This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [156]
So went the plan. So went the execution, too, until the time came when everything depended on Joe Hooker. Then the whole business fell apart like a sheet of soggy blotting paper, and the South won a spectacular victory … from which, finally, it could gain no lasting advantage.
Hooker’s troops began to march on April 27. (Grant was nearly ready to put his men across the Mississippi; Grierson was riding hard for Baton Rouge.) Three army corps crossed the two rivers and drove swiftly in toward Fredericksburg, marching through a confusing and almost roadless jungle of second-growth timber known as the Wilderness, and going into bivouac on the last day of April at a crossroads by a pillared brick mansion: Chancellorsville. Two other army corps, left in Fredericksburg in the competent hands of General John Sedgwick, began to cross the river there, as if the Burnside fight were to be repeated, and two more Federal corps waited at the river fords a few miles upstream from Fredericksburg, where they could quickly join either wing of the army. Hooker himself went to Chancellorsville, and as April ended he could boast that he had done — so far — exactly what he set out to do and that he had done it very well.
He had at Chancellorsville very nearly as many soldiers as there were in Lee’s entire army, and they were hardly more than ten miles from Fredericksburg, right behind the great crescent of trenches with which the Confederates had surrounded that town. Abundant reinforcements were close at hand, and Sedgwick with forty thousand men was squarely in Lee’s front — a solid rock against which Hooker’s force could smash the Army of Northern Virginia. On the morning of May 1, Hooker put his men on the roads and they started east, moving in to make a finish fight of it. Hooker was confident, and the soldiers were confident. Even crusty George Meade, commander of one of the three army corps at Chancellorsville — a man who rarely bubbled with enthusiasm for anything — was showing his elation. “Hurrah for old Joe!” he cried to a brother officer. “We’re on Lee’s flank and he doesn’t know it.”1
Lee knew it well enough, but he refused to let it bother him. Technically he was in a desperate fix. If he stayed where he was he would be crushed between Hooker and Sedgwick. If he turned to meet the Chancellorsville thrust he would have to strike at a force that could quickly be made much stronger than his, and John Sedgwick would be right on his heels. If he tried to retreat toward Richmond, Hooker could easily cut across, strike him in flank, and cut off his escape. All of the choices open to him were bad, and it did not seem that there was very much that he could do about it.
Yet he seemed quite unworried. He left some ten thousand men to hold the line against Sedgwick, and with everybody else he set out for Chancellorsville to meet Hooker. Somewhere around noon on May 1, Confederate and Federal skirmish lines collided three miles east of Chancellorsville. When Federal battle lines came up behind the skirmishers they met a line of Confederate infantry, well posted, with field artillery in action. The commanders of the Federal advance confidently prepared to shoulder this roadblock aside and get on with the war, and they sent news of the encounter back to headquarters.
That put it up to Hooker, and he immediately began to wilt. Things were going precisely according to plan. Only the night before he had issued a big-talk statement to his troops, announcing that the enemy “must either