Upon the Altar of the Nation (39 page)

While Sallie Putnam wished to downplay the seriousness of Richmond’s civilian population distress, her telltale concession that bread shortages were “too fatally true” belied the indignation she expressed. In fact, many Confederate women of means suffered in Richmond alongside their poorer compatriots. This was especially true of nonnative refugees fleeing battlefields for the capital city. On the same day that rioters demonstrated in Richmond, the aristocratic Ann Grymes of King George County penned the following letter to President Davis:

Outside of Richmond, the devastations wrought by Union armies were as apparent to Northern soldiers as to the victims. In a letter to his wife, Philo B. Buckingham, commander of Company H of the Twentieth Connecticut Volunteers, described the destruction from his vantage point in Stafford Hills, Virginia, directly across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg:

On a more personal level, Buckingham described an old man from a wealthy family, worth $250,000 before the war, who had been reduced to two pigs. These too soon fell victim to hungry Union pickets who “actually took them killed and cooked them before the old mans eyes.” When the old man complained to Buckingham that he was a noncombatant in duress, he received a response that did not bespeak an officer and a gentleman: “The moral is that those who dance must pay the fiddler, those who
rebel
must take the consequences.” In time, General Sherman would refine this logic to a science; civilians, no less than soldiers, must feel the hard hand of war. And overseeing all was President Lincoln and Lieber’s Code.

 

Life was not much better in the Army of Northern Virginia than in Richmond. Lee’s ill health grew worse, even as his undermanned army of 50,000 faced Hooker’s 122,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry. With Longstreet still detached, all Lee could do was wait for Hooker to make the first deployments and then depend on contingency and ingenuity to win the day. Fortunately for Lee, Hooker accommodated him by wasting his vast superiority and deploying his line of seven corps stretching all the way from Fredericksburg to the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers fifteen miles to the west. By April 30 Hooker’s objective became clear as three Federal corps under General Henry Slocum, a roommate of Philip Sheridan’s at West Point, massed on Lee’s flank.

On the very day that Hooker planned to attack, the North was observing a fast. Most Northern newspapers promoted the fast and underscored Union goodness, but one demurred. In terms that would anticipate Lincoln’s famous Second Inaugural Address, a writer for the
New York Evangelist
reflected on the meaning of the war:

Words like this stand out for their relative scarcity in the rhetoric of war, reinforcing
The Liberator’s
demand for equality as a “reparation” for “the awful sin and injustice to them which lies at our door.”
²⁶
To a culture unwilling to think of blacks as “men” as opposed to “boys,” such sentiments must have appeared oddly alien. For appearances’ sake, most Northern citizens involved in fast services were willing to confess stock sins of envy, greed, materialism, and so forth. They acknowledged the
South’s
sin of slavery. But they would not concede racism in their own backyard, or even, for that matter, in the South. It simply did not register. Few white voices asked the one genuinely comprehensive moral question that could justify a war and reconstruction. Racism was a sin to which they did not confess, let alone concede as the primary cause of war.

The
Evangelist,
however, did not stop with African Americans but went on to extend racism to include injustices to Indians. In the same issue, the paper included a column for “the children at home” that told the story of wars fought against Indian men, women, and children. In the story, one child asks in regard to an Indian woman seeking a burial space for her grandson:

Finally, pulling no punches in anticipating the sins of the fast day, the
Evangelist
took issue with the conduct of the war—again a rare occurrence. In a second “children at home” column, the paper explored “A Story of Fredericksburg.” It was not a story of heroes and just war. Rather it told the story of houses shelled by Northern artillery with only a doll to salvage by “the despoiling hand of war”:

In a sixty-two-page handwritten fast sermon, Worcester’s Reverend Seth Sweetser reiterated the myth of American origins in “the Mayflower brought over [by] men who sought a refuge from the oppressed faith,” and who proceeded to lay the foundations for a Christian republic. This continued through the Revolution, Sweetser claimed, and now reappeared in the war: “There has been a wonderful revival of patriotism.... The people were astonished at the resurrection of a spirit, which many thought had long since been buried in the sepulcher of the past.”
²⁹

In another unpublished fast sermon, Abijah Marvin, a Worcester minister, took note of the slaughter of the war. He predicted that, if nothing else, it would discourage any future civil wars: “If peace were restored today on the old footing, it would be a long time before another rebellion would occur.... The South remembers that the Revolution was successful, and that it did not cost them much. But their children will remember that this rebellion, whether it proves successful or not—was carried on at a frightful expense of life.”
³⁰
Little did he know that at that very moment, carnage loomed with dire consequences.

A
s Northern churches fasted for victory, Hooker set up headquarters around the Chancellor family house, known as Chancellorsville. His plan was simple. He would advance on Richmond, using sheer superiority of firepower to turn Lee’s left flank and rout his army from the rear. Because of his numerical superiority, Hooker believed he could break his army up into three units. One, led by General John Sedgwick, would feint an attack on Fredericksburg, drawing Lee back toward the town where he had been so successful months earlier. Then the other two units would crush Lee’s undermanned army in a converging vice grip, leaving Lee no choice but surrender or destruction. For weeks Hooker savored the sweet revenge his plan would inevitably bring and boasted of imminent victory. Like many other generals of both the North and the South, he was fast becoming a legend in his own mind. But he forgot his commander’s dictum that victories had to be won on the field before they could be celebrated in talk. And his pride blinded him in respect to the general opposing him, who spoke very little indeed.

Like McClellan and Pope before him, Hooker badly underestimated both Lee’s intelligence resources and his audacity. By late April Lee knew what Hooker’s intentions were and had determined a counterresponse.
¹
With only sixty thousand effectives, Lee faced a daunting challenge. But Jeb Stuart’s cavalry had informed him that Hooker was advancing in force through the isolated and densely wooded area of second-growth forest known as the Wilderness to strike Lee in the rear. This was territory Lee knew well and Hooker knew not at all. As before, Lee determined to divide his outnumbered forces, gambling on the power of surprise and the effective use of his interior convex lines for rapid redeployment. Hooker expected Lee either to retreat or to face annihilation. Instead, Lee planned the unthinkable: to take the offensive in a savage attack that so surprised Hooker that numerical inequities no longer mattered.

On the evening of May 1, soldiers on both sides knew they were in for a battle. John Emerson Anderson of the Second Massachusetts Volunteers Infantry was not fooled by Hooker’s bravado and described the scene of anticipation:

At the same time, Lee and Jackson met that night in a scene romanticized in thousands of lithographs as
The Last Meeting between Lee and Jackson.
They agreed to send Jackson and three divisions southwest and then north to hit Hooker’s isolated flank and get in the rear of the Federal army.

The next day, Jackson moved six of his fifteen brigades in position to storm General O. O. Howard’s exposed west (right) flank. He got away with it because Howard and Hooker were certain that Jackson was retreating. Military historians hold up Jackson’s successful movement as one of the most daring—and dangerous—maneuvers in war: a flank march across Hooker’s entrenched front. Should Howard discover the movement, Jackson’s widely strung-out column would be exposed and raked with artillery fire. Everything depended on coordinated timing, nerves of steel, and the element of surprise. There could not be a moment’s hesitation or all would be lost.

The gamble worked. Lee later summarized Jackson’s actions in a letter written after the war to Jackson’s widow: “General Jackson, after some inquiry concerning the roads leading to the terrace, undertook to throw his command entirely in Hooker’s rear, which he accomplished with equal skill and boldness, the rest of the army being moved to the left flank, to connect with him as he advanced.”
³
Jackson, like Lee, counted on Hooker to do nothing. As usual, “Fighting Joe” Hooker’s battle-eve bravado gave way to crunch-time caution. It cost him dearly. His exposed right flank was now Jackson’s for the taking.

With two hours of sunlight left, Jackson’s exhausted but manic army stormed the unsuspecting and relatively untrained German regiments in Howard’s Eleventh Corps and a rout ensued. Rebel yells and heavy musketry ripped through the Federal lines and, despite stiff resistance from “Howard’s Dutchmen,” the line crumpled. Though overrun, the troops did not turn tail in panic and thus cause the Federal defeat. The fault was Hooker’s. Though relatively untrained and less than stellar, Howard’s soldiers fought bravely, but in a hopeless cause. By evening, Hooker’s right wing was blown to pieces with twenty-four hundred Yankees killed or wounded in little over two hours of desperate combat.
⁴

On the night of May 2, most soldiers wanted to stop fighting. Except one. Stonewall Jackson furiously pushed ahead of his troops to scout areas around the Rappahannock where he might move his troops at night and destroy Hooker’s army the next morning. While riding ahead to look for roads, he placed himself in front of a North Carolina regiment. Seeing Jackson and mistaking him for Yankee cavalry, they opened fire and shot Jackson off his horse.

“Friendly fire” inflicted a wound that would never heal. Two bullets tore into his left arm, requiring that it be amputated. As happened to many amputees, Jackson’s wound became infected, throwing him into a battle for his life that he could not win. On May 10 Stonewall Jackson died, the first warrior general destined to live not on the battlefield but enshrined in sacred mythology. A disconsolate Lee had earlier written Jackson as he lay dying: “Could I have directed events, I should have chosen for the good of the country to have been disabled in your stead.”
⁵

With Jackson’s mortal fall, Lee immediately reorganized his Second Corps, placing cavalryman Jeb Stuart in temporary command. The two generals carried their wings into the Wilderness, fighting vicious battles in the woods west of Chancellorsville. By noon on May 3, they had pushed the Federal line back far enough to reunite their two wings. As Hooker surveyed the battlefield from his headquarters at the Chancellorsville house, an artillery shell exploded near him and temporarily stunned him. But it did nothing to his senses that Lee had not already done.