Viewing the battle after the lapse of more than twenty years, I may say, however, that Burnside’s move might have been made stronger by throwing two of his grand divisions across at the mouth of Deep Run, where Franklin crossed with his grand division and six brigades of Hooker’s. Had he thus placed Hooker and Sumner, his sturdiest fighters, and made resolute assault with them in his attack on our right, he would in all probability have given us trouble. The partial success he had at that point might have been pushed vigorously by such a force and might have thrown our right entirely from position, in which event the result would have depended on the skillful handling of the forces. Franklin’s grand division could have made sufficient sacrifice at Marye’s Hill and come as near success as did Sumner’s and two-thirds of Hooker’s combined. I think, however, that the success would have been on our side, and it might have been followed by greater disaster on the side of the Federals; still they would have had the chance of success in their favor, while in the battle as it was fought it can hardly be claimed that there was even a chance.
Burnside made a mistake from the first. He should have gone from Warrenton to Chester Gap. He might then have held Jackson and fought me, or have held me and fought Jackson, thus taking us in detail. The doubt about the matter was whether or not he could have caught me in that trap before we could concentrate. At any rate, that was the only move on the board that could have benefited him at the time he was assigned to the command of the Army of the Potomac. By interposing between the corps of Lee’s army he would have secured strong ground and advantage of position. With skill equal to the occasion, he should have had success. This was the move about which we felt serious apprehension, and we were occupying our minds with plans to meet it when the move toward Fredericksburg was reported. General McClellan, in his report of August 4th, 1863, speaks of this move as that upon which he was studying when the order for Burnside’s assignment to command reached him.
When Burnside determined to move by Fredericksburg, he should have moved rapidly and occupied the city at once, but this would only have forced us back to the plan preferred by General Jackson.
* * *
1 That General Lee was not quite satisfied with the place of battle is shown by a dispatch to the Richmond authorities on the second day after the battle, when it was uncertain what Burnside’s next move would be. In that dispatch he says; “Should the enemy cross at Port Royal in force, before I can get this army in position to meet him, I think it more advantageous to retire to the Annas and give battle, than on the banks of the Rappahannock. My design was to have done so in the first instance. My purpose was changed not from any advantage in this position, but from an unwillingness to open more of our country to depredation than possible, and also with a view of collecting such forage and provisions as could be obtained in the Rappahannock Valley. With the numerous army opposed to me, and the bridges and transportation at its command, the crossing of the Rappahannock, where it is narrow and winding as in the vicinity of Fredericksburg, can be made at almost any point without molestation. It will, therefore, be more advantageous to us to draw him farther away from his base of operations.”—EDITORS.
2 It is more than probable that Burnside accepted the proposition to move by Hoop-pole Ferry for the purpose of drawing some of our troops from the points he had really selected for his crossing.—J.L.
3 In his official report General Lafayette McLaws says: “The body of one man, believed to be an officer, was found within about thirty yards of the stone-wall, and other single bodies were scattered at increased distances until the main mass of the dead lay thickly strewn over the ground at something over one hundred yards off, and extending to the ravine, commencing at the point where our men would allow the enemy’s column to approach before opening fire, and beyond which no organized body of men was able to pass.”—EDITORS.
4 General Lee explained officially, as follows, why he expected the attack would be resumed:
“The attack on the 13th had been so easily repulsed, and by so small a part of our army, that it was not supposed the enemy would limit his efforts to an attempt which, in view of the magnitude of his preparations and the extent of his force, seemed to be comparatively insignificant.
“Believing, therefore, that he would attack us, it was not deemed expedient to lose the advantages of our position and expose the troops to the fire of his inaccessible batteries beyond the river by advancing against him; but we were necessarily ignorant of the extent to which he had suffered, and only became aware of it when, on the morning of the 16th, it was discovered that he had availed himself of the darkness of night, and the prevalence of a violent storm of wind and rain, to recross the river. The town was immediately reoccupied and our position on the river-bank resumed.”
—EDITORS.
1863
INTRODUCTION
James M. McPherson
The year 1863 opened on a profoundly pessimistic note for supporters of the Union cause. Morale in Union armies and among the Northern public was at a low point. When President Abraham Lincoln had learned of the Union defeat in the battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, he said: “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.” At the dawn of the new year, news of the bloody repulse of General William T. Sherman’s attack on the Yazoo River bluffs just north of Vicksburg arrived in Washington. Early that New Year’s morning, Lincoln met with Generals Ambrose E. Burnside and Henry W. Halleck plus Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to discuss what to do with Burnside’s Army of the Potomac in the aftermath of Fredericksburg. Lincoln turned aside Burnside’s offer to resign and also rejected his suggestion that the president should get rid of some other generals as well. Lincoln urged general in chief Halleck to return with Burnside to Fredericksburg and decide on a strategy for the next campaign. “If in such a difficulty you do not help,” Lincoln wrote Halleck, “you fail me precisely in the point for which I sought your assistance.… Your military skill is useless to me, if you will not do this.” When the general in chief read this letter, he promptly submitted his resignation. Lincoln apologized and refused to accept the resignation.
Depressed by his experiences that morning, the president repaired to the public rooms of the White House, where he endured the traditional New Year’s Day reception. After this three-hour ordeal of handshaking, he went to his office to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. His hand was sore and shaking so badly that he had to wait for a while before he could pen a firm and unwavering signature. “I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper,” he told the small group that had gathered to witness the occasion. “If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.”
Of course Lincoln’s name did go into history, as much for this act as for anything else he did. But the Emancipation Proclamation would have little effect unless Union armies won the war. Prospects for that victory never appeared darker than on the first day of 1863. And things would get worse before they got better. On January 20, Burnside launched an initially promising movement against the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Fredericksburg, but the heavens opened and heavy rain bogged down the Army of the Potomac in what became notorious as the Mud March. Burnside had to abort the movement; morale plunged even lower; and Lincoln replaced Burnside with Joseph Hooker. The new commander reorganized the army and raised its morale, but winter turned into spring before Hooker was ready to move.
In the West, General Ulysses S. Grant renewed the campaign against Vicksburg, key to control of the entire Mississippi Valley. But during February and March, Grant’s Army of the Tennessee seemed mired in the endless swamps and bayous that protected three sides of the Confederate defenses at Vicksburg. Only on the east, away from the Mississippi River, was there high ground suitable for an attack on these defenses. Grant’s problem was to move his army, supplies, and transportation across the river to that high ground. As he made several apparently false starts in this effort, d
isease and exposure took a toll on his troops. False rumors of excessive drinking, which had dogged Grant for years, began to circulate again. But Lincoln resisted pressure to remove him from command. “What I want,” the president reportedly said, “is generals who will fight battles and win victories. Grant has done this, and I propose to stick by him.”
Lincoln’s faith in Grant would soon pay off. But as winter turned into spring, the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party in the North (called Peace Democrats by themselves and Copperheads by the Republicans) stepped up their campaign for a cease-fire and peace negotiations. Efforts to restore the Union by war had failed, they declared, and they seemed to be gaining many adherents to that view. Peace Democrats also attacked the Emancipation Proclamation as unconstitutional, “wicked, inhuman, and unholy.”
Defeatism in the North was an anguish of the spirit caused by military defeat. In contrast, Southerners were buoyed up by military success but were suffering from hyperinflation and shortages. The tightening Union naval blockade, weaknesses and imbalances in the Confederate economy, the escape of slaves to Union lines, and enemy occupation of some of the South’s best agricultural areas put increasing strains on the Southern economy. Despite the conversion of hundreds of thousands of acres from cotton to food crops and forage, food was scarce in parts of the South because of the deterioration of railroads and the priority given to army shipments. A drought in the summer of 1862 had made matters worse. Even the middle class suffered, especially in Richmond, where the population had more than doubled since the start of the war. “The shadow of the gaunt form of famine is upon us,” wrote a War Department clerk in Richmond in March. “I have lost twenty pounds, and my wife and children are emaciated.” The rats in his kitchen were so hungry that they nibbled bread crumbs from his daughter’s hand, “as tame as kittens. Perhaps we shall have to eat them!” Bread riots in Richmond and elsewhere during the spring of 1863 testified to the desperate situation, which was not alleviated until the 1863 crops began to mature in the summer.
This unrest in the South coincided with the beginning of major military campaigns on three fronts. At Charleston, South Carolina, a powerful Union naval fleet of nine new ironclads attacked the forts defending the city on April 7. They were decisively repulsed by Confederate artillery that damaged all of them and sank one. Combined operations by the Union navy and army captured some forts during the next several months, but Charleston’s main defenses held and the city remained defiant. In Mississippi and Virginia, however, initial Union efforts seemed more promising. In mid-April, Grant launched a campaign that would soon put Vicksburg under siege. The Union river fleet ran downriver past the Confederate batteries at Vicksburg with minimal losses. The Northern infantry slogged down the Louisiana side of the river while Colonel Benjamin Grierson’s Union cavalry brigade distracted Confederate defenders of Vicksburg with a spectacular raid through the whole state of Mississippi. In early May, as he would recall in The Century, Grant crossed his entire army to the east bank of the river 40 miles below Vicksburg. During the next three weeks the Federals marched 180 miles, won five battles, and penned up 32,000 Confederate troops and 3,000 civilians in Vicksburg between the Union army on land and the gunboats on the river.
Grant had cut loose from his base and from the telegraph for the initial stages of this campaign, so news of his victories was delayed. Meanwhile, after a promising start, the North received little but bad news from Virginia. At the end of April, General Hooker began his campaign against General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Instead of crossing the Rappahannock River directly in the face of Confederate defenses at Fredericksburg, as Burnside had done the previous December, Hooker sent two-thirds of his troops on a rapid march upriver to cross at lightly defended fords and come at Lee from the flank and rear. This maneuver, which Darius Couch described in his contribution to the Century collection, put Lee’s 60,000 men in a vise between 70,000 Union troops advancing toward a crossroads mansion named Chancellorsville, ten miles in Lee’s rear, and 40,000 across the river in his front. Lee’s only apparent choices were to retreat toward Richmond, which would expose his army to possible attacks on both flanks, or to face his troops about to meet the larger threat from Chancellorsville, which would risk an attack on his rear from the Union force that could then cross the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg.
Lee was not known as “the Gray Fox” for nothing. As he had done before, he took a bold risk and divided his army, leaving General Jubal Early with only 10,000 men to hold the trenches at Fredericksburg and taking the rest toward Chancellorsville. There, the second-growth forest of scrub oaks and pines intertwined with thick undergrowth, known as the Wilderness, would neutralize the superior numbers and artillery of the Union forces.
Confounded by Lee’s moves, Hooker yielded the initiative he had so successfully seized. On May 1 he drew back into a defensive position around Chancellorsville. Lee immediately took advantage of this withdrawal. On May 2 he sent his famous corps commander Stonewall Jackson with 28,000 troops on a long march through the thick woods around Hooker’s front to attack him in the flank. This dangerous maneuver worked because Hooker thought that Jackson’s march was a retreat. Shortly after 5:00 P.M. on May 2 he learned otherwise. Jackson’s men burst from the woods in a screaming attack on the Union right that rolled it up like a wet leaf. Riding ahead to reconnoiter in the moonlight, Jackson was shot by his own men, who mistook him and his staff for Union cavalry. James Power Smith recalled the unexpected turn of events for The Century. Surgeons amputated Jackson’s arm. When Lee heard this news, he said that Jackson “had lost his left arm; but I have lost my right arm.” Nevertheless, the Confederate attack pressed forward on May 3, and by May 6 had forced all of the Union army to retreat again to the north bank of the Rappahannock.
Although grieved by Jackson’s death on May 10 from pneumonia, which he had contracted after his wounding, Confederates celebrated the victory at Chancellorsville as Lee’s greatest triumph yet. When Lincoln received word of the outcome at Chancellorsville, his face turned “ashen,” according to a newspaper reporter who was present. “My God, my God,” the president exclaimed. “What will the country say?” It said plenty, nearly all of it bad. Copperheads stepped up their denunciations of the war as a failure. Republicans in Congress were stunned. When the influential senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts learned the news of Chancellorsville, he lamented: “Lost, lost, all is lost.”
But all was not lost. Reports of Grant’s success in Mississippi soon trickled in. To relieve the pressure on Vicksburg and in Middle Tennessee as well as to follow up his victory at Chancellorsville, Lee persuaded President Jefferson Davis to authorize an invasion of the North. Another victory on the scale of Chancellorsville, they hoped, might force the Lincoln administration to sue for peace. The invasion would also allow Lee to subsist his army on the rich Pennsylvania countryside. He believed that both the Army of the Potomac and the Northern people were demoralized and ready to give up. He also considered his own army invincible. “They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led,” Lee wrote in June 1863. So he led them into Pennsylvania, a move that in retrospect became known as the high tide of the Confederacy.
The Army of the Potomac was not as demoralized by its defeats as Lee believed. Nor was his own army invincible. On July 1, advance units of the two armies collided a mile west of a Pennsylvania town named Gettysburg. The unit commanders on both sides sent couriers pounding down the roads to summon reinforcements. Because Gettysburg was the hub of a dozen roads radiating to all points of the compass, the reinforcements poured in and the fighting escalated. Over the next three days the largest battle in the history of the Western Hemisphere, and one of the most important in the history of the United States, took place in and around that small town. Henry J. Hunt’s vivid reports chronicled the complex battle for Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. Confederate attacks broke the Union lines on the first day and drove them back to a defensive position along thr
ee hills and a connecting ridge south of Gettysburg. On July 2, Confederate assaults on both flanks of this position bent but did not break the Union lines as desperate fighting in once quiet locales made such places as the Peach Orchard, Wheatfield, Devil’s Den, Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, and Cemetery Hill famous down the ages.
Lee planned to give the enemy the coup de grâce on July 3. He planned a three-pronged attack: a renewal of the assault on Culp’s Hill that had been stalled by a stubborn Union defense and by darkness the night before; an attack on the Union center along Cemetery Ridge spearheaded by General George Pickett’s fresh division of Virginians; and a strike against the Union rear by cavalry commander Jeb Stuart, whose jaded horsemen, absent from the army for a week on a raid, were to sweep in from the east as Pickett’s men were piercing the Union line from the west. All three parts of this plan failed. Northern troops punished the attackers at Culp’s Hill; Union cavalry stopped Stuart’s troopers three miles from the main battlefield; and the center of the Army of the Potomac held firm against Pickett’s Charge and killed, wounded, or captured half of the 13,000 Confederate troops who participated in that charge.
Union general George Gordon Meade, who had replaced Hooker on June 28, fought a superb defensive battle at Gettysburg. But he did not counterattack against Lee’s shattered army, which retreated on July 4 weaker by more than 25,000 men who were killed, wounded, or captured in the battle and on the retreat. The Confederates finally crossed the Potomac into Virginia on July 14. Lincoln was upset by Meade’s failure to follow up his great victory with a knockout blow. “My dear general,” wrote Lincoln in a letter to Meade that he decided not to send, “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely.”
Hearts Touched by Fire Page 65