THE COMMANDERS OF CHANCELLORSVILLE

Rutledge Hill Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................viiIntroduction......................................................1The Antagonists...................................................5One: A Man of Honor, a Soldier of Genius..........................21Two: On the Brink of Greatness....................................43Three: Officer and Gambler........................................67Four: Bravo for Joe Hooker........................................87Five: Plans and Preparations......................................111Six: Crossing Over................................................129Seven: A Most Extraordinary Twenty-Four Hours.....................149Eight: Confidence Lost............................................167Nine: Trusting to an Ever Kind Providence.........................183Ten: My God, Here They Come!......................................203Eleven: Attack and Counterattack..................................225Twelve: What Will the Country Say?................................251Epilogue: Out of the Woods........................................271Notes.............................................................281Bibliography......................................................313Index.............................................................329

Chapter One

Early on the frigid afternoon of December 13, 1862, Robert E. Lee, from a hilltop along the right-center of his army's lines southwest of Fredericksburg, Virginia, became a spectator to mass murder. Shortly before noon, thousands of armed men in blue caps, pants, and overcoats-members of Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside's Army of the Potomac-had poured out of the streets of Fredericksburg and onto a vast, open plain that fronted an array of hills, ridges, and lower elevations occupied by their gray- and butternut-clad enemy. In common with many of those sixty thousand waiting Confederates, General Lee had stared in disbelief at the sight of so many soldiers moving in well-aligned ranks and with apparent nonchalance across ground that provided little protection against the thousands of rifles and the dozens of cannons pointing in their direction. Lee's senior subordinate, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who for much of the day shared the army commander's vantage point, noted that "the flags of the Federals fluttered gayly, the polished arms shone brightly in the sunlight, and the beautiful uniforms of the buoyant troops gave to the scene the air of a holiday occasion rather than the spectacle of a great army about to be thrown into the tumult of battle."

That tumult commenced as soon as the leading ranks came within range of the nearest guns, those along the Confederate right, the sector supervised by Lee's Second Corps commander, Lt. Gen. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson. With Jackson's guns, followed by Longstreet's, "tearing through their ranks, the Federals pressed forward with almost invincible determination, maintaining their steady step and closing up their broken ranks." Although men fell at every step, comrades pressed ahead toward a stone wall along a sunken road at the foot of Marye's Heights, a position held by one of Longstreet's brigades. "As they came within reach of this brigade," Longstreet recalled, "a storm of lead was poured into their advancing ranks and they were swept from the field like chaff before the wind. A cloud of smoke shut out the scene for a moment, and, rising, revealed the shattered fragments recoiling from their gallant but hopeless charge."

For a time, Longstreet's superior feared the attack was far from hopeless. As soon as one charging column was reduced to human debris, another double-quicked forward to take its place. Burnside's great advantage in manpower-attackers outnumbered defenders nearly two-to-one-appeared to give him the unlimited ability to close the gaps torn in his lines. When a third wave swept forward as if determined to succeed where its predecessors had failed, Lee turned toward the subordinate he called his "Old War Horse," and said in a tone of deep concern: "General, they are massing very heavily and will break your line, I am afraid." He appeared unreassured by Longstreet's sweeping reply: "If you put every man now on the other side of the Potomac on that field ... and give me plenty of ammunition, I will kill them all before they reach my line."

Longstreet's boast was no exaggeration. Although Burnside's troops achieved a temporary breakthrough along Jackson's line, they could make no headway against the Confederate left and center. For the better part of the day Lee and his First Corps commander watched in horrified fascination as column after column of bluecoats appeared about to seize Marye's Heights and other equally well fortified sectors of Lee's six-mile-long line, only to be blown apart short of their objectives. The unrelieved carnage imparted such a macabre rhythm to the spectacle that at one point Lee-at last assured that Burnside could gain no advantage over him no matter how many troops he sacrificed to the effort-exclaimed to Longstreet and everyone else within earshot:

"It is well that war is so terrible-we should grow too fond of it!"

Despite the cautionary note thus expressed and the morality lesson it conveyed, Robert E. Lee was fond of warfare. A devout Christian, his natural inclination was to regard war as a detestable blot on the human character. But although he professed to abhor its violence and destruction, combat exerted an exhilarating effect on him that appears to have satisfied a basic need. When away from the field of conflict he could be moody, depressed, even morose, but invariably his spirits rose when battle beckoned.

Expressions of his enthusiasm for combat predated Fredericksburg by almost fifteen years. During the war with Mexico, in which he had served as an engineer officer on the staff of the commanding general, Winfield Scott, he had won plaudits not only for his technical acumen but for his cool-headedness and soldierly bearing under fire. The battlefield held no terrors for him; as he confided to a fellow participant in the Mexican campaign, "a little lead, properly taken, is good for a man." To this colleague Captain Lee confessed to the excitement he derived from battling the army of that "miserable populace" below the Rio Grande. Short weeks after he had distinguished himself and won promotion during the storming of Mexico City, he expressed his desire for another go at the enemy: "Should they give us another opportunity, they will be taught a lesson.... They will oblige us in spite of ourselves to overrun the country and drive them into the sea."

At least one historian has suggested that Lee's enthusiasm for battle was the symptom of a repressed personality overcompensating for habitual passivity. While a psychologist may reject this diagnosis as simplistic, it is true that in early youth Robert Edward Lee developed an affinity for self-control and self-denial, qualities that would characterize him throughout his life. These traits were, in large part, products of his upbringing in a family that was both a bastion of Virginia aristocracy and a source of notoriety and scandal. His parents were the primary motivators in his life. His pious and longsuffering mother taught him the virtues of self-denial, while his obsessive, prolifigate father showed...