v1.1.2 / chapter 45 of 93 / 01 oct 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* Although Joe Hooker had got off to a good start with his offensive against Lee's army, Hooker then lost his nerve, keeping his army in the Wilderness at Chancellorsville instead of continuing to move aggressively. It turned out to be a disastrous blunder.
In the meantime, the previous commander of the Army of the Potomac, Ambrose Burnside, now in command in Ohio, was demonstrating more of his trademark clumsiness by taking high-handed actions to suppress public unrest -- and producing controversy and more unrest instead.
* On hearing reports of the Army of the Potomac's advance towards Chancellorsville, on the night of 29 April General Lee sent Major General Richard Anderson's division to scout and cover major roads. Anderson confirmed the presence of Yankees in force. Anderson did not want to confront them in the tangled Wilderness, and so he set up defenses in open country to the east. There were two roads that went east from Chancellorsville, one named the "Turnpike" in the north, and the second named the "Plank Road" in the south. The Plank Road received its name from the fact that it had a rough pavement of wooden planks. Anderson's men set themselves up to block an advance along either of these routes.
On the morning of 30 April, Lee was still uncertain of Federal intentions. Stonewall Jackson wanted to attack John Sedgwick's forces, now across the Rappahannock in Fredericksburg, but Lee remained wary of Federal artillery massed across the river. Sedgwick remained where he was, and so in the afternoon Lee decided correctly that the real threat was from Chancellorsville. He ordered all of Jackson's corps, except for Jubal Early's division, to march in the morning to join Anderson. Early was to remain in Fredericksburg to keep an eye on Sedgwick.
Jackson arrived on the line at about 08:00 AM on Friday, 1 May, to find Anderson's men still digging in. Defense was not Jackson's way of doing things; he told the troops to cease their work and prepare to attack. From Jackson's point of view, he wasn't outnumbered: he instead had, as the modern phrase has it, a "target-rich environment". Hooker's divisions were even at that moment moving eastward. George Meade's V Corps was moving along a trail known as the River Road that ran between the Rappahannock and the Turnpike, Generals George Sykes and Winfield Scott Hancock were moving down the Turnpike, and Slocum's XII Corps and Howard's XI Corps were advancing down the Plank Road.
The Federals quickly made contact with rebel soldiers of Lafayette McLaws' division, who began to attack Sykes' division on its flanks. Other Union divisions moved up in support and took strong positions on open country. Then, to the shock of the corps and division commanders, orders came down from Joe Hooker: Abandon the advance and return to Chancellorsville. Meade was outraged: "My God! If we can't hold the top of a hill, we certainly cannot hold the bottom of it!"
General Darius Couch of II Corps was similarly disturbed. Couch was a cool, slight fellow who by all evidence knew no fear. During the fighting that morning he had helped out by suggesting to his staff: "Let us draw their fire." -- and led them out to be visible targets for the rebels. None of them were hurt, except for highly frayed nerves. Couch went to Hooker to find out what had possessed his commander to give up the initiative so easily. Hooker gave Couch bland assurances: "It's all right, Couch. I have got Lee just where I want him; he must fight me on my own ground." Couch was anything but reassured, since the tangled thickets of the Wilderness were hardly the place to make good use of the superior numbers of the Army of the Potomac. He left Hooker's tent believing his commander was a "whipped man".
Hooker apparently had been given caution by intelligence reports that indicated Longstreet's command had returned to the theater by rail and was lurking someplace in the Federal rear. The reports were contradictory and in fact Longstreet was no threat to the Army of the Potomac for the time being. However, Hooker's fears were reinforced by Lee's aggressive actions, which hardly seemed to be the kind of reaction to be expected from someone who was badly outnumbered. Apparently Hooker had done little to study the mindset of his opponent.
Whatever his motivations, Hooker sent orders to his corps commanders and instructed them to prepare a defense. The order ended: "The major general commanding trusts that a suspension in the attack today will embolden the enemy to attack him."
* If Hooker's behavior seemed odd to Robert E. Lee, Lee didn't dwell on it for long. If Hooker wanted to be attacked, the Army of Northern Virginia would be happy to oblige him.
There was the question of the best way to do so. Reconnaissance indicated that the Wilderness was too dense to allow an attack on the Federal lines from the east and that Federal positions in the center were too strong for a direct assault, but it appeared that a flank attack might be possible from the west. Jackson's skilled topographical engineer, Major Jedediah Hotchkiss, had drawn up a map for a route of attack. Confederate forces could skirt unobserved around the Wilderness over a road known as the "Brock Road", and then drive directly into the Federal positions via the "Orange Plank Road". On studying the map, Lee asked Stonewall Jackson: "General Jackson, what do you propose to do?"
"Go around here," he replied in his terse way, indicating the route of attack given by the map.
Lee asked: "What do you propose to make this movement with?"
Jackson said: "With my whole corps." There was a long pause as Lee considered the notion; he then asked what troops would be left behind, and Jackson said: "The divisions of Anderson and McLaws."
Lee replied: "Well, go on." This plan meant that 70,000 men of the Army of the Potomac would be facing a mere 14,000 rebels in their front, while 26,000 other Confederates spent a day on the march. It was an incredible gamble, provoked as so many times before by the fact that, given the odds, the long shot was the only choice.
* By early morning of Saturday, 2 May 1862, Jackson's men were on the move around Hooker's army. The Federals were deployed in an arc in the middle of the Wilderness, with Meade's V Corps on the east, near the Rappahannock; the corps of Couch, Slocum, and Sickles in the center, around Chancellorsville; and Howard's XI Corps around the Wilderness Chapel, about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) to the west.
Stuart's cavalry had been doing a good job of keeping Federal scouts in their place for the last few days, and in fact most of the Union cavalry was involved in Stoneman's raid, ironically leaving Hooker badly outnumbered in horsemen. However, such a large movement of rebels could not be easily concealed. One of Dan Sickles' division commanders, Brigadier General David Birney, saw what was going on and sent runners back to army headquarters to inform Hooker. Hooker could even see a bit of the stretched-out rebel column from his own vantage point.
Hooker had learned that some of his apprehensions of the previous day were groundless, having received information that Lee couldn't have more than 50,000 men and that Longstreet was still far away from the battlefield, down at Suffolk. Lee had to be retreating, but Hooker still waffled, saying to himself: "Retreat without a fight? That is not Lee. If not retreat, then what is it?" He came to the correct conclusion: "Lee is trying to flank me." Hooker sent a message to General Howard, instructing him to prepare for a possible flank attack from the west. At 11:00 AM Howard replied that he was taking appropriate measures. However, Howard did not say that all he had done was face two regiments and his reserve artillery to the west.
Meanwhile, Dan Sickles had been insistently requesting permission to attack the Confederates moving across his front. Hooker finally gave him guarded authorization to "advance cautiously" and "harass the movement as much as possible." Sickles, though he had no formal military training, possessed an excess of aggressiveness and interpreted the orders liberally, attacking the rear of Jackson's column with two full divisions at an old ironworks named Catherine Furnace, in the center of the Union line.
The assault was led by the 1st and 2nd Sharpshooter Regiments under Colonel Hiram Berdan. The Sharpshooter Brigade was an elite unit: all its men were dead shots, they had been given intensive physical training, and they wore distinctive green uniforms instead of normal Union blue. The Sharpshooters managed to capture several hundred Georgians, until the Confederate rear guard rallied and threw back the attack. Jackson continued his march without further interference.
At this point, Hooker then unaccountably decided that the rebels were retreating after all. Complacency propagated down the chain of command. Increasingly frantic reports by regimental officers in Howard's command of rebels massing to the west were ignored. After all, Howard had informed headquarters that he was taking necessary precautions, so what was the fuss about? With the Confederates apparently running away, Hooker passed orders back to Sedgwick for him to attack with his 30,000 men and drive the enemy out of Fredericksburg.
* Part of the complacency was also due to the low esteem given Howard's XI Corps by the rest of the Army of the Potomac. Roughly half of the regiments in XI Corps were made up of German immigrants, who were regarded with a certain amount of bigotry as "Dutchmen", or even "Hessians", the hated German mercenaries hired by the British during the American Revolution. More to the point, the Germans had a bad military reputation, many of their numbers having been part of the infamous "lost division" that had been misplaced for six weeks on their way from McClellan's command to Fremont's. Fighting with the bumbling Fremont and then after that with the courageous but equally bumbling Franz Sigel didn't do anything to enhance their status.
Their relationship with their present commander was another problem. Oliver Howard was excessively pious. His colleague, General Abner Doubleday, recollected with annoyance that when they were at West Point together, on meeting a pretty young lady Howard could only ask her if she had reflected on the goodness of God recently; Howard had acquired the sarcastic nickname of the "Christian Soldier". Many of the German soldiers had been malcontents in the old country who had fled to the New World to escape traditions they found oppressive, and having a leader who attempted to preach to them and pass out religious tracts did not inspire them. To his credit, Howard did learn the errors of his ways quickly, but by then the damage had been done.
In any case, the alarms were ignored. There was a certain logical disconnect in Hooker's thinking: he believed Howard's XI Corps could be relied on to defend the Army of the Potomac against a flank attack, while simultaneously refusing to believe anything Howard's officers said about what was going on in front of them. Unfortunately, Joe Hooker had been demonstrating a knack for logical disconnects since entering the Wilderness. When a brigade commander named Colonel Leopold von Gilsa personally took a message to General Howard from one the commander in charge of one the regiments on the west flank that read: "A large body of the enemy is massing on my front. For God's sake make disposition to receive him!" -- Howard angrily replied that the woods in that area were too thick to permit an attack.
One of Howard's artillery officers was almost captured by Jackson's men while on reconnaissance, but when he went to Hooker's headquarters his report was dismissed as a fairy tale. The officer went to XI Corps headquarters, where he was told that Lee was retreating.
* In fact, Jackson had reached the Orange Plank Road, the jumping-off point for his planned attack, at 2:00 PM. However, Jackson had a clear view of the Federal positions in front of him -- and though the Yankees were clearly unaware of any danger, they had also dug effective defenses. Jackson would have to move farther north, to the Turnpike, to make an effective flanking attack.
This took another two hours. Jackson assembled his men into three lines, stretching about a mile to either side of the Turnpike. Brigadier General Robert Rodes' division was in the first line; Brigadier General Raleigh Colston's was in the next; and A.P. Hill's division was in the rear. Jackson intended to drive down the Turnpike and eventually link up with his right with Lee's forces near Catherine Furnace, while moving artillery and infantry northward to block Hooker's lines of retreat.
A little after 5:00 PM, Jackson asked Rodes: "Are you ready?" Rodes said: "Yes." Jackson replied: "You can go forward, then." The rebels moved out in a wave. The first indication the Union men had of trouble was a rush of deer and rabbits coming out of the thick undergrowth. The Yankees thought this was amusing, failing to consider what it was the animals were running from -- until the first lines of screaming Confederates appeared, their clothes torn up by charging through the brambles.
Jackson's men hit the Federals hard, overrunning Federal pickets and colliding with four of Howard's regiments on the western flank. Two of these regiments, the 153rd Pennsylvania and 54th New York, managed to get off a few volleys before falling back. The 41st and 45th New York, caught in the flank, broke and ran without putting up a fight.
Just behind them was the 75th Ohio. The regiment's commander, Colonel Robert Reiley, had realized what Jackson was up to a half-hour before the attack came and had organized his men for defense. They let the stampeded regiments pour through their ranks and then let the rebels have it when they were only 30 paces away. It was a brave fight, but Jackson's men flowed around the 75th Ohio and the Federals finally had to flee. Colonel Reiley was killed, one among the 150 men killed or wounded in his unit, and the regiment disintegrated as a fighting force.
Within an hour Jackson's soldiers were tearing through the entire western flank of the Army of the Potomac. When Howard went up the line to investigate, he ran into the flood of men running back to the rear. An aide suggested that he fire on the fleeing men to stop them, but he refused, instead grabbing a US flag under the stump of his right arm, and, waving a pistol with his good arm, shouting out: "Halt! Halt! I'm ruined! I'm ruined!" He became so hysterical that some of the soldiers stopped simply to watch him in amazement.
One XI Corps brigade under Colonel Adolphus Buschbeck managed to make a stand at the last line of defense, mowing down rebels with volleys of rifle file and blasts of canister, but Jackson's men kept on coming, and after holding them up for a half hour, Buschbeck's men were overwhelmed and ran in their own turn. During the advance, one junior officer told Stonewall Jackson: "They are running too fast for us. We can't keep up with them!" The humorless Jackson replied: "They never run too fast for me, sir. Press them! Press them!"
* Dan Sickles of III Corps was still unaware of the danger to his flank. When the Confederate attack was confirmed, however, he dispatched the 8th Pennsylvania cavalry regiment to help. The cavalrymen did not really understand the situation and ran straight into Rodes' men, much to the surprise of both sides. The Pennsylvanians charged, slashing away with sabres, but were then caught in a terrible volley that took down over 30 of their number. The charge was suicidal, but it did buy Union troops a little time to form another line that began to slow Jackson's advance. It would also lead the Confederates to make a terrible blunder later.
Hooker, who was sitting on the porch of Chancellor House, was similarly unaware of the disaster. Oddly none of the ruckus could be heard there. The first sign of trouble was the appearance of panicked Union soldiers pouring down the Plank Road. Hooker and his officers jumped on to their horses and rode into the mob, trying to rally them. It was futile, and so Hooker extricated himself from the mob and then found the commander of his old III Corps division, his good friend Major General Hiram Berry. Hooker shouted at Berry: "General, throw your men into the breach -- receive the enemy on your bayonets!"
Berry's division formed up a line running south of the Plank Road just to the west of Chancellorsville, and Hooker threw in artillery and such divisions as he could find to bolster the line. One of Couch's brigades was assigned to halt the fleeing XI Corps men and get them back to the fighting.
* Faced with stiffening resistance and falling darkness, the rebel attack began to falter. Stonewall Jackson had been among his men through the entire attack. When the fighting slowed down, he went forward to organize a night attack and get the battle rolling again.
There was a bright full moon and so continuing the fight seemed perfectly practical. While Rodes' and Colston's men were disorganized and exhausted by spearheading the attack, A.P. Hill's men were still relatively fresh. Jackson hoped to use them to attack in two directions: one thrust would cut the Federals off from US Ford while the other would link up with Lee. This done, the reunited Confederate forces would then be able to annihilate Hooker's trapped Army of the Potomac.
Jackson and his staff went close enough to Union lines to hear the Yankees organizing their defense and then went back to their own lines. As they moved through the darkness, pickets of the 18th North Carolina, members of Rodes' command and still rattled by the mad charge of the 8th Pennsylvania earlier in the day, mistook them for Federal cavalry and fired on them. One of Jackson's aides shouted: "Cease firing! You are firing into your own men!" The answer came back: "Who gave that order?! It's a lie! Pour it into them, boys!" The North Carolina men fired another volley and hit Jackson three times, once in the right hand and twice in the left arm. Jackson, badly injured, still managed to control his frightened horse and guide it to the Plank Road.
Aides got the general off his horse and carried him to the side of the road. A.P. Hill rode up and inquired: "General, is the wound painful?" Jackson replied: "Very painful. My arm is broken." A surgeon came up and inspected the wounds. One of the shots had severed an artery and the general had bled profusely, but the bleeding had slowed. The surgeon didn't want to move Jackson, but the Federals seemed to be massing for a counterattack, and so Jackson tried to walk to the rear. He was finally persuaded to lie down on a litter and be carried back.
Then Yankee artillery opened up, wounding one litter-bearer and scaring another into the woods. An aide managed to walk Jackson to relative safety in the woods, where they returned him to the litter. The journey through the tangled brush in the dark was difficult. At one point, one of the litter-bearers tripped and dropped Jackson on his wounded arm. Finally, an ambulance took Jackson to a tavern up the road, where a surgeon told the general that his arm would have to be amputated. Jackson replied: "Yes, certainly. Do for me whatever you think best." The surgeon gave him chloroform and sawed off the general's arm.
Command had passed to A.P. Hill when Jackson was hit, but only minutes after that a Yankee shell blast knocked Hill down, temporarily paralyzing his legs. Command then passed in turn to General Rodes. However, Rodes was not well known by the rank and file in Jackson's corps, and so Hill decided to switch command to Jeb Stuart. Rodes raised no objection, later writing: "I was satisfied the good of the service demanded it." Stuart had no clear idea of what Jackson had been planning, so he sent a messenger to the injured general to ask for advice. Jackson, groggy with pain, shock, and chloroform, was only able to respond: "I don't know -- I can't tell. Say to General Stuart he must do what he thinks best." For the rest of the night, Stuart organized his men to renew the attack on Hooker's army in the morning.
* The night battle was sheer madness. A Federal cavalryman, observing the battlefield from high ground to the north, later wrote: "A scene like a picture of Hell lies below us. As far as the horizon is visible are innumerable fires from burning woods, volumes of black smoke covering the sky, cannon belching in continuous and monotonous roar; and the harsh, quick rattling of infantry firing is heard nearer at hand. It is the Army of the Potomac, on the south of the Rappahannock, engaged at night in a burning forest. At our feet, artillery and cavalry are mixed up, jammed, officers swearing, men straggling, horses expiring."
Despite the confusion, the Federals managed to organize a defense. By the next morning, Sunday, 3 May, elements of Couch's II Corps and Slocum's XII Corps facing Stuart had cleared fields of fire and built breastworks and abatis. North of this line, Meade's V Corps and Reynolds' I Corps, which had forded the Rappahannock during the night, protected Federal lines of retreat back to the river.
Sickles' III Corps held the southern end of the Federal position, forming a salient centered on Hazel Grove, about a mile south of Chancellorsville. They had pulled back from their forward thrust at Catherine Furnace after dark, enduring a hideous gauntlet of fire from both Confederates and confused Union troops. What remained organized of Howard's routed XI Corps protected the Army of the Potomac from an attack from the east. Howard's men had taken a severe beating, but there was no immediate danger from that direction in any case.
There was something unreal about the situation that morning. With the arrival of Reynolds and his men, Hooker had 76,000 effectives in a reasonable defensive position, threatened by 43,000 rebels who were split in half. The Federals had been badly shaken by Jackson's flank attack but not seriously damaged in terms of numbers, equipment, or (at least as far as the troops in the line were concerned) morale. They should have at least been an intimidating prospect for an attack, and if they took the offensive, they would be able to destroy the separated Army of Northern Virginia one piece at a time.
Unfortunately, Couch's assessment of Hooker was correct: he was a beaten man. He refused to attack, simply sending orders back to Sedgwick at Fredericksburg for him to come to his relief. Then Hooker destroyed his chances of even being able to conduct an effective defense. He had been worried by the vulnerability of the salient occupied by Sickle's III Corps. The night before, a rebel probe had in fact cut off Sickles, and Couch later wrote that it caused Hooker "great alarm, and preparations were at once made to withdraw the whole front, leaving General Sickles to his fate; but that officer showed himself able to take care of his rear, and communication was restored at the point of the bayonet."
During the night, Sickles requested reinforcements but nobody would wake Hooker. When Hooker did wake up that morning, he refused the request and ordered Sickles to fall back towards Chancellorsville. Sickles was entirely reluctant to give up the high ground around Hazel Grove, but orders were orders, and so at about 6:00 AM he fell back.
Then Jeb Stuart launched his attack. Advance units occupied Hazel Grove without effective opposition, capturing 100 Yankees and three guns of Sickles' rearguard. The Confederates had moved up 30 guns near that place during the night and immediately set them up on the high ground. From there they could take the entire Union position under effective fire, and did so without delay.
A.P. Hill's division, now under Brigadier General Henry Heth, took the lead in the drive on the Federal position across the Plank Road. With help from the artillery firing from Hazel Grove, they pushed the Federals back, but the rebel advance quickly fell into confusion in the rough terrain. The battle disintegrated into a terrible brawl with Confederate and Union regiments attacking and counterattacking, trees smashed apart by shot and shell to crush soldiers with falling limbs, fires spreading through the underbrush to burn the wounded alive while their cartridge boxes cooked off and tortured them further.
Among the dead was General Hooker's friend Hiram Berry, killed by a rebel sharpshooter. Berry's corpse was carried off the field. When Hooker saw the group of officers bearing the body, he called out: "Who have you got there, gentlemen?" On finding it was Berry, Hooker jumped off his horse and said: "My God, Berry! Why was this to happen? Why was the man on whom I relied so much to be taken in this manner?"
As the fighting raged, some Federals drifted to the rear, others stood their ground and fought back stubbornly. Heth's rebels took an ugly beating, and many Confederate regiments became dispirited with fear. Fellow regiments coming up to bolster the attack became confused in some cases, firing into their comrades in the front line. Others advanced past regiments who hugged the ground, too frightened to move, and were badly torn up in turn. Even the famed Stonewall Brigade bled itself to exhaustion in a charge and had to be rallied to charge again by Stuart, who rode among them wearing his flashy plumed hat and red-lined cape, mocking the Yankees and encouraging the soldiers to get up and fight once more. They advanced to a hundred yards of the main Federal artillery battery on top of high ground named Fairview Heights, behind the center of the Union line, and were then torn to pieces by massed canister fire.
Although the Confederates were taking a beating, they were dishing one out as well, and the Union men were being slowly worn down. Fire from the Confederate battery at Hazel Grove was proving particularly troublesome. Under pressure, at about 9:00 AM troops from General "Blinkey" French's division began to fall back from their positions astride the Plank Road, and the gunners on Fairview Heights had to pull back as well. The Union soldiers fell back in reasonably good order and set up a new line, closer to Chancellorsville.
The fighting revealed an unlikely hero in the front lines, a pretty young lady named Annie Ethridge who wore sergeant's stripes on a black riding habit. Annie had been a laundress with the 3rd Michigan when that regiment went to war. The other laundresses had left when the regiment marched off from Washington to fight, but Annie had stayed. The late Phil Kearny had been so impressed by her that he had recruited her, in theory as a cook in the officer's mess. She was described as a quiet, modest young woman who was adored by the entire 3rd Michigan. Any man who said anything unkind of her faced the wrath of the entire regiment. That morning she rode into the thick of the fighting on her horse, carrying canteens of coffee and a sack of hardtack. The men tried to make her go back, but she insisted they have something to eat and drink and betrayed not the slightest fear. She then went to encourage a Union battery that had been badly cut up by the Confederate barrage, and talked them into holding their ground.
* A short time later, Hooker was standing on the porch at Chancellor House when a Confederate shell from the batteries at Hazel Grove hit one of the pillars on the front porch and split it. Part of the pillar hit Hooker in the head, and he fell down unconscious. Some of his officers thought he had been killed, but they managed to get him up again. Hooker was partially paralyzed and in pain. General Darius Couch of II Corps came to Hooker for instructions, but Hooker neither gave him instructions nor suggested that Couch, the next in the chain of command, take over.
Couch did what he could to stabilize the line. A critical portion of his defense was held by Colonel Nelson Miles and his men. Miles was still recuperating from the ugly throat wound he had taken at Fredericksburg, but he managed to hold off several Confederate drives. He was then wounded by a sharpshooter and carried off the field. The bullet had gone into his stomach, fractured his pelvis, and stopped in his thigh; everyone thought he would die, but he would survive the wound and return to duty.
The shrinking Federal position was under increasing stress as the rebels focused artillery fire into the Yankee defense. Couch believed he could save the day with a determined counterattack, but when he was summoned by Hooker at 9:30, he was simply ordered to lead the army northward and off the field of battle. Using Winfield Scott Hancock's division as a rearguard, the bitterly disappointed Couch pulled the Army of the Potomac back to a line north of Chancellorsville. The withdrawal was completed at noon. The rebels tried to press an attack on the new Yankee lines, but the defenses were solid: the attack was broken up by Federal artillery, directed by General Charles Griffin.
Griffin was a lean, tough regular with a walrus mustache who was very popular with his men. He had specifically asked Meade to use artillery instead of infantry to check the attack. Meade gave him the go-ahead as long as Griffin thought the guns could do the job. He replied: "I'll make them think Hell isn't half a mile off!" He lined up a dozen guns and hit the rebels with double charges of canister at short range. The Confederates, badly torn up, decided they'd done enough for one day.
In any case, Lee and Stuart's forces had finally linked up. Lee himself rode up towards Chancellor House, which was burning furiously, and was greeted by the cheers of his men. Lee was about to press the attack once more against the Federals, when a messenger brought him news: General Sedgwick was attacking the Confederate forces at Fredericksburg.
* Sedgwick had received orders late the night before to cross the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg and come to the aid of the rest of the army at Chancellorsville by sunrise. In fact, when Sedgwick got the message, he was already across the river with most of his command, just south of Fredericksburg. However, he still had to penetrate the defenses that had frustrated the Army of the Potomac in December, and the Confederates had improved them since then. The trenches were manned by 9,000 rebels under Jubal Early and were a deadly obstacle.
Sedgwick ordered General John Gibbon, still back at Falmouth with his division, to lay a pontoon bridge across the Rappahannock and join the attack. Gibbon responded quickly, but found that in the moonlight the rebels were easily picking off his engineers. He decided to wait for dawn.
Sedgwick moved upstream during the night. Once he and his men arrived at Fredericksburg at dawn, Gibbon and his men were able to move across the river largely unmolested. Goaded by messages from Hooker and his chief of staff, Dan Butterfield, Sedgwick immediately sent his divisions forward to attack the Confederates on Marye's Heights. The first attack foundered in blood, as had happened in December. Sedgwick, watching the fiasco, said: "By Heaven, sir, this must not delay us."
A second attack was organized. Some of the commanders, remembering the futile charges of the December battle, formed their men into columns instead of lines, then ordered them to charge at a double-quick with unloaded rifles and overwhelm the enemy with the bayonet. The Federals pressed their assault but were thrown back. However, men of the 7th Massachusetts, hiding behind a fence, noticed one section of the rebel line that seemed lightly held. A party of stretcher-bearers set out under truce confirmed that was the case, and the Massachusetts men rushed the weak point.
On their left, Colonel Thomas Allen of the 5th Wisconsin sent his men with fixed bayonets, ordering them: "When the signal FORWARD is given, you will start at double-quick, you will not fire a gun, and you will not stop until you get the order to halt. You will never get that order." They went forward in a rush and the Union men poured over the wall, grappling with the rebels in savage hand-to-hand fighting. Other Federal units joined in, and Early's men crumbled. The rebels managed to collect their equipment and flee south. It was about 11:00 AM.
* Sedgwick had done the seemingly impossible and it was essential that he follow it up quickly. He did not. He was a common-sensible, plain, methodical man who was generally not inclined to hurry, and didn't manage to get his men on the move up the Turnpike towards Chancellorsville for several hours. By that time, Lee had sent General Lafayette McLaws' division to block the Turnpike. The two forces made contact at about 3:30 PM. Sedgwick's men charged the Confederates and broke their lines, only to be thrown back and almost crushed when the rebels threw in reserves.
Sedgwick had 19,000 men to McLaws' 10,000, but Sedgwick had been only able to commit a single advance division of 4,000 men to the attack. His other divisions arrived a short time later, but it was too late in the day to organize another attack on McLaws.
After the sun went down, Lee ordered General Richard Anderson to take his division and reinforce McLaws. This left a mere 25,000 men to keep an eye on Hooker, but Lee had correctly decided that Hooker had no fight in him. An opportunity was available to destroy Sedgwick and his command and Lee wanted to take advantage of it. Lee sent orders to Early for him to return to Fredericksburg and threaten Sedgwick from the rear.
* When the sun came up on Monday, 4 May, Hooker was actually in the strong position he had thought he had been in three days earlier. His men, having long ago learned the survival value of digging in, had fortified their contracted lines with great skill. Had Lee decided to attack he would have been bloodily driven back.
Lee was busy elsewhere for the moment, focusing on wiping out Sedgwick's corps, and didn't have the resources present in front of Hooker's lines to make such an attack. In fact, the rebel forces there were in grave danger from a counterstroke, and many of the Union men knew it. If Joe Hooker knew it he didn't seem interested, and his men spent the day in relative quiet.
While Hooker sat, Sedgwick was concentrating on the business of survival. Early's forces had chased Sedgwick's pickets out of Fredericksburg, and as the day wore on, Sedgwick found him and his 19,000 men confronted with a rebel force of 21,000 that was trying to encircle him. Sedgwick moved his corps northward toward the river and set his men up in a defensive horseshoe, while engineers laid down two pontoon bridges over the Rappahannock at a place called Scott's Mill Ford. Lee planned to destroy the bridges with artillery and then attack Sedgwick's position from south and west.
Lee didn't get his forces organized until late in the afternoon. It wasn't until 5:30 PM that the attack jumped off, and after a short and nasty fight the assault became confused in the rough terrain. Despite the best efforts of Confederate artillery, the two pontoon bridges were intact by time nightfall put a stop to the attacks. Sedgwick was still worried and at midnight sent a message to Hooker, pointedly requesting permission to withdraw.
Hooker had called a meeting of his corps commanders to debate the question of withdrawal. Meade, Howard, Reynolds, Couch, and Sickles arrived and were asked to vote on the matter. Meade, Howard, and Reynolds voted to stay, while Sickles and Couch voted to withdraw. Couch actually wanted to fight but had no confidence in Hooker's leadership. The vote was in favor of fighting, but Hooker ignored it and ordered the army to retreat anyway. Reynolds loudly complained, apparently within hearing of Hooker: "What was the use of calling us together at this time of night when he intended to retreat anyhow?!"
Sedgwick had all his men back across the river and had dismantled his pontoon bridges by sunrise on Tuesday, 5 May. Evacuating the bulk of the Army of the Potomac from its position north of Chancellorsville was more complicated. Matters were made worse by the fact that the dispirited Hooker was one of the first to return across the river, leaving the organization of the retreat to his corps commanders, and by torrential rains that bogged down the soldiers and kept the engineers busy extending the pontoons. By the morning of Wednesday, 6 May, the evacuation was complete. The battle of Chancellorsville was over.
* The news of the defeat made its way back to the White House through a telegram from Dan Butterfield. Lincoln cried out: "My God! My God! What will the country say?!"
Hooker's soldiers straggled back to Falmouth, to be joined a bit later by Stoneman's cavalry troopers. The Union cavalry had accomplished little on their raid, having struck at a large number of insignificant targets without seriously inconveniencing the Confederates. Hooker was furious and Stoneman's days were numbered. In fact, Hooker was busily blaming the defeat on everyone but himself, while his generals loudly bickered with him and among themselves. Nobody was much fooled by Hooker's bluster. Darius Couch asked to be transferred; he refused to take orders from Hooker any more.
Critics said that Hooker had to have been drunk to have behaved as he had. Couch disagreed, saying that a few drinks would have likely done Hooker a lot of good. Some time later, Hooker admitted: "I was not hurt by a shell, and I was not drunk. For once I lost confidence in Joe Hooker, and that is all there is to it."
Darius Couch went back to Pennsylvania and out of the action for the rest of the war, It is one of the interesting might-have-beens of the war to consider what would have happened had Hooker been disabled by that cannonball at Chancellor House, and the cool and aggressive Couch had risen to the command of the Army of the Potomac. Couch was replaced in command of II Corps by Major General Winfield Scott Hancock.
There was still a silver lining to the disaster at Chancellorsville if anyone was sharp-eyed enough to see it. There was grumbling and complaint after the battle among the public and in the ranks, but it didn't amount to very much. Neither the country nor the Army of the Potomac seemed very much deterred by the defeat.
* For the Confederacy, Chancellorsville was a brilliant victory. Robert E. Lee had taken on a force almost twice the size of his own and sent it back to where it had come from, inflicting greater casualties than he had taken.
It was, however, only a tactical victory. Lee's silver cloud had a very black lining. The Union Army of the Potomac had been hurt but not seriously injured. The Federals had taken 17,000 casualties, the Confederates 13,000, but relative to the size of forces the Confederates had taken a larger loss they were less able to make good. The arrangement of the pieces on the chessboard remained unchanged.
One of the Confederate casualties was of enormous significance. Stonewall Jackson seemed to be quickly recovering from the loss of his arm, but on 7 May he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Hopes that he might survive the illness were lost when the doctors told Jackson's wife they did not think he would live through the day. Jackson rambled, obtaining momentary clarity in the midafternoon to say: "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees." He then faded, rambled more, and died. He was 39 years old.
Jackson's body lay in state in the Confederate Capitol in Richmond, and was observed by crowds. The body was then taken to Lexington, Virginia, where Jackson had taught at the Virginia Military Institute, and put to rest. The battle had cost Robert E. Lee the services of one of his best subordinates, as well as dozens of other senior officers. While the South celebrated, Lee worried about the future.
* It is unlikely that Ambrose Burnside, off in command of the Department of the Ohio, felt any satisfaction in seeing Hooker come to ruin. Burnside may have been a bumbler but there was little meanness in him. Besides, by the time the news of the defeat at Chancellorsville reached him, he was preoccupied with his own difficulties.
They were largely of his own making. If the Lincoln Administration had thought that sending Burnside off to a command in the rear would keep him out of trouble, they were very much mistaken. Burnside had arrived in Cincinnati in late March and set up headquarters there. He was responsible for military authority over Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. He quickly became aware of the grumblings and agitation of the antiwar faction in the Ohio River Valley.
Dissatisfaction with the war, the Lincoln Administration, antislavery agitators, and the conscription law that had been passed in March was widespread in the region. Lincoln was well aware of it, telling Charles Sumner that he feared "'the fire in the rear' more than our military chances." The dissatisfaction manifested itself in a loose but widespread secret society known by various names, such as the Order of American Knights, Mutual Protection Society, Circle of Honor, Knights of the Golden Circle, or Order of the Sons of Liberty. This society may have had its origins in some obscure pre-war fraternity. Its principles supported States' Rights, slavery, and the restoration of the Union. These sentiments were not treasonable in themselves, but there was not much in specific that could be done about them without committing treason, so the society went underground. They instituted secret passwords, secret handshakes, solemn and bloodthirsty oaths, and a paramilitary organization.
They called themselves "Butternuts", after the homespun uniforms worn by many Confederates, but were labelled "Copperheads" by Unionists in honor of the common poisonous snake. Some made the label their own, wearing a penny worked into a lapel ornament to display the profile of Lady Liberty.
The Copperheads started by encouraging desertion from the Union Army, and then graduated to buying arms and drilling in secret. Their membership was widespread, but there was less to them than met the eye. There was an element of play-acting in their secret rituals, and their military drills were little more than playing soldier. Confederate agents who contacted them in hopes of using them for violent action against the Federal authority found them unenthusiastic, frightened of actual bloodshed.
The Copperhead organization's security was so lax that it was thoroughly infiltrated by Federal agents and informants. Ironically, the large volume of intelligence reports on the activities of the Copperheads obtained by these spies somehow managed to inflate their actual significance, obscuring the fact that the Copperheads actually did very little. Federal authorities were only too painfully aware of the violent activities of anti-Union guerrillas in Missouri, and from the appearance of things it was by no means unreasonable to believe that the Copperheads were organizing to take similar measures. With as many fires as were burning, few of those in charge were inclined to take a relaxed view of people who were talking about starting more.
Ambrose Burnside, never known for the subtlety of his thinking, had no doubt that the Copperheads were a bloodthirsty anti-government underground intent on assaulting Federal authority, and he intended to deal with them accordingly. On 13 April 1863, Burnside had made his intentions known by issuing General Order Number 38. This proclamation established the death penalty for certain specific treasonable acts, and further stipulated no tolerance for expressions of sympathy with the Confederate cause. Confederate sympathizers would be put on trial or simply escorted across Confederate lines.
* It was inevitable that Burnside would collide with Clement Laird Vallandigham. Vallandigham had been a Democratic member of the House of Representatives who had been noted as an unwavering opponent of Republicanism and Federal actions against the South. He had been swimming against an equally unwavering tide, and his Congressional district had been gerrymandered to ensure that he was not re-elected in late 1862. Out of a job, Vallandigham saw an opportunity to put his enforced unemployment to good use and decided to run for Ohio state governor.
Vallandigham hoped to ride the wave of discontent to the governor's office, and ran on a platform of specific opposition to the war, the Lincoln Administration, and the Republicans. General Order 38 was a challenge to him. On 1 May 1863, Vallandigham delivered an impassioned speech to a big crowd in Mount Vernon, Ohio. There were a large number of men wearing pennies on their lapels in the crowd. There were also two Union Army officers busily taking notes. They didn't take very detailed notes, simply recording Vallandigham's mockery of "King Lincoln", a denunciation of General Order 38, and his call for immediate cessation of war against the Confederacy. Although these comments weren't particularly treasonous in themselves, when the two officers reported back to Burnside in Cincinnati, Burnside went hot and immediately ordered Vallandigham's arrest.
A few days later, a squad of soldiers marched to Vallandigham's residence in the quiet hours of the night, broke in, ordered him to dress, and carted him off to prison in Cincinnati while he protested angrily. When the news got out, a mob in Dayton sacked a Republican newspaper and set a fire that burned down a number of buildings.
From prison, Vallandigham issued denunciations of Burnside and protests against his arbitrary arrest. On 6 May, Vallandigham went before a military tribunal, making no attempt to defend himself and contenting himself with further denunciations. His lawyer asked the US Circuit Court to intervene, but the court replied that it had no jurisdiction in the matter. On 16 May, the military tribunal ordered that Vallandigham be confined to prison in Fort Warren, Boston, for the duration of the war. Unfortunately, while Burnside may have put away a dedicated enemy of the Lincoln Administration, he had also done much to inflame opposition to the war. Anti-war sentiments in the Ohio Valley went red-hot.
* Vallandigham busied himself in his confinement by writing messages protesting his treatment and attacking the Republicans and the Lincoln Administration. He enjoyed considerable public sympathy, and Lincoln quickly recognized that Vallandigham's arrest had been a blunder.
Still, the President was reluctant to reverse Burnside's action. On 26 May, Lincoln compromised: he ordered that Vallandigham be escorted across Confederate lines. Lincoln reasoned with the public, writing: "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?" Under the current conditions of emergency, he went on, to insist on the full exercise of peacetime rights amounted to giving the rebels a lever to obtain "amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors of their cause."
As far those who worried that "emergency measures" might become permanent, Lincoln reassured them with one of his homely and effective similes, saying that the idea of indefinite continuation of the suspension of civil liberties was like believing that "a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life." No doubt Lincoln believed this himself, but students of history might have well been skeptical.
The Confederates hardly knew what to make of or do with Vallandigham. He spoke with a representative of the Confederate government, suggesting that if the Confederacy took offensive actions into the north, they would alarm those sympathetic to the Southern cause and strengthen those who opposed it. This was plausible, but it also clearly suggested that the South really had few friends in the North, and that Vallandigham wasn't really among them. He was engaged in a power struggle with Republicanism; the Confederacy was merely a detail. Whatever the case, Vallandigham left the South on a blockade runner, and on 5 July landed in Nova Scotia.
He had unanimously won the Democratic nomination for the governor's race in his absence, and by mid-July he was campaigning for the race from the Canadian side of the border. He soon came back across the border in disguise. He abandoned the disguise shortly and campaigned openly, daring the Federals to arrest him. They didn't make that mistake again.
Indeed, by that time there seemed less need to be heavy-handed. In response to the perceived threat posed by Copperheads, Unionist civic groups, the "Loyal Leagues" and the "Union Leagues", had been established. They were generally led by men of influence; the facts that they didn't have to conceal their activities and enjoyed at least tacit government support gave them a substantial edge over the Copperheads. Instead of play-acting, the Loyal Leagues and Union Leagues got things done, and the Copperheads were absolutely no match for them.
