This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [158]
With daylight the Confederate attack was renewed. Jeb Stuart, the jaunty cavalryman with the plumed hat and the floating cloak lined with scarlet, was called away from his mounted men and given control of the fight Jackson had commenced, and while he desperately reorganized the mixed-up southern infantry elements his gunners moved fieldpieces into an open meadow which the stumbling Federals had abandoned, and from this vantage point his artillery hammered at the Federal guns and blanketed Chancellorsville clearing with a storm of shell. One missile knocked down a pillar of the Chancellorsville mansion. Hooker, who was lounging against the pillar, was thrown down and stunned. The will to strike a counterblow flickered and died in the Federal commander, and by noon his troops were fighting a rear-guard action, pulling back to form a great defensive horseshoe covering the Rappahannock bridgeheads. The two wings of Lee’s army came together again, and the huge northern army was shoved and huddled into its new lines, all notion of an offensive fight gone forever. Hooker was not thinking of anything larger than the hope that the army might avoid annihilation.
Back at Fredericksburg, John Sedgwick came into action. His men hit the Confederate trenches on the high ground west of town, captured the heights that Burnside had been unable to take in December, and started off to rescue Hooker. But Lee, as calmly as if he had been directing maneuvers back in the Richmond training fields, left a few brigades to keep an eye on Hooker’s host and with the rest of his army turned, boxed Sedgwick’s tough soldiers up in a bend of the Rappahannock halfway between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and after a wearing day’s fighting compelled them to retreat across the river, glad enough to escape alive. Then — as smoothly as if this shuttling back and forth against impossible odds were all part of the normal routine — Lee regrouped his army in front of Hooker’s horseshoe bridgehead and prepared for a new blow that would complete the rout of the Army of the Potomac.
This blow he never had to make, for Hooker had had enough. His men occupied a powerful position, with good trenches on high ground and abundant artillery. He greatly outnumbered Lee, and nearly half of his soldiers had not yet been in action at all; by the book, any Confederate attack now could lead to nothing but a Confederate defeat. But Hooker folded up, once and for all, and on a dark and rainy night he pulled his troops back, crossed to the north side of the Rappahannock, and marched back to his camps opposite Fredericksburg, abandoning the campaign that had been planned and begun so ably. He had been hopelessly beaten, he had lost seventeen thousand men, some of his generals were almost in a state of mutiny — tough little Couch was declaring that he would never serve under Hooker again and was asking the War Department for a transfer — and his soldiers were angrily inquiring how they had lost a battle in which so many of them had not even had a chance to fight.
By any standard, this was a personal triumph for Lee. It had been the story of the Seven Days’ all over again, with all of the highlights and the shadows intensified; the man with all the odds against him had taken desperate chances and had seen them pay off, while the man with everything in his favor had gone nervous and had seen his chances evaporate like the gun smoke shredding out over the