This Day in Civil War History (Battle of Chancellorsville)

May 2, 1863—In his most daring, perhaps even greatest, tactical maneuver of the Civil War, Confederate General Robert E. Lee split his force in the face of the enemy, sending Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson to fall on the right flank of Union General Joseph Hooker. Though the maneuver demoralized the formerly supremely confident Hooker and produced a Rebel victory, the Battle of Chancellorsville proved unexpectedly costly when Jackson was fatally wounded at twilight.

Hooker had received his chance at high command following the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg six months before and the even more dismally ineffectual “Mud March” that followed it. “Fighting Joe’s” openly dismissive attitude toward Ambrose Burnside led the commander to request Washington that either he be kept or Hooker. It wasn’t much a choice—Abraham Lincoln immediately accepted Burnside’s offer to go and put Hooker in his stead.

Not, however, before the shrewd President informed his new commander of the Army of the Potomac to get over himself. It had come to his attention, the President wrote, in his droll way, “in such a way as to believe it, your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up as dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.”

Before long, the hyper-aggressive Hooker proved that he would not achieve either. The shocking thing was that at the beginning, it appeared that both lay within his grasp. He immediately set to work restoring the morale of his troops, and as spring broke began to move quickly against Lee. While General John Sedgwick’s corps would engage in a diversionary tactic against Lee, Hooker would cross the Rappahannock River and fall upon Lee’s flank. “May God have mercy on General Lee,” Hooker boasted, “for I will have none.”

The problem was that Hooker’s army became stuck in the river crossing, then became confused in the brush and trees of the Wilderness between Fredericksburg and Richmond. Unfamiliar with the dense, sodden terrain, Hooker turned, in a change for him, to the defensive.

Analyzing what happened afterward, Hooker’s disgusted subordinate, Darius N. Coach, noted that Hooker had expected Lee not to risk battle. “Finding himself mistaken he assumed the defensive, and was outgeneraled and became demoralized by the superior tactical boldness of the enemy.”

While he waited, Lee and Jackson quickly huddled. They were aided by a discovery by Jackson’s adept topographical engineer, Jed Hotchkiss, of a trace not found on maps that furnished a road behind the Federals, on which Jackson could travel and surprise Hooker. The maneuver went against virtually everything in the military book, for Lee was going to divide his army of 60,000 against the larger Union force of 130,000. But Lee had gotten inside the head of Hooker, and knew that his opponent would freeze.

Before dawn on May 2, Jackson ordered his men to march. Almost 10 hours and 15 miles later, in the warm late afternoon, they attacked the Federals with their blood-curdling Rebel yell. The Union forces began to buckle. Near twilight, hoping to urge on his troops, Jackson was riding on a pitch-black road when he was hit in a hand and arm by a Confederate picket who didn’t recognize his leader in the dark. Jackson’s left arm was amputated. The rueful Lee remarked, “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.”

Eight days after sustaining his wound, Jackson raised himself up from his sickbed, said “no, no, let us pass over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees,” and breathed his last.

“I know not how to replace him,” Lee mourned. “God’s will be done. I trust He will raise up someone in his place.” Unfortunately, it never really happened.

If you’d like an analogy to the inspired, almost instinctive relationship between Lee and his subordinate, think of football’s Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry, or baseball’s Bob Gibson and Tim McCarver. Each brought out the best in the other, to the point where words almost didn’t even have to be spoken.

Lee acknowledged as much: “Such an executive officer the sun never shone on. I have but to show him my design, and I know that if it can be done it will be done. No need for me to send or watch him. Straight as the needle to the pole he advances to the execution of my purpose.” The man Lee appointed as successor to Jackson, Richard S. Ewell, was a brave officer who unfortunately lacked Jackson’s rapidity of mind and singleness of purpose—which he demonstrated at the Battle of Gettysburg two months later.

An abashed Hooker slipped back across the river, his dreams of glory vanished. The battle became part of the legend of the Confederacy, as well as those of the Lost Cause’s greatest heroes, Lee and Jackson.

The battle also inspired, in one way or another, three vivid depictions of war. Though it never explicitly identified the name of the particular battle, Stephen Crane based his Red Badge of Courage on descriptions of the battle. In a subsequent short story, “The Veteran,” a now-older Henry Fleming does mention Chancellorsville as the site of his encounter with the enemy.

Even More startling was the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story “Night at Chancellorsville.” Uncharacteristically for Fitzgerald, this piece was neither based on his own experience nor even set in his own period. Even the point of view used—a prostitute left outside her coach, along with her friends in the “world’s oldest profession,” during the battle when their quarters aer commandeered to handle the wounded—is unexpected. Yet the author was, in his way, tipping his hat to his recently deceased father, a gentle scion of the Old South who had raised his son on stories of antebellum days and the war that swept it all away.

Finally, Jackson’s famous last words furnished the title of Ernest Hemingway’s first post-WWII novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, about the aging soldier Col. Robert Cantwell. Too bad it is generally regarded as one of the Nobel laureate’s poorest efforts.