Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  Then, quite abruptly, their domestic happiness ended. Sometime before dawn Jubal Early’s adjutant galloped into the yard at Belvoir and knocked loudly on the door. Early’s division held Jackson’s left flank. The news the adjutant carried was that Joseph Hooker, now in command of the Union army, was on the move. His troops had been spotted fording the river, in heavy fog, two miles below the town. The war was on again. Anna and the baby must hurry to Richmond. Jackson kissed them good-bye, mounted Little Sorrel, and rode away. Anna packed quickly, and soon Reverend Lacy arrived with an ambulance wagon, saying that General Jackson had sent him to take them to the train station. He carried a note from Jackson invoking God’s blessing and telling Anna and Julia that he loved them. The visit had lasted exactly nine days. As they left, Hooker’s big guns were already thundering from the riverbank, rattling the windows of the house.51 The spring campaign had begun.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  COMETH THE HOUR, COMETH THE MAN

  Sometime deep in the afternoon of April 30, 1863, Robert E. Lee and his staff rode to the top of a high promontory near Fredericksburg known as Telegraph Hill.1 From its ramparts—cleared of trees by his orders—Lee had directed the Battle of Fredericksburg four and a half months earlier. From here he had watched the seemingly endless waves of blue-uniformed men crash on the killing grounds below the Sunken Road. He had watched Jackson’s bloody rout of Meade and Gibbon, which had prompted him to comment, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it.”2 Today he had come not to see men fight but to try to understand his enemy’s mind. Though he had grown accustomed to thwarting the well-laid plans of his Union counterparts, he had been caught off guard by large Federal troop movements in the preceding two days. Now it was his turn to be puzzled. From the hilltop he watched the Federals intently for some time. Then he closed his glass, turned to a staff officer, and said, “The main attack will come from above.” By “above” he meant to the west, upstream on the Rappahannock, where a large chunk of the Union army had suddenly materialized a dozen miles due west of his main force in Fredericksburg—behind him. Lee was right, and he knew it, even though most of his officers did not agree with him.3 But this was not exactly good news. It meant that his adversary Major General Joseph Hooker, known fondly to his men as Fighting Joe and referred to contemptuously by Lee as Mr. F. J. Hooker, had stolen a march on him.

  It was that very contempt that had gotten Lee into this trouble. Hooker, as it turned out, was not at all like the man he replaced. Though the forty-eight-year-old general was seen in the army as a pushy, self-promoting opportunist who happily disparaged others to advance himself and was fonder of strong drink than he ought to be, he was also an aggressive fighter and, to everyone’s surprise, a talented administrator.4 He had inherited a demoralized army from Ambrose Burnside and in three and a half months given it back its snap. He replaced incompetent officers and reduced absenteeism. He streamlined operations and improved food, sanitation, campsites, and even clothing. Hospitals were cleaned up. Pay arrived on time.5 There was order and clarity and purpose in the camps, and the men could feel it. There was a sense, too, reminiscent of the old McClellan days, that the high command cared once again about the fate of the ordinary soldier. One of Hooker’s most important moves was to revamp his intelligence service, now known as the Bureau of Military Information. Unlike the bizarrely incompetent Allan Pinkerton, the BMI delivered consistently accurate estimates of rebel troop strength. Hooker, who had 159,329 men in his army (of whom roughly 135,000 were infantry, cavalry, and artillery), knew for a fact that Robert E. Lee had roughly 55,000 infantry available to fight.6 For the first time in the war, a Union commander had a clear picture, literally brigade by brigade and general by general, of his enemy’s strength.

  Hooker, moreover, had a plan, and it was a good one, and it did not depend on reckless and sacrificial assaults on entrenched Confederate positions. He had put it in motion on Sunday, April 27, with elaborate secrecy, while Anna and Thomas Jackson were listening to Reverend Lacy preach at the open-air church at Hamilton’s Crossing. That day Hooker launched his “flying column”—three full army corps, stripped to the bare essentials of fighting, carrying eight days’ rations—on a march that covered more than thirty miles for some units around the rebel army’s extended left flank. Brilliantly executed and completely unknown to Lee—who had been fooled by a simple ruse of the Union signal corps into deploying his intelligence-gathering cavalry too far upstream—forty thousand men, nine batteries, and their assorted trains had tramped off to the west and south, crossed both the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, then swung east toward Lee’s flank and rear. By April 30, the Union flanking column—the 5th Corps under George G. Meade, the 12th Corps under Henry W. Slocum, and the 11th under Oliver O. Howard—were all camped in the vicinity of a little crossroads called Chancellorsville. They were soon joined by Darius Couch’s 2nd Corps.

  What Lee had finally understood, squinting through his telescope that afternoon, was that the threat to his army’s existence came not from the 1st and 6th Corps sitting in front of Jackson—though they were forty thousand strong—but from this massive turning movement to his west. The 1st and the 6th were merely there to hold the Confederate army in place while Hooker’s main column rolled up its flank. Lee was still unaware of the third and equally menacing component of Hooker’s plan: a cavalry strike at his supply line between Richmond and Fredericksburg. The previous day Jackson’s quiet West Point roommate George Stoneman and ten thousand Union horsemen had taken off on a long, looping ride far above the Confederate left. Their mission was to destroy Lee’s railroad link to Richmond and thus the line by which all of his supplies moved. By these movements Hooker planned to force Lee out of his entrenchments and into the open, where he would either have to fight or retreat on Richmond. By April 30, everything was going exactly as planned.

  Robert E. Lee, meanwhile, the great strategic and tactical genius, had failed to anticipate any of this.7 The best evidence of this failure was that, as Hooker’s men were marching, fully a quarter of Lee’s army was running an errand some eighty miles away in southeastern Virginia. Two crack divisions under James Longstreet—John Bell Hood’s and George Pickett’s—had been dispatched in February to blunt a suspected movement toward Richmond by the Union 9th Corps. When that threat failed to materialize, the Confederate force stayed to gather much-needed food and forage for the army—shipping it up on rail lines through Richmond—and to try to capture the Union garrison at Suffolk. Longstreet was busy laying siege to that town when he received Lee’s call for help, sent on April 29 and received on April 30. But Lee had already waited too long. Longstreet would not be able to even start north until May 3. Lee would have to fight Hooker’s army with what he had.

  But before he did anything else, Lee had to throw something in the way of Hooker’s oncoming legions. He had already ordered Major General Richard H. Anderson to fall back from the river with his nine thousand men and establish a defensive line east of Chancellorsville. Now he summoned Jackson. Jackson, predictably, had wanted to attack the Federal troops who had crossed the Rappahannock on the foggy morning of April 29 and were now in his front. (It was the sound of the guns covering their crossing that had awakened him and led to Anna’s hasty departure.) Lee, who did not agree with Jackson, had nevertheless indulged this idea. But having studied the enemy’s dispositions, Jackson now told Lee he concurred that “It would be inexpedient to attack there.” By that he meant that massed Federal artillery on Stafford Heights would blast him out of existence if he tried.

  Instead, Lee now ordered a massive shift to his left, sending most of Lafayette McLaws’s division plus three of Jackson’s divisions (under Robert Rodes, Raleigh Colston, and A. P. Hill) to join Anderson east of Chancellorsville. He left only a single division, plus one attached brigade, of twelve thousand men under Jubal Early, to defend the heights west and south of Fredericksburg. Lee thus committed four-fifths of his available army, under Jacks
on’s command, to stopping Hooker’s flanking column.8 Jackson was thrilled with the prospect. He was always in high mood before battle, but today—whether it was due to Anna’s visit or the long lapse in fighting—he was as animated as his staff had ever seen him. “I well remember the elation of Jackson,” wrote his ordnance officer William Allan. “He seemed full of life & joy. His whole demeanor was cheerful & lively compared with his usual quiet manner.”9

  Back in Chancellorsville the Union command was indulging in a small orgy of self-congratulation. They had been outmaneuvered, outflanked, outmarched, and outgamed so many times by Lee and Jackson that they could scarcely believe this new scheme was working so well. Hooker had earlier boasted to a group of officers, “My plans are perfect, and when I start to carry them out, may God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.” Which might have seemed more of that standard-issue, high-command Union bloviation, familiar from the days of Pope and McClellan, except that the plan had worked perfectly so far. They had outfoxed the master. Three army corps had executed a difficult and nearly flawless sequence of maneuvers that had surprised Lee and placed them squarely on his flank. Now they were being reinforced. Full of confidence and pride, Hooker issued a general order to his army that read,

  It is with heartfelt satisfaction that the commanding general announces to the army that the operations of the last three days have determined that our 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 order was greeted with cheers. Except for the bit about “certain destruction,” everything Hooker said was accurate.10

  • • •

  Chancellorsville was not really a town at all. It was not even a hamlet. It was barely a crossroads. The place consisted of a single large two-and-a-half-story brick house with a columned porch and a couple of outbuildings. The house was the residence of the widow Fanny Chancellor, her young son, and seven good-looking daughters, plus a handful of local refugees. Partly on the strength of the comely daughters, it had become a sort of social center during that extended, languorous Confederate winter. Dinner guests included Generals Dick Anderson and Jeb Stuart and the dashing Mississippi brigadier Carnot Posey.11 The girls loved Stuart above all, with his perfect manners, his plumed hat, and his perpetual good humor. The fun and ringing laughter had ended with the arrival of the Yankees, who took over the house for use as Hooker’s headquarters, including all of its most comfortable rooms, consigning the unhappy residents to one crowded wing.

  More important for the two hundred thousand men who were about to fight here was the peculiar terrain surrounding the Chancellor house. People called it the Wilderness of Spotsylvania or just the Wilderness. The name was well chosen. It was a dense tangle of forest that spread twelve miles long and six miles deep on the flanks of the Rappahannock. There had been an iron industry here since colonial times, and the trees had all been cut down to make charcoal for furnaces and foundries. The vegetation that had grown back was a stunted, thorny snarl of dwarf pine, cedar, hickory, scrub oak, and assorted brambles. Though the woodland was pierced here and there by a few roads, much of it was indeed dark, impenetrable, trackless, labyrinthine, and often swampy wilderness. In all of its more than seventy square miles there were only a few cleared areas, most of which lay athwart the two main east-to-west roads that ran through it: the Orange Turnpike, and the looping and intermittent Orange Plank Road. The largest of these was a seventy-acre open area around the Chancellor house. There was nothing pretty or pleasant about the Wilderness. It would soon become apparent to many soldiers that, as a place to fight a battle, these dark woods were something out of a nightmare.

  Jackson’s men marched from their camps below Fredericksburg in the light of a brilliant moon that yielded in the early dawn to a thick, watery mist. They left quietly, all twenty-four thousand of them, and headed west.12 By 11:00 a.m. on May 1 most of them had reached General Anderson’s division, which was busily digging in along a ridge about three and a half miles east of Chancellorsville that crossed both the Orange Turnpike and the Orange Plank Road. There they confronted Hooker’s army and braced themselves for the inevitable attack. Lee’s trust in Jackson was such, by this point in the war, that he had given him only the broadest guidelines for action: “Make arrangements to repulse the enemy,” he had said, which allowed Jackson to handle the problem as he saw fit. Jackson knew, at the same time, that it was Lee’s ultimate desire to drive Hooker back across the Rapidan. That suited him just fine. And so, upon assuming command near the Zoan Church, he told the troops under Anderson and McLaws to put down their picks and spades, climb out of their trenches, and prepare to attack.

  There is no way to know Jackson’s thought process as he prepared to engage the Union army in front of him. He knew very little about it and certainly he had no idea that, at the moment he ordered his men to advance, he was actually outnumbered five to one. But it was characteristic of the man that his means of determining the enemy’s strength was to hit the enemy in the face and then see what happened. Typical, too, was his impatience to fight. As at Port Republic, he chose to attack before his full force had arrived.

  Hooker, meanwhile, a few miles to the west, was unaware that Jackson himself had taken the field against him. Jackson’s movements, under cover of night and fog, had gone completely undetected, and Hooker’s latest intelligence still placed the entire 2nd Corps on the heights below Fredericksburg. The Union commander thus believed he was facing only the divisions of Lafayette McLaws and Richard Anderson. They would be dug in, he believed, and he expected them to fight a defensive battle. With his superior numbers, he would spread their flanks and make short work of them. At roughly 10:30 a.m. Hooker signaled the start of a three-pronged advance, stacked north to south: George Meade with two divisions on the River Road, George Sykes with one division on the Orange Turnpike, and Henry Slocum on the Plank Road with another two divisions. They would move forward, link up, and, if all went well, carry the heights of Fredericksburg by 2:00 p.m.

  At almost exactly the same moment, Jackson signaled his own advance. To the amazement of the Union command, which had not expected to be attacked, his rapidly advancing columns slammed into the two lower prongs of Hooker’s attacking force. Jackson not only had the element of pure surprise, but also, by hitting the Federal columns head-on and hitting them early, he deprived them of their ability to communicate with one another and, as they had planned, to join forces. Meade’s two 5th Corps divisions in the north were isolated from their comrades and out of the fight, while McLaws hit Sykes in the center with superior numbers and Jackson stopped Slocum cold almost before he got started. By 1:00 p.m. Hooker knew that his plan had gone badly awry. So had his strategy at Fredericksburg. He had ordered John Sedgwick to “threaten an attack in full force” below the town, but Sedgwick had done nothing at all. That was because, due to faulty telegraphs, Sedgwick would not even receive those orders until almost 5:00 p.m.13

  By now Hooker was beginning to understand what was happening to him. He received more bad news: a large Confederate force had detached from Fredericksburg and marched west. Thus his opponent on the field was almost certainly not Richard Anderson but Stonewall Jackson himself. And so when Union general George Sykes, fighting astride the Orange Turnpike, reported that he was heavily outnumbered and that his flanks were being turned, this information took on new meaning. Sykes not only could not be rescued easily, but also, with Jackson on the field, the divisions under Meade and Slocum might be threatened, too. At about 2:00 p.m. Hooker issued orders to all three columns to withdraw. Jackson, as always, pursued. But the Federals managed disciplined countermarches under fire, and Jackson’s last-ditch attempt at a flank attack was repulsed by Hooker’s heavy artillery. In spite of his natural predatory instincts, Jackson knew that a frontal assault on Hooker’s entrenched, U-shaped defensive position at Chancellorsville would have been suicidal. The day ended with Hooker’s tro
ops in exactly the same position they had been in at dawn. Jackson’s men were two miles in advance of Anderson’s entrenchments. Jackson had won the day: Hooker’s huge army was suddenly penned up in dense thickets, where its numbers meant far less than they would have on open ground.

  In spite of his repulse, and his failure to take the high ground at Zoan Church, which should have been readily his, Hooker was undaunted. He believed he had accomplished his main purpose—flushing Lee from his defensive position and out into the open—and that he was now in a position to fight a defensive battle “on my own ground.”14 That was how he saw it, anyway. He was, moreover, expecting word from George Stoneman any minute that the rebels’ railroad supply line had been cut.15 What he did not comprehend was that, while his individual decisions may have been perfectly rational, and while he held, technically speaking, one of the stoutest defensive positions of the war, he had also surrendered the initiative to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. And that was a very dangerous thing to do.

  Just how important Jackson’s presence was in Hooker’s decision to withdraw is impossible to know. But it likely loomed large. Hooker later explained his retreat by saying that he believed he “was hazarding too much to continue the movement” and that because of the difficulty of deploying his troops in the wooded terrain he “was apprehensive about being whipped in detail.” Both statements might have referred to Jackson.16 Jackson’s name alone may not have been worth two divisions, as an observer once suggested, but it was still enough to inspire prudence and caution in even a hard-fighting man like Joe Hooker, whom Jackson had fought to a bloody standstill in the cornfield at Antietam and who had been fully present for Jackson’s tactical masterstroke at Second Manassas.