Battle of Chancellorsville





The Battle of Chancellorsville marked the zenith of the powers of the
Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in its struggle to drive off and
destroy the Army of the Potomac and win independence for the Confederate
States of America in the American Civil War.

The Chancellorsville campaign began with the crossing of the Rappahannock
River by the Union (United States) army on the morning of April 27, 1863.
Heavy fighting began on May 1 and did not end until the Union forces
retreated across the river on the night of May 5-6. The battle had some
characteristics of a modern battle, as the armies were spread out over a
front of several miles and neither side every fully concentrated its army.

On paper, it was one of the most lopsided clashes of arms in the war. The
Union army, commanded by Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, brought an effective
fighting force of 132,000 men onto the field. The Confederate army,
commanded by General Robert E. Lee, numbered approximately 57,000.
Furthermore, the Union forces were much better supplied and were well-rested
after several months of inactivity. Lee's forces, on the other hand, were
spread out all over the state of Virginia. In fact, some 15,000 men of the
Army of Northern Virginia under Lieut. Gen. James Longstreet, stationed near
Norfolk some 100 miles to the southeast, failed to arrive in time. Their
absence probably saved the Union army from total destruction in the battle
that ensued.

On April 27-28, Hooker and the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rappahannock
and Rapidan rivers in several places, most of them near the confluence of
the two rivers and the hamlet of Chancellorsville, which was little more
than a large mansion at the junction of the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank
roads. In the meantime, a second force of more than 30,000 men crossed the
Rappahannock at Fredericksburg, some 14 miles to the east and the site of a
battle the previous December. By doing this, Hooker now had substantial
forces on both Lee's front and on his right flank, and he had dispatched
some 7,000 cavalry under Maj. Gen. George Stoneman to raid deep in the
Confederate rear areas. He ordered Stoneman to attack and destroy crucial
supply depots along the railroad from Richmond to Fredericksburg, which
would cut Lee off from resupply and force him to fall back to positions
closer to his supply sources.

By May 1, Hooker had approximately 70,000 men concentrated in and around
Chancellorsville, while Lee worked frantically to concentrate his own army.
He confronted Hooker at Chancellorsville with 40,000 men, while on his
right, Maj. Gen. Jubal Early manned Fredericksburg's formidable Marye's
Heights with 12,000 troops, hoping to keep Sedgwick out of Lee's rear. The
next day, the Union and Confederate troops clashed on the Chancellorsville
front, with some Union forces actually pushing their way out of the
impenetrable thickets and scrub pine that characterized the area. This was
seen by many Union commanders as a key to victory. If the larger Union army
fought in the woods, known as the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, its huge
advantage in artillery would be useless, since artillery could not be used
to any great effect in the Wilderness.

However, Hooker had decided before beginning the campaign that he would
fight the battle defensively, forcing Lee, with his small army, to attack
his huge one. At the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Union army had done the
attacking and met with a bloody and dreadful defeat. Hooker knew Lee could
not take such a defeat and keep an effective army in the field. So he
ordered his men to withdraw back into the Wilderness and take a defensive
position around Chancellorsville, daring Lee to attack him.

Lee, with no other options but to retreat down open roads with Hooker's
larger army in pursuit (this was what Hooker really wanted Lee to attempt),
chose to take the dare and plan an attack for May 2. On the night before,
Lee and his top subordinate, Lieut. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, came
up with a tremendously risky, but daring, plan of attack. They would split
the 40,000-man force at Chancellorsville, with Jackson taking his Second
Corps of 28,000 men around to attack the Union right flank. Lee, on the
other hand, would exercise personal command of the other 12,000 (the other
half of Longstreet's First Corps, commanded directly by Lee during the
entire battle) facing Hooker's entire 70,000 man force at Chancellorsville.

For this to work, several things had to happen. First, Jackson had to make a
12-mile march via roundabout roads to reach the Union right, and he had to
do it undetected. Second, Lee had to hope that Hooker stayed tamely on the
defensive. Third, Early would have to keep Sedgwick bottled up in
Fredericksburg. And last but not least, when Jackson launched his attack, he
had to hope that the Union forces were unprepared.

Incredibly, all of this happened. Confederate cavalry under Maj. Gen. J.E.B.
Stuart kept the Union forces from spotting Jackson on his long flank march,
which took almost all day. The only sighting came shortly after Jackson's
corps disengaged from Union forces south of Chancellorsville, and this
worked to the Confederates' advantage--Hooker thought that his cavalry under
Stoneman had cut Lee's supply line and that Lee was about to retreat.
Therefore, he stayed right where he was and never contemplated an all-out
attack, sending only his III Corps of 13,000 men under Maj. Gen. Dan Sickles
forward. Sickles captured a handful of Second Corps men and then stopped.

Over at Fredericksburg, Sedgwick and Hooker were unable to communicate with
one another due to the failure of telegraph lines between the two halves of
the army. And when Hooker finally got an order to Sedgwick late on the
evening of May 2, ordering him to attack Early, Sedgwick failed to do so
because he mistakenly believed Early had more men than he did.

But what led most of all to the impending Union disaster was the incompetent
commander of the Union XI Corps, Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard. Howard, whose
11,000 men were posted at the far right of the Union line, failed to make
any provision for his defense in case of a surprise attack, even though
Hooker ordered him to. The Union right flank was not anchored on any natural
obstacle, and the only defenses against a flank attack consisted of two
cannon pointing out into the Wilderness. Making matters worse, the XI Corps
was a poorly trained unit made up almost entirely of German immigrants, many
of whom didn't even speak English.

At 4:30 in the afternoon, Jackson's 28,000 men came running out of the
Wilderness and hit Howard's corps totally by surprise right when most of
them were cooking dinner. More than 4,000 of them were taken prisoner
without firing a shot, and most of the remainder were routed. Only one
division of the XI Corps made a stand, and it was soon driven off as well.
By nightfall, the Confederate Second Corps had advanced more than two miles,
to within sight of Chancellorsville, and were separated from Lee's men only
by Sickles' corps, which remained where it had been after attacking that
morning. Hooker himself suffered a minor injury when a Confederate shell hit
near his headquarters during the peak of the fighting.

Both Hooker and Jackson made serious errors that night, and for Jackson, his
mistake cost him his life.

Hooker, concerned about Sickles' ability to hold what was now a salient into
the Confederate lines, pulled the III Corps back to Chancellorsville that
night. Unfortunately, this gave the Confederates two advantages--it reunited
Jackson and Lee's forces, and it gave them control of a clearing in the
woods known as Hazel Grove, one of the few places in which artillery could
be used effectively.

Jackson's mistake came when he was scouting ahead of his corps along the
Orange Plank Road that night. Having won a huge victory that day, Jackson
wanted to press his advantage before Hooker and his army could regain their
bearings and plan a counterttack, which might still succeed because of the
sheer disparity in numbers. He rode out onto the plank road that night,
unrecognized by men of the Second Corps behind him, and was hit by friendly
fire. The wound didn't seem life-threatening at first, but Jackson
contracted pneumonia after his arm was amputated and died on May 10. His
death was a devastating loss for the Confederacy.

On May 3, Lee put Stuart in command of the Second Corps, and the daring
cavalryman proved to be a fine commander of infantry, as well. Stuart
launched a massive assault all along the front, and even though the Union
army still far outnumbered and outgunned the Confederates, they won by
simply outfighting the Union defenders, and by using the Hazel Grove
position to pound the Union artillery and eventually drive it off. By that
afternoon, the Confederates had captured Chancellorsville, and Hooker pulled
his battered men back to a line of defense circling United States Ford,
their last remaining open line of retreat.

Still, Lee couldn't declare victory, and Hooker wasn't conceding defeat,
either. During the peak of the fighting at Chancellorsville on May 3, he
again called on Sedgwick to break through and attack Lee's rear. Again, that
general delayed until it was too late. That afternoon, he finally did attack
Early's position (after Early at one point abandoned it himself thanks to a
misinterpreted order from Lee), and broke through. But he did it too late in
the day to help Hooker's men. In fact, a single brigade of Alabama troops
led by Brig. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox staged a delaying action along the Orange
Plank Road west of Fredericksburg and slowed Sedgwick's already-sluggish
advance. Reinforcements under Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws arrived from
Chancellorsville late in the afternoon and joined Wilcox at Salem Church,
four miles west of Fredericksburg, and the combined Confederate force halted
Sedgwick's march to Chancellorsville.

The fighting on May 3, 1863 was some of the most furious anywhere in the
war, and would have ranked among the bloodiest battles of the American Civil
War by itself. About 18,000 men, divided equally between the two armies,
fell in battle that day.

On the evening of May 3 and all day May 4, Hooker remained in his defenses
while Lee and Early battled Sedgwick. Sedgwick, after breaking Early's
defenses, foolishly neglected to secure Fredericksburg. Early simply marched
back and reoccupied the heights west of the city, cutting Sedgwick off.
Meanwhile, Lee directed the division of Richard Anderson from the
Chancellorsville front and reinforced McLaws before Sedgwick realized just
how few men were opposing him. Sedgwick, as it turned out, was as resolute
on the defensive as he was irresolute on the attack, and he stood his ground
that day before withdrawing back across the Rappahannock at Banks' Ford
during the pre-dawn hours of May 5. Ironically, this was another
miscommunication between he and Hooker; the commanding general had wanted
Sedgwick to hold Banks' Ford, so that Hooker could withdraw from the
Chancellorsville area and re-cross the river at Banks' to fight again. When
he learned that Sedgwick had retreated back over the river, Hooker felt he
was out of options to save the campaign, and on the night of May 5-6, he
also withdrew back across the river.

Stoneman, after a week of ineffectual raiding in central and southern
Virginia in which he failed to attack any of the objectives Hooker set out
for him, withdrew into Union lines east of Richmond on May 7, ending the
campaign.

The most noteworthy characteristic of the battle was the horrifying
conditions it was fought under. Soldiers tended to get lost in the
impenetrable maze of undergrowth, and many fires started during the course
of the battle. Reports of wounded men being burned alive were both common
and entirely creditable.

Lee, despite being outnumbered by a margin of about five to two, won
arguably his greatest victory of the war. But he paid a terrible price for
it. With only 52,000 infantry engaged, he suffered more than 13,000
casualties, losing some 25 percent of his force--men that the Confederacy,
with its limited manpower, could not replace. Just as seriously, he lost
Jackson, his most aggressive field commander. His loss would be felt
severely later in the summer, in the Gettysburg campaign.

Hooker, who began the campaign believing he had "80 chances in 100 to be
successful", lost the battle through communications snafus, the incompetence
of some of his leading generals (most notably Howard and Stoneman) and
through some serious errors of his own, including not pushing out of the
Wilderness on May 1, pulling back Sickles on May 2 and even by retreating on
May 6. For on that day, Lee planned to launch an all-out attack on Hooker's
defenses. What Lee didn't know was that they were virtually impregnable, and
beyond the capability of his remaining 39,000 infantry to carry. Hooker also
erred in his disposition of force; some 40,000 men of the Army of the
Potomac scarcely fired a shot.

Of the 90,000 Union men who bore the brunt of the fighting, just over 17,000
fell in battle, a casualty rate much lower than Lee's, and this without
taking into account the 4,000 men of the XI Corps who were captured without
a fight in the initial panic on May 2. Hooker's tactic of forcing Lee to
attack him was clearly sound in its conception, but terribly flawed in the
way he and his subordinates implemented it. The actual fighting showed the
Union army had become as formidable in battle as Lee's heretofore unbeatable
legions, something else that would be proven again at Gettysburg.

The Battle of Chancellorsville, along with the May 1864 Battle of the
Wilderness fought in the same area, formed the basis for Stephen Crane's
1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage.