Glory Road (29 page)

All in all, however, it seems that there were more gay shouts and whoops of laughter than curses that night. Some pictorial quality in the scene, with the firelight dancing on the water and the white clouds drifting across the face of the moon and the limitless lines of men coming down over the northern hills, splashing through the water and shaking themselves out on the southern side, seems to have caught the soldiers' fancy. They remembered it long afterward, this crossing of the Rapidan in the April moonlight, and all of these precocious amateur strategists realized that Hooker was getting them safely around the dreaded entrenchments back of Fredericksburg, and everybody was ready to believe in his general, his army's chances, and his own lusty, irrepressible youth. The thickets and dim clearings and shallow ravines back of the Chancellorsville crossroads were still innocent that night. Men remembered that the whippoorwills sang.
¹⁴

Next day was April 30. Slocum pushed his men forward. He was a good man, this Slocum, and from one end of the war to the other the Federals developed few better corps commanders. By noon George Meade had his V Corps at the Chancellorsville clearing, where a ponderous white manor house with tall pillars looked down on the country crossroads. The advance guard chased away a small Rebel outpost, and a bit later the head of Slocum's corps came up, Slocum himself riding in front. Meade rode to meet him, fairly bubbling over with enthusiasm—a rare state for Meade, a saturnine man who was sometimes lifted out of himself by hot fury at human error but rarely by any lighter emotion.

"Hurrah for old Joel" cried Meade. "We're on Lee's flank and he doesn't know it."
¹⁵

This was only a slight exaggeration. John Sedgwick had pushed his VI Corps across the river just below Fredericksburg, laying his pontoon bridges where Franklin had crossed in December, and he had his soldiers drawn up on the open plain south of the town, looking warlike and menacing, the idea being to make Lee think that a full-dress attack was about to develop. This was nothing but a bluff, and Lee was beginning to see through it. Stuart had warned him that a good many Yankees were crossing the Rapidan, and by nightfall Lee would conclude that Sedgwick was merely trying to annoy him and that the real attack was coming from his left rear.

Nevertheless, there was reason for Meade to feel exultant. This advance to Chancellorsville had already forced the Confederates to withdraw the troops which had been defending United States Ford, and two divisions of the Yankee II Corps were crossing there unopposed. By dusk Hooker would have fully fifty thousand men at Chancellorsville, together with the artillery reserve and a handful of cavalry. The open rear of Lee's field fortress on Marye's Heights lay barely a dozen miles to the east, with only one Rebel division—eighty-five hundred men or thereabouts—standing in the way. Almost equally close, and even less protected, were the main highway and the railway which led from Fredericksburg to Richmond, the life lines of Lee's army. Hooker had done precisely what he had planned to do, and he had done it with remarkable skill.

Meade's effervescence did not last long, however. What he wanted to do, he told Slocum, was to keep moving, take what troops were present and start down the road for Fredericksburg with them, "and we'll get out of this wilderness." But Slocum had a late message from army headquarters at Falmouth. Dan Sickles and his corps had been ordered to Chancellorsville, and Slocum was to make no move until they arrived, which would not be until next day. The army went into bivouac, with Meade slightly crestfallen.

Meade had touched on one cause for unease: they were still in the Wilderness. There was a little open plain about Chancellorsville itself and there were a few stunted farms scattered here and there, but in the main the army was surrounded by a forest which looked literally impenetrable—a mean sort of woodland, its second-growth timber clotted by vines and thorns and tangled underbrush, with boggy little streams leading from nowhere to nowhere, crossed by a few very narrow, inadequate roads. Advantages of numbers and guns could be canceled out if it should come to fighting here. If Hooker proposed to destroy the Rebel army, he had not quite reached the right place for it.

One other reason for doubt was cropping up that night, if anybody had bothered to notice it. Out on the byroads to the south and the west Yankee cavalry detachments were being driven in by hard-riding Confederates, Stuart himself riding at the head of one furious charge down a moonlit lane. These Yankee detachments were being driven in partly because they got confused in the patternless forest roads, but mostly because they were badly outnumbered. In view of the fact that Yankee cavalry was much stronger than Confederate cavalry that spring, this was odd.
¹⁶

Stoneman had crossed the river and had gone riding south as ordered, heading for the remote, unguarded Rebel rear. Stuart had assigned one skimpy brigade to follow him—a detachment so weak it could hardly do more than keep him under observation—and with the bulk of his men had come pelting cross-country to join up with Lee. As a result he was now in shape to ride rings around Hooker's army. Having built up his cavalry so that it could dominate the field, Hooker had sent all of it away except for four regiments, and these were groping blindly against the cordon that Stuart was pulling in around the army.

However, all of that might not mean much. For once in history the Army of the Potomac tonight had the jump on its rival, and spirits were running high: Hooker's spirits, and the spirits of the men, who were laughing and shouting as they chopped firewood and pitched their pup tents in the little clearings and along the margins of the turnpike. Hooker reached the crossroads that evening and promptly issued General Order Number 47, which was read to all the troops at evening parade:

"It is with heart-felt satisfaction that the commanding general announces to the army that the operations of the past three days have determined that our enemy must either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him."
¹⁷

The soldiers were feeling good, and that was just what they wanted to hear. They believed in themselves again and Joe Hooker was responsible, and if now he said that the enemy was about to be whipped, everybody was ready to take him at his word. Parade lines broke up with men cheering and tossing their caps and knapsacks in the air, the brigade bands began to play, and the army sat around its campfires feeling jubilant, which it had not felt since the early days of the war.
¹⁸

Next day was May Day. It came in with a slow misty rain, dank and chilly under the trees, a thin fog hanging in the narrow roads and the scattered fields. Dan Sickles rode in at the head of his troops, the day turned fair and the sun dried things up, and a little before noon the army wheeled into thick columns and started out for Fredericksburg.

Three roads led there: river road meandering to the left to follow the curves of the Rappahannock, turnpike in the center, old plank road curving around to the right and joining the turnpike halfway to Fredericksburg. Meade had his three divisions up in front and he sent two of them along the river road and had George Sykes and his regulars go along the turnpike. On the right, Slocum started down the plank road with the XII Corps. The other outfits present were ordered to stand by.

As the corps commanders understood it, they were to push ahead until they were out of the Wilderness on open ground. There they would join hands, with Meade's extreme left touching the river and uncovering Banks Ford—a matter of some importance, this last, since it would cut in half the distance from Chancellorsville to Sedgwick's men. With all of this done, the army would be ready for the big fight.

The divisions on the river road had an uneventful time, but Sykes's regulars ran into trouble. From Chancellorsville, going east along the turnpike, the ground rose in a long slope heavily covered with jack pines and scrub oaks and spiky bushes and cut up by little streams. It was
^-
very bad walking, as the skirmishers who went on ahead soon discovered. A couple of miles from Chancellorsville this gentle slope reached a broad crest, where the Wilderness thinned out and the country began to look more prosperous. Along this crest Sykes's advance guard ran into Rebel skirmishers.

There was a little intermittent firing, and then as the enemy skirmishers faded back they disclosed solid lines of Confederate infantry, supported here and there by artillery. The guns began to plaster the road and the wood with shells, and as the regulars struggled through the underbrush to deploy, the opposition became heavier. Men were hit, and the firing rolled out in long, echoing volleys, and Sykes realized that because the roads diverged he was in touch neither with the rest of Meade's corps on his left nor with Slocum's men on his right. From Slocum's front, as a matter of fact, more firing could be heard, with a dirty-looking cloud of smoke going up toward the sky. The Rebels began to assail the flanks of Sykes's line, and he sent word back to Hooker that he needed help.

Back at Chancellorsville, Hooker had heard the firing and he sent Couch down the road with Hancock's division to help. When Couch came up he found Sykes pulling his men back into a better defensive position, the Rebel attack having become quite strong. Couch prepared to bring Hancock's men up, restore contact with Slocum and Meade, and resume the advance. Before he could do much about it, however, new orders came in from Hooker: call everything off and bring everybody back to Chancellorsville.
¹⁰

Couch sent an aide back to protest that Sykes was in no real trouble and that they could soon butt their way through the Rebel line to the open ground where Hooker wanted to go, but it did no good. The aide returned with orders for retreat reiterated. Off to the right and left, Slocum and Meade were bringing back the rest of the troops, Meade storming and demanding, "If he thinks he can't hold the top of the hill, how does he expect to hold the bottom of it?"
²⁰
Glumly Couch swung Hancock's men into line to act as rear guard, and the regulars marched back to Chancellorsville.

He was a cool customer, Couch. Slight, rather frail, a professional soldier who had won much reputation and lost nearly all of his health in the Mexican War, he was a man who had great personal courage. After Hancock's deployment the gunners in a distant Rebel battery saw massed troops on the turnpike and began to throw shells, trying to find the range. Couch turned to his staff and said, "Let us draw their fire," and led his officers up to an open knoll where the gunners could not fail to see them. The trick worked—gunners could seldom resist a chance to shoot at a cluster of mounted officers—and the infantry on the road escaped punishment. As it happened, nobody was hit, although it is written that the staff was not especially enthusiastic about any part of the deal.
²¹

By evening the troops were back in the lines they had left that morning, the higher officers very dubious, enlisted men puzzled but not especially disturbed. Couch found Hooker full of reassurance: "It's all right, Couch, I've got Lee just where I want him." Couch said nothing, but made a mental note to the effect that the major general commanding was a beaten man.
²²

Couch may have been right. Hooker was talking too
much, too loudly, too confidentl
y—and, as Senator Sumner would have said, too blasphemously. To .officers at headquarters he proudly announced: "The Rebel army is now the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac." A little later he declared: "The enemy is in my power, and God Almighty cannot deprive me of them."
²³
Then, descending
to business, he dictated a circular order to corps commanders, instructing them to put their lines in a condition of defense, with wagon trains parked in the rear, and he closed with the statement:

"The major general commanding trusts that a suspension in the attack today will embolden the enemy to attack him."

Of all the hopes Joe Hooker ever had, that was the one destined to be the most completely realized.

FOUR

On the Other Side of the River

1. Some of Us Will Not See Another Sunrise

Perhaps Joe Hooker had lost his nerve. He could be debonair under fire, riding unconcerned into the middle of the fighting line, and the soldiers considered him very courageous. But here in the gloomy forest, with responsibility settling down over headquarters like the shades of blackest night, it was a little different. The showdown had come before he was quite ready. He had planned to be out in the open, and the Rebels had hit him ahead of time. There was a soft spot in the man, and the cruel test of war had found it. Now it was Robert E. Lee who was going to say what happened next.

Where do those soft spots come from? Somewhere between West Point and Chancellorsville—a few hundred miles in an air line, an incalculable distance as a man's life goes—there had developed in this man's character a little place that would collapse under pressure. No one had known it was there, Hooker least of all, but it was giving way right now as the moon came up over the forest and the camp-fires glowed under the trees, while the shooting died away on the picket lines and a misty light lay on the narrow roads.