Battle of Chancellorsville

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Chancellorsville lasted just seven days, from the 30th of April to the 6th of May, 1863, and it cost more than 30,000 men their lives, their limbs, or their freedom. Robert E. Lee walked away from it with a victory so complete that some historians have called it his "perfect battle." He achieved it by doing something almost no military commander would dare: dividing an already outnumbered army not once, but twice, in the face of a Union force that was more than double his own. How do you win against those odds? And what does it cost you when you do? The answer to the second question arrived eight days after the fighting stopped, when Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, struck down by his own men in the Virginia darkness, died of pneumonia. Lee would later say it was like losing his right arm.

• 2. Hooker's Bold Design

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  Joseph Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac on the 25th of January, 1863, inheriting an army that was falling apart. Desertions were rising. Morale had collapsed after the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg and a humiliating episode known as the Mud March. His predecessor, Ambrose Burnside, had attempted to purge the army's leadership and then offered President Lincoln his resignation. Lincoln transferred him to the Western Theater instead.

  Hooker set to work rebuilding. He fixed the soldiers' daily diet, reformed the quartermaster system, added company cooks, improved hospitals, and tightened the furlough system. He reorganized the cavalry into a single corps under Maj. Gen. George Stoneman, concentrating a force that previous commanders had dispersed. He established the Bureau of Military Information under Col. George H. Sharpe, drawn from the 120th New York Infantry, giving his army intelligence capabilities that went far beyond the prisoner interrogations his predecessors had relied on.

  The plan he built with all this was genuinely audacious. He would send Stoneman's 10,000 cavalrymen on a deep raid into Confederate supply lines, forcing Lee to abandon his fortified Rappahannock positions. Simultaneously, 42,000 men in three corps would make a secret march to cross the river upriver at Kelly's Ford, then swing south to cross the Rapidan at Germanna and Ely's Fords, concentrating at the Chancellorsville crossroads to hit Lee from the west. A further 40,000 under John Sedgwick would press Lee from the east at Fredericksburg. Hooker himself said he had "80 chances in 100 to be successful."

  The first attempt at the cavalry raid, launched on the 13th of April, failed when heavy rains made the crossing at Sulphur Spring impassable. Lincoln lamented, "I greatly fear it is another failure already." Hooker met with Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and general-in-chief Henry Halleck in Aquia on the 19th of April and presented a revised plan. This time the cavalry and infantry would move simultaneously.

• 3. Lee Divides His Army

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  On the morning of the 27th of April, 1863, the three lead Union corps began their march in silence. By dawn on the 29th, pontoon bridges stretched across the Rappahannock south of Fredericksburg, and Sedgwick's force had begun to cross. Hooker arrived at the Chancellor mansion on the afternoon of the 30th and made it his headquarters. The mansion itself was little more than a large brick house at the crossroads of the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Road, serving as the home of the Frances Chancellor family, some of whom remained inside during the fighting to come. By May 1, Hooker had approximately 70,000 men concentrated in and around that crossroads.

  Lee, at his Fredericksburg headquarters, was initially uncertain what Hooker intended. He initially suspected the main Union column under Slocum was heading for Gordonsville. As cavalry intelligence from J.E.B. Stuart clarified the picture, Lee made a decision that violated a basic principle of warfare: he divided his outnumbered force. He left behind roughly 11,000 men and 56 guns under Jubal Early and William Barksdale to pin down Sedgwick's 40,000 at Fredericksburg, while directing the bulk of his army westward to confront Hooker at Chancellorsville.

  Lee's outnumbered position was made worse by a prior mistake. Some 15,000 men from James Longstreet's corps had been sent to southeastern Virginia to guard against a Federal threat from the Peninsula. Longstreet's two divisions under John Bell Hood and George Pickett were 130 miles away. They would take a week or more to reach Lee, and they would not arrive in time. Lee had allowed them to slip away, and some historians consider it his gravest miscalculation of the campaign.

  On the morning of May 1, Stonewall Jackson met with Richard Anderson near Zoan Church at 8 a.m. and found that Lafayette McLaws's division had already arrived. Jackson, not in a defensive mood, ordered an advance at 11 a.m. The first shots of the battle were fired at 11:20 a.m. as the two armies collided. Despite progress by Meade's two divisions toward their objective at Banks's Ford, Hooker halted his advance and ordered his men to withdraw into the dense second-growth thicket called the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, daring Lee to attack him. His subordinates were outraged. Maj. Gen. Meade exclaimed, "My God, if we can't hold the top of the hill, we certainly can't hold the bottom of it!"

• 4. Jackson's Flank March

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  That night, Lee and Jackson met at the intersection of the Plank Road and the Furnace Road. Cavalry commander Stuart arrived with intelligence from Fitzhugh Lee: Howard's XI Corps, at the far right of the Union line, was resting with its flank "in the air," anchored on nothing. Charles C. Wellford, proprietor of Catharine Furnace, showed Jackson's cartographer Jedediah Hotchkiss a recently built road through the forest that would hide a marching column from Union observation. When Lee asked how many men Jackson would take, he replied, "my whole command."

  Jackson's Second Corps, 28,000 men, began its 12-mile flanking march between 7 and 8 a.m. on May 2. Left behind to hold the Chancellorsville front were roughly 13,000 men and 24 guns, facing 70,000 Union troops. Soldiers in the III Corps spotted a Confederate column moving through the woods. Division commander Brig. Gen. David Birney opened artillery fire, and corps commander Sickles rode out to Hazel Grove to observe. He watched the Confederates passing for over three hours. Hooker received the report and suspected a flanking march was underway, but also thought Lee might be retreating. He sent a warning at 9:30 a.m. to Oliver Howard, the XI Corps commander, to advance pickets and watch for an approach from the west. Howard replied at 10:50 a.m. that he was "taking measures to resist an attack from the west."

  The XI Corps had a troubled history. Formed in the spring of 1862 from the merger of Louis Blenker's division with John Fremont's Mountain Department, many of its regiments were composed of German immigrants and political refugees from the 1848 revolutions. Blenker himself had fallen from a horse during the Northern Virginia campaign and suffered injuries that claimed his life later in 1863. Eight of the corps's 27 regiments had never been in battle. The remaining 21 had never been on the winning side of one. Howard had replaced the popular Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel only in March 1863 and was widely disliked by the enlisted men.

  Warning after warning went unheeded. Col. Leopold von Gilsa, commanding a brigade in Charles Devens's division, went directly to Howard's headquarters and told him an all-out assault was imminent. Howard insisted the Confederates could not penetrate the woods. Captain Hubert Dilger of the 1st Ohio Artillery rode far north almost to the Rapidan and back to Hooker's headquarters to raise the alarm, but a cavalry officer turned him away without letting him in. Around 5:30 p.m., with the men of the XI Corps sitting down to supper and their rifles stacked, Jackson turned to Robert Rodes and asked, "General, are you ready?" Rodes nodded. "You may go forward then."

  The first warning the Union soldiers received was a flood of rabbits and foxes fleeing east out of the western woods, followed by the crack of muskets and the Rebel Yell. Devens's division collapsed in minutes. Col. Robert Reily's 75th Ohio held for about ten minutes, losing 150 casualties including Reily himself. Dilger manned a gun alone, firing double-shotted canister until three of his horses were shot dead, then abandoned the piece and fled. Howard stood waving a flag held under the stump of his arm, lost at the Battle of Seven Pines in 1862, unable to stop the rout. By nightfall Jackson's Second Corps had advanced more than a mile and a quarter and were within sight of the Chancellorsville crossroads. The XI Corps suffered nearly 2,500 casualties, including 12 of its 23 regimental commanders.

• 5. Jackson Falls

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  With victory seemingly within reach, Stonewall Jackson rode out onto the Plank Road after dark to assess whether a night attack was feasible in the light of the full moon. He traveled beyond the farthest advance of his own men. When a staff officer warned him about the danger, Jackson replied, "The danger is all over. The enemy is routed. Go back and tell A.P. Hill to press right on."

  As he and his party returned toward Confederate lines, men of the 18th North Carolina Infantry mistook them for Union cavalry and opened fire. Three bullets struck Jackson. None of the wounds was individually fatal, but his left arm was broken and had to be amputated. As surgeons worked, the Union artillery at Fairview Cemetery fired a cannonade that struck the party carrying the wounded Jackson to the rear and also wounded A.P. Hill. Jackson seemed to be recovering in the days that followed, but he contracted pneumonia and died on the 10th of May. Lee, receiving the news, said it was like losing his right arm. Some historians, particularly those of the postbellum Lost Cause movement, would later argue that Jackson's absence directly contributed to the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg two months later.

• 6. The Bloodiest Day

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  May 3 was the heaviest day of fighting in the entire campaign, and it ranked as the second bloodiest single day of the Civil War. Combined losses across three engagements that day reached 21,357 men, split roughly equally between the two armies, exceeded in American history only by the Battle of Antietam.

  At Chancellorsville itself, Lee faced a dangerous problem at dawn: his army was split in two by Sickles's III Corps, which held the high ground at Hazel Grove. Joseph Hooker solved that problem for him. He ordered Sickles to abandon Hazel Grove early that morning. As the corps withdrew, a Confederate brigade under James Archer captured roughly 100 prisoners and four cannons from its trailing elements. Col. Porter Alexander immediately turned Hazel Grove into an artillery platform of 30 guns. This gave Confederate gunners their only decisive artillery advantage of the entire Virginia war. Twenty additional Confederate guns on the Plank Road joined in a sustained duel with the Union batteries on Fairview Hill, picking off gun crews and forcing a withdrawal when Federal ammunition ran low. Fairview was evacuated at 9:30 a.m., briefly retaken in a counterattack, and ordered abandoned for good at 10 a.m.

  At 9:15 a.m., a Confederate cannonball struck a wooden pillar at Hooker's headquarters at the Chancellor mansion while he was leaning against it. Half the pillar struck him from head to foot. He was likely concussed and lost consciousness for over an hour. Despite being clearly incapacitated, he refused to hand command to his second-in-command, Maj. Gen. Darius Couch. There was no one at headquarters with sufficient rank to force the issue. Meanwhile, III Corps division commander Hiram Berry was killed by Confederate musket fire around 7:30 a.m. Brig. Gen. Gershom Mott was severely wounded moments later. Joseph Warren Revere, grandson of Paul Revere, briefly assumed division command and led roughly 500 to 600 soldiers three miles north of the battlefield, an action for which he was later court-martialed.

  When the two halves of Lee's army reunited shortly after 10 a.m. before the burning Chancellor mansion, Lee rode in on Traveller to survey the scene. An account preserved in the source describes the soldiers, faces blackened with smoke, erupting in a sustained cheer as their commander arrived, the wounded joining in from the ground. Sedgwick, meanwhile, had broken through at Fredericksburg, overrunning the stone wall at Marye's Heights, but Confederate delaying actions under Cadmus Wilcox slowed him, and at Salem Church, reinforced by brigades from McLaws and Anderson, the Confederates turned Sedgwick back in sharp afternoon fighting.

• 7. Price of Victory

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  Lee's "perfect battle" left the Army of Northern Virginia badly damaged. With roughly 60,000 men engaged, Lee suffered 13,303 casualties, or about 22% of his force. The killed totaled 1,665; wounded numbered 9,081; and 2,018 were listed as missing. James Longstreet, rejoining the army afterward, was openly critical, arguing that battles like Chancellorsville cost the Confederacy more men than it could afford to lose. The Union, with 133,000 men engaged, lost 17,197, a lower percentage; but the Union had men to replace. The Confederacy did not.

  Hooker, who had begun the campaign believing he held overwhelming advantages, was later quoted in a letter traced back to 1903, allegedly confessing that "for once I lost confidence in Hooker." The historian Stephen Sears investigated this account and found it in John Bigelow's 1910 history, sourced to a letter written by E. P. Halstead, a former staff officer who claimed to have overheard Hooker speaking to Abner Doubleday during the Gettysburg campaign. Sears showed that Hooker and Doubleday were dozens of miles apart during that campaign and could not have met. Doubleday made no mention of any such confession in his own 1882 history of Chancellorsville. Sears concluded that Halstead was at best repeating a campfire tale and at worst inventing a role for himself in the historical record.

  Within a month of Chancellorsville, Lee had reorganized his army and launched what became the Gettysburg campaign, taking the war north into Pennsylvania, now without the man he had called his right arm.