Darkness at Chancellorsville

by Ralph Peters

  They chanted: “Lee, Lee, Lee!”

  He took off his hat and slackened the reins, letting Traveller take him forward.

  These men knew how grim their own struggles had been. They knew the price paid by their companies and regiments. But did they grasp the magnificence of their victory? The fearful odds they’d faced? The desperation?

  He suspected they did. They might not express it in refined words or even in cruder language, but in their souls, in a sanctum of the spirit, they understood.

  He raised his hat above his head, holding it up as though it were their trophy.

  “It is good,” he said. “You have done well. It is good.”

  The crowds of soldiers grew thicker still as men broke from re-formed ranks to join the multitude. As he approached the vital crossroads, charred brick walls and lingering flames drew his eyes. Yes, war was terrible for the innocent. And many a home had been lost, his own property seized and his wife dispossessed, his nephew’s fine house victim to sanctioned arson, so much ruination, such waste. But it could not be helped.

  The press of soldiers spared him the sight of the nearest dead, of another army’s wreckage, but he already sensed the terrible cost of this day. He did not need to wait for the casualty lists.

  The price had had to be paid and must not be regretted. To think too much of losses courted defeat.

  He did rue the loss of Jackson, though, for even the briefest period. As the man who had breathed life into a plan any other general would have resisted, Thomas Jackson had a right to be here, riding beside him.

  Again, Lee felt the odd twinge in his heart, one more concern.

  He must not be despondent, not on this day, not amid this clearing smoke with a good May sun above, and not before these men. The Lord might permit him to indulge his pride, just for this hour.

  Soldiers laid captured flags beside his path.

  The work was unfinished, the fight must be renewed, Hooker had to be pushed into the river, it had to be done, and soon.

  But this moment was of spun gold. Lee’s mind already had passed far beyond his humbled opponent. With this army, with these men … so much more might be possible.

  He fixed his gaze northward, Caesar eyeing Gaul.

  Amid the magnificent tumult, a rider from the rear forced his way through the crowd. Alerted, Lee turned and saw Marshall intercept the man, a lieutenant.

  He let himself bask in the cheers again. By God’s grace, this day had seen a miracle. David had brought low Goliath.

  Was there anything these men could not do?

  Jackson would return soon, would not let him down, wouldn’t dally a moment. Then they would drive this war to its conclusion.

  The press of reeking humanity became so great that Traveller could not go forward. The cheers had the force of artillery. Red flags waved at the brink of madness.

  He was about to chide the men to let him pass, when Marshall forced his way forward, rough-handing soldiers when necessary.

  “You must hear this, sir,” the military secretary called, leaning from his horse. “Lieutenant Pitzer just came from Fredericksburg. He claims General Early’s been driven south and Sedgwick’s advancing toward Chancellorsville.”

  Lee’s face remained impassive as he said:

  “There is still more work to be done.”

  ELEVEN

  Afternoon, May 3

  Between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville

  Cad Wilcox tugged his gelding aside to let a gun section pass. Straw hat pushed back on his head and hickory switch in hand, he’d been mounting a delaying action since noon, shaking out skirmishers, putting up brief resistance at key points, and constantly shifting the handful of cavalry troopers he’d pressed into service—all to slow the Yankee Sixth Corps, a behemoth compared to his Alabama Brigade.

  He’d been cut off from Early’s Division when the Yankees swarmed over the heights at Fredericksburg. Now his men were all that remained between the Federals and Lee’s rear at Chancellorsville.

  He welcomed the challenge.

  It was the first time in the war that he’d been entirely his own man, able to implement infantry tactics precisely as he’d taught them to the cadets:

  Put up the pretense of a fixed defense, forcing the enemy to deploy into battle lines, then withdraw to the next position under artillery cover. Alternate heavy skirmish lines with Jaeger bands to “amuse” the enemy. Use the strength of the foe’s formations against him, forcing him to unfold his column and then re-form again. Inflict delays, not necessarily casualties. When necessary, fight.

  Fighting—real fighting—would soon be necessary.

  Wilcox did wish he had one particular witness to his performance: his friend Tom Jackson, who lay severely wounded. For that matter, he wouldn’t have minded having Sam Grant, long his dearest friend, observing him, too.

  His mind deserted the battlefield for a moment, flying to Grant’s wedding out in Missouri, when they served at Jefferson Barracks in better times. He’d been Sam’s best man. Julia had looked lovely, her father dubious. Sam had appeared high-nerved and immeasurably happy, disbelieving his good fortune. Of course, Grant shouldered his share of hard times afterward, nor did he seem to be prospering on the Mississippi this spring: Vicksburg was a harder nut than Donelson.

  Gone into battery on the road and in the yard of the tollhouse, the section of Napoléons he’d placed teased the oncoming Yankees, lofting shells over blue skirmishers to annoy the robust columns marching westward.

  When might he hear from Lee? Or Early, who had disappeared down the Telegraph Road? Wilcox knew the ground from a shivering winter: He’d have to make his real stand at Salem Church and that schoolhouse, hardly an artillery shot away. That’s where military art would break down into a death match, where all the books on tactics would avail little, where Yankee numbers would tell. He’d already sent back two regiments, with instructions as to how they should position themselves, but he wouldn’t be able to hold very long against an entire corps without reinforcements. He had expected support to arrive by now.

  Meanwhile, every small advantage mattered.

  The afternoon grew hotter as the sun declined, hard on men who’d been on their feet since dawn. His soldiers were game, enjoying this agile fraud, but empty canteens and double-quick dashes wore on them. You could only ask so much of an honest soldier.

  Tom Jackson would disagree, of course, demanding that the soldiers bend to his will. Strange Tom, so awkwardly kind to intimates, so brutal in a fight. If the running rumors were accurate, Tom should recover just fine, but you never really knew about wounds until the fickle body made its decisions. He was just getting over a visitation of dysentery himself—so much for the charms of war.

  To his front, the blue-clad skirmishers advanced gingerly, determined but wary, pressing across fields that marked the last respectable cultivation—the last civilization—before the primeval Wilderness began. This was indeed a battlefield, and the church just to his rear marked its hind end.

  Turning a churchyard into a butcher’s shop, and on a Sunday. Tom would not have approved, and yet he would have done it himself, if necessary. Then he would have prayed over his sin, begging forgiveness.

  Wilcox had always liked Jackson, from their time as West Point classmates, when Tom had been stiff as an oak tree and just as rustic, and during the thrilling hazards of Mexico, right up to this fateful day. Yet he couldn’t have explained exactly why he was so fond of the man, other than his own conviviality. Jackson was the most unlikable likable man he knew.

  Maybe it was the innocence. Tom had always seemed the most innocent of men, even amid slaughter.

  Wilcox prayed he’d be all right. The army needed Tom.

  “Hurry on there, hurry along, boys!” Wilcox called to his retiring skirmishers, sweat-drenched, soot-faced men striding rearward to reorganize and resume their task anew. In the road just to his front, an artillery lieutenant barked orders to switch to spherical case. Wouldn
’t let the Federals get close enough to need canister. Not here.

  Back at the church, though.

  Sedgwick had not been a fireball as he advanced, and that was a blessing. His corps was coming on more steadily now, but still didn’t seem in a hurry. Methodical Uncle John, another likable fellow from the old Army. Well, let him advance as slowly as he liked.…

  During his teaching days at the Point, Wilcox had stressed alacrity and speed. Now he wanted everything to slow down.

  A Yankee battery went into action a thousand yards away, replying to his carefully husbanded guns. Almost time to pull them off. Daren’t lose a piece, not yet.

  He did enjoy it all, though. Just had to admit it. Applying the rules he knew so well, issuing confident orders, making the system work without interference. And, thus far, he’d kept his casualties to a minimum. Never did relish bleeding his own men.

  Judge the time, judge it perfectly. Stretch the leathers until they’re about to snap. Then move sharply.

  The foremost Yankee skirmishers paused to fire, waiting for their leading brigade to unfold again.

  Four more minutes, Wilcox judged, and then he’d leapfrog back. The regimental commanders present glanced in his direction, nerves alight and waiting on a command. Wilcox offered a smile in return.

  Time it just right. Then skedaddle. Back to the church and that first fringe of forest. And one last surprise for the Yankees.

  Riding a surge of confidence, of pride, Wilcox pondered Jackson again and granted himself a last interlude of reverie, recalling that night of mild dissipation in Brown’s Hotel in Washington, on furlough after graduating West Point. As nobodies, they’d been consigned to a sweatbox of a room on the top floor, four of them packed together—in a cholera summer—and Tom had gotten drunk unto singing and dancing in his unmentionables, inflamed by the bottle for, perhaps, the only time in his life. The next day, Jackson’s desolation had been so morbid it made his more experienced classmates laugh.

  Hard not to be a touch jealous of Tom’s success, of course. On the eve of war, folks would have bet on him, Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox, to rise rapidly, while no one had thought much of Tom, but Wilcox languished atop a brigade, dutiful but undistinguished, while Jackson had risen like a Congreve rocket.

  He didn’t want to be jealous, didn’t believe in it. But it was hard sometimes.

  Today was his day, though.

  He tapped his mount with his switch and rode his line.

  * * *

  General Bartlett rode up in a mood so black he seemed to darken the sun. Campbell did his best to turn invisible amid the clinging dust and sudden bustle. They were in for it now, he suspected.

  The brigade commander reined up beside his favorite regimental colonel, Campbell’s superior.

  “Upton,” Bartlett began, “this is going too slow. Might as well crawl along on our hands and knees.” The general swallowed the cloud that his arrival had created, cleared his throat, and spit. “I want you to take the lead, push ahead while Edwards re-forms. Move fast and get your teeth into the Johnnies.”

  “They’re ready to make a stand, sir,” the boy-faced colonel said.

  The colonel’s certainty annoyed the brigadier. “How do you know that, Upton? They haven’t dared fight us yet. They just make us dance like monkeys then stop the music.” The general grunted. “I wish they would make a goddamned stand, we’d maul the sonsofbitches.”

  As Campbell expected, his colonel winced at the mild profanity. Emory Upton did not smoke, drink, curse, or play cards, and there was always a Bible on his field desk.

  “I’ll see to them, sir,” the colonel said.

  “You do that. Catch ’em and pitch into ’em. The rest of the brigade will be behind you, if I have to horsewhip every man into the fight.” Bartlett grunted again. “Go on. Get moving.”

  Campbell didn’t wait for the general’s party to ride off or even for an order from his colonel. He began shouting back to his fellow officers to get their idling men back on the road and do it quickly.

  When Campbell turned again, Upton just nodded.

  Wiry, abruptly terrifying, and twenty-three years old, Colonel Emory Upton was an officer his soldiers would never love. But, Campbell knew, they had learned to admire and trust him. When Upton took command of the 121st New York, the regiment had been an untrained shambles, with drunken officers disappearing from camp and lassitude the rule for everyone else, its ranks drained by the worst sick lists in the army. Upton had enforced stern sanitation, improved the men’s diet, drilled them to exhaustion, and worked his officers so hard that the political men and debauchees resigned. The soldiers had cursed him to the nether regions, and neighboring regiments had mocked the endlessly parading New Yorkers as “Upton’s Regulars.”

  Ever so gradually, the men had come to embrace that name with pride.

  If Upton proved right, as he usually did, and they were about to fight, it would be their trial by fire. At Fredericksburg, in December, they’d merely looked on behind a screen of skirmishers. Even that morning, their brigade had marched from the rear of the corps, unmolested.

  Now here they were. With hooting, shooting, flesh-and-blood Rebs to their front.

  Polite and savage, Upton led the men forward, straight up the road. Jutting cheekbones gave the colonel the look of a youthful Mongol.

  Campbell watched the last Rebs—tiny figures—pull off the crest ahead, flitting away before the New Yorkers’ sister regiment could move forward and catch them.

  Upton’s expression remained that of a Christian who feared no hellfire.

  A stone-cut Methodist, the colonel came from the burned-over district of western New York, a realm of religious revivals, curiosities, and fanaticism, and the rural New Yorkers he led found him no phenomenon. For Campbell, though, his colonel was passing strange: A rigid abolitionist, Upton conversed with Negroes as normally and respectfully as if he were chatting with white men, his voice and choice of words the same as if passing the time with a neighbor or a cousin, without distaste or the slightest condescension.

  Once, Campbell had alluded to Upton’s treatment of the Negroes they encountered and the colonel had appeared genuinely surprised.

  “Why, Campbell,” he’d said, “they’re the same as you and I.”

  Upton did not impose his beliefs on his soldiers, other than disdaining vulgar speech, but Campbell had come to know him well enough to realize he would never know him well, grasping only that Emory Upton was a crusader.

  Erect in the saddle, the colonel gained the crest the Rebs had abandoned. Halting the regiment, he called back, “Skirmishers forward. Double-quick!”

  As the designated companies trotted briskly to the fore, Upton turned to Campbell and pointed at a building in the distance.

  “That church,” Upton said. “That’s where they’re going to fight.”

  * * *

  Major General John Sedgwick was frustrated enough to kick a mule and see what happened. From the porch of the house where his staff had stopped to attempt to speed the march to Chancellorsville, the hastening columns of his corps looked potent enough. But he worried that he’d made one fateful mistake.

  Following Hooker’s orders—clear orders at last—he had advanced. But the heights that trumped the army back in December had been judged, from a distant headquarters, to be only lightly defended and easily seized. Instead, the morning had been a bloody mess, with punishing losses before they took the ridge and a bundle of captured Rebs no consolation. At last, he could have destroyed Early’s Division, eating it whole, but his orders forbade him from following Early south. Obedient, he had turned the Sixth Corps west toward Chancellorsville, but his lead divisions had been so disarranged by the morning fight that he’d felt the need to call up Bully Brooks, whose men had gone unscathed. Their march from rear to fore had cost him two hours. Now, with the afternoon on the wane, he wasn’t halfway to a union with the rest of the army.

  Worse, the battle noise off to the west
had all but stopped. And it did not indicate a Union victory, or there would have been Reb fugitives on the roads. John Sedgwick felt his confidence slipping.

  He should have driven on immediately, letting his battered brigades lick their wounds on the march. If he had a weakness, he knew, it was his reluctance to waste his soldiers’ lives. And he’d squandered enough that morning.

  On top of it all, Southern captives taken from Early insisted that Longstreet was marching to their rescue with two more divisions. Sharpe dismissed the reports, but the colonel in charge of spying was back at headquarters and bore no responsibility for tens of thousands of soldiers.

  Sedgwick turned to Marty McMahon, his chief of staff and a good man who still felt the loss of a brother. “Bring the horses around, I can’t stomach this nonsense. I’m going forward to prod Bully Brooks with a pitchfork.”

  * * *

  “No,” Wilcox told his regimental commanders, “we’re not going to hold the tree line. That’s what the Yankees expect.”

  He gestured to right and left of the church and the schoolhouse, beyond the interval of cleared ground to the arms of forest reaching toward the road, with trees and brush a few hundred yards in depth.

  “Williams, Sanders, you’ve seen the ditch. And the rifle pits from last winter. Guide your brother colonels to their positions.”

  “That ditch, it’s inside the woods, sir. And toward the rear, at that.”

  Wilcox offered his usual, friendly smile. Behind him, his rallied guns went into action, harassing the Yankees.

  “You’re thinking just the way the Yankees will,” Wilcox continued. “When they realize we’re not in the tree line, waiting, they’ll come sauntering through the undergrowth, full of confidence. And the brush will break up their formations. Then, when they catch the sun-dazzle from the far side, when they’re blind and expecting nothing, you’ll give them a volley then keep pouring fire into them.”