The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  The fact was that Fighting Joe Hooker, a talented and competent commander, had created an excellent plan. The only thing he had not counted on was the genius of Robert E. Lee, who instantly comprehended everything that Hooker intended to do and, having comprehended the plan, acted to defeat it. In the process, he created the military masterpiece of Chancellorsville.

  Lee’s first move was refusing to respond to Stoneman’s cavalry. He let the Union troopers raid unmolested while he sent his own great cavalry commander, Jeb Stuart, to take control of the roads in and out of Chancellorsville, thereby bottling up an encampment of some 70,000 Army of the Potomac soldiers. Worse, with Stuart having seized the initiative, Hooker was unable to send out reconnaissance patrols. Suddenly, he was deprived of all situational awareness. He had no idea where Lee’s main force was. Lee had thrust upon Hooker the one thing he knew that the Union general could not plan for—the unknown.

  George McClellan’s great weakness had been that he feared losing more than he craved winning. Hooker suffered from no such flaw—until he was deprived of his eyes and ears. Now he panicked. Effectively tearing up his plan, he abandoned the offensive and groped toward a defensive posture, hunkering down in Chancellorsville. Remarkably, the boastful Hooker let go of the initiative without firing a shot.

  With 70,000 Union troops effectively put on ice, Lee listened to Jeb Stuart’s reconnaissance report. It revealed that those Army of the Potomac troops who were not idled Chancellorsville were getting ready to attack the flank and rear of the Army of Northern Virginia. They would approach via a dense patch of forest growth called “the Wilderness.” Acting immediately to forestall and delay the attack, Lee deployed Jubal Early with 10,000 men to engage the Federals as they began their advance through the Wilderness. During this delay, Lee intended to strike the Union forces at Chancellorsville. In direct contrast to Hooker, who abandoned offense for defense, Lee gave up his defensive advantages to take the fight to Hooker.

  Genius never sleeps. With the battle having begun in earnest on May 1 southeast of Chancellorsville, Lee summoned Stonewall Jackson to his field headquarters shortly after midnight on May 2. Pulling up a couple of cracker barrels, the two men shaped an entirely new plan. At the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 28–30, 1862), Lee had gambled by purposely violating a standard tactical commandment. He divided his army in the presence of the enemy. The risk was being attacked and defeated in detail. The reward was enveloping the enemy. He decided to gamble again.

  Lee assigned a command of 26,000 to Jackson, who would lead them in a fierce surprise attack through the Wilderness and directly against Hooker’s flank. Hooker would be completely absorbed in defending his flank, which would give Lee, at the head of 17,000 men, the opportunity to attack Hooker’s front. While Jackson and Lee were enveloping Hooker at Chancellorsville, Jubal Early would fight a holding action aimed at pinning down the rest of the Army of the Potomac, at Fredericksburg. By dividing in the presence of the enemy, Lee proposed to defeat a divided and diluted Army of the Potomac in detail.

  Jackson had the hazardous and demanding mission of advancing—in total stealth—with 26,000 men to positions just two and a half miles from the Union front. He did have an edge in Jeb Stuart’s control of the roads in and out of Chancellorsville. Nevertheless, it was supremely difficult to hide the march of so many men. Fortune, however, favored Jackson at this point. Pickets in advance of the Union XI Corps actually detected and reported the movement. Astoundingly, however, the commanding general of the corps, O. O. Howard, considered the movement insignificant. He nevertheless conferred with Hooker, who concurred in his assessment. Thus Jackson’s maneuver was ignored.

  The day waned—until, just two hours before sunset—a highly unconventional time to initiate an attack—Jackson hit Howard, whose corps formed the entire right flank of the Army of the Potomac. He hit Howard hard, and the surprise was total. The Union troops were at their leisure, engaged in the usual camp activities of eating, swapping stories, playing cards. For the most part, arms were stacked outside of every tent. Most soldiers did not have their rifle muskets to hand when (as one Union man recalled), Jackson’s men fell upon them “like a clap of thunderstorm from a cloudless sky.”

  The Union XI Corps began to melt away under the onslaught. A rout developed, and Hooker gave the command to withdraw from the prepared defenses of Chancellorsville. The Union commander suddenly realized that his only hope of salvation lay in maneuvering. This, as he saw it, would avoid destruction. It was a panic-driven move. As Hooker would later admit, he had “lost his nerve.” In leaving the cover of Chancellorsville, he did precisely what Lee and Jackson hoped he would do. He led his men out into the open.

  Jackson quickly turned from Chancellorsville proper and engaged some 70,000 Union soldiers on the field. While this was happening, Lee closed in on Hooker’s front, but despite the envelopment, the Chancellorsville phase of the battle raged over two days, ending late on May 4. Cut off by Early’s control of the road net, Hooker was unable to receive reinforcements. He, not Lee, suffered the consequences of having divided his army in the presence of the enemy. As the sun went down on May 4, Hooker and his men made a fighting retreat north of the Rappahannock.

  The cost to Hooker of the Chancellorsville phase of the battle was 12,145 men killed, wounded, captured, or missing. The Union general was stunned—as was the whole of the North. Chancellorsville was but a short distance from Fredericksburg, site of the massive defeat of Ambrose Burnside in December 1862. Now, months later, Burnside’s replacement, Fighting Joe Hooker, had suffered casualties of the same magnitude—and the battle was not yet over. It was incomprehensible to the Union public, press, and president how Hooker, with more than twice Lee’s manpower, was so horrifically defeated.

  But, then, the people of the North did not yet know the full extent of Lee’s losses. While the final toll of battle would leave the Army of the Potomac with a 13 percent casualty rate and force the army out of Chancellorsville, the victorious Lee would lose nearly one fourth—22 percent—of the Army of Northern Virginia, killed, wounded, captured, or missing.

  In fact, Lee would lose even more.

  Having opened his assault on Hooker late in the day on May 2, Jackson was compelled to break off the attack before he had finished with his adversary. He therefore decided to scout the front in order to plan a continuation of the battle through the night. After reconnoitering, Jackson and his staff set out to return to their lines via the Plank Road—the very route along which his men had advanced so stealthily to Chancellorsville. Along the road was a picket line from the 19th North Carolina Regiment. These sentries were wound up tight, on the lookout for advancing Federals. The last thing they expected to see was their own commanding general and his aides. So when uniformed figures appeared on the Plank Road, the pickets opened fire—not in a single volley, but in a succession of two. General Jackson was hit three times, twice in the left arm and once in the right hand. Others among those accompanying him were also hit—killed or wounded.

  Supported by two of his staff, the stricken general was led to a place where he could be loaded onto a stretcher and carried to the rear. As he was being conveyed, one more shot cracked. The ball struck down one of the stretcher bearers, who lost his grip on the stretcher. The wounded Jackson tumbled onto the ground, hard. Another bearer helped put Jackson on the stretcher again, and the grim party made its way to an ambulance, where Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire, chief surgeon of Jackson’s Corps, knelt to examine his commanding officer.

  “I hope you are not badly hurt, General.”

  “I am badly injured,” Jackson replied and, in even more measured words, continued. “I fear I am dying. I am glad you have come. I think the wound in my shoulder is still bleeding.” His calm was in sharp contrast to Hooker’s panic. The two men were very different generals.

  No commander, save Lee himself, meant more to the Confederacy than Thomas J. Jackson, and there he lay, soaked in his own blood. He and the So
uthern cause were fortunate in just one thing at that moment. McGuire was a first-class physician, who knew exactly what had to be done and did it. Jackson was bleeding out from a major artery in his left arm. McGuire stopped the bleeding by applying hard compression and severely tightening the bandage. He recognized Jackson’s icy hands, clammy skin, and colorless lips as the signs of shock caused by massive blood loss. Although the general insisted that he was in no pain, McGuire gave him whiskey and a dose of morphine before sending him to a field hospital. There, the physician made the decision to do one of the few things surgeons of the era could do for a wounded man. He would amputate Jackson’s left arm.

  “Yes, certainly, Dr. McGuire,” Jackson replied without question. “Do for me whatever you think best.”

  As McGuire gently placed a chloroform-soaked cloth over Jackson’s nose and mouth, the general uttered, with gratitude, “What an infinite blessing.”

  McGuire used the span of Jackson’s unconsciousness to attend first to the quick and simple task of removing a musket ball that had burrowed itself under the skin on the back of his patient’s right hand after having entered through the palm and fractured two bones. It was a round ball, .57 caliber—nearly three-fifths of an inch in diameter—the old-fashioned ammunition used in so many obsolescent Confederate muskets, not the bullet-shaped Minié ball fired by more modern rifle muskets. This relatively simple operation completed, McGuire swiftly amputated the left arm two inches below the shoulder. He later noted that this limb had been shattered by two musket balls, one having smashed the bone and divided the artery about three inches below the shoulder-joint, the other having torn a wound from the outside of the forearm, an inch below the elbow, through to the opposite side of the arm, exiting just above the wrist. It was the kind of horrific gunshot damage any Civil War surgeon soon became accustomed to treating.

  Stonewall Jackson came through the surgery very well, and his chances for recovery seemed promising. True, on regaining consciousness, he was uncharacteristically disengaged from the battle. When Major Sandy Pendleton visited him in the hospital seeking orders to carry to Major General Jeb Stuart, who had assumed command, Jackson replied to his request with “I don’t know, I can’t tell; say to General Stuart he must do what he thinks best.”

  With this, he fell asleep and slept until the next morning. By that time, a note had arrived from Lee. Jackson’s aide read it to him: “Could I have directed events, I should have chosen, for the good of the country, to have been disabled in your stead. I congratulate you upon the victory, which is due to your skill and energy.”

  “General Lee should give the praise to God,” Jackson told the aide. His faith and humility were also in contrast with the profane bombast of Fighting Joe Hooker.

  After passing this day and the night that followed in the field hospital, Jackson, on McGuire’s orders, was sent away from the front to Guiney’s Station. The doctor explained that he feared Union troops might capture him.

  “If the enemy does come, I am not afraid of them; I have always been kind to their wounded, and I am sure they will be kind to me.”

  He was made comfortable in a private house and even took a crust of bread and cup of tea. Learning that there were men elsewhere in the house who were suffering from erysipelas, a painful and highly contagious skin infection commonly known as Saint Anthony’s fire, McGuire moved his patient to an out-building on the property. The next morning brought a cheerful development, as Jackson awakened with a hearty appetite. Better still, on replacing his dressings, Dr. McGuire noted that the wounds were healing well, without any of the telltale indications of infection. The general spoke of soon returning to the field.

  About one the next morning, Jackson woke nauseated. He asked a servant for a wet towel, but absolutely forbade him to wake his doctor, noting that the poor man had not slept for three days. When McGuire made his regular visit to his patient later that morning, he diagnosed pleuropneumonia—inflammation of the lungs and the pleura (sacs surrounding the lungs)—on the right side. McGuire speculated that this was caused by Jackson’s fall after one of his stretcher bearers had been shot. It could, however, also have been aggravated by the chloroform anesthetic.

  Jackson deteriorated through the day, but he seemed to improve that evening and was greatly cheered by the arrival of his second wife, Mary Anna Morrison, who brought with her their infant daughter, Julia Laura.

  “I know you would gladly give your life for me,” he told Mary Anna, “but I am perfectly resigned. Do not be sad. I hope I may yet recover. Pray for me, but always remember in your prayers to use the petition, Thy will be done.”

  The next morning gave new reason for hope. Jackson’s wounds continued to heal satisfactorily, and his pain was fading. Nevertheless, his breathing was becoming progressively more labored, and, as the day wore on, Jackson showed signs of exhaustion as he worked harder to breathe. He made it through another night and, the next day, was sufficiently alert to play with his baby daughter. Later, however, he beckoned to Dr. McGuire: “I see from the number of physicians that you think my condition dangerous, but I thank God, if it is His will, that I am ready to go.”

  At sunup on Sunday, May 10, Mary Anna sat by her husband’s bedside. Dr. McGuire had spoken to her, and now, when Jackson opened his eyes, she told him that the doctor believed his recovery was “doubtful.”

  “It will be infinite gain to be translated to Heaven,” Jackson replied to her. “You have a kind and good father, but there is no one so kind and good as your Heavenly Father.”

  At about eleven that morning, Jackson tried to calm his wife’s fears—“I may yet get well”—and then he asked her to send in Dr. McGuire.

  “Doctor, Anna informs me that you have told her that I am to die today; is it so?”

  McGuire answered that this was so.

  “Very good, very good, it is all right.”

  By the afternoon, Stonewall Jackson slipped into a strangely calm delirium. He began issuing battlefield orders and then seemingly held mess-table conversation with his staff. When his doctor offered brandy and water, Jackson demurred.

  “It will only delay my departure, and do no good. I want to preserve my mind, if possible, to the last.”

  McGuire told him that he would live, perhaps, another two hours.

  “Very good, it is all right.”

  He sunk deeper into incoherence, but, suddenly, he snapped into something very like full consciousness.

  “Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly! Tell Major Hawks—–”

  At this he stopped, and what Dr. McGuire described as “a smile of ineffable sweetness spread itself over his pale face.”

  “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” he said. They were his final words. He was thirty-nine.

  The Battle of Chancellorsville had ended four days earlier, on May 6, with a final action at nearby Fredericksburg and Salem Church. The Confederate victory was so complete and against such superior numbers that even Northerners admiringly called it “Lee’s masterpiece.” Yet while Hooker lost 13 percent of the force engaged, Lee lost 22 percent. And the hardest loss of all was Stonewall Jackson.

  “I have lost my right arm,” Lee said. Realizing that the Confederacy could not replace let alone endure another loss of so many men, including men like Stonewall Jackson, the commanding officer of the Army of Northern Virginia made the fateful decision to try to force a rapid end to the war by bringing the fighting into the North. Battered though the Army of Northern Virginia was, he resolved to invade the Union. He would march into Pennsylvania.

  As for Abraham Lincoln, another of his generals having failed him, he could do little more than gasp out his disbelief: “My God! My God! What will the country say? What will the country say?”

  17

  November 7, 1862

  Lincoln Chooses Burnside to Lead the Army of the Potomac

  Why it’s significant. Desperate to find a general c
apable of delivering victory, Abraham Lincoln replaced George B. McClellan with Ambrose Burnside as commanding officer of the Army of the Potomac—even after Burnside twice declined the offer of that prestigious command, protesting that he was not capable of undertaking so great a responsibility. Seven days after hiring Burnside, the president approved his aggressive but ham-handed plan to capture Richmond, the prize that had eluded McClellan. The Battle of Fredericksburg would prove that the desire for victory, no matter how desperate, could not prevail against military genius in the persons of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. For the Union, Fredericksburg was sheer heartbreak. For Lee, it was the first of two triumphs—the second was at Chancellorsville (Chapter 16)—that nevertheless failed to bring the North to negotiate a favorable peace with the South.