout, leading to the virtual collapse of the Union right, but although Jackson hoped to drive the Federal forces in disorder all the way back to the United States Ford four miles away, Union officers finally began to rally their men, while the Confederate troops, exhausted by a fourteen-mile march, were unable to keep up the initial pace of their advance. Although Jackson pushed the Federals back over a mile, he could not take Chancellorsville, nor cut his way through the remaining Union lines to join Lee. Then, despite the genius of his successful flank march—in many ways the military high point of the Confederacy—his victory was compromised by delay. He had optimistically told Lee that he would start out at 4 a.m., but did not, in fact, get under way until after 7 a.m. His decision to follow Fitzhugh’s advice and march farther to the west, while it was tactically correct, cost him another two hours. When he did launch his attack there were only two hours of daylight left. As Federal resistance intensified, Jackson worried that his attack was in danger of bogging down and that he was still heavily outnumbered. He rode forward along Plank Road far in front of his men to assess the possibility of a night attack. Jackson had suggested such an attack at Fredericksburg, adding “that we should all strip ourselves perfectly naked,” to avoid confusion of identity,
which is the bane of all nighttime military assaults. Lee had rejected the idea as too risky and perhaps too eccentric, but the idea of a night attack clearly stayed with him. On May 2 it might have worked, since there was a full moon.
Returning from their reconnaissance, Jackson and his aides were mistaken by his own troops for Federal cavalry, and fired on. Some North Carolina troops had loaded “buck and ball,” a .69-caliber ball ahead of which were three buckshot pellets, a formidable load at short to medium distances. Jackson was struck in three places, two of the balls shattering his left arm above and below the elbow. Little Sorrel, reacting to the sudden noise and flash, bolted, and his rider was knocked to the ground by a low-hanging branch. Jackson was only stunned by the fall, and none of his wounds was life-threatening, but his left arm had to be amputated. Pneumonia set in. Eight days later he was dead.
Had Jackson started at 4 a.m., as he told Lee he would, and had he not, at Fitzhugh’s suggestion, taken a longer route that added two hours to his march, he might have had more daylight hours to meet up with Lee. This of course would have spared him the need to ride ahead of his own lines in the dark.
For Lee this was “a calamity of the first order”: Jackson was by far his best general. A lesser problem was that Jackson, as usual, had not confided his own plan to anyone. Had he intended to advance to the north in the morning and cut off Hooker’s army from the United States Ford, or to regroup his scattered units and attack at Orange Pike and then join up again with Lee?
Lee himself spent May 2 making a series of small attacks against Hooker’s center to distract Hooker from looking right, and did not hear “the swelling roar of Jackson’s attack” until twilight. Volley after volley of artillery fire lit up the night sky, and musketry could be heard until after eleven o’clock. There was no news, however, from the battlefield, so Lee eventually lay down in a small clearing to rest. “Around 2:30” he was woken by Taylor talking to one of Jackson’s signal officers, Captain Wilbourn, who described his commander’s extraordinary flank march, ending with Jackson’s being wounded by his own men.
Clouds of Glory Page 62