by John Keegan
The campaign in the West in 1862 culminated in the opening of Grant’s direct offensive against Vicksburg, frustrated though it was to be for months by appalling terrain. While Grant struggled to find a way forward, harassed by troopers of Van Dorn’s and Forrest’s cavalry, Rosecrans—who had succeeded Buell in command of the Army of the Cumberland—attempted to assist him by increasing the area of Union control within Tennessee. Rosecrans’s advance was threatened by Bragg, who at Murfreesboro—also known as Stones River—began a battle which, in terms of casualties as a percentage of numbers engaged, was to prove the costliest of the war to both sides. Fought over three days, from December 31, 1862, to January 2, 1863, it began with Confederate attacks on the Union positions, from which they were successively driven back. Eventually, however, the Union lines reformed, leaving the Confederates exposed to the fire of massed Union artillery, which as Bragg’s subordinate, General John C. Breckinridge, had correctly foreseen, massacred his infantry as they attempted to mount a battle-winning charge. Both armies claimed a victory, but both withdrew, each having lost about a third of their respective strengths. Murfreesboro, or Stones River, terminated the campaign in Tennessee for the winter.
The West was an enormous theatre, dwarfing that in the East, where only a hundred miles separated the two capitals and the road and rail networks, together with the tidewater channels, facilitated communication both east-west and north-south. From Memphis to New Orleans was 400 miles along the Mississippi; from Chattanooga to Memphis nearly 300 miles overland. The cross-country communications were poor, railroads differing in gauge or petering out in dead ends. For the Union there was no long-distance rail connection between the East and the Mississippi Valley except by the roundabout route through Cincinnati to St. Louis. Nor were the rivers helpful, as they were in the Ohio country. The tributaries of the Mississippi led westward into the South’s backcountry. Its neighbours, like the Alabama and the Chattahoochee, were internal to the states they watered, not interstate axes of communication. Both the human and physical geography of the western theatre defied the effort to make organised war, condemning the armies that operated there to piecemeal campaigning or to raiding. Nor did the theatre, outside the Mississippi Valley, offer objectives the capture of which promised decisive results. To fight in the West was to act at a level little superior to that of exploration and pioneering, in a struggle to find the enemy and routes between potential battlefields.
Winfield Scott had therefore correctly identified at the very start of the war that the key to any success in the vast territory south of the Ohio River was the seizure of the Mississippi Valley, which by early 1863 had become Grant’s chief purpose. The geography of the valley, however, frustrated his efforts. His seizure of Forts Henry and Donelson and domination of the confluence of the Cumberland, Ohio, and Tennessee had quite fortuitously furnished him control of the Mississippi’s upper reaches. Farragut’s bold seizure of New Orleans had given the Union control of the river’s exit into the Gulf of Mexico. But complete control of the river was still lacking in early 1863 because of the South’s continuing hold on Vicksburg and, farther south along the river, Port Hudson. Vicksburg was the biggest obstacle.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Chancellorsville and Gettysburg
UNION VICTORIES IN the Mississippi Valley in the first half of 1863 presaged the collapse of the Confederacy’s whole western position, yet left the Union still under threat in what both governments and peoples regarded as the principal theatre of operations, the borderlands of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. There were threats elsewhere, of course, and failings: in April a Union ironclad fleet failed to overcome the first of the forts defending Charleston harbour and suffered severe damage in the attempt. The war in Tennessee, whose Union constituency was so close to Lincoln’s heart, might go the wrong way, for Rosecrans’s army was nearly outnumbered by those of Bragg and Buckner. It was even possible that the surviving Southern armies at liberty in Louisiana might succeed in regaining New Orleans.
The real menace to Union fortunes, however, lay in the continuing presence of the Army of Northern Virginia in Fredericksburg, from which position it was poised to strike into Maryland or Pennsylvania, a move that would have panicked the residents of the great Northern cities and would certainly deeply alarm Lincoln and his government. Lee, supremely self-confident himself, also reposed strong confidence in the capacities of his soldiers, who, he believed, if properly supplied and led, could defeat any Northern army they encountered. Ironically, in view of the outcome of the approaching campaign, the recently appointed commander of the Army of the Potomac, General Joseph Hooker, also believed that he could beat Lee and displayed signs of sublime certainty in his superiority and that of his army. Known as “Fighting Joe” Hooker, from an injudiciously drafted newspaper headline, he had been chosen to succeed Burnside because of the appalling casualties that had occurred at Fredericksburg under that general’s command. Hooker was actually a brave and normally competent officer. Unfortunately, he had decided to challenge Lee to a contest in manoeuvre warfare, an art of which Lee was already a master and perhaps the leading expert in the Western world. On April 12 there began those suggestive preliminaries to all great battles: clearing out the hospitals, inspecting arms, looking after ammunition, shoeing animals, issuing provisions, and making every preparation necessary to an advance.
First to move was the army’s cavalry division, which Hooker intended to send against the railroad bringing Lee supplies. That move, however, required the crossing of the Rappahannock, but because heavy rain had swollen it, George Stoneman, the cavalry commander, was unable to proceed, forcing Hooker to postpone the army’s advance. This was the first in a subsequent chapter of setbacks. Hooker hoped by cutting the railroad to starve Lee out of Fredericksburg and force him to fight a battle in the open. As a preliminary to the campaign, he divided his army, sending three corps across the Rappahannock eastward and the remaining four corps westward towards Chancellorsville, a spot on the landscape marked by a large mansion, the Chancellor House. Hooker’s total strength, including cavalry, numbered about 125,000, Lee’s under 60,000 plus cavalry. Hooker, however, was in a weakened position, since to dominate the river crossings he had divided his army and in such a way that Lee’s army lay between the two halves. Initially Hooker retained the initiative, since his position dominated several roads which led to Lee’s rear, thus allowing the possibility of cutting Lee’s communications with Richmond should the Army of the Potomac advance in that direction. In mid-afternoon on May 1, however, orders came from Hooker to his corps commanders to fall back on Chancellorsville. His subordinates protested, agreeing among themselves that the open ground they occupied and the high ground to their rear formed a position highly favourable to a successful attack. Firing had by now broken out and Darius Couch hastened to the Chancellor House intending to persuade Hooker that the advancing Confederates should be attacked. Inexplicably, something had happened to Hooker. All drive to exploit his thus far successful manoeuvre had evaporated. “It is all right, Couch,” he replied, “I have got Lee just where I want him. He must fight me on my own ground.” Couch’s inner thought was that “fighting a defensive battle in that nest of thickets was too much.” He made his exit with the private notion that “my commanding general was a whipped man.”1
Events would swiftly reveal the correctness of that conclusion. Hooker had succumbed to self-doubt, not a quality he had previously displayed, though his behaviour did not surprise his West Point contemporaries. It was about to be exploited by Lee and Jackson, neither of whom was afflicted by lack of confidence in any way. Indeed, during the next two days, May 2-3, Lee was to violate two inflexible rules of war—not to divide an army in the face of the enemy and not to march an army across the face of the enemy army deployed for battle—and to avoid the consequences, largely thanks to Jackson’s iron grip on his nerves. The two generals met on the evening of May 1 in woodland a mile southeast of the Chancellor House. J
ackson sat on a tree stump, Lee on an empty hardtack box, a small fire glowing between them, to discuss the situation and their prospects. Lee had been bewildered by Hooker’s retreat, thinking at first it had come about because of the enemy’s recognition of a weakness in their position. A personal reconnaissance revealed, however, that the Federal forces were deployed in “a position of great natural strength, surrounded on all sides by a dense forest filled with tangled undergrowth, in the midst of which breastworks of logs had been constructed.” The description was of the locality known as the Wilderness, abandoned farmland which had gone back to secondary forest, forming one of the least passable regions in the whole Virginia theatre, though it had counterparts elsewhere. Ill fortune decreed that the armies would have to fight not once but twice in these fatal groves.
The two generals were at first dubious of the possibility of successfully engaging the enemy in such conditions. Then they received a report from J. E. B. Stuart, commanding the cavalry, which told them that Hooker’s right flank lay outside the Wilderness, unprotected by natural obstacles, and was vulnerable to surprise attack. Lee ordered Jackson, who enthusiastically consented, to take his corps and march it along a woodland track twelve miles through the thickets and brush to take the Federals in the rear. It was a dangerous thing practically as well as doctrinally to undertake, since the advance would be protected from view only by screens of vegetation. Jackson nevertheless set out confidently next morning at 7:30 a.m. His rearguard was found and attacked by two Union divisions commanded by General Daniel Sickles, but Sickles failed to understand the reason for Jackson’s presence in the area. At five o’clock, as dusk fell, Jackson’s men had reached the encampment of the regiments of Howard’s Eleventh Corps. Most of its soldiers were Germans, recent immigrants who had stacked their rifles and were preparing supper. In the years before the great Prussian victories in Europe of 1864-71, the Germans were not thought of as a military people, certainly not in the United States, where they enjoyed a poor reputation as soldiers. These unfortunates were about to fulfil it. Their ranks were first disturbed by the flight of a herd of deer, running ahead of Jackson’s men, followed by a flock of rabbits and squirrels. Before they could divine the reason for the wildlife sauve qui peut, they heard the nerve-shattering rebel yell and were set upon by Jackson’s ranks. The rebels’ blood was up and they tossed the Union regiments into frenzied disorder, driving them out onto the nearby Plank Road, where other Union units were caught up in the frenzy. General Oliver Howard, whose corps suffered most, described with remarkable frankness the effect of the rebel attack: “More quickly than it can be told, with all the fury of the wildest hailstorm, everything, every sort of organisation that lay in the path of the mad current of panic-stricken men, had to give way and be broken into fragments.”2
Riding just behind the advancing Confederate front line was Stonewall Jackson. One of his subordinates called out as the broken Union troops dispersed into the woods, “They are running too fast for us. We cannot keep up with them.” Jackson shouted back, “They never run too fast for me. Press them. Press them.” The Union troops opposite began to make a stand and, as their line solidified, Jackson rode forward of his own troops to make a reconnaissance. Returning in the gathering dusk he and his party were seen by men of A. P. Hill’s division, who mistook them for the enemy. At a distance of about four hundred yards, fire was opened. A sergeant and a captain riding with Stonewall were killed. Then a regiment of North Carolina troops fired another volley and hit General Jackson three times. One ball lodged in his right hand, a second went through his left wrist. Then a third hit his left arm between elbow and shoulder and shattered the bone. He fell from his horse and when reached was bleeding heavily. Captain James Power Smith, a staff officer, helped General Hill with first aid. Stonewall’s sleeve was cut open and a handkerchief tightened around the wound to staunch the blood. A carrying party of nearby troops was brought, with a litter, on which the wounded man was placed and carried off shoulder-high. Union artillery fire wounded one of the litter bearers and Stonewall almost fell but was steadied at the last moment. The carrying party was forced to take cover and the general was laid on the road. When the fire lifted, Captain Smith put his arms round Stonewall and helped him to walk into the woods, where the litter bearers got him onto their shoulders once more. Another bearer was hit and Jackson fell to the ground with a cry of pain but was helped to his feet and returned to a litter, on which he was eventually brought to a field hospital established near the Wilderness Tavern. There about midnight surgeons amputated his left arm near the shoulder and extracted a rifle bullet from his right hand.
His doctors and comrades were optimistic. No vital organ had been touched and he had been spared a serious loss of blood. He received a stream of messages from elsewhere in the army, expressing the belief that he would recover. He survived for a week, attended by his wife with her newborn daughter, but pneumonia and perhaps pleurisy as well set in and on the afternoon of Sunday, May 10, 1863, he died. His last words were “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” later adapted by Ernest Hemingway as the title of one of his novels of war, Across the River and into the Trees. Lee regretted the loss of Jackson ever afterwards, while the leadership of the Army of Northern Virginia never recovered; in Lee’s words, “the daring, skill and energy of this great and good man” were now lost to the Confederacy and could not be replaced.
During May 3, while Jackson was gradually succumbing to his wounds, Lee renewed the attack on Hooker. Both armies were now divided, Hooker having sent a corps under General John Sedgwick to capture Fredericksburg. Lee ordered J. E. B. Stuart, who had assumed command of Jackson’s corps, to unite the two halves of the Army of Northern Virginia. As Hooker’s army outnumbered Lee’s, he should have retained the advantage; however, his nerve had been affected by Lee’s dashing attack and his own misreading of the battle. His only purpose now was to hold his position, to which end he ordered the abandonment of an important position at Hazel Grove, as a means of shortening his line. After occupying Hazel Grove, the Confederates pressed on to another hilltop called Fair View. The Union troops opposed their advance and a bitter fight broke out in the thickets of the Wilderness, described by General Howard as comprising “scraggy oaks, bushy firs, cedars and junipers, all entangled with a thick, almost impenetrable undergrowth and criss-crossed with an abundance of wild vines.” It appeared impassable, and the skirmishers could only work their way through with extreme difficulty. Nevertheless, fighting reached a level of murderous intensity, lasting half an hour and forcing the Union to abandon their position at Fair View. The Confederate artillery was now drenching the battlefield with fire, some of which fell on the Chancellor House, where Hooker had set up his headquarters. A shot hit one of the pillars of the house, against which Hooker was leaning, split it and threw Hooker unconscious to the ground. He remained in a dazed condition. On May 5 he gave orders for his army to cross to the north side of the Rappahannock. It was an admission of defeat, and Hooker had indeed been defeated comprehensively.
Everything from the start had promised a different outcome. Hooker had outnumbered Lee two to one; Lee had several times weakened himself by dividing his army in the face of the enemy. Hooker, though, simply by loss of nerve and failure to understand Lee’s movements, had thrown away any advantage. Even at the very end, when he had announced his failure by withdrawing his army across the Rappahannock, he enabled Lee to achieve one more victory, by allowing Sedgwick, whom he had sent to Fredericksburg, to fight unsupported at Salem Church on May 3-4. Sedgwick then followed the rest of the army in retreat across the Rappahannock. Hooker’s judgement on his lamentable performance proclaimed the self-justification of a weak incompetent. “My army was not beaten. Only a part of it had been engaged. My First Corps … was fresh and ready and eager to be brought into action, as was my whole army. But I had been fully convinced of the futility of attacking fortified positions and I was determined not to sacrifice
my men needlessly, though it should be at the expense of my reputation as a fighting officer.”3 This was disingenuous. The Chancellorsville position was not fortified, except by the difficulty of the Wilderness itself and by hasty entrenchments and obstacles. In any case, Hooker sacrificed what reputation he enjoyed by declining to fight at times and places where he might have succeeded. Like McClellan, he had thrown away all his advantages for no good reason other than his own timidity.
Hooker’s loss of nerve at Chancellorsville disturbed Lincoln, who spent the first two weeks of May 1863 trying to put backbone into him, when he was not simply trying to establish what the general was doing and intended to do. By May 6 Lincoln had at last learned that a major battle had taken place, resulting in “no success to us” and that the Army of the Potomac had withdrawn to the north bank of the Rappahannock. Holding this telegram communicating the news and showing a face gray with anxiety, he paced about the White House, repeating the words, “My God, my God. What will the country say? What will the country say?” That afternoon, in his distraction, he decided that he must meet and question Hooker, and left at once. When he arrived at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, he held a conference of senior officers, whom he disappointed by referring not at all to the battle of Chancellorsville. Nor did he give them an opportunity to recommend Hooker’s removal, though several of the corps commanders wished it. Nevertheless, some of Hooker’s critics discussed making a visit to Washington to put the matter directly to Lincoln, out of sight of their superior, and to suggest his replacement by George Meade, one of the corps commanders. In the event, they desisted, since Meade declined to be nominated.
Lincoln also interviewed Hooker alone, at which time, following his established habit, he gave the general a letter, in which he set out his views and asked the questions to which he needed answers. What he really wanted to know was what Hooker intended next, since the Confederates were clearly still in a dominant position in the theatre of campaign. Hooker wrote to Lincoln at Washington in reply, strangely evasively. He said that he had formed a plan, which he would reveal if Lincoln desired. A week later, May 13, he wrote again, announcing that he intended to attack across the Rappahannock immediately, even though he was now outnumbered, a familiar cry from the McClellan days. Also McClellan-like, he requested reinforcements. Lincoln asked to see him in Washington. Dropping his plan to attack Lee, Hooker left at once. On arrival he was given another letter by the president and told that it would be quite satisfactory for Hooker to hold his positions in Virginia and merely to keep Lee under observation. He was also told that Lincoln was receiving expressions of dissatisfaction at his conduct of operations from Hooker’s immediate subordinates, which was perfectly true. Some generals had written to the president or been to visit him in Washington. Boldly, Hooker demanded names, which were refused, and then challenged the president to question every general who came to Washington.
