This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [157]
Hooker was still talking it up. He told his ranking officer, General Darius N. Couch: “It’s all right, Couch, I’ve got Lee just where I want him.” To other officers he remarked that Lee’s army was now “the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac”; to still others he boasted that not even God Almighty could deprive him of the victory that he was about to win. But Couch concluded that under all of this fine talk Hooker was already a beaten man, and no one since that time has seen any reason to think that Couch was mistaken.
While Hooker made windy brags and put “the finest army on the planet” on the defensive, Lee sat on a cracker box a few miles away and held a conference with Stonewall Jackson. They had, by the most favorable estimate, fewer than forty-five thousand men with them; except for the force left at Fredericksburg, that was all the army there was, and they were in the immediate presence of eighty thousand Federals. But Lee was in charge of the battle now, and not Hooker, and what Lee wanted to discuss was the best way in which Hooker’s army might be wiped out. He and Jackson talked and they made a plan, and promptly the next morning they set about putting it into execution.
The plan was the distilled and concentrated essence of extreme daring.
Jackson would take twenty-five thousand men, march the length of Hooker’s front, circle around until he was due west of him, and attack his exposed right flank. The march would take the better part of the day, and to form line of battle in the trackless wilderness where Hooker’s flank rested might take hours; it would be early evening before Jackson could make his fight. Until then Lee with fewer than twenty thousand men would have to confront Hooker and his eighty thousand. Indeed, merely to confront him would not be enough; he would have to pretend to be fighting an offensive battle, and the pretense would have to be convincing, because if Hooker ever found out what Jackson was up to or learned how small Lee’s force really was he could destroy the Army of Northern Virginia before the sun went down.
Hooker would find out nothing, for Lee had him in his hands and was toying with him. Jackson made his march (it was discovered, but in the paralysis that had come upon his spirit Hooker was quite unable to interpret the meaning of his discovery; he concluded finally that part of Lee’s army must be retreating, and he sent out a couple of divisions to prod the fugitives along). Lee gave a masterful imitation of a general who is about to open a crushing attack all along the line, and kept Hooker looking his way without inducing him to look so attentively that he could discover anything. And a little while before sundown Jackson struck Hooker’s exposed flank like the crack of doom.
One Federal army corps was driven off in rout, the right half of Hooker’s line was disrupted, and Jackson believed that if the attack could be pressed the Federals could be cut off from the Rappahannock crossings and destroyed utterly. But effective woods fighting in the darkness was impossible, the Confederate battle line was all confused … and Jackson himself, at last, was shot down and had to be carried to a field hospital with a wound that would kill him within the week. The fighting died out, with a confusing and malignant sputter of picket-line firing and sudden, meaningless cannonades, around midnight. In the streaky moonlight