Glory Road (35 page)

They put in a gloomy night. Losses had been heavy, the lanterns of the stretcher-bearers were bobbing through the woods and across the fields for hours, and Sedgwick stayed awake almost all night, trying to get word of his plight to Hooker and to get some sort of intelligent instructions in return. One soldier remembered that the "night was inexpressibly gloomy," and the 95th Pennsylvania recalled an episode of eerie horror. One of their number had been killed while climbing over a rail fence and by some appalling freak remained balanced upright astride the top rail all night, rocking slowly to and fro in the breeze, his comrades in bivouac a few hundred feet away able to see his white face distinctly in the fight of the full moon. Rebel pickets held the line of the fence, and when they fired, the flash of their pieces put a lurid light on the ghostly figure.
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The next day was May 4, and Hooker's main body stayed in its lines while Lee tried to destroy Sedgwick's corps. Lee might have succeeded if he had been able to mount his attack in time, but one of his division commanders was sluggish and the ground was difficult, and in the end Sedgwick was able to stand the Confederates off until after dark, when he finally managed to get his men back to the north side of the Rappahannock. From first to last his venture had cost forty-seven hundred casualties and had done no good whatever, except that for some thirty-six hours it had diverted Lee's attention from Joe Hooker.

May 5 came in rainy, with Hooker's men huddled in trenches or in dripping woods behind the lines. The Rappahannock was rising rapidly, and the pontoon bridges at United States Ford, only remaining avenue of communication between the Army of the Potomac and the North, were swaying insecurely on the flood. The eight days' rations had all been eaten or lost, supply trains were back around

Falmouth, and it seemed to Hooker that he and his army were in a desperately bad spot. Army intelligence said that Longstreet had brought his corps up from below Richmond to take a hand in the game, and after Sedgwick's defeat there was obviously nothing to keep Lee from assaulting Hooker's lines with everything he had.

Army intelligence was wrong about Longstreet, who was still far away. Its information came from Rebel deserters, who seem to have been planted for purposes of deception. However, Hooker was having a stiff case of McClellan caution, and that evening he called his corps commanders into council to see whether it might not be time to retreat.

The meeting was neither happy nor harmonious. Slocum was late and did not get to headquarters until after the meeting had adjourned. Meade was angry, full of fight and eager to resume the battle. Howard was somewhat subdued, feeling that his corps had been responsible for the army's troubles, but he too was all in favor of fighting it out. Reynolds was sullen and weary. He told Meade to vote his proxy for an offensive, and then lay down in a corner and went to sleep. Couch, slight and pale, looking more like a clergyman than a corps commander, was quietly bitter, making it clear that he would vote for an offensive if someone besides Hooker were to be in command but not otherwise. Sickles confessed himself an amateur soldier among professionals and was frankly ready to vote for a retreat. Hooker let his generals talk by themselves for a while and then came back in to say that his mind was made up and that the army would go back to Falmouth. As the meeting broke up Reynolds inquired savagely (quite loud enough for Hooker to hear him, one said): "What was the sense of calling us all together if he had decided to retreat anyway?"
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So here was the end to all the bright prospects and the fine talk, and Hooker's boasts would dance about in the newspaper columns to torment him for many a fine day. Meade's V Corps took station in the wet wood to act as rear guard, with a long picket line strung out in the darkness, and in the black night over atrocious roads the brigades and divisions of the rest of the army climbed out of their trenches and headed back for the river. There were the usual delays and mix-ups, and some regiments stood in line for hours, men falling asleep where they stood, so that orders had to be relaxed to permit the men to lie down in place and sleep in the mud and pelting rain if they could. Wind and rain grew worse, and somewhere after midnight the rising river broke the bridges. Hooker had already gone back to Falmouth, and here was the army on one side of the river and its commanding general on the other, all communication cut off and nobody able to say when or whether it would be restored. Somebody told General Couch about it, remarking that under these circumstances he, Couch, was now in effective command of the army. Couch replied that if that was so the army would turn around next morning and fight, but that meanwhile he was going to go to his tent and try to get a little sleep. Later the bridges were rebuilt and stern orders came from Hooker to resume the retreat, and by the middle of the morning the last of the rear guard was north of the rive
r and the engineers were dismantl
ing the bridges.
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The march from United States Ford back to Falmouth was slow and dreary. Tired and dejected, the soldiers fell out by platoons, some of them exhausted by fighting and marching, others fed up with the war and ready to quit. For the rest of the week all the countryside within a twenty-mile radius was swarming with stragglers, some of them in a lawless, ugly mood. They were pillaging houses for food, robbing citizens of their clothing and then putting it on in place of their own uniforms, and striking out for Alexandria and the road home. The provost marshal had squads of cavalry combing the woods and fields, but before long he was notifying the high command that he was outnumbered and asking for help.
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The rain did not let up—one diarist spoke of "a tremendous cold storm"—and the infantry came slopping in, soaking wet and covered with mud, in an atmosphere as glum as a funeral. Somewhat bewildered, a private in the 83rd Pennsylvania wrote that "no one seems to understand this move, but I have no doubt it is all right." He added that his outfit got back to camp completely exhausted, saying: "Most of the way the mud was over shoe, in some places knee deep, and the rain made our loads terrible to tired shoulders."
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General headquarters was getting a count on the losses and was discovering that this Chancellorsville battle had cost more than seventeen thousand casualties, of which six thousand came under the heading "missing." A good many of these latter entries stood for men who had quietly died in the dark forest without being noticed by surviving comrades, but the list also represented many men captured by the Rebels, which indicated that things might not have been too good in some of the combat outfits. Desertions were heavy from the XI Corps, as might have been expected. Surprisingly enough, they seemed to be equally heavy from Slocum's XII Corps, which had fought magnificently on May 3, and from Reynolds's I Corps, which had not had to fight at all.
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Back in Falmouth, Hooker began to find out what his cavalry had been doing, and the story did not please him. Stoneman had started down from the river full of enthusiasm, apparently minded to carry out his orders to the letter. He was supposed to get as rapidly as possible to Hanover Junction, which was where the Virginia Central Railroad crossed the line of the Fredericksburg Railroad, for if that junction and its adjacent tracks and bridges were properly smashed, Lee's supply problem would have been impossible. Once he got under way, however, Stoneman had second thoughts. He sent half of his command off under Averell to keep Rebel cavalry at a distance, and Averell wandered over to Rapidan Station and went into bivouac there, confused and inert, as much out of the war as if he had been in Cuba. With the rest, Stoneman rode down to the line of the Virginia Central and then got entangled in his own eloquence.

Calling his regimental commanders together, he explained that "we had dropped in that region of country like a shell, and I intended to burst it in every direction, expecting each piece or fragment would do as much harm and create nearly as much terror as would result from sending the whole shell, and thus magnify our small force into overwhelming numbers."
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This was putting it very nicely, and it showed that General Stoneman could thrash about in the rank second growth of the English language as valiantly as the next man, but it did not describe the part which Hooker had expected his cavalry to play. There had been nothing whatever to prevent Stoneman from marching his men into Lee's immediate rear. Practically all of Lee's transportation was collected at Guiney's Station, some eighteen miles south of Chancellorsville, and the guard there was of the sketchiest. Stoneman's division could have destroyed the lot, together with all of the supplies collected there, and Hooker's dream of the Rebel army in desperate retreat might have become a reality.

Instead of doing that, however, Stoneman broke his troops up into raiding parties (the "bursting shell" motif), which did spread a good deal of alarm in Richmond but which Lee simply ignored. A contributory factor may have been that Stoneman suffered extensively from piles at this time, so that riding was torture to him and the driving, twenty-hours-in-the-saddle kind of advance which Hooker had expected was just too much for him.
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But whatever the cause, the result was that the cavalry had been wasted. One disgusted trooper wrote that "our only accomplishments were the burning of a few canal boats on the upper James River, some bridges, hen roosts, and tobacco houses." Hooker furiously relieved Averell of his command—a soldier remembered passing cavalry headquarters the day that order came out and seeing Averell seated in his tent, his head in his hands, the very picture of dejection—and a bit later he relieved Stoneman as well, putting Pleasonton in his place.
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That would not undo what had been done, however, and the unhappy fact remained that the Hooker who had turned the Yankee cavalry into an effective instrument had not been able to get any service out of it when the big test came.

But if Hooker's cavalry had let him down, the worst letdown had come from Hooker himself. He had planned his campaign like a master and had carried out the first half of it with great skill, and then, when the pinch came, he had simply folded up. There had been no courage in him, no life, no spark; during most of the battle the army to all intents and purposes had had no commander at all. With a two-to-one advantage in numbers, Hooker had let his men fight at a numerical disadvantage at every important point on the battlefield. Howard's XI Corps had been mashed by an irresistible flank attack, but the real reason for that disaster was the fact that neither Hooker nor anyone else in authority would listen to the specific warnings which the unhappy Dutchmen had repeatedly sent in. Thereafter, while Lee and Stuart crushed his lines around Fairview and Chancellorsville, Hooker had held thirty thousand good troops out of action; he had cowered in his trenches while Lee broke up Sedgwick's corps; and then, to cap it all, he had hastily retreated across the river just as he was about to be given a chance to redeem the whole situation.

For on the morning the army recrossed the river Lee had actually been planning a full-scale assault on Hooker's lines. Those lines were strong; Hooker still had a two-to-one advantage in numbers, he had 106 guns in emplacements with 140 more in reserve, and by all military logic that assault should have resulted in a Confederate defeat as bad as the one at Malvern Hill.
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Yet it may be that military logic would have had nothing to do with it. Lee had not been contending with the Yankee army at Chan-cellorsville. He had been contending with Joe Hooker; he was more of a man than Hooker was, and Hooker knew it. Couch may have been right: if Hooker was to remain in command the thing to do was to get back across the river as fast as possible, because victory just was not in the man. Years later, when someone asked Hooker what went wrong at Chancellorsville, the general knew a rare moment of humility and remarked, "Well, to tell the truth, I just lost confidence in Joe Hooker."

In Washington there was deep dejection because of the battle—in Washington, which is always convinced that the soul-tearing doubts which come from looking at operations from the under side will immediately overwhelm every American citizen. Senator Sumner, tall and handsome, bearing on his face the indescribable shadow of the brain injuries left by Bully Brooks's cane, stalked into Secretary Welles's office, threw out his arms dramatically, and cried: "Lost —lost—all is lost!" Welles was hardly surprised. He had already noted that the War Department was shuffling papers, staring at the ceiling, and talking the vaguest of double talk, and by these infallible signs he knew the army had been beaten again. Horace Greeley cringed in print at the thought that the finest army on the planet had been defeated by "an army of ragamuffins." Lincoln had been hopeful as long as there was any room for hope, but he finally got the bad news in the form of a laconic telegram from Dan Butterfield. He read it, and his sallow face turned ashen-gray, and to a caller he said, as if dazed: "My God! What will the country say?"
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The President's anguished question went across the capital in muffled echoes, and government waited in deepest suspense for the answer. And at last, slowly, imperceptibly, it became evident that the country was not going to say anything at all.

There were sensitive weather vanes in Washington, and in the days following Chancellorsville they caught no breeze whatever. The profound depression which had settled down on the nation after Fredericksburg did not reappear. The editors and orators who could make political capital out of disaster flailed the air as usual and seemed to get no particular response. Most significant of all, perhaps —like the inactivity of the dog in the nighttime in the Sherlock