The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 2 of 2

With numbers so overwhelming, Hooker was free to do pretty nearly whatever he might choose to do without risk of weakening himself at any point below the strength of his enemy.

His plan of campaign was simple and strategically admirable. Broadly stated it was this:

1. To push a strong force of cavalry, under Stoneman, around Lee's left and into his rear, to destroy his communications, and to harass and prevent his retreat towards Richmond – for Hooker's plans looked to nothing less than the capture of the whole Army of Northern Virginia.

2. To send a strong force of artillery and infantry under Sedgwick down the river to cross there, turn Lee's right, force whatever might be left of his army, by that time, out of their entrenchments, and mercilessly assail him in flank on his expected retreat toward Richmond, thus additionally making his surrender inevitable.

3. At the same time to march up the river with the main body of the Federal army, estimated by Lieutenant Colonel Theodore A. Dodge, U. S. A. , at 120,000 men, push the head of his column across the stream far up it, sweep down the southern bank, clear the several fords in succession and at each to send fresh columns across; then, in irresistible force to march through the Wilderness, as that tangled country is called, and emerge from it in appallingly overwhelming numbers at Chancellorsville.

This would completely turn Lee's left with the main army and force him either to retreat hurriedly toward Richmond with Sedgwick on his flank, or to give battle in the open, with utterly inadequate forces.

Never during the whole course of the war was there a campaign more brilliantly planned than this one was to compel victory; never did one fail more conspicuously. Never were the advantages of the assailant so great; never were they so completely offset by the genius of the defending commander and the resolution of an army vastly inferior in numbers and in the appliances of war, – in every element of strength indeed except high soldierliness.

Stoneman moved on the thirteenth of April. His orders were to pass up the river, keeping well out of sight and masking his movement, to wheel suddenly and cross the stream at a point west of the Orange and Alexandria railroad, destroy Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry at Culpeper, seize upon Gordonsville, where the Orange and Alexandria and the Virginia Central railroads form a junction; push on toward Richmond; cut the Richmond and Fredericksburg railroad at Hanover Junction, thus cutting off Lee's retreat; fortify himself there in strong positions and obstinately oppose any effort of Lee to retreat, until Hooker, moving from Lee's left and Sedgwick, moving from his right, should join forces with Stoneman and complete the work of destroying the Army of Northern Virginia. This culmination of the campaign was planned to occur six days after Stoneman's start.

Stoneman made the first failure. He moved up the river and crossed a part of his force. But high water soon afterwards rendered the stream unfordable, while Lee's alert cavalry lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, confronted the force already crossed, and compelled it to retreat by swimming to escape certain destruction.

This ended the cavalry part of Hooker's program. For the ford did not become passable again until the twenty-seventh and by that time the main movement had been begun. It was too late for Stoneman to do his part of the work.

In the meanwhile the crossings at and near Port Royal, about twenty miles below Fredericksburg, had been secured, and bridges had been laid. On the twenty-ninth of April, early in the morning – before daylight in fact, – General Sedgwick forced a crossing with three corps. In preparation for this, ninety-eight guns had been previously placed in position under Hooker's direction and a number more held in reserve.

Sedgwick's orders were to seize a principal road, turn Lee's right flank, and in case of serious opposition, to carry Lee's works at all costs; then to push forward on Lee's flank and harass his retreat. It was expected that Stoneman would by this time be fortified in the way of Lee's retreat, and that the main body of the Federal army under Hooker, moving from Chancellorsville, would fall upon the Confederates and crush them.

With these dispositions made, Hooker moved up the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, crossed forces at the upper fords, moved thence down the right or Confederate bank of the stream, uncovering the several fords in succession, and crossing heavy forces at each.

Once across the Rapidan he moved his army rapidly through the Wilderness, to Chancellorsville, a solitary plantation house near the Southern edge of that vast thicket.

In posting himself at Chancellorsville Hooker had placed his army far to the rear of Lee's left at Fredericksburg. It was obvious that Lee must quit his entrenchments and move southwest to meet his adversary at Chancellorsville, otherwise his army would be completely cut off, overwhelmed and conquered, and the road to Richmond would be opened to his adversary with no possibility of effective resistance anywhere.

But Lee had not been asleep. Neither was he appalled by the enormous advantages of numbers, guns and position enjoyed by his adversary.

With that calm self-possession which was the keynote of his character; with that masterful skill in the art of war which had so often served him in lieu of heavy battalions, and which then and since has commanded the admiration of military men both north and south; and, above all, with that confidence in the superb endurance of his veterans which their conduct on many fields had taught him to feel, he set to work to meet and defeat Hooker's admirably planned campaign.

He left 8,500 men and thirty guns to hold the works at Fredericksburg, so long as they could be held against Sedgwick's 30,000 men and more than 100 guns. With the remainder of his army, – in round numbers about 45,000 men, – he quickly moved to Chancellorsville to meet Hooker with his tremendously superior force.

The great Confederate had by this time completely penetrated Hooker's plan of campaign. He had no idea that the 8,500 men left in the works at and below Fredericksburg could for long hold that position against Sedgwick's superior force, but he knew the quality of the men set to that task, and he confidently reckoned that they would make such resistance – as in fact they did – as to prevent Sedgwick from forming a junction with the main army at Chancellorsville, until the struggle there should be ended.

And what a struggle it promised to be! Lee knew that at most he could hope for nothing better than to oppose one man to Hooker's three but even against such odds he decided to risk battle in the open rather than attempt a hazardous and dispiriting retreat to the defenses of Richmond.

Cautiously but rapidly, he transferred his army to Chancellorsville and after baffling various Federal attempts to strike at his stores and communications, he concentrated in Hooker's front quite all that he could of his scanty force.

By this time Hooker's ceaseless activity had uncovered all the fords above Fredericksburg, and opened short and easy lines of communication, through Falmouth opposite Fredericksburg, between Sedgwick, operating on the east of Fredericksburg, and Hooker's headquarters near Chancellorsville on the southwest. Thus the two temporarily divided wings of Hooker's army were brought again into touch with each other and the whole vast force acted as a unit under Hooker's command, while its disposition was such as to compel Lee to divide his much smaller force in preparation for the expected determined assault of the Federals upon one or the other of two faces – he could not know which.

But it was not Lee's purpose long to await attack. His all-daring thought was to become himself the assailant as soon as he could get his army corps disposed in positions favorable to such a purpose.

He first selected a strong defensive position in front of Chancellorsville and hurriedly fortified it as a means of holding Hooker in check until he should himself be ready to take the offensive.

In the meanwhile, as his orders issued at that time clearly show, Hooker regarded his campaign as already completely successful. He had succeeded in so enveloping Lee that that general, according to all the rules of the war game must surrender either after a show of fighting or without that bloody preliminary.

In these calculations Hooker had not sufficiently reckoned upon Lee's resourcefulness or his daring, or the fighting qualities of the Army of Northern Virginia. All these were factors underestimated in his statement of the equation.

The position at Chancellorsville itself was a conspicuously bad one for the Federals if they should stand on the defensive, and Hooker, seeing this, pushed his forces forward to more advantageous ground, a movement which involved a good deal of fighting in a comparatively small way, for the Confederates not only resisted stoutly but manifested a fiercely aggressive disposition wherever opportunity offered for a fight.

For reasons that have never been disclosed Hooker after a time withdrew his advance columns to their old unfavorable position at Chancellorsville and awaited his opportunity. His force was so greatly superior to that of his adversary that there seemed no risk in doing this, although it sacrificed a distinct advantage. It was obvious that if Lee should make a front attack he must be beaten off and crushed while, with his already inferior force, it would be simple madness, Hooker thought, for his opponent to divide his army and attempt any flank movement against an army outnumbering his own by three to one.

That madness Lee deliberately adopted as his strategy, and he carried it to a conclusion that must always be an astonishment to the reader of history.

Hooker's extraordinary retirement from the front of an enemy whom he had come out for the express purpose of attacking in overwhelming force, has always been inexplicable. Why he shrank from the attack after seeking opportunity for it with so much energy and skill it is impossible to understand. Why he abandoned his offensive operation just as its culmination in victory seemed certain, and, with enormously superior forces under his command fell back and assumed the defensive in an unfavorable position, even he seems never to have been able to explain. The most masterful critic and historian who has written of this campaign, says:

At this point Hooker faltered. Fighting Joe had reached the culminating desire of his life. He had come face to face with his foe, and he had a hundred and twenty thousand eager and well-disciplined men at his back. He had come to fight and he retreated without crossing swords.⁴

This was the situation: Lee had had 59,000 men at Fredericksburg. He had left 8,500 of them there and had made other compulsory detachments which reduced his fighting force in front of Hooker to no more than 39,000. He confronted Hooker, who had 120,000 securely intrenched with 11,000 or 12,000 more within reach. Obviously Lee could not hope by direct assault to carry the works and conquer a force so overwhelming. Equally he could not hope to stand on the defensive against an army which could easily and certainly overlap both his flanks and quickly crush him to a pulp. He must either retreat or play a great and most hazardous game of strategy.

In consultation with Stonewall Jackson – the two being seated upon cracker boxes abandoned in Hooker's retirement – it was decided to take a supreme risk in face of a supreme danger. With 39,000 men facing 120,000, it was decided to divide the smaller army and send Jackson, with 22,000 men upon an expedition, the purpose of which was to strike like a lightning flash at Hooker's right flank and rear, while Lee, with the little remnant of his army, 17,000 in all, should so far occupy Hooker in front as to prevent him from detaching troops for the timely reinforcement of his threatened wing.

The results that followed this operation have been and still are a subject of bitter controversy. Hooker tried afterwards to throw the blame for the disaster which ensued upon Howard, Sickles and his other lieutenants. They in turn disclaimed that responsibility and insisted that the disaster was due solely to Hooker's own orders and to his neglect of obvious duty as commanding general. The skilled military critics who have since written of the campaign have taken one side or the other of this purely personal controversy, according to their lights of knowledge, or their darkenings of prejudice. These things belong to biography. It is the function of the historian merely to tell the story of what happened and to that task alone the present writer addresses himself.

Lee and Jackson decided, as they sat there on the cracker boxes, that Jackson, with 22,000 men, should undertake to turn Hooker's right flank and assail him in rear, while Lee with 17,000 men should fully occupy him by a threat of front attack, and that if Jackson's movement should succeed, his part of the army should force its way to a junction with Lee. Failing that, the two parts of the army must of course retreat in the not very confident hope of uniting again at Gordonsville and together falling back to the defenses of Richmond. For Stuart with the Confederate cavalry had utterly broken up and defeated that part of Hooker's plan which had contemplated Stoneman's sweep to Hanover Court House and the entrenching of his force there as an obstacle in the way of Lee's retreat.

On Saturday, May 2, 1863, at daylight, or a little before, Lee and Jackson began the execution of their daring stratagem.

Hooker's headquarters were at Chancellorsville. His line stretched eastward and northeastward to the river and westward to a region of high ground unassailable from the front, where his right lay "in the air," in military phrase, that is to say with no natural obstacle, such as a river or a mountain, to defend it. It was Jackson's purpose to march westward on a route parallel with Hooker's line, turn its western end and strike it in flank and rear.

To accomplish that he must completely separate his 22,000 men from Lee's 17,000 and take the chances of battle for a reuniting of the two forces.

It took all day to make the march. All day Jackson kept Stuart's cavalry between his column and the enemy, feeling the enemy's lines to find out how they were posted and what their strength was at every point.

His march was clearly discovered to the Federal troops, and fully reported to their commander, Hooker. But it was completely misinterpreted. It was believed to be the initiatory movement of that retreat upon Richmond, which Hooker – master of logistics that he was – thought that he had by his maneuvers compelled Lee to undertake by way of saving his little army from destruction.

While Jackson, with scarcely any disguise or concealment, was marching along Hooker's front with intent to turn his flank and strike him in rear, Hooker rested easily in the conviction that his adversary, confronted by an irresistible force, was retreating upon Richmond either by way of Culpeper or by the Gordonsville route.

In this belief Hooker broke the continuity of his own lines by throwing forward a part of his forces to assail Jackson's moving column in flank and rear, but he made no effort to advance from Chancellorsville upon Lee's manifestly depleted force in front or in any vigorous way to push a column in between Lee and Jackson. He fought Lee on the skirmish lines all day, but he made no determined attempt to run over the skirmish lines and find out what was behind them. In other words he suffered himself to be completely and disastrously deceived by that tapping at his own lines which Lee ceaselessly kept up by way of misleading him.

As he knew Lee's strength almost to a man, and as he was fully and frequently informed during the day concerning the extent to which Jackson's detachment had weakened it, it is difficult to understand why he did not end the struggle then and there by hurling three men to one against Lee on the one hand and against Jackson on the other, and crushing them separately.

Here was another illustration and proof of the fact that the Federal administration at Washington had not yet found a general fit to command the superb Army of the Potomac. The opportunity at Chancellorsville was the very greatest and completest that was at any time during the war offered to a commanding general on either side to make a quick and complete end of the struggle.

Under like circumstances a Grant or a Sherman would have hurled 40,000 or 50,000 men upon Lee and an equal number upon Jackson, meanwhile employing a lesser but quite sufficient force in keeping the two wings of the Confederate army divided beyond the possibility of reunion. But it is conceivable at least that if Lee had been confronting a Grant or a Sherman, he would never have risked so dangerous a division of his inferior force. The character of the adversary's commanding general is a factor in every military problem, upon which a strategist must reckon as carefully as he does upon the number of that adversary's men or guns.

However that may be, Lee had divided his meager force in the presence of an enemy who greatly outnumbered him, and Hooker took no effective account of the fact. He did not strengthen his own right wing while Jackson was marching around it to assail it in the rear. He took no effective measures either to assail Jackson on his threatening march or to fall upon Lee in front in crushingly overwhelming force. He was content to beat off Lee's pretended attacks in front and to neglect Jackson's movement as very certainly a retreat with which he had not energy enough to interfere.

As a result Jackson succeeded in turning the Federal right flank, and at six o'clock in the evening the great Confederate flanker fell like a thunderbolt upon the rear of Hooker's divisions on the right.

Without skirmishers to give warning of his coming Jackson pushed his columns through the woods and the tangled underbrush. So eager were the Confederates in their work that their divisions, thrown into separate lines for the forward movement, pushed after each other until the several lines became a single mass of humanity pressing forward, each man striving to get in front of his fellow and be first to fall upon the foe.

Jackson knew his men too well to doubt them for a moment, and he therefore rushed them forward to the assault without any of those precautions which the books of tactics prescribe. He threw out no skirmishers to feel the way. He sent no company in advance to ascertain the enemy's disposition. He simply hurled his force upon that of the foe, striking as the tempest does, without warning.

The first intimation Hooker's men had of their enemy's advance came to them in a rush of deer, grouse and other game that had been disturbed and was fleeing through the tangled woodlands before the on-coming mass of armed and belligerent humanity. And before wonder over this rush of animals, serpents and birds had satisfied itself, Jackson's men, nine deep, fell upon the unsuspecting Federals at supper, and swept like a hurricane through their camps and over their lines.

Then occurred the second great panic of the war, in which men fell into such fear as to lose all semblance of soldierly self-control, and in which military cohesion was completely dissipated. Here and there a brigade or a regiment or a company of Federals bravely stood its ground, but the great mass of that German army corps commanded by men of unpronounceable names which had been extensively advertised as intending to show Americans how to fight, fell into hopeless confusion, broke ranks and ran to whatever cover the fugitives could find. Jackson ran over their lines, possessed himself of their defenses, captured their arms and their suppers and completely telescoped the left wing of Hooker's army.

Night alone saved the rest of it. For panic is more contagious than smallpox and, in view of what happened afterwards, it is safe to say that but for the coming of night the panic which so suddenly reduced the right wing of Hooker's force to a mass of fugitives, would quickly have spread throughout the army.

But night called a halt and Jackson's men rested upon their arms, ready to renew their victorious progress with the dawn of day. According to a competent and adverse witness⁵ these men of Jackson's command were "the best infantry in existence, as tough, hardy and full of élan, as they are ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-looking."

But a great calamity was in store for the Confederates that evening. Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men acting under orders of his own giving, while he was making his preparations for the completion of his wonderful work on the following morning. Except in the possible death of Lee, no greater loss could have befallen the Southern arms. The destruction of a division or even of an army corps would have been a trifling disaster in comparison. For upon Jackson as upon no other man, Lee depended for the masterful execution of his plans, and equally for wise counsel and daring initiative. The soldiers of the army, too, had come to look upon the great lieutenant as the one man invincible, and to regard whatever work he might assign them to do as a task that must be accomplished at all costs and all hazards. In the doing of his bidding, the officers and men alike were accustomed to think of their orders as the decrees of an all-wise Providence and of themselves as mere instruments set to accomplish the purposes of a higher authority. No man among them questioned the wisdom of Jackson's plans or doubted the possibility of doing whatsoever he had ordered them to do. In such mood as that which their reverent love for Jackson inspired in them, those incomparable fighters were capable of well-nigh any achievement.

When it was whispered through the army that Stonewall Jackson was wounded unto death there was mourning and distress at every bivouac fire, and depressing sorrow in every soldierly heart. But there was no thought of failure or faltering in the work to be done on the morrow. That work had been marked out for them by Stonewall Jackson himself, and every man of them was resolved to do it or fall fighting in a determined endeavor to accomplish to the uttermost limit of possibility the will of the fallen chieftain.

The command fell upon J. E. B. Stuart and after sustaining a midnight assault upon the Confederate flank by Sickles, which was repulsed with comparative ease, Stuart was prepared, early on Sunday morning, to press forward with the entire detachment and force a junction with Lee in front of Chancellorsville, after destroying or driving into retreat all of Hooker's forces that lay west of that point.

There was terrific fighting at every step. There were formidable breastworks to be assailed and carried, and they were protected by difficult abattis in front. There were superbly served batteries at every defensive point with determined infantry in support. But the men who had been Jackson's yesterday, and were to-day under the dare-devil leadership of Stuart, remembered that Jackson had planned this movement and they were death-resolute to carry it to completion. They pressed forward always. A "fire of hell" meant no more to them than a summer breeze. In face of canister and a murderous fire of musketry, they plunged onward with no thought of hesitation or shrinking.

Jackson lay under a tree somewhere, wounded unto death, but it was Jackson still whom these heroic fellows were serving; it was in obedience to his orders and in execution of his plans that they were advancing, and their inspiration of resoluteness had for one of its elements a mad resentment of Jackson's wounds, as an injury for which the enemy must be made to pay the blood atonement of those old Scriptures in whose words Jackson so devoutly and reverently believed.

Probably never before or since in battle did men fight with a madder impulse than did this "best infantry in existence" on that Sunday morning, in execution of their stricken leader's purpose. They were very maniacs, filled with fury, assailing the enemy at every point with truly demoniacal determination, reinforced by all the strength and skill that long discipline and battle-habit could give to men with arms in their hands.

In spite of numbers, in the face of obstacles that would have appalled the best battalions in any European army, these grief-stricken worshipers of the great leader, swept forward as the hurricane does, regardless of all obstacles and absolutely resistless in their onward progress.

Their impulse was indicated by the battle cry, "Charge and remember Jackson!" which was continually passed up and down the lines by word of mouth throughout the day, by men with set teeth and lips compressed to paleness.

Early in the morning it was Stuart's thought to refresh some of his troops who had been long without food. He ordered an issue of rations and a pause for breakfast, meantime directing a small advance in order to rectify the line at a defective point. The men rushed forward with such impetuosity, abandoning rations and taking the bloody work of war in lieu of breakfast, that Stuart decided to let them have their way and bring on at once the action for which it had been his thought to prepare them by a feeding. The incident is valuably illustrative of the temper in which that Sunday's fight was undertaken, a fight decisive for the time, and ending as it did in the defeat and overthrow of the largest, strongest, and most perfectly equipped army that had ever been assembled on this continent, by a force one third or one fourth its number, ill-fed, ill-clothed and exceedingly ill-looking, as Colonel Dodge has testified in print.

Here it is necessary to make an important distinction, which is often overlooked. When troops are beaten by an adversary having inferior numbers, the fault is not always or even usually with the men. It lies almost always with commanding officers who, through error or incapacity or otherwise, fail to bring the men into such positions as may render their superiority of numbers effective. At Chancellorsville Hooker had quite all of three men to Lee's one – and including Sedgwick's force his odds were even greater than that. On the part of the so-called German corps there seems to have been a distinct inferiority of soldierly quality, while Jackson's men, according to the expert judgment of Colonel Dodge, supported by that of General Hooker, were "the best infantry in existence." But between the men generally of the two armies there was no such superiority on the one side and inferiority on the other as to offset the enormous disparity of numbers and thus to account for the result.

The difficulty was that in the great war game Lee was immeasurably more than Hooker's master. At every point he so handled his forces as to bewilder and embarrass his enemy. In spite of his inferiority in numbers he managed at many points, by deft maneuvering, to assail Hooker's divisions, with more men than they could for the moment bring to bear in resistance.

In reviewing great battles and campaigns it is important to bear these things in mind, and, for the credit of a brave soldiery, to remember that all dispositions of troops are made by men higher up. The skill and alertness of those men higher up, or their lack of skill and alertness, determines whether or not due advantage is to be taken of numbers, the nature of the ground and other adventitious circumstances upon which the outcome of battles in a large measure depends.

At Chancellorsville, for example, there was one position so favorable that the artillery of either army, posted there upon the crest of a commanding hill, could work havoc in the ranks of its adversary. The Federals held that position when night fell on Saturday. They unwisely abandoned it during the night and early in the morning Stuart, always quick to see and alert to seize advantage, occupied it with thirty guns too strongly supported to be dislodged. In like manner the superior generalship of the Confederates at other points enabled them often to bring two men to bear against one in spite of their general inferiority of numbers.

When Hooker found his right wing crushed and reduced to a panic-stricken mass of fugitives, he still had the battle in his own hands and victory easily within his grasp.

After Jackson's blow was delivered on Saturday evening Hooker could not have doubted that Lee's little army of less than forty thousand men had been divided in his front. It was his obvious and easy task to keep it divided and to crush its two parts separately. He had already thrust Sickles in between Lee and Jackson, and in order to maintain the separation he had only overwhelmingly to reinforce Sickles, an enterprising officer. This he might easily have done by drawing troops from his completely unemployed left wing which stretched away superfluously to the fords of the river with no enemy at all in front.

The war problem was simple and easy at that time, and had Hooker been a man of masterful mind, he must have wrought it out to checkmate within twenty-four hours.

But it is to be remembered that Lee knew all old army officers, and knew the capacity and temper of every commander sent to oppose him. It is probable that had Hooker been a man of masterful mind, Lee would never have attempted the strategy which created this opportunity.

Let us leave speculation for facts. Hooker had unaccountably abandoned his brilliant offensive movement at the crowning moment when its success, complete and decisive, seemed certain. Having come out to force Lee to a fight in the open, he had shrunk from the conflict. Having skilfully and brilliantly so maneuvered as to place himself on the flank of Lee's army with intent to assail and overwhelm his adversary, he had suddenly shrunk back, as if appalled, into a defensive attitude and had left it to Lee to determine when and where and how the further fighting should be done. Having advanced from Chancellorsville into the more favorable country beyond, he had quite inexplicably fallen back to Chancellorsville again and fortified there as if he had been confronted by an adversary of superior strength, and when he clearly saw that Lee had divided his inferior force, he had over-confidently assumed that retreat was intended instead of a blow.