Glory Road (32 page)

2. Hell Isn't Half a Mile Off

The explosion that wrecked the Dutchmen left Sickles's men isolated. They had heard little or nothing of all the firing in their rear, and when darkness came down in the dense thickets around the ironworks they had supposed that everything was going as it should. Sickles himself was skeptical when he first got the news about what had happened to Howard. Convinced at last, he pulled his men back to Hazel Grove, with Berdan's sharpshooters forming the rear guard, sniping at Rebel patrols which moved forward to maintain contact. The sharpshooters were interested mostly in the exploits of one of their chaplains, the Reverend Lorenzo Barber of the second regiment, who had taken one of the old-fashioned telescopic-sight rifles and had gone out on the skirmish line, where legend magnified his exploits prodigiously, leading to the assertion that he had shot Rebels out of trees a mile away. From that time on, it is recorded, Chaplain Barber always had a crowd when he held services. "The chaplain practices what he preaches," said one soldier. "He tells us what we should do, and goes with us to the very front to help us in battle."
¹

Back in Hazel Grove, the fifteen thousand men Sickles had with him began to realize that their situation was potentially serious. Between them and the rest of the army there seemed to be a large number of Confederates. The moon was high, the sky was cloudless, and there was a ghostly light in the roads and clearings, with acrid layers of smoke drifting about like an evil fog, but under the trees the night was black as ink, and nobody's sense of direction seemed to mean anything in this tangled woods country. Most of the men had got wet wading creeks and swamps, and the night had turned chilly. Near Chancellorsville and the turnpike the night pulsed and glowed with intermittent gunfire. Hooker had put thirty-six guns in line by the little cemetery, and the gunners looked out over a land of hazy moonlight and deceptive shadows and fired whenever they believed that they saw movement.
²

Sickles felt that he was in a desperate position, and he prepared to have his men fight their way back inside the Union lines. In the queer twilight about the Hazel Grove clearing he tried to form an assaulting column, with confused officers getting the men headed in the general direction of Chancellorsville, and he sent couriers flying down the dark woods roads to notify Hooker and Slocum. While he was getting his men lined up, an advancing Rebel patrol came into the clearing from the south, and the darkness all around twinkled and sparkled with rifle fire, stampeding all of the wagons and camp followers into wild flight back toward the Rappahannock and safety. The batteries which had been parked in the clearing swung into position and knocked the Confederates back into their own lines—a little exploit which the imaginative cavalryman, General Alfred Pleason-ton, later magnified into a great save-the-Union repulse of Stonewall Jackson's entire corps.
³

Back by Fairview Cemetery the gunners were alert. A few hundred yards west of them Berry's division and four or five thousand unpanicked survivors of the XI Corps had formed a line across the turnpike, and when the gunners fired at the Rebels their shell passed low over this line. That unnerved the infantry and now and then killed a few of them, since the shell fuses and propellants of that era were slightly erratic, but there was no help for it. The gunners fired at anything that looked like a target and opened a tremendous cannonade once when they saw a shadowy mass of Rebel infantry on the moonlit highway. The gunfire almost destroyed the party which was carrying the wounded Stonewall Jackson to the rear, did wound General A. P. Hill, and disrupted the formation of a division which he was preparing for a new assault.
⁴

The Confederates had not yet lost sight of the fact that their big hope that night was to keep moving. Their lines were nearly as disorganized by victory as the Federal lines were by defeat, there were more Yankees than Rebels around Chancellorsville, and if the Yankees ever got properly reorganized the situation could easily be reversed. Jackson had the one great virtue of an aggressive soldier: he believed that no victory was complete as long as a single enemy was on his feet and breathing. When he was shot down he was trying to find a way to slide his troops to the northward, past the Chan-cellorsville clearing, and cut the Yankees off from their line of supply and retreat over the Rappahannock. On paper it is hard to see how he could have done it, since Hooker had an unused army corps in the vicinity, but in all that Wilderness nobody but Jackson really knew what the chances were that night, and if the man had not been shot he might just possibly have done what he wanted to do. In any case, the Rebels had not yet given up for the night.

Around the Chancellorsville house there was the utmost confusion. The clearing was a wild jamboree of stragglers, riderless horses, advancing troops, and galloping couriers, fragments of regiments trying to rally, wagons and pack mules going at the dead run down the roads and across the fields. Huge fires were burning in the woods, stretcher parties were coming and going, and here and there brass bands were industriously making music to restore the spirits of defeated men. Shells exploded overhead, the blast of the massed guns by the cemetery lit the sky like recurrent sheet lightning, and the fringes of the woods broke out with little pin points of flame as skirmishers and pickets fired into the darkness. There was an unending racket, and most of the time the low-hanging smoke blotted out the moonlight.
⁵

In all of this seething confusion Sickles's couriers went astray, and his intention to fight his way back into the lines was known to no one. In addition, Sickles did not know that there was a solid Federal battle line drawn up across the turnpike and angling off through the woods to the south.
⁶
Men could see very little in that intermittent smoking moonlight, and what they could see was not reliable. Everybody was nervous, and nobody knew where anybody else was or what was apt to happen next.

In spite of everything, Sickles got his men moving at last and they went forward into the blind second-growth jungle, moving north to get to the turnpike. Sickles had three regiments in front—1st New York, 3rd Michigan, and 37th New York—and these advanced "by the right of companies," each company going in its own column of twos, a dozen yards or more separating each column from its neighbors. From the rear, divisional officers sent forward warnings to incline to the right—the columns were drifting to the left; they'd get into Howard's old lines if they weren't careful—and the attack became a blind, aimless drift, pressed forward by sheer weight of numbers.
⁷

In the darkness the men heard voices, sentries challenged, the shadowy outline of earthworks came into view. There were a few shots from skirmishers, then a great sheet of flame lit up the jammed woodland and dropped a choking cloud of smoke, and the company columns ran and stumbled and collided with trees and with each other, trying to get up into line. A Michigan soldier recalled: "Some commence to fire, others follow suit, and all blaze away, not knowing what at, and all seems to be one vast square of fire. All begin to yell and cheer, some go forward, some to the right and others to the left." On the left the men ran into a Confederate entrenchment behind which alert Rebels were waiting, and there was blind hand-to-hand fighting in the darkness. A Pennsylvania private remembered the "awful grandeur" of this attack, and recalled "the demoniac yells of the Rebel forces—the flash of invisible guns marking the line of the enemy's defenses through the darkness—the gleaming of glittering bayonets in the pale moonlight."
⁸

On the right the advancing Federals bumped into a line of Slo-cum's soldiers who thought the Rebels were charging them, and there was a desperate fight between opposing groups of Union troops. In the midst of all of this the Yankee gunners by the cemetery sprang to their pieces and b
egan to hammer the contestants in
discriminately with canister and shell, and Rebel artillery off to the west began firing in reply. In the road and under the trees there was perhaps the most complete infernal mix-up of the army's entire experience, Rebel yell and Federal cheer mixed in together, officers swearing and beating ineffectively with their swords, men screaming, "Don't fire—we're friends!" and nobody able to straighten anything out.
⁸

Looking back on it afterward, General Alpheus Williams of the XII Corps remembered "such an infernal and yet sublime combination of sound and flame and smoke, and dreadful yells of rage, of pain, of triumph, or of defiance." Less emotionally, General Slocum reported: "I have no information as to the damage suffered by our troops from our own fire, but fear that our losses must have been severe." A Massachusetts infantryman who watched from a vantage point near the cemetery wondered how anyone at all survived the assault and the cannonade, especially the latter. The Federal gunners were filling their pieces with all kinds of old iron, he said, including such things as trace chains.
¹⁰

Far back to the rear, by Ely's Ford over the Rapidan, Yankee cavalrymen on a hilltop looked off through the night, and one of them described what they saw:

"A scene like a picture of hell lies below us. As far as the horizon is visible are innumerable fires from burning woods, volumes of black smoke covering the sky, cannon belching in continuous and monotonous roar; and the harsh, quick rattling of infantry firing is heard nearer at hand. It is the Army of the Potomac, on the south of the Rappahannock, engaged at night in a burning forest. At our feet"—for the flying debris of the army had got that far by now— "artillery and cavalry are mixed up, jammed, officers swearing, men straggling, horses expiring."
¹¹

Somehow, at last, the fighting lines were disentangled. Somehow, at last, part of Sickles's men got back inside the lines. The rest stayed in the Hazel Grove clearing and made the best bivouac they could. It was not a very good one. From a barn near the clearing, where wounded men had been taken, came a steady chorus of agonized cries, and off in the woods the men could hear the dreadful screaming of wounded horses. Sporadic outbursts of firing lit the sky, sometimes bringing nervous soldiers to their feet in expectation of attack. Men remembered oddly that when the racket of this fearful night subsided the whippoorwills were singing. Far to the rear, men of the
I Corps, hastily summoned as reinforcements, came marching up the hollow roads from United States Ford singing the John Brown song.
¹²

It was probably the gunners by the cemetery who stabilized the situation, if anything about that chaotic mess could be called stable. After Jackson and Hill were wounded, the Confederates found that the gunfire had so broken up their attempted regrouping that nothing more could be done until morning, and some while after midnight the effort to continue the advance was officially suspended. The moon went down and the firing stopped, and both armies got what sleep they could.

Morning brought better visibility and a great deal more fighting. Hooker was worried about Sickles's men in Hazel Grove, and as soon as it began to get light he ordered them to come on back into the lines—a fatal decision, for it gave to the Confederates what turned out to be an invaluable artillery position, and the Confederates began moving guns into the clearing as soon as the Federals left.

Jackson had broken Hooker's right wing into fragments, but the Union Army still had a perfectly good position, and if Hooker had only realized it he was standing squarely between the two disconnected pieces of Lee's army, with a tremendous advantage of numbers on his side. But Hooker just was not realizing things at Chancellorsville.
¹³
Some paralysis of spirit was on him. The idea of a counterattack seems not to have entered his head. Instead he sent hasty word to Sedgwick, who was supposed to be keeping the Rebel rear guard amused in front of Fredericksburg, ordering him to march to the rescue at once. For the rest, he had the men dig in around the Chancellorsville clearing and prepare to hang on.

The digging was not easy, shovels and spades not being at hand. The men loosened the earth with bayonets or sharpened sticks and then scooped it out with tin plates, pieces of board, or their bare hands. Axmen went forward fifty yards in front of the line and felled trees to form an abatis, or entanglement—a highly effective obstacle when the trees were big enough and were felled so that their branches became intertwined. With some of the branches slashed off and others tied together, the fallen trees could be an almost impassable barrier for advancing infantry. The artillerists by the cemetery had been kept busy all night digging gun pits, and by morning the guns and gun crews were well protected.
¹⁴

Confederate Jeb Stuart, meanwhile, had taken command of the infantry Stonewall Jackson had led. Old Stonewall himself was awaking from an amputation in a field hospital far behind the lines, beginning to drift slowly but surely toward the invisible riverbank which he was to speak of in his last moment on earth. Stuart had Jackson's own ideas about the virtues of an unceasing offensive. Dawn had hardly come before Stuart had his men swinging forward.

They swung first into the Hazel Grove plateau, getting there just as the last of Sickles's men were preparing to leave, and what had begun as an orderly withdrawal turned suddenly into a rout. (An XI Corps soldier who witnessed this note
d with satisfaction that these II
I Corps cocks-o'-the-walk were "apparently as much panic-stricken, and as much stampeded, as any of Howard's men had been. The writer saw these demoralized and disorganized men with his own eyes.")
¹⁵
One of Slocum's brigadiers wrote bitterly that he saw an entire red-pants regiment of Zouaves legging it desperately for the Union lines, pursued by about half of its number of jeering Southerners. He tried to stop these Zouaves, he said, so that they could stand beside his men and fight, but the Zouaves kept on going and the 20th Connecticut came out and drove the pursuers back.
¹⁶

This was the 20th's first fight, and there was in the regiment one man who had said openly, back in bivouac, that he was such a great coward that he believed he would certainly run away the first time he came under fire. His captain made a mental note to keep an eye on him, but when the fighting began he had other things on his mind and forgot the man. Suddenly he came upon him, down on one knee behind a log barricade, loading and firing as coolly as a veteran. The private looked up at him, bit a paper cartridge open, and grinned a leathery Yankee grin. "Hello, Cap'n," he said. "I believe the powder goes in fust, don't it?"
¹⁷