Never Call Retreat, page 17
Mr. Lincoln was impressed but not wholly persuaded. Something about Hooker's easy optimism seems to have worried him, and he apparently warned the man to avoid taking undue risks; much later Hooker said the President told him that the political condition of the country was shaky and that it might not be able to stand another shock like the one it received at Fredericksburg in December. Furthermore, the President had other things on his mind. On the steamboat that brought his party down the Potomac from Washington, while people chatted brightly about Hooker's army, he turned suddenly to his newspaper friend Noah Brooks to whisper: "How many of our ironclads do you suppose are at the bottom of Charleston harbor?"8 He had to think about Charleston, where Du Pont might be overpowering Fort Sumter; about the Mississippi, where Grant was mysteriously on the move, trying a shift down the river after his other maneuvers had failed; about Louisiana, where Banks was at last beginning to make his way northward; and about central Tennessee, where Rosecrans was slowly and methodically
getting ready to smite Bragg. For two years Mr. Lincoln had tried to get his generals to see that the way to defeat the Confederacy was to apply overwhelming pressure in many places at once; this spring, at last, it was going to be tried, and all in all things looked promising; things always looked promising when a campaign was beginning. The President could only wait, knowing that the force needed for victory had been assembled and hoping that it would be used. A hint of anxiety came one evening when he concluded a talk with General Hooker and Major General Darius N. Couch, commander of Hooker's II Corps, by saying earnestly: "I want to impress upon you two gentlemen, in your next fight put in all your men." General Couch considered this advice excellent. General Hooker made no comment, but in his handling of the army a few weeks later there was nothing to show that he had even been listening.9
As Mr. Adams said, the generals were trained for command and Mr. Lincoln was not; and it would seem odd to find this untaught civilian lecturing professional soldiers on elementary points of tactics except for the fact that many of the professionals obviously needed lecturing by somebody. The war was approaching its crisis, and everything the President hoped for would stand or fall on the way the generals did what they had been trained to do. Before April was half gone there were some ominous indications.
There was flat failure at Charleston, where the navy was unable to finish the job and the army was not ready to begin it; already the pressure on the Confederacy here had grown so much lighter that Beauregard was sending infantry off to other duty in North Carolina, and in a short time he would be instructed to send 5000 troops all the way to Mississippi. In Louisiana, General Banks had turned his back on the big river and was marching off through central Louisiana, heading for Alexandria on the Red River, fifty airline miles away from the Mississippi: which permitted the worried General Pemberton to draw much-needed reinforcements from his strong point at Port Hudson, for use against General Grant. And in central Tennessee General Rosecrans was still preparing to do something but was showing no sign that he was ready to do it. Halleck warned him, late in March, that "it is exceedingly important at the present time that you give the enemy in your front plenty of occupation," but nothing happened. Halleck also tried to appeal to the man's ambition, sending word that the first field commander who won a decisive victory would be made major general in the Regular Army—the richest prize that could be given to a professional soldier. Rosecrans was insulted, and he replied stiffly: "I feel degraded to see such auctioneering of an honor. Have we a general who would fight for his own personal benefit when he would not for honor and the country?"10
It was hard to tell about Rosecrans. No one ever doubted his loyalty, his energy, his courage or his freedom from political ties; yet ever since the battle of Stone's River he had held his army in camp while he plied Washington unceasingly with demands for more cavalry, more infantry, more equipment, more horses, better arms, better officers and a clearer understanding of his needs. This went on so long that Halleck at last complained about "the enormous expense to the government of your telegrams," saying that Rosecrans was on the wire more than all other army commanders combined. Meanwhile, the fact remained that General Bragg's army, which was in Rosecrans' front, got in the first half of 1863 the longest respite from action that any Confederate army had in the entire war.11
Rosecrans offered a number of explanations for his inaction. He did not have enough cavalry to protect his own communications and threaten Bragg's: if he drove Bragg out of Tennessee the retreating Confederates would at once go to Vicksburg and enable Pemberton to crush Grant; if Joe Johnston felt Grant's pressure he might call Bragg to him and so give Tennessee to the Federals without a struggle; furthermore, Rosecrans' army was in a sense the government's last reserve and it ought not to be committed to action until the fate of Grant's campaign could be determined. The argument is unconvincing, and apparently it reflects nothing more than Rosecrans' reluctance to start a major campaign until he had perfected all of his arrangements.12 It is natural for a general to feel so; unfortunately, Rosecrans' caution helped the Confederacy much more than it helped the Union. One of the people it helped was Robert E. Lee.
Lee had had to play a waiting game this spring. It was not as easy as it used to be for him to learn what the Army of the Potomac was going to do; Hooker had at least created a cavalry corps, and Jeb Stuart's squadrons could no longer roam as they pleased behind the Yankee lines. Symbol of the change was a brisk battle fought in mid-March when Brigadier General W. W. Averell led a Federal cavalry division across the Rappahannock at Kelly's Ford and ran into a Confederate brigade under Brigadier General Fitzhugh Lee. Lee drove Averell back, but the mere fact that a Yankee cavalry outfit had entered Confederate territory and had fought well after it got there indicated that times were changing. In this fight the Confederates lost their incredibly daring young artillerist, Major John Pelham. Pelham was in the neighborhood on other business, and had no connection with Lee's brigade, nor did he have his battery with him; but when he heard about the fight he got a horse and hurried over to get into action, and he was gaily leading a charge when a shell burst killed him. Pelham was pure swords-and-roses, one of those irrepressible Southerners who actively liked to risk his life, and in a sense he had been living on borrowed time ever since the war began . . . Yankee cavalry taking the initiative, John Pelham dead: the war in Virginia was beginning to grow old.13
Lee's immediate problem of course was Hooker's army. This was problem enough, inasmuch as Hooker's army this spring was at least twice the size of Lee's and was much better equipped; yet Lee's confidence in his troops and in his own ability was so strong that the Army of the Potomac by itself did not worry him greatly. For a time it looked as if Hooker might move his army by water down to the James River as McClellan had done, but Lee was skeptical, doubting that his opponent would dare to uncover Washington. He concluded at last that when Hooker set out for Richmond he would take the direct route, which was solidly occupied by the Army of Northern Virginia, and Lee calmly told Adjutant General Samuel Cooper that if Hooker tried such an advance "I think he will find it very difficult to reach his destination." The real problem was quite different.
Lee had already had to send Longstreet and most of Longstreet's army corps down to the Virginia-North Carolina border, to counter Federal pressure there and also to gather supplies, and he probably would be unable to get Longstreet back before Hooker advanced. If the Federals now made a real combined operation out of the attack on Charleston, and at the same time mounted a strong offensive in Tennessee, the Confederacy would have to strike a heavy counterblow without delay, and the only person who could strike it was Lee himself. It would be necessary, Lee suspected, for him to take the offensive and march boldly for Maryland, because "greater relief would in this way be afforded to the armies in middle Tennessee and on the Carolina coast than by any other method." But the Virginia roads were still bad, he had neither supplies nor transportation for a forward movement, and the odds against him would be appalling. Perhaps it would be necessary to send Longstreet to the west . . . and perhaps, indeed, the problem would go beyond a solution.14
It did not happen so. The Lincoln administration, to be sure, was committing itself to a major offensive at Charleston, and it was arranging now to have a new admiral and a new general in charge of it, but this blow would come later. In Tennessee Rosecrans still was not ready to move, and his offensive would hardly begin until the campaign on the Mississippi was finished. Burnside and the IX Corps had been sent west, and Mr. Lincoln's old dream of an advance into eastern Tennessee would eventually be realized . . . but full co-ordination of all of these moves would not be had this spring, and it was the threat of them rather than the unbearable massed weight that bore on the Confederate strategist in Virginia. For his next fight Lee was going to be dreadfully shorthanded, but at least he would not have to be looking back over his shoulder at Tennessee and South Carolina.
Joe Hooker at last got into action. Late in April he had 130,000 men, present for duty equipped, and he put most of them on the road moving up the Rappahannock, with a powerful cavalry force going on ahead, while detachments at Falmouth feinted at making a crossing there. Lee's time of uncertainty came to an end. He had a few more than 60,000 effectives, but at last he knew what his enemies were trying to do and he told Richmond: "Their intention, I presume, is to turn our left and probably get into our rear."15 Then, as coolly as if he had all the advantages, he set out to frustrate them.
7. The Darkness, and Jackson, and Fear
8.
GOING WEST from Fredericksburg in the old days a traveler would follow the Orange Turnpike, which started out through open farming country as pleasant to see in springtime as anything east of the Blue Ridge. Eight or nine miles from Fredericksburg the countryside's mood changed, and the road went down a long slope into a gloomy second-growth forest known as the Wilderness. The Wilderness stretched west for fifteen miles or more, thinly populated, with dense timber covering irregular ravines and low hills; a year or two later a Federal soldier referred to this gloomy, shaded country, with reason, as a land of grinning ghosts. Not long after the road entered this woodland it reached an unremarkable crossroad called Chancellorsville, where a family named Chancellor had built a big house.
Chancellorsville was not important, except of course to the Chancellor family; it was just white pillars and red brickwork at an open clearing in the woods, with country roads converging in front of it. It lay four miles due south of the place where the Rapidan River flows into the Rappahannock, and from Chancellorsville a road led up to the United States Ford, a crossing-place on the Rappahannock just below the fork. Other roads went northwest from Chancellorsville, to Ely's and Germanna Fords on the Rapidan, and the turnpike itself continued through the Wilderness, going west by south and coming out at last at Orange Courthouse. All of these roads and fords and the twilight tangle about them were obscure enough, in 1863, but if General Hooker intended to fight General Lee he would have to go through this country to get at him, and sooner or later he would have to come to Chancellorsville. To Chancellorsville he came, at last, and the word has been a scar on the national memory ever since.
Perhaps Hooker's trouble was that he won his battle in anticipation, and won it too completely. What began as a simple attempt to maneuver Lee out of his impregnable lines back of Fredericksburg came before long to look like a strategic masterpiece that would win the war; as it took on this aspect it began to seem real before a shot had been
fired, and Hooker's contemplated triumph kept expanding until it burst. As the campaign got under way he remarked jauntily that Lee's army now was the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac, and on the eve of battle he formally announced to all ranks that he had maneuvered so cunningly that the enemy must either fly ingloriously or come out and submit to destruction; and after the campaign was over he confessed frankly: "What I wanted was Lee's army; with that, Richmond would have been ours, and indeed all of Virginia."1
Lee's army was exactly what Hooker got, but it came at him from the wrong direction when he was thinking about something else and so it was too much for him; and his real trouble was not so much his own vainglory as the fact that he was up against the wrong opponent. After all, Hooker planned very well, and although he executed poorly his advantage in numbers was large enough to rub out a good many mistakes. What he tried would have worked, against most generals. Against Lee it failed so completely that its basic excellence is too easily overlooked.
Hooker began by planning a cavalry sweep that would shear in behind the Confederate left, snip the railroads by which Lee got his supplies, and so compel him to retreat. (Once Lee was out in the open country the Army of the Potomac could doubtless attack him to advantage.) Two days after Mr. Lincoln went back to Washington, Hooker ordered his cavalry commander, Major General George Stoneman, to take his troopers across the upper Rappahannock near the line of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad and start operating in the enemy's rear, "inflicting on him every possible injury which will tend to his discomfiture and defeat." Stoneman set out, but as he began to cross the river a violent rainstorm blew up, the river rose and the unpaved roads went out of sight in mud. Stoneman considered an offensive impossible and recalled his advance guard, and the whole movement came to nothing.2 Two weeks passed, and Hooker made a new plan, much more ambitious than the first. It was this plan that brought his army to Chancellorsville.
As before, the cavalry would cross the river and head for the Confederate rear, but this time its role would be comparatively minor. While the cavalry cut Lee's supply lines, the bigger part of the infantry of the Army of the Potomac would also march upstream, cross the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, and then march eastward behind Lee's left. In effect, this flanking column would be approaching Lee's line on Marye's Heights from the rear, and it would be only a little smaller than Lee's entire army.
This force was ordered to go first to Chancellorsville. When it moved from Chancellorsville—with Stoneman's cavalry spreading panic and destruction near Richmond, making it impossible for Lee's army to get either supplies or reinforcements—Lee would have to get out of Fredericksburg in a hurry. If he headed for Richmond, the Federal column could strike him ruinously in the flank; if he turned to fight at Chancellorsville, the rest of the Army of the Potomac, following hard from Fredericksburg, could pitch into him and he could be attacked in front and in rear simultaneously— which of course would be the end of him.
So went the plan. It was a good plan, and up to a point it worked well. The huge flanking column moved precisely as Hooker intended, and by the evening of April 30 he had four army corps at or near Chancellorsville. Shortly after nightfall he reached the place himself, radiating confidence, sure that he had the game in his hand.
He was sure, that is, with part of his mind, the part that he knew about: not sure, apparently, with the part that ran down out of sight in the darkness, where fears come from. Although it was at Chancellorsville that Hooker got out that strange announcement of the impending defeat of Lee's army, it was also at Chancellorsville that he ceased to look like a general who is about to win a great victory and began to resemble one who suspects that he will be beaten if he is not very cautious. He became cautious just a little too soon—a few miles and a few hours short of the victory he had talked about so much.
On the night April ended, Hooker had approximately 50,000 men at Chancellorsville, with 22,000 more on the way. Back at Falmouth, just above Fredericksburg, were 47,000 more, under Major General John Sedgwick, the competent commander of the VI Corps. Sedgwick and Hooker were hardly ten miles apart in a direct line, but as the roads went, roundabout on the United States Ford route, the distance was more than twice that far, and it could be dangerous to separate the two wings of an army so widely in the presence of General Lee. However, the separation would end very soon. On May 1 the force at Chancellorsville was to march eastward near the river, and after a few miles this march would uncover Banks' Ford, a river crossing hardly four miles from Falmouth, and the separated wings would be in touch again. Meanwhile, Sedgwick had laid pontoon bridges below Fredericksburg and had crossed part of his troops, hoping to convince Lee that he was about to attack. If this worked, Lee was not likely to notice what was going on at Chancellorsville, which would be fatal; if he did notice he would of course retreat in haste, in which case Sedgwick was ideally posted to pursue him and bring him to grief.3
The real trouble with Hooker's plan was that it was brittle. It rested on the belief that Lee would react predictably to a series of challenges; if he did not, Federal strategy might need more flexibility than the plan allowed. It had been assumed, for instance, that when Stoneman and his cavalry galloped south Stuart and his cavalry would gallop after; but Stuart did nothing of the kind. The Yankee cavalry might do damage in the unprotected rear areas but Lee's army was the only thing that mattered now, and so Stuart kept his cavalry on Lee's flank to give the army the protection and the knowledge that might make the difference between victory and defeat. As a result he kept Lee posted about the advance and strength of Hooker's flanking force, and kept the flankers from finding out very much about Lee; and by the night of April 30 Lee knew that Sedgwick was bluffing and that the real threat was coming out of the Wilderness at Chancellorsville.
Then he refused to behave as expected. It seemed obvious that if he went to Chancellorsville at all he would take his entire force, because he was so badly outnumbered that he could hardly do anything else, and this of course would open the road for Sedgwick and Lee would eventually be caught between two fires. But simply because he was so terribly outnumbered, Lee was free to take preposterous chances; the odds against him were so long to begin with that it could not hurt much to lengthen them a bit, and anyway an opponent who believed that Lee would do the obvious under any circumstances was simply begging for trouble.
