Joseph Hooker

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Joseph Hooker is one of the most contradictory figures of the American Civil War. He was the general who commanded the largest, best-organized army the Union had ever fielded, then lost his nerve at the moment it mattered most. He fought with genuine courage at Antietam, absorbing a foot wound while driving into Stonewall Jackson's lines on the bloodiest single day in American history. He rebuilt a demoralized army from the ground up in the winter of 1863, overhauling its food, its hospitals, its cavalry structure, its intelligence operations. Then, at Chancellorsville, he watched Robert E. Lee divide a smaller Confederate force and rout him anyway.

  The questions Hooker's life raises are sharp ones. What separates a gifted administrator from a great commander? Can a general who is brilliant at everything except the moment of decision be called a success? And how does a man who resented one nickname spend his career permanently tagged by another that a typesetter accidentally invented? The answers run through three decades of American warfare, from the Florida swamps of the Seminole Wars to the burning Georgia countryside of Sherman's Atlanta campaign.

• 2. From Hadley to West Point

  ›

  Hooker was born on the 13th of November 1814 in Hadley, Massachusetts, in a family whose roots in New England reached back to the early 1600s. His grandfather had served as a captain in the American Revolutionary War, and Hooker was aware of that military inheritance. His early schooling was at Hopkins Academy before he secured a place at the United States Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1837, ranked 29th in a class of 50.

  His first posting sent him to Florida for the second Seminole War, and from there he was absorbed into the Mexican-American War, serving on the staffs of both Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. That war gave him his first taste of genuine recognition. He earned brevet promotions for gallantry at three battles: Monterrey, which brought him a captain's brevet; National Bridge, which made him a brevet major; and Chapultepec, which raised him to brevet lieutenant colonel. Mexican women in those campaigns reportedly called him the "Handsome Captain," a forerunner of the personal reputation that would follow him the rest of his life.

  The peace that followed the Mexican-American War in 1848 was punishing for Hooker. He served as an assistant adjutant general of the Pacific Division but grew restless, and his standing in the Army took damage when he testified against his former commander General Scott during the court-martial of Gideon Johnson Pillow. He resigned his commission in 1853 and settled in Sonoma County, California, as a farmer and land developer. He ran unsuccessfully for the California legislature. In 1858, feeling clearly trapped, he wrote directly to Secretary of War John B. Floyd asking that his name be put forward to President Buchanan for a lieutenant colonelcy. The request went nowhere. From 1859 to 1861 he held a colonel's commission in the California militia, waiting for something to change.

• 3. Fighting Joe, Reluctantly

  ›

  When the Civil War began in 1861, Hooker traveled east from California with borrowed money to request a commission. His first application was rejected, likely because Winfield Scott had not forgotten his earlier testimony against him. After witnessing the Union defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run, Hooker wrote directly to President Abraham Lincoln, criticizing military mismanagement and arguing for his own qualifications. The letter worked. Lincoln appointed him brigadier general of volunteers in August 1861, with rank from the 17th of May.

  The nickname "Fighting Joe" arrived the same way many things arrived in wartime: accidentally. During the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, a newspaper dispatch reached New York with a heading that read "Fighting - Joe Hooker Attacks Rebels." A typesetter dropped the dash. The label printed as "Fighting Joe Hooker" and fastened itself permanently to the general's identity. Hooker hated it. He complained that people would think he was a highwayman or a bandit. Robert E. Lee occasionally referred to him in letters as "Mr. F. J. Hooker," a mild but pointed jab. The nickname outlasted the war, outlasted Hooker himself, and persists in every history of the conflict.

  Hooker's conduct during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862 made the label feel earned. He commanded the 2nd Division of the III Corps and built a reputation as an aggressive fighter who found the key points on a battlefield and drove at them. At Williamsburg and at Seven Pines he led his division with distinction. He openly criticized his superior, George B. McClellan, for failing to exploit opportunities, and was quoted saying of McClellan: "He is not only not a soldier, but he does not know what soldiership is."

• 4. Antietam and Fredericksburg

  ›

  On the 26th of July 1862, Hooker was promoted to major general, with rank from the 5th of May. At Antietam on the 17th of September, his I Corps launched the opening assault of the battle, driving south into the corps of Lieutenant General Stonewall Jackson. The two forces fought to a standstill before Hooker left the field with a foot wound early in the morning. He later argued that a decisive Union victory had been within reach if he had remained in command and if McClellan had pressed the Confederate flanks more aggressively.

  President Lincoln shared Hooker's frustration with McClellan's caution. Lincoln replaced McClellan with Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside. Ironically, despite Hooker's persistent private criticism of McClellan, McClellan in early October, just before his removal, had recommended Hooker for a brigadier's commission in the regular army. The War Department acted promptly and Hooker received that commission to rank from the 20th of September. That regular-army rank mattered: it guaranteed Hooker a general's pension and pay for life, regardless of what happened next.

  What happened next at Fredericksburg in December 1862 was a disaster for the Union. Hooker commanded a "Grand Division" comprising both the III and V Corps. He called Burnside's plan to assault the fortified Confederate heights behind the city "preposterous," and the battle proved him right. Fourteen futile assaults cost his Grand Division serious losses. After the battle, Burnside's Mud March in January compounded the humiliation. Hooker's criticism of Burnside crossed close to insubordination, and he described Burnside as a "wretch... of blundering sacrifice." Burnside drafted an order calling Hooker "unfit to hold an important commission during a crisis like the present" and requested Lincoln's approval for a purge of his subordinates. Lincoln declined to sign it and removed Burnside instead.

• 5. Rebuilding an Army

  ›

  Lincoln appointed Hooker to command the Army of the Potomac on the 26th of January 1863. A New York Times correspondent had quoted Hooker during the Mud March saying that nothing would go right until the country had a dictator, and the sooner the better. Lincoln's response was a remarkable letter in which he told Hooker he had given him the command not because of that remark but in spite of it, and that only generals who succeed can set up dictators. What he needed from Hooker was military success, and he would risk the dictatorship.

  Hooker's administrative record that winter was genuinely impressive. He overhauled the army's diet, requiring that troops receive flour or soft bread four times a week, fresh onions or potatoes twice a week, and desiccated vegetables once weekly. He reformed camp sanitation, requiring men to bathe twice a week and to air their bedding regularly. He improved the quartermaster system, added company cooks, and introduced a furlough program allowing two men per company by lot, ten days for mid-Atlantic states and fifteen days for those from farther north and west.

  Among his lasting institutional contributions was the creation of the Bureau of Military Information, the first all-source intelligence organization the U.S. military had ever employed. His chief of staff Daniel Butterfield suggested another lasting innovation: corps badges, which Hooker implemented to help identify units in battle and to build unit pride. Hooker consolidated the federal cavalry into a single corps for the first time. Of the revived army he said: "I have the finest army on the planet. I have the finest army the sun ever shone on. If the enemy does not run, God help them. May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none."

  He also quietly attempted something unexpected. He asked the War Department to send him Brig. Gen. Charles Stone as his chief of staff. Stone had been arrested and imprisoned for his role in the 1861 Battle of Ball's Bluff without any trial. The Army historian Bruce Catton called this "a strange and seemingly uncharacteristic thing" and noted that speaking up for Stone required moral courage, a quality Hooker was rarely credited with possessing.

• 6. Chancellorsville

  ›

  Hooker's operational plan for the spring campaign of 1863 was widely praised even by those who would later criticize its execution. He intended to send cavalry deep behind Confederate lines to disrupt Lee's supply routes, pin Lee's army at Fredericksburg with part of his force, and swing the bulk of the Army of the Potomac in a flanking march to strike Lee from the rear. The plan achieved strategic surprise when the flanking march began. But Brig. Gen. George Stoneman conducted the cavalry raid cautiously, and it met none of its objectives.

  On the 1st of May, Stonewall Jackson's attack pushed Hooker back, and rather than pressing forward, Hooker pulled his army to defensive positions at Chancellorsville and waited. Lee responded with remarkable audacity. He split his already smaller army in two, then split it again, sending Jackson's corps on a flanking march that struck Hooker's exposed right flank and routed the Union XI Corps. Several of Hooker's subordinate generals, including Maj. Gen. Darius N. Couch and Maj. Gen. Henry W. Slocum, openly questioned his decisions.

  Partially explaining the loss of nerve was a physical blow. While Hooker stood on the porch of his headquarters, a cannonball struck the wooden column against which he was leaning, knocking him senseless and then leaving him concussed for the rest of the day. Even so, he refused to hand temporary command to Couch. The Army of the Potomac retreated. Couch was so disgusted that he refused to serve under Hooker again.

  Chancellorsville is still described as Lee's finest battlefield performance. Its aftermath tilted the strategic balance sharply. Lee now held the initiative, and he used it to march north toward Pennsylvania. Hooker attempted to keep command by proposing to seize Richmond directly; Lincoln vetoed the idea immediately. When Hooker got into a dispute with Army headquarters over the garrison at Harpers Ferry and offered his resignation in frustration, Lincoln and Halleck accepted it at once. On the 28th of June 1863, three days before Gettysburg, Maj. Gen. George Meade replaced him. Hooker's tenure commanding the Army of the Potomac had lasted five months.

• 7. A Second Act in the West

  ›

  Hooker's transfer to the Western Theater in November 1863 allowed him to recover something of his standing. He brought the XI and XII Corps of the Army of the Potomac west to reinforce the Army of the Cumberland near Chattanooga, Tennessee. At the Battle of Lookout Mountain, Hooker played an important role in Lt. Gen. Ulysses Grant's decisive victory at Chattanooga. He was brevetted to major general in the regular army for his success there. The reward stung slightly: Grant's official report credited William Tecumseh Sherman's contribution over Hooker's.

  During the 1864 Atlanta campaign under Sherman, Hooker led his corps, now designated the XX Corps, with competence. The breaking point came in July when Army of the Tennessee commander James B. McPherson was killed in battle near Atlanta. Sherman appointed Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard to the command instead of Hooker, who outranked Howard and had blamed him specifically for the defeat at Chancellorsville. Hooker resigned in protest. Sherman did not resist. Grant, hearing of Hooker's complaint about his seniority being overlooked, remarked dryly that a major general was only entitled to command of a division. Hooker's biographer notes that Lincoln reportedly tried to intercede with Sherman on Hooker's behalf, urging Howard's appointment be reversed, and that Sherman threatened to resign if the president insisted. Because of gaps in the Official Records, that story cannot be verified.

  From the 1st of October 1864 until the end of the war, Hooker commanded the Northern Department from Cincinnati, Ohio, overseeing the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In Cincinnati he married Olivia Groesbeck, the sister of Congressman William S. Groesbeck. After the war ended, he led Lincoln's funeral procession in Springfield on the 4th of May 1865.

• 8. Reputation and Legacy

  ›

  Hooker retired from the U.S. Army on the 15th of October 1868 with the regular army rank of major general. His postbellum years were clouded by a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He died on the 31st of October 1879 during a visit to Garden City, New York, and was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, his wife's hometown.

  The popular myth that the slang word "hooker," meaning a prostitute, derives from the general's name proved persistent but appears to rest on shaky ground. The term appeared in published sources as early as 1845, before Hooker rose to any public prominence. Linguistic and historical scholarship traces the word more plausibly to the Corlear's Hook district of Manhattan, where the term became common in the early to mid-19th century. A Washington, D.C. district near what was known as Murder Bay did carry the informal name "Hooker's Division" during the Civil War, later shortened to "The Division," which may have reinforced the association. Historian Walter H. Hebert described Hooker's personal habits as the "subject of much debate," while historian Stephen W. Sears flatly stated there is no basis for claims that Hooker was a heavy drinker or was ever intoxicated on the battlefield.

  Hooker's men parodied his whiskey reputation in the popular war song Marching Along, swapping lyrics about McClellan for lines about Joe Hooker taking his whiskey strong. His soldiers sang those lines while following a man who had genuinely cared about their welfare, had fixed their food, reformed their hospitals, and devised the corps badge system that the U.S. Army retained long after the war. There is an equestrian statue of Hooker outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston. Hooker County in Nebraska bears his name. In Sonoma, California, where he farmed before the war, his historic house near the Sonoma Plaza now houses a winery office and tasting room, and a nearby road in Agua Caliente is still called Hooker Avenue.