A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [243]
The fighting began on May 1, 1863. At Fredericksburg, General Sedgwick fired some artillery at the Confederates and engaged in a few skirmishes. It was hardly the aggressive movement envisaged by “Fighting Joe” Hooker, but to the raw and untested second lieutenant Henry George Hore, it seemed as though he had participated in a marvelous triumph. Hore had joined Sedgwick’s staff only a few weeks earlier, having sailed from England to do his part in freeing the slaves. “We are victorious and captured [the Confederates’] batteries, men and all,” Hore wrote in the afternoon to his cousin Olivia; it had been “the Battle of Fredericksburg the Second.”1
Francis Lawley had rushed from Richmond as soon as he heard that Hooker was on the march but was disappointed that the Wilderness’s impenetrable scrub made it impossible for him to see what was happening. What blinded him also hindered Hooker’s generals as they tried to lead their men through the woods. At 2:00 P.M., after meeting relatively light pockets of resistance from the Confederates, Hooker suddenly called off the advance and ordered his army to retreat back to Chancellorsville. His commanders begged him to continue fighting. Hooker was obstinate: “I have got Lee just where I want him,” he told General Darius Couch, who walked away from the meeting convinced that “Fighting Joe” “was a whipped man.” Hooker was never able to explain his decision afterward except to say that all of a sudden he lost faith in himself.2
That night, Lee and Stonewall Jackson discussed how to take advantage of their adversary’s hesitation. They agreed to divide their already outnumbered army into even smaller segments. Jackson would take thirty thousand men and march around Hooker’s army, relying on local guides to find a way through the Wilderness, and surprise him from the rear, while Lee remained in front with just fifteen thousand troops. In any other battle, the enemy cavalry would have spotted such a maneuver, but Hooker’s was miles away, destroying barns and canals.
When Hooker was informed that large troop movements were taking place, he decided that it meant the Confederates were retreating back to Fredericksburg. It never occurred to him that Lee would attempt an attack from two different directions, using the same divide-and-surprise tactic that he himself had intended to employ. The next day, May 2, at five o’clock, just as the Federals were sitting down to cook their dinners, Stonewall Jackson ordered his men to charge. “Swift and sudden as the falcon sweeping her prey, Jackson had burst on his enemy’s rear and crushed him before resistance could be attempted,” wrote Francis Lawley in a sudden fit of poetry.3 The rout was so complete that an entire wing of the Union force collapsed and ran back toward headquarters, some two miles away. The first Hooker learned of the battle was when one of his staff officers happened to walk out onto the veranda and look through his field glasses. “My God, here they come!” he shouted.4 The lines between the two armies became blurred as the twilight turned to darkness.
Hooker was not beaten yet, however. Though strangely passive with regard to his immediate danger, he had no trouble directing the operations at Fredericksburg. Furious that