Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (129 page)

Commander of the 11th Corps holding the Union right was Oliver O. Howard, the opposite in every respect of Sickles. A West Point professional whose distinguished combat record included loss of an arm at Fair Oaks, Howard was a monogamous teetotaling Congregationalist known as the Christian Soldier. He had little in common with the German-American soldiers who constituted a large part of his corps. This "Dutch" corps, only 12,000 strong, had a poor reputation, having turned in mediocre performances under Frémont in the Shenandoah Valley and Franz Sigel at Second Bull Run. What happened at Chan-cellorsville did nothing to improve that reputation. All through the afternoon, alarmed pickets sent word to Howard that the rebels were building up to something off to the west. Howard assured Hooker that he was ready for an attack. Yet most of his regiments were facing south, for Howard considered the thick woods to the west impenetrable. And like Hooker he also thought that this enemy activity was designed to cover a retreat. As suppertime approached, many of Howard's troops were relaxing or cooking.

A few hundred yards to the west, Jackson's rugged veterans—their uniforms torn to worse tatters than usual by briars and brush—were deployed for attack at 5:15. Coming through the woods from the west on a front two miles wide and three divisions deep, the yelling rebels hit the south-facing Union regiments endwise and knocked them down like tenpins. Despite wild confusion, some of the 11th Corps brigades and batteries maintained discipline and fought desperately, slowing the Confederate advance but being forced in the end to join the stampede of routed regiments fleeing to the rear. By dusk Jackson had rolled up the Union right for two miles before Howard and Hooker improvised a new line out of troops from four different corps to bring the jubilant but disorganized southerners to a halt. The two divisions remaining with Lee had joined the attack on their front. For several hours, sporadic and disordered fighting flared up in the moon-shadowed woods, with some units firing on their own men in one of the rare night actions of the Civil War.

Misfortune beyond the usual tragedies of war struck the Confederates during this moonlit melee. Determined to keep the Yankees on the run, Jackson and several officers rode ahead of their lines to reconnoiter for a renewed attack. Returning at a trot, they were fired on by nervous rebels who mistook them for Union cavalry. Jackson fell with two bullets in his left arm, which had to be amputated. Stuart took command of his corps and led it well for the rest of the battle. But the loss of Jackson proved to be permanent and irreparable. Pneumonia set in, and the inimitable Stonewall died eight days later.

The morning after Jackson's wounding, May 3, saw the crisis of the battle. Some of the war's hardest fighting took place on two fronts separated by nine miles. During the night Hooker had ordered "Uncle" John Sedgwick (so named by his men for his avuncular manner), commander of the 6th Corps at Fredericksburg, to carry the heights back of the town and push on toward Lee's rear at Chancellorsville. At daybreak

Uncle John hurled his three divisions against the trenches and the stone wall below Marye's Heights where Burnside's troops had come to grief the previous December. History appeared to repeat itself as Jubal Early's division threw them back twice. But on the third try, in one of the war's few genuine bayonet charges, the first wave of blue attackers carried the heights, captured a thousand prisoners, and sent the rebels flying.

Meanwhile Hooker at Chancellorsville had remained strangely passive, seeming to expect Sedgwick to do all the army's offensive fighting. Hooker had even ordered Sickles's corps to fall back at dawn from a salient on high ground at Hazel Grove, a mile west of the Chancellorsville crossroads. This allowed Lee and Stuart to reunite the two wings of their army and to mass their artillery at Hazel Grove, one of the few places in the Wilderness where it could be used effectively. The Confederates pressed an all-out attack on the three corps holding the immediate area around Chancellorsville. Hooker kept three other Union corps idle despite openings for them to fall on Lee's flanks. Hooker seemed in a daze even before a cannonball hit his headquarters and knocked him unconscious in mid-morning. He recovered in time to retain command—a pity, in the eyes of several subordinates, who had hoped that the ranking corps commander would take charge and launch a counterattack. Instead, Hooker ordered withdrawal a mile or two northward to a contracted defensive line.

The exhausted but exultant rebels, who had fought with an elan unprecedented even in this victorious army, cheered wildly as Lee rode into the clearing around the burning Chancellor mansion. It was the Virginian's greatest triumph—but the battle was not yet over. While the two armies around Chancellorsville broke off fighting as if by mutual consent to rescue hundreds of wounded men threatened by brush fires started by exploding shells, Lee received word of Sedgwick's breakthrough at Fredericksburg. Here was a serious threat to his rear even though Hooker seemed cowed in his front. Without hesitation Lee dispatched a division which blunted Sedgwick's advance near a country church midway between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Next day Lee took yet another division from his front to attack Sedgwick. This left only 25,000 Confederates under Stuart to face Hooker's 75,000, but Lee seemed to know that his benumbed adversary would remain passive. In the late afternoon of May 4 a disjointed attack by 21,000 rebels against Sedgwick's equal force was repulsed. Aware that Hooker had given up, however, Sedgwick pulled his troops back over the Rappahan-nock during the night.

At a council of war that same night, a majority of the Union corps commanders with Hooker voted to counterattack. True to form, Hooker disregarded this vote and decided to retreat across the river. The Army of the Potomac accomplished this difficult task during a rainstorm the next night. Aggressive as ever, Lee had planned another assault on the morning of May 6 and expressed regret, as he had done the previous summer, that the Federals escaped destruction. But by any standard he had won an astounding victory, recognized as such in both North and South. Without Longstreet and with little more than half as many men as an enemy that had initially outmaneuvered him, Lee had grasped the initiative, gone over to the attack, and had repeatedly divided and maneuvered his forces in such a way as to give them superiority or equality of numbers at the point of attack. Like a rabbit mesmerized by the gray fox, Hooker was frozen into immobility and did not use half his power at any time in the battle.

The triumph at Chancellorsville, however, came at great cost. The Confederates suffered 13,000 casualties, 22 percent of their force (the Union figures were 17,000 and 15 percent). The most grievous loss was Jackson, who had done so much to make the victory possible. And the boost that the battle gave to southern morale proved in the end harmful, for it bred an overconfidence in their own prowess and a contempt for the enemy that led to disaster. Believing his troops invincible, Lee was about to ask them to do the impossible.

During the battle Lincoln haunted the War Department telegraph office. For several days he received only fragmentary and contradictory reports. When the truth became clear on May 6, the president's face turned "ashen," according to a newspaperman who was present. "My God! my God!" exclaimed Lincoln. "What will the country say?" It said plenty, all of it bad. Copperheads saw in the outcome further proof, if any was necessary, that the North could never cobble the Union together by force. Republicans expressed despair. "Lost, lost, all is lost!" cried Charles Sumner when he heard the news.
²⁸

Northern morale descended into the slough of despond in the spring of 1863. Reports of Grant's advances in Mississippi were slow in coming and uncertain in meaning, especially after the failure of assaults at Vicksburg on May 19 and 22. Rosecrans had done nothing in middle Tennessee since his bloody and ambiguous New Year's victory at Stones

28
. Noah Brooks,
Washington in Lincoln's Time
(New York, 1896), 57–58;
Diary of Gideon Welles
, ed. Howard K. Beale, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), I, 293.

River. On April 7 an attack on Fort Sumter by eight supposedly irresistible Monitors had been repulsed in a manner that gave the Union navy a black eye. The attack had been the first step in an effort to capture Charleston, whose symbolic significance was greater than its strategic importance. The failure of the Monitors proved again that these ironclads could take an enormous amount of punishment but that their offensive punch was limited. Rebel artillery got off more than 2,200 shots, scoring some 440 hits on the eight ships and sinking only one. But most of the Monitors suffered damage to their gun turrets that limited their firing capacity, and the fleet was able to get off only 140 shots and inflict limited damage with about forty hits. The high hopes for naval conquest of the citadel of secession were dashed. Union army troops began a slow, frustrating, and ultimately unsuccessful advance along the coastal islands and through the swamps in an attempt to starve or pound Charleston into submission.

III

The Confederacy could not rest on Lee's laurels in Virginia or Beaure-gard's at Charleston. Although beaten, Hooker's army still bristled 90,000 strong along the Rappahannock. Grant was on the move in Mississippi. Rosecrans showed signs of motion in middle Tennessee. Pressed on all sides by invading forces, the South needed an offensive-defensive stroke to relieve the pressure. Longstreet thought he saw a way to accomplish this. Returning with his two detached divisions to rejoin Lee on the Rappahannock, Longstreet stopped in Richmond on May 6 for a meeting with Secretary of War James Seddon. Longstreet proposed that he take these two divisions to reinforce Bragg in Tennessee. With additional help from Johnston, they would drive Rosecrans back to the Ohio. This would compel Grant to break off his campaign against Vicksburg and go to the rescue of the shattered Army of the Cumberland. Seddon liked the idea, but suggested that Longstreet go instead to Mississippi to help Johnston and Pemberton smash Grant, after which they could turn their attention to Rosecrans. Jefferson Davis favored this proposal, for he was concerned about his home state and convinced that the retention of Vicksburg was crucial.

But Lee dashed cold water on the enterprise. It would take weeks for Longstreet's divisions to travel nearly a thousand miles to Mississippi over the Confederacy's mangled railroads. If Vicksburg could hold out that long, said Lee, it would be safe without reinforcements, for "the climate in June will force the enemy to retire." In the meantime a reinforced Army of the Potomac might return to the offensive against Lee's depleted forces. Although he had held off Hooker before without these two divisions, Lee now believed that he needed them—and additional troops as well. In sum, he concluded, "it becomes a question between Virginia and Mississippi."
²⁹

Lee's opinion carried so much weight that Davis felt compelled to concur. The president remained disquieted by news from Mississippi, however, and called Lee to Richmond for a strategy conference on May 15. This time the Virginian dazzled Davis and Seddon with a proposal to invade Pennsylvania with a reinforced army and inflict a crushing defeat on the Yankees in their own backyard. This would remove the enemy threat on the Rappahannock, take the armies out of war-ravaged Virginia, and enable Lee to feed his troops in the enemy's country. It would also strengthen Peace Democrats, discredit Republicans, reopen the question of foreign recognition, and perhaps even conquer peace and recognition from the Union government itself.

The cabinet was awed by this vision. Postmaster-General John Reagan was the sole dissenter. The only member of the cabinet from west of the Mississippi (Texas), Reagan still thought that preservation of Vicksburg as a link between the Confederacy's two halves should have top priority.
³⁰
But Lee convinced the others that even if the climate failed to drive the Yankees out of Mississippi, a successful invasion of Pennsylvania would draw them out. In the post-Chancellorsville aura of invincibility, anything seemed possible. "There never were such men in an army before," said Lee of his soldiers. "They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led." So great was the prestige of Lee, "whose fame," said a cabinet member, "now filled the world," that he carried the day. Even Longstreet came around. "When I agreed with [Seddon] and yourself about sending troops west," he wrote to Senator Wigfall of Texas, "it was under the impression that we would be obliged to remain on the defensive here. But the prospect of an advance changes the aspect of affairs."
³¹

29
. Lee to Seddon, telegram and letter both dated May 10, 1863,
O.R.
, Ser. I, Vol. 25, pt. 2, p. 790. For an analysis of this issue, see Archer Jones,
ConfederateStrategy from Shiloh to Vicksburg
(Baton Rouge, 1961), 206–14.