by John Waugh
The horses, in fact, were worn out, used up, and suffering more than the men. “The air of Virginia is literally burdened today with the stench of dead horses, federal and confederate,” Adams wrote his mother. “You pass them on every road and find them in every field, while from their carrions you can follow the march of every army that moves.” It wasn’t just the Union cavalry that was wearing out horses. Adams found the roads on which they were riding “made pestilent by the dead horses of the vanished rebels.”38
The raiders at one point reached the outskirts of Richmond, but their presence didn’t seem to impress the city’s beleaguered residents. The raid somehow was not getting its proper respect. John B. Jones, the rebel war clerk, sniffed disdainfully at the whole business. “They are like frightened quails when the hawks are after them,” he said, “skurrying about the country in battalions and regiments.” Nothing but wild cavalry as far as he was concerned, “the mad prank of a desperate commander.”39
At last on May 8 it was over. Nothing had seemed to come of Hooker’s invasion to the north. So Stoneman brought his raiders back over the Rapidan and the Rappahannock, and on the ninth Adams wrote his distinguished father, for whom he was named and who was the U.S. ambassador to England: “So ends today the four toughest weeks campaigning that I have ever felt—mud and rain, rain and mud, long marches and short forages.” The curious thing about it all, as he wrote his mother a few days later, “we were in the field four weeks, and only once did I see the enemy, even at a distance.” Such were “the non-fighting details of waste and suffering of war.”40
The people of the North didn’t seem to be any more impressed with the raid than the people of the South. Stoneman returned to less than a hero’s welcome. But then, nobody in the North was happy about anything on May 8. On May 2 the raiders had heard the thunder of heavy fighting from the direction of Chancellorsville. As they were to learn later, it was another Union catastrophe in the making. Hooker, who had crossed the river on his two-pronged advance the day after Stoneman had launched his raid, first lost his nerve, and was then hit a numbing blow on his flank by that Confederate flanking specialist, Tom Jackson. He had limped back across the Rappahannock beaten and demoralized, and was in no mood to feel good about anything his cavalry might have accomplished.
As it turned out, his cavalry hadn’t accomplished much. At first Secretary of War Stanton, ready to see any silver lining in the dismal clouds, acclaimed it “a brilliant success.”41 The New York Times published an inventory: 22 bridges, 7 culverts, and 5 ferries destroyed; 7 railroads and 3 canals cut or broken (in spots); 3 trains of rail cars, 4 supply trains, and 5 canal boats burned; 122 wagons destroyed; 200 horses and 104 mules rustled; 4 telegraph stations burned and 5 wires cut (in places); 3 depots burned; 25 towns visited; and 150 contrabands liberated. Every line of communication between the rebel army on the Rappahannock and Richmond, and the canal through which more than half the supplies floated, were disabled. Millions of dollars in commissary stores and supplies were destroyed. Travel on the main pikes was disrupted when the raiders destroyed all the bridges over large streams. It looked good in the paper.42
But Stanton’s silver lining began to fade into dreary disillusionment almost immediately. Everybody learned that the rail communications between Fredericksburg and Richmond were disrupted for but one day, and the important bridges appeared to have been untouched. “My instructions appear to have been entirely disregarded by General Stoneman,” Hooker growled.43
Hooker was perhaps beginning to see that he should have kept his cavalry with him at Chancellorsville, instead of sending it away on its pointless mission. A big, inquisitive cavalry corps might have saved him from Jackson’s humiliating flank attack.
There were those critics who now believed that all the things Stoneman had burned or destroyed, captured or freed, had only exasperated without terrifying the enemy, giving color to accusations that the federal cavalry were merely mounted robbers. Better that Stoneman had destroyed Rooney Lee’s rebel cavalry, which he could have done. Better that he had sacked Richmond, which he also could have done. He had been close enough and the Confederate capital was virtually unprotected, most of its able-bodied men being with Lee’s army at Chancellorsville.44
A consensus was building in the North that the raid’s pregnant promise, like Chancellorsville in general, had given birth to small fulfillment.45 One critic was to say that instead of hurling his troopers like a thunderbolt on the rebels, Stoneman had divided and frittered away the strength of his command, detaching and scattering it into mere scouting parties to “raid on smoke-houses and capture henroosts.”46
The more Hooker thought about it, the angrier he became. Stoneman had “almost destroyed one-half of my serviceable cavalry force,” he told Stanton.47 Hooker hadn’t really wanted Stoneman in command of his cavalry to begin with. He would have preferred somebody else, but the seniority rule of the service had tied his hands. So he had been stuck with this “wooden man” instead.48
Within a few days the wooden man, ailing physically—perhaps the hemorrhoids again—relinquished his command. Within a few weeks, Hooker, who seemed to plan badly and fight well as an inferior and plan well and fight badly as a chief, was himself out of a job.49 And Lee was again invading the North, already in Pennsylvania.
Hooker would eventually become more philosophical and less wrathful, although no less regretful, about what had happened at Chancellorsville. He would shift the blame to Stoneman’s classmate, George McClellan. Over dinner with John Hay and others in Washington several months later, Hooker said that Stoneman was an instance of the “cankerous influence” of McClellan’s staff. “I sent him out to destroy the bridges behind Lee,” Hooker said of Stoneman. “He rode 150 miles and came back without seeing the bridges he should have destroyed.… His purposeless ride had all the result of a defeat.”
But, without emphasizing that the ride had been his idea in the first place, Hooker was now inclined to be forgiving of his cavalry commander. “He is a brave good man,” Hooker conceded, “but he is spoiled by McClellan and the piles.” The finest army on the planet in Hooker’s view lacked only vigor, and that was because in its early days it had fallen into evil hands, McClellan’s hands—“the hands of a baby who knew something of drill, little of organization, and nothing of the morale of the army.” Hooker believed the army had been “fashioned by the congenial spirit of this man into a mass of languid inertness destitute of either dash or cohesion.” It was that, Hooker believed, that had “spoiled” Stoneman and ruined the raid.50
There were those who argued that Fighting Joe himself had shown a fatal lack of vigor at Chancellorsville. And there were many Union cavalrymen who conceded that while the raid was not a huge success, they were proud of it anyhow.
It had a galvanizing moral effect. “For the first time,” one of them was to write, “the cavalry found themselves made useful by their general, and treated as something better than military watchmen for the army.” They saw that the time had come when they would be permitted to win honor and reputation, when they would cease to be tied to the slow-moving infantry, when they would be permitted to strike a blow independently for the cause of the country and the credit of their commanders. The raid, one of them said, “gave our troopers self-respect, and obliged the enemy to respect them.”51
It was “the first great achievement of the Union cavalry of the Army of the Potomac,” a member of the First Maine would write. It had been enough that they had been “a part and parcel of this expedition, and shared its dangers, its hardships and its triumphs.” He believed it was ever after a matter of pride with the boys that they were on Stoneman’s raid.52
Years afterward, troopers were still saying it had been unrivaled in the annals of war for discomfort and hardship, considering the time it had taken. They had to admit that it had probably been more trouble than it had been worth.53
But perhaps the most trouble of all, as the raid ended and the troopers turned b
ack toward the fords of the Rapidan and the Rappahannock, was being visited on a frightened woman in a living room in Richmond. There Mary Anna Jackson was distraught. She had just learned that her husband had been wounded in the flank attack at Chancellorsville. She didn’t know how badly. She knew only that he had called her to his side and that she must go. But she couldn’t, because her husband’s soft-spoken West Point roommate had stopped the train traffic to the front.
It was not stopped long—she had to wait but a day or so. But to this distracted and loving wife, it would seem like a lifetime.
Shots
in the Night
The last days of April had been as happy and joyful for Tom and Anna Jackson as they were dismal and wet for George Stoneman. Jackson’s corps was camped on the Rappahannock near Fredericksburg awaiting the spring campaign, and Anna came up from Richmond on Monday the twentieth to be with him. They had enjoyed but little time together since the war began. Jackson seemed always going from one battle to the next, and he never took leave.
Anna brought their little six-month-old daughter, Julia, for her doting daddy to dandle proudly on his knee. Henry Kyd Douglas called her “little Miss Stonewall,” and she and her mother were the hit of the army. Anna’s attractive looks, manners, and good sense made her popular with her husband’s troops.1 She could have ridden down the line and they would have shouted “Jackson or a rabbit!” for her, too.
Early Wednesday morning, the twenty-ninth—about breakfast time—Major Samuel Hale of Major General Jubal Early’s staff galloped into camp to tell Jackson that Hooker’s army was on the move and crossing the Rappahannock. Jackson told Anna that she and Julia must leave, and that afternoon he sent them “to the rear as extra baggage.” The winter was over, the war was about to begin again, and Douglas could see that the general was in fine spirits. The light was glimmering again in those blue-gray eyes, as it always did when there was the prospect of a “scrimmage.”2
Hooker had sent John Sedgwick’s corps across Deep Run two miles below Fredericksburg that morning. It was a movement in force, and Jackson rode out to have a look. Later in the day J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry observed an even larger Union force crossing the Rappahannock at Kelley’s Ford twenty miles above Fredericksburg, heading for Chancellorsville. So the crossing at Fredericksburg was only a feint. Hooker’s big push was to get around on the Confederate left flank. It was very admirable, an excellent plan. Jackson could appreciate such thinking.
The situation was this: Hooker had put Sedgwick’s thirty thousand men across the river in front of Lee’s army. The main body of the Union army, another hundred thousand, minus Stoneman’s cavalry, was moving in on the Confederate left with not less than four hundred guns. To counter this monstrous force, Lee could muster perhaps sixty thousand men of all arms, and less than half as many guns. Of the two corps that made up the Army of Northern Virginia, only Jackson’s was present in force. Most of James Longstreet’s corps—three divisions—was absent on a reforaging mission in southern Virginia and North Carolina.
When Hooker’s flanking force reached the Rapidan, Richard H. (Fighting Dick) Anderson’s division and Lafayette McLaws’s division—what was left behind of Longstreet’s corps—marched westward to meet the invasion. For the time being Jackson remained where he was in front of Sedgwick. The question puzzling Lee was which half of this divided Union army he ought to attack first.
At about midnight on April 30, Jackson left Jubal Early’s seven thousand troops in place before Sedgwick, and began marching the rest of his corps out of the trenches at Fredericksburg under a brilliant moon. Before the mists of early morning had lifted on Friday, May 1, he was well on his way westward toward Anderson and McLaws. Reaching them at about 11:00 in the morning, he began pressing Hooker immediately, to learn more of his true strength, position, and intentions. This went on all afternoon.
That night Lee and Jackson met about a mile in front of Hooker’s works, on the brow of a gentle hill among the pine trees, on ground carpeted with clean dry sedge and fallen leaves. Stuart, riding in from the left, joined them. They all knew that it was but a matter of time before Jackson’s disappearance from Sedgwick’s front would be noted. Hooker must be attacked soon.
The idea of a flanking movement of their own promptly surfaced; that was the way these men thought. Hooker was now stopped around the little villa of Chancellorsville, where the old turnpike and the plank road from Fredericksburg met the Ely’s Ford road. The terrain was gently undulating, and where the roads joined was cleared farmland. Immediately to the west of the cleared land was a thick wall of woods called the Wilderness. It was decided that Jackson, the forced-march and flanking specialist, would drive his entire command around Hooker’s outthrust right flank and hit him in the rear through this forest wall. Stuart would cover the movement, and Lee would stay behind and entertain Hooker with Anderson’s and McLaws’s divisions until Jackson struck from the west.
This all involved yet another “grand detachment” of the army in the face of an active and overwhelming federal force—against all the rules of sensible warfare. But hadn’t they already tempted fate by leaving Early at Fredericksburg? And that was working so far. Hooker was inviting a flank attack by having sent his cavalry on that mindless mission in the rear. If he was careful, Jackson might make the entire fifteen-mile march around the Union flank unobserved. Against Hooker, whom they seemed to know as well as they had known McClellan, the plan made sense. It would probably work.3
It had been a long day for Jackson’s young staff officer, James Power Smith, and it wasn’t until late in the night on May 1 that he finally wrapped himself in his saddle blanket and fell into a weary sleep. Sometime after midnight he awoke to the early morning chill. Turning over, he caught a glimpse of a little flame flickering on the slope above. Sitting up, he saw Lee and Jackson seated together on two captured Yankee cracker boxes, quietly talking.4
That talk meant trouble, and probably another long day in the morning. A little after sunrise on Saturday, May 2, Jackson had his corps up and on the move again. Lee stood by the side of the road to watch the head of the column march by and to exchange a final few words with Jackson.5
Not a soldier in Jackson’s corps could imagine where they were going, but all of them knew that serious business was afoot, for they were marching hellbent.6 On through the morning they moved, past Catharine Furnace, a regiment from McLaws’s division guarding the entrance to the blind road to prevent a federal attack on the marching flank. Out in the country between the line of march and the enemy outposts rode Stuart’s horsemen, screening the moving column from prying federal eyes. On into the early afternoon they marched, down the connecting backroads under a beating sun. It was another hot, oppressive, mystifying march with Stonewall Jackson. But his soldiers were used to that.
Hooker’s scouts sighted the fast-moving column from the heights of the tall trees southeast of the Chancellor house, and reported it to Hooker. The Union commander, who didn’t know Lee and Jackson as well as they knew him, smiled. A retreat, surely, he convinced himself; Lee was turning tail in the face of the finest army on the planet.7
By 3:00 in the afternoon Jackson had arrived six miles west of Chancellorsville on Hooker’s right flank. He stopped his army there and hurriedly scribbled a note to Lee. “General,” he wrote, “the enemy has made a stand at Chancellor’s which is about 2 miles from Chancellorsville. I hope as soon as practicable to attack.” He didn’t forget to add: “I trust that an ever kind Providence will bless us with great success.”8
There ahead, on the other side of that wilderness forest, its flank in the air and its arms stacked, as unsuspecting as if on a picnic, the troops of Hooker’s Eleventh Corps were thinking about their Saturday night dinner.
Jack Haydon, a hunter of the region, who knew every turn in every dirt road for miles around, had guided Jackson’s march from Catharine Furnace to the Orange turnpike. Now his job was finished, and he was about to leave. On his way out, he ro
de up and paused in front of Jackson.
General, he said, would you do me a favor?
“What is it, sir?” snapped Jackson, his mind now on more urgent matters.
“Take care of yourself,” Haydon said.9
Taking care of himself was the last thing on Jackson’s mind at that moment. He must now prepare his twenty-seven thousand troops for an attack. For the next two hours that’s what he did, arraying his columns in two parallel lines of battle: Robert E. Rodes’s division in front and Raleigh Colston’s next. Four of A. P. Hill’s six brigades closed up in the rear of Colston. Richard Ewell was not present; he was still recovering from his amputation at Groveton.
At about 5:15 in the afternoon, with his visor pulled low over his eyes, his lips compressed, and his watch in his hand, Jackson turned to Rodes, who was sitting on a horse beside him.
“Are you ready, General Rodes?” he asked.
“Yes, sir!” said Rodes.
“You can go forward, then.”
The woods rang with answering bugle calls and Jackson’s corps surged into the wilderness.10
The soldiers of the Union Eleventh Corps looked up from their cookpots into the late afternoon sun and saw deer, turkey, rabbits, and other wildlife running for their lives out of the dense, tangled woods, and wondered what it meant. It meant disaster. Immediately out of the wilderness behind the bounding animals, with a crazed cry, erupted Rodes’s division followed closely by Colston’s.
The Union soldiers hastily canceled dinner plans and joined the wildlife. Benjamin Leigh, a Confederate officer who had just that morning come on A. P. Hill’s staff, watched as they ran “like sheep … throwing away their arms, knapsacks and everything of which they could divest themselves.”11 Jackson’s soldiers surged after them, galloping through the enemy camp past tents, past kettles still bubbling over the fires. In one tent a huge Newfoundland dog continued to sit placidly as if nothing was going on—a change in masters, perhaps.12