Joe Hooker at last got into action. Late in April he had 130,000 men, present for duty equipped, and he put most of them on the road moving up the Rappahannock, with a powerful cavalry force going on ahead, while detachments at Falmouth feinted at making a crossing there. Lee's time of uncertainty came to an end. He had a few more than 60,000 effectives, but at last he knew what his enemies were trying to do and he told Richmond: "Their intention, I presume, is to turn our left and probably get into our rear."¹⁵ Then, as coolly as if he had all the advantages, he set out to frustrate them.

7.  The Darkness, and Jackson, and Fear

8.   

GOING WEST from Fredericksburg in the old days a traveler would follow the Orange Turnpike, which started out through open farming country as pleasant to see in springtime as anything east of the Blue Ridge. Eight or nine miles from Fredericksburg the countryside's mood changed, and the road went down a long slope into a gloomy second-growth forest known as the Wilderness. The Wilderness stretched west for fifteen miles or more, thinly populated, with dense timber covering irregular ravines and low hills; a year or two later a Federal soldier referred to this gloomy, shaded country, with reason, as a land of grinning ghosts. Not long after the road entered this woodland it reached an unremarkable crossroad called Chancellorsville, where a family named Chancellor had built a big house.

Chancellorsville was not important, except of course to the Chancellor family; it was just white pillars and red brickwork at an open clearing in the woods, with country roads converging in front of it. It lay four miles due south of the place where the Rapidan River flows into the Rappahannock, and from Chancellorsville a road led up to the United States Ford, a crossing-place on the Rappahannock just below the fork. Other roads went northwest from Chancellorsville, to Ely's and Germanna Fords on the Rapidan, and the turnpike itself continued through the Wilderness, going west by south and coming out at last at Orange Courthouse. All of these roads and fords and the twilight tangle about them were obscure enough, in 1863, but if General Hooker intended to fight General Lee he would have to go through this country to get at him, and sooner or later he would have to come to Chancellorsville. To Chancellorsville he came, at last, and the word has been a scar on the national memory ever since.

Perhaps Hooker's trouble was that he won his battle in anticipation, and won it too completely. What began as a simple attempt to maneuver Lee out of his impregnable lines back of Fredericksburg came before long to look like a strategic masterpiece that would win the war; as it took on this aspect it began to seem real before a shot had been

fired, and Hooker's contemplated triumph kept expanding until it burst. As the campaign got under way he remarked jauntily that Lee's army now was the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac, and on the eve of battle he formally announced to all ranks that he had maneuvered so cunningly that the enemy must either fly ingloriously or come out and submit to destruction; and after the campaign was over he confessed frankly: "What I wanted was Lee's army; with that, Richmond would have been ours, and indeed all of Virginia."¹

Lee's army was exactly what Hooker got, but it came at him from the wrong direction when he was thinking about something else and so it was too much for him; and his real trouble was not so much his own vainglory as the fact that he was up against the wrong opponent. After all, Hooker planned very well, and although he executed poorly his advantage in numbers was large enough to rub out a good many mistakes. What he tried would have worked, against most generals. Against Lee it failed so completely that its basic excellence is too easily overlooked.

Hooker began by planning a cavalry sweep that would shear in behind the Confederate left, snip the railroads by which Lee got his supplies, and so compel him to retreat. (Once Lee was out in the open country the Army of the Potomac could doubtless attack him to advantage.) Two days after Mr. Lincoln went back to Washington, Hooker ordered his cavalry commander, Major General George Stoneman, to take his troopers across the upper Rappahannock near the line of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad and start operating in the enemy's rear, "inflicting on him every possible injury which will tend to his discomfiture and defeat." Stoneman set out, but as he began to cross the river a violent rainstorm blew up, the river rose and the unpaved roads went out of sight in mud. Stoneman considered an offensive impossible and recalled his advance guard, and the whole movement came to nothing.² Two weeks passed, and Hooker made a new plan, much more ambitious than the first. It was this plan that brought his army to Chancellorsville.

As before, the cavalry would cross the river and head for the Confederate rear, but this time its role would be comparatively minor. While the cavalry cut Lee's supply lines, the bigger part of the infantry of the Army of the Potomac would also march upstream, cross the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, and then march eastward behind Lee's left. In effect, this flanking column would be approaching Lee's line on Marye's Heights from the rear, and it would be only a little smaller than Lee's entire army.

This force was ordered to go first to Chancellorsville. When it moved from Chancellorsville—with Stoneman's cavalry spreading panic and destruction near Richmond, making it impossible for Lee's army to get either supplies or reinforcements—Lee would have to get out of Fredericksburg in a hurry. If he headed for Richmond, the Federal column could strike him ruinously in the flank; if he turned to fight at Chancellorsville, the rest of the Army of the Potomac, following hard from Fredericksburg, could pitch into him and he could be attacked in front and in rear simultaneously— which of course would be the end of him.

So went the plan. It was a good plan, and up to a point it worked well. The huge flanking column moved precisely as Hooker intended, and by the evening of April 30 he had four army corps at or near Chancellorsville. Shortly after nightfall he reached the place himself, radiating confidence, sure that he had the game in his hand.

He was sure, that is, with part of his mind, the part that he knew about: not sure, apparently, with the part that ran down out of sight in the darkness, where fears come from. Although it was at Chancellorsville that Hooker got out that strange announcement of the impending defeat of Lee's army, it was also at Chancellorsville that he ceased to look like a general who is about to win a great victory and began to resemble one who suspects that he will be beaten if he is not very cautious. He became cautious just a little too soon—a few miles and a few hours short of the victory he had talked about so much.

On the night April ended, Hooker had approximately 50,000 men at Chancellorsville, with 22,000 more on the way. Back at Falmouth, just above Fredericksburg, were 47,000 more, under Major General John Sedgwick, the competent commander of the VI Corps. Sedgwick and Hooker were hardly ten miles apart in a direct line, but as the roads went, roundabout on the United States Ford route, the distance was more than twice that far, and it could be dangerous to separate the two wings of an army so widely in the presence of General Lee. However, the separation would end very soon. On May 1 the force at Chancellorsville was to march eastward near the river, and after a few miles this march would uncover Banks' Ford, a river crossing hardly four miles from Falmouth, and the separated wings would be in touch again. Meanwhile, Sedgwick had laid pontoon bridges below Fredericksburg and had crossed part of his troops, hoping to convince Lee that he was about to attack. If this worked, Lee was not likely to notice what was going on at Chancellorsville, which would be fatal; if he did notice he would of course retreat in haste, in which case Sedgwick was ideally posted to pursue him and bring him to grief.³

The real trouble with Hooker's plan was that it was brittle. It rested on the belief that Lee would react predictably to a series of challenges; if he did not, Federal strategy might need more flexibility than the plan allowed. It had been assumed, for instance, that when Stoneman and his cavalry galloped south Stuart and his cavalry would gallop after; but Stuart did nothing of the kind. The Yankee cavalry might do damage in the unprotected rear areas but Lee's army was the only thing that mattered now, and so Stuart kept his cavalry on Lee's flank to give the army the protection and the knowledge that might make the difference between victory and defeat. As a result he kept Lee posted about the advance and strength of Hooker's flanking force, and kept the flankers from finding out very much about Lee; and by the night of April 30 Lee knew that Sedgwick was bluffing and that the real threat was coming out of the Wilderness at Chancellorsville.

Then he refused to behave as expected. It seemed obvious that if he went to Chancellorsville at all he would take his entire force, because he was so badly outnumbered that he could hardly do anything else, and this of course would open the road for Sedgwick and Lee would eventually be caught between two fires. But simply because he was so terribly outnumbered, Lee was free to take preposterous chances; the odds against him were so long to begin with that it could not hurt much to lengthen them a bit, and anyway an opponent who believed that Lee would do the obvious under any circumstances was simply begging for trouble.

Stonewall Jackson wanted to smash Sedgwick before doing anything else, and although Lee was skeptical he told Jackson to study the ground carefully; if Jackson felt that it could be done Lee would order it. Jackson studied, concluded finally that Sedgwick was not smashable, and so reported, and Lee ordered the army over to Chancellorsville. But he did not take everybody. He detached 10,000 men, entrusted them to hard-fighting Major General Jubal Early, strengthened the contingent with extra artillery, saw that it was well posted on Marye's Heights, and instructed Early to keep Sedgwick from doing any harm.

It seemed folly to leave 10,000 men to oppose 47,000. But it would also have been folly for Lee to try to march back to Richmond with Yankee cavalry blocking the road ahead, four Yankee infantry corps on the immediate flank, and Sedgwick in hot pursuit; worse folly to let the army get pressed to death between the converging halves of the Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville; folly in its highest form simply to do nothing, waiting at Fredericksburg for the executioner. What Lee did was risky, but it was less risky than the other options that were open . . . and anyway it was something General Hooker might not expect. And so on the night of April 30 and the morning of May 1 Lee and Jackson and everybody but Early's command marched toward Chancellorsville to meet Hooker.

Hooker gave them just time enough. Unaccountably, he lost his grip on the situation, somewhere between the afternoon of April 30 and the morning of May 1; the driving energy that had been his saving grace suddenly went out of him, and the army floundered. On this campaign it was Hooker's habit, every evening, to issue orders for the following day's movements. Yet on the night of April 30, when he proclaimed assured victory, Hooker issued no orders at all, although the advance that must be made the next day was the key to the success of the whole campaign. This advance would be short, and if made promptly it would be practically unopposed. By going forward a few miles the army would not only uncover Banks' Ford, which would end the isolation of Sedgwick's force, but would also emerge from the confusing Wilderness and reach open country where the Federal advantage in manpower and artillery could be exploited to the full. But Hooker spent most of the morning waiting at Chancellorsville. Not until eleven o'clock on May 1 was his army put in motion; then, with three corps advancing on separate roads, Hooker learned that the Confederates were not quite where he thought they were. The heads of his columns suddenly ran into Confederate skirmishers and there were bursts of rifle fire from the woods and hills that fringed the little clearings.

The opposition did not seem to be especially heavy, and the Federal commanders prepared to form lines of battle and clear the way, but Hooker's plan abruptly fell completely apart. Up from Chancellorsville came unexpected orders from headquarters: cancel the advance, break off the firing, and bring everybody back to a defensive position around the Chancellorsville crossroad.⁴

The corps commanders were dumfounded and indignant, and Darius Couch of II Corps, their senior, hurried to headquarters to protest. Hooker tried to soothe him, saying: "I have got Lee just where I want him; he must fight me on my own ground." Couch went away, convinced (as he wrote later) that "my commanding general was a whipped man,"⁵ and Couch was about right. From the day of his appointment up until this moment, Hooker had been all that a general ought to be; now, in the shadows of the Wilderness, he was alone with his responsibility and it was too much for him. He had planned to destroy Lee's army: now he was hoping that Lee's army would be obliging enough to destroy itself. All that happened to Hooker at Chancellorsville-—to him, and to the unlucky private soldiers who lived and died by his orders— was foreshadowed in his strange withdrawal on the afternoon of May 1.

Hooker drew his lines at Chancellorsville—long lines, and strong, with a bulging crescent on a low plateau east and south of the Chancellorsville house, one wing on the left stretching all the way up to the Rappahannock, the other drawn up along the turnpike, facing south. Here Hooker waited, his men using axes and spades to strengthen their field works, and the afternoon ended and night came. It was an uneasy night, with a big moon putting a streaky light on the landscape, Confederate patrols prowling about in front to see how things were, Stuart's squadrons sweeping all the roads and keeping the Federals from seeing anything except what the moonlight would show, a man from a rifle pit in the thickets. To Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, his chief of staff, who had stayed at Falmouth, Hooker sent a message: all of Stuart's cavalry was in his front, which meant that Stoneman ought to "do a land-office business" far to the south; Sedgwick was to watch the Confederates closely and keep them from doing whatever they tried to do; and at Chahcellorsville "I think the enemy in his desperation will be compelled to attack me on my own ground."⁸

This meant that it was Lee's turn now; Hooker had given up the initiative and Lee had grasped it. That night, around a campfire in the woods just out of gunshot from Hooker's lines, Lee and Stonewall Jackson met to consider the best way to strike their foes.

They were not nearly strong enough to make a frontal assault, and the Federal left could not be turned, but Stuart's cavalry had learned that Hooker's right was "in the air"; the line went west from Chancellorsville for two or three miles and then simply ended, wholly unprepared for an attack from the west. If the Confederates could mass troops four or five miles west of Chancellorsville, these troops could march straight into Hooker's rear and the Federal position would collapse. Hooker had placed the bigger part of his army in position to do this to Lee but he had failed to go on and do it; as a result he had given Lee the chance to do exactly the same thing to him, and of all the soldiers in North America Lee and Jackson were the ones most likely to see and to accept this opportunity. They lost little time coming to a decision, and shortly after the sun came up on May 2 Stonewall Jackson put his army corps on the road and set off to crumple the Federal flank.⁷

Jackson was the man who would strike the blow, and much would depend on his skill and daring; but the real responsibility was Lee's, and the risk he was taking now made all his earlier risks seem mild. He had already divided his army, leaving 10,000 men to hold four times their number at Fredericksburg, and he had with him at Chancellorsville no more than 42,000 infantry. Now he was dividing this inadequate force, sending 28,000 off with Jackson on a twelve-mile flanking march that would unquestionably take most of the day. For about ten hours Lee would have just 14,000 men to oppose most of Hooker's army, 70,000 men. Ten hours could bring him to ruin if Hooker once saw what was happening.

Hooker actually did see a little of it, but he misinterpreted what he saw and in the end was worse off than if he had seen nothing at all. After Jackson moved, Lee kept his 14,000 busy, shifting men about, opening sudden bursts of artillery and infantry fire, giving indications that he was about to assault the Federal left. Hoping that such an attack would be made, Hooker accepted these indications at face value. But Jackson's march was discovered. Making his long detour to the west, Jackson at one place had to turn sharply to his left to get past a patch of open country some three miles from Hooker's right-center, and the Federal outposts saw a long column of Rebel infantry accompanied by artillery and wagons—the wagons, of course, being nothing more than Jackson's ambulances and ammunition train. For a moment Hooker was on the verge of full awareness, and he ordered Major General Oliver Otis Howard, who held the extreme right, to prepare for a flank attack.⁸ Then he had a second thought, which led him to disaster.

That Confederate column, after all, was moving south, and wagon trains were with it: Did not this mean that Lee was at last making the retreat which any sensible man in his position ought to make? This seemed all the more likely because the activity on the Federal left was not actually bringing on a real fight, and Hooker accepted the welcome notion: Lee was fleeing, and it was necessary to molest him. Shortly after noon Hooker ordered Major General Daniel E. Sickles, a political general of most moderate military capacity, to take his II Corps forward and attack that moving column, and he jubilantly told General Couch: "Lee is in full retreat toward Gordonsville, and I have sent out Sickles to capture his artillery." Couch remembered afterward that it did seem odd that this momentous retreat was to be struck with only one army corps.

When Sickles advanced most of Jackson's column had passed; Jackson detailed less than one brigade to hold Sickles off and kept everybody else moving, swinging north through the concealing Wilderness to go up beyond the Federal right. Sickles got into a noisy, inconclusive fight; his own inexperience and the dense second-growth timber kept him from seeing that he was fighting no more than a detachment, and after a time he called for reinforcements. Hooker had Howard send him a brigade, and got off a message to Falmouth: Sedgwick was to seize Fredericksburg and everybody in it because Lee was in retreat and Sickles was attacking him.⁹

This was all very well; but when Hooker sent Sickles forward he created a big gap in his line and left Howard's XI Corps completely isolated, and when he reinforced Sickles he made Howard's corps still weaker. Sending away one brigade, Howard now had fewer than 10,000 men, most of them posted so that they could not possibly meet a flank attack, and the rest of the Federal army was two miles away. By three in the afternoon Jackson began to reach the position he wanted. Two hours later he had formed a battle line two miles wide and in some places three divisions deep, lined up astride of the turnpike, ready to come in from west and northwest on a Federal line that was resolutely facing to the south.

Howard's XI Corps was a hard-luck organization all the way. It included many German regiments, referred to loftily by the rest of the army as Dutchmen of unproved fighting quality, and it had previously been commanded by Franz Sigel, under whom it had won no distinction whatever. Sigel had recently resigned after a quarrel over rank, and although he was quite incompetent he was the idol of the Germans. They never warmed up to Howard, a strait-laced man famous for his unbounded piety, not at all the sort to appeal to this assemblage of ill-disciplined free-thinkers. (Abner Doubleday, who disliked Howard deeply, considered him much too other-worldly, and scoffed: "At West Point he talked nothing but religion. If a young lady was introduced to him he would ask her if she had reflected on the goodness of God during the past night.")¹⁰ Howard was a good soldier, but he shared Hooker's idea that the Rebels this afternoon were in flight. Some of his junior officers sensed that Jackson was about to descend on them, but they could not get anyone in authority to listen to them and at five o'clock the troops were at ease, many with their arms stacked preparing supper. Over the treetops came remote echoes from Sickles' fight, but along this front all was quiet. Sunset was less than two hours away, and as far as the XI Corps was concerned an uneventful day was about to come to a close.

Then Stonewall Jackson's bugles sounded beyond the western forest, and his powerful battle line came crashing forward through the thickets, the peace and quiet of the evening ended in an uproar of Rebel yells and heavy musketry, General Hooker's delusion ended along with it, and Howard's corps was routed. Jackson's men stormed eastward through the timber, where the undergrowth was so thick some men found their uniforms ripped off entirely, and a couple of miles farther on the Chancellorsville clearing came alive with bursting shell and running men and panicky teamsters flogging frightened horses. (One trouble was that Howard's wagons and his herds of beef cattle had been parked just behind his lines: when the Rebels came all of these went east in a prodigious hurry, slicing across the immediate rear of all the rest of the army.) Night came on, and the full moon shone down through dust and smoke and bursts of flame, and the right wing of the Federal army had gone to pieces.

Say this much for Howard's Dutchmen: they fought, even if they never got credit for it, and although they were beaten they grave ground stubbornly. For proof there is their casualty list—the butcher's bill, as tough generals used to say. In about two hours of fighting, between late afternoon and night, they lost more than 2400 men in killed, wounded and missing, which means that some of them fought desperately. They could not stay very long, because there were too many Confederates; any unit that made a stand was attacked in front and on both flanks; but the thing was not the helpless runaway that is usually described. Jackson crumpled the Union right but he met some stiff opposition.

Darkness brought universal confusion. Bursts of fire kept breaking out in unexpected places, drifting smoke stained the moonlight, no one knew where anyone else was, and one Federal said it all when he wrote: "Darkness was upon us, and Jackson was on us, and fear was on us." Jackson's triumphant corps was half-disorganized itself, brigades and divisions having become all intermingled in the formless fighting. Far out in front, Sickles' men began to understand that something had gone very wrong far in the rear, and they made a shaky, uncoordinated retreat, fighting blindly with other Federal units when they collided in the darkness. Over at Fredericksburg, Sedgwick got a peremptory order from headquarters: he was to occupy Fredericksburg and march at once along the road to Chancellorsville, being sure to "attack and destroy" any Confederate force he met.¹¹ Around the Chancellorsville clearing, powerful Federal artillery opened a blind fire whenever the gunners saw anything moving in the woodland in front. For the time being the Confederate attack had come to a standstill.

Then Jackson paid the penalty for being the kind of man he was. He was strange, impassioned, made of fire crossed with a belief in pre-destination, and this evening he could think of nothing except that his enemies were in trouble, so he tried with furious single-mindedness to keep the battle moving. His corps desperately needed realignment, not to mention rest, and a cautious general would have called a halt in order to get people sorted out. But Jackson knew that if he could put armed Confederates on the bank of the Rappahannock before the night ended Hooker might lose his entire army, and he had not the faintest notion of stopping. He rode on ahead of his troops, looking for the roads that might lead to his goal, and in the darkness and general mix-up he got in front of a North Carolina regiment that had been bracing itself for an expected attack by Yankee cavalry. The regiment saw Jackson and his mounted aides, moving horsemen coming out of the deep shadows, it opened fire—and Jackson was shot off his horse, bullets in him, a death wound on him. They got him back to the rear at last, and at last the night became quiet.

Most of the battle remained to be fought, and Joe Hooker could have won it, except that by now he himself had been beaten beyond recall. His troops were ready: only a few of them had fought at all, and he still had more than 70,000 men between the two halves of Lee's army. As caustic General Couch said, all he needed to do was "take a reasonable common-sense view of the state of things" in order to retrieve everything he had lost.¹² This was beyond him. When daylight of May 3 came the Confederates resumed the attack— with Jackson gone, and A. P. Hill, his ranking division commander, wounded, his corps was temporarily led by Cavalryman Jeb Stuart, who bore in mind Lee's warning that it was vital to get the two wings of the Confederate army into contact again. Stuart attacked on one side and the other wing of Lee's army attacked on the other, there was bitter fighting in the woods west of Chancellorsville, and by noon the Federals had given up more ground, Lee had his army united once more, and Hooker's men had been reduced to fortifying a rambling salient covering the approaches to United States Ford. Hooker had been stunned when a cannon ball struck a pillar of the Chancellorsville house against which he was leaning, but this made no difference because he was numb already. This was Lee's battle, all the way.

Lee went on to prove it. Sedgwick got his corps together and stormed Early's line back of Fredericksburg, and just as Lee's soldiers won the Chancellorsville clearing Lee learned that the Federal VI Corps was coming up on his rear. As coolly as if he had unlimited resources, Lee divided his army once more, keeping a fraction to bemuse Hooker while the rest went back to deal with Sedgwick. That unhappy general, whose original function had been to exploit any opening Hooker's men made and who now found himself obliged to fight his way to Hooker's rescue, was penned up next day in an uneven rectangle near Salem Church, six miles east of Chancellorsville, attacked from three sides while Hooker's 70,000 prepared to defend the Rappahannock escape route. Sedgwick had to retreat, getting his troops safely across Banks' Ford—the crossing which Hooker's maneuverings had been supposed to open in the first place—and once this had happened, Lee brought everybody back to Chancellorsville to attack Hooker's bridgehead. By any sober estimate, Lee would have ruined his army if he had tried it, attacking superior numbers in a strong, well-entrenched position . . . but he had the battle in his pocket by this time, and if he had struck Hooker once more Hooker would almost certainly have collapsed. Hooker did not wait for him. He took his army back to the north side of the Rappahannock on May 6, moved over to Falmouth, and began to argue that his woes came mostly because of the shameful flight of the XI Corps. The campaign and battle of Chancellorsville were over.

On May 10 Stonewall Jackson died of his wounds in a little cottage at Guiney Station. To the very end he was trying to move on. Just before he died he said that he wanted to cross the river—the river—and rest under the shade of the trees. At last he had found the road to it.

4. Aftermath of Victory

ON MAY 12, in Richmond, all of the church bells were tolling, the flags were at half-mast, minute guns were fired, and government offices and places of business were closed. Thousands of people stood bareheaded in the streets to see Stonewall Jackson's coffin go past.

The coffin was covered with a Confederate flag topped by evergreen sprays and wreaths of flowers, and in the lid there was a glass plate so that when the coffin lay in state at the capitol everybody could look at the pinched waxen face; and in the tense silence there was awareness that this death meant more than the loss of a great warrior. As the devout very well knew, death was swallowed up in victory, but this all-consuming victory was personal to General Jackson; what the Confederate cause had won might not be enduring, might even mean much less than it had at first seemed to mean. When this man was cut down people were compelled to examine the hopes that had rested upon him.

The pallbearers following the hearse were all general officers. President Davis rode behind them in an open carriage, looking drawn and haggard, members of the cabinet walked after him two by two, and there was a long procession of state and city officials, government clerks, ordinary citizens, and such military detachments as were available. Men who watched remembered black plumes everywhere, the general's riderless horse led by a servant, "a common sorrow too deep for words," and the measured thud-thud of the minute guns; and up by the Rappahannock, on the edge of a forest reeking with unburied bodies and powdered with gray ashes from burned underbrush, General Lee sent word that unless his army could be strongly reinforced he might eventually have to retreat to the defenses of Richmond.¹

This was disturbing, because General Lee had won the most brilliant victory of his career and a brilliant victory does not usually lead to a forced withdrawal by the victor. Yet upon examination the Chancellorsville victory looked hollow. It had been dazzling, a set piece for the instruction of students of the military art, but it had been inconclusive, winning glory and little more. It was disappointing for a reason even graver than the loss of General Jackson; it left government and army facing precisely the problems they had faced before the campaign began. Joe Hooker's pouter-pigeon strutting and circling had come to a full stop, of course, and there would be a breathing spell before the Federals moved on Richmond again, but nothing had been settled. There was not even time to take proper pride in the victory itself.

Stonewall Jackson was buried at Lexington, Virginia, and the Richmond Dispatch declared solemnly: "His fame will be grand and enduring as the eternal mountains at whose feet he was cradled; whose long shadows, like those of some majestic cathedral, will consecrate his grave." But by the time he was laid to rest it was the Mississippi situation that was getting top-level concern.

The victory on the Rappahannock, in fact, had been offset by bad news from General Pemberton. The end of April brought Hooker to Chancellorsville, where he grew nervous and invited a defeat that speedily came to him; but it brought U. S. Grant to the east side of the Mississippi River, where he felt vast relief because at last he had reached a place where he could fight, which he immediately began to do. While Hooker was losing the Chancellorsville clearing Grant was winning the towns of Port Gibson and Grand Gulf, and as soon as he had won them he moved relentlessly on into the interior of the state of Mississippi. Now Richmond remembered that Joe Johnston was at Tullahoma, Tennessee, theoretically commanding both Pemberton and Bragg but doing very little about it, and Richmond sent Johnston brusque orders to go to Mississippi at once, take active command there, and beat off this invasion. Meanwhile Secretary Seddon notified Lee that it might be necessary to detach at least one of Longstreet's divisions and send it to Vicksburg.²

This rubbed Lee where he was raw, because he had badly missed Longstreet's men at Chancellorsville and he was only now beginning to get them back; and George Pickett's division, which seemed to be the one Mr. Seddon wanted, was one of Longstreet's best. Lee replied that Pickett would of course be sent if the administration insisted, but he warned that "it becomes a question between Mississippi and Virginia." He added that Pickett could hardly reach Pemberton before June; surely, when June's hot weather struck the lower Mississippi the unacclimated Federals would have to withdraw, bringing the campaign to a close. The next day Lee told Mr. Davis that the northern newspapers, which Lee read carefully, said that Hooker was going to be reinforced, which could only mean that Virginia again was to be the theater of action. It was therefore more than ever necessary to strengthen the Army of Northern Virginia; if it could advance it might ease pressures elsewhere.³

Beauregard worked out a plan—elaborate, like all of Beauregard's plans, but for once not reserving the leading role for Beauregard. Hooker, he said, had been bruised and must lie quiet for at least two months. Let Longstreet's whole corps, therefore, be sent to Tennessee, and then let Lee himself go there and use Longstreet and Bragg in a quick blow to crush Rosecrans. Losing Rosecrans' army, the Federals would lose Tennessee and no doubt Kentucky as well, and if that happened Grant's campaign against Vicksburg must be abandoned. Longstreet worked out a somewhat similar plan, except that it did not involve sending Lee himself to the west, and pressed it on the Secretary of War. Lee himself, meanwhile, had a plan for Beauregard: he believed that some Confederate troops could be drawn from Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas, and he wanted them brought to Virginia and put under Beauregard; this would help to free Lee's army for offensive operations, and would worry Washington.⁴

In the end, none of these plans was adopted. The western armies that faced Grant and Rosecrans must continue to face them alone, with such incidental reinforcements as could be scraped together. Lee's army would be kept intact, strengthened as far as possible, to face the Army of the Potomac, but it too would have to operate alone. There were too many threats, and Lee's warning that they might have to choose between Virginia and Mississippi showed the gravity of the situation. If Richmond really had to save one of these states and let the other be lost it was in profound trouble, because it could not afford to lose either; nor, for that matter, could it afford to lose Tennessee or South Carolina. The government could not weaken itself in any threatened area. It must simply go ahead and do the best it could everywhere.

Against this background Lee planned what presently became his great march into Pennsylvania. His aims were modest; he was on the defensive, this march was a defensive maneuver, and it is unlikely that he seriously thought that it would ease Grant's pressure on Pemberton.⁵ If he could go to Pennsylvania, Hooker would have to follow him, and this at least would compel Mr. Lincoln's administration to think about protecting Washington rather than about capturing Richmond. On the march Hooker's army might well expose itself to an attack in detail, and although Lee did not think the South strong enough to carry on a regular war of invasion and doubted that he could force a general battle in Pennsylvania the move should at least disrupt Federal plans for the summer. Lee's army could also collect supplies north of the Potomac, and if Federal armies left Virginia more supplies could be got at home. Altogether, Lee hoped that he could spend the summer maneuvering in the north, returning in the fall in better shape than when he left.⁸

Limited objectives, in other words: yet as the campaign came nearer the objectives inevitably expanded. There was, to begin with, the state of mind of the troops. Lee had given his own army the habit of victory and he had given the opposing army the habit of defeat; if he now moved to Pennsylvania both armies must believe that the great, final showdown was at hand. There was also the state of mind of the high command. Lee came to feel that his move might be part of a peace offensive. To President Davis he wrote that "we should neglect no honorable means of dividing and weakening our enemies," and this move seemed to offer an opening. With a Southern army in Pennsylvania the Northern people might well begin to feel that they were losing the war. If, at the same time, they were gently led to believe that by making peace they could restore the Union they might stop supporting the war; "and that," wrote General Lee, "after all is what we are interested in bringing about." Once Northern will power gave way there would be time enough to disillusion people, and it would be Yankees rather than Southerners who would be hurt thereby because "the desire of our people for a distinct and independent national existence will prove as steadfast under the influence of peaceful measures as it has shown itself in the midst of war."⁷

This thinking was a trifle mixed. It assumed on the one hand that the Northern friends of peace wanted reunion so much that it would be necessary to deceive them, and on the other hand that they wanted it so little that they would readily abandon the idea once they saw that deception had been practiced on them. To believe this was to expect more of the march into Pennsylvania than was likely to be forthcoming. Men even hoped that this march might finally bring them to the pot of gold that hid at the end of the rainbow, the happy ending for all Confederate hopes . . . British recognition.

Apparently Lee retained certain reservations. He got his army into shape, and by the end of May he could record a total, present for duty, of all arms, of nearly 75,000 men. He divided this army into three corps, keeping stout Long-street as one corps commander and giving the other two corps to newly created lieutenant generals, Richard S. Ewell (who had fought so well under Jackson in the faraway Valley campaign) and A. P. Hill, a good leader and a furious fighter; each would command some 20,000 men, and for the most part the men were veterans of high morale. Yet even as he made these arrangements Lee notified Mr. Davis that he began to fear that "the time has passed when I could have taken the offensive with advantage," saying that "there may be nothing left for me to do but fall back." He also told Secretary Seddon that Hooker apparently planned to turn the Confederate left while Federal troops on the peninsula advanced directly on Richmond. This last was a serious threat. The Federal commander at Fort Monroe, Major General John A. Dix, had some 32,000 men arrayed on both sides of the James, and to oppose him Richmond had fewer than 8000 under Major General Arnold Elzey. Richmond could get some help from Major General D. H. Hill's 20,000 in North Carolina but it probably could not get very much because Hill was under a good deal of pressure himself. A simultaneous advance by Hooker and Dix could present a most difficult problem.⁸

But anything was better than to wait idly for the storm to break, and on June 3 Lee began to move. Longstreet's corps started for the Blue Ridge, with Ewell following, while Stuart's cavalry rode off to screen the move and Hill stayed in Fredericksburg to guard the rear. The army would go through the Blue Ridge gaps and move on down the lower Shenandoah Valley for the Potomac crossings, and although for a while it would be badly strung out Lee believed that Hooker could be deceived long enough to make the march relatively safe. By June 8 Lee himself, with the two leading army corps, was in the vicinity of Culpeper Courthouse, and Stuart jauntily put on a grand review of his cavalry for the edification of the commanding general.

Perhaps the review was a mistake. It had the scent of holiday warfare, with pretty ladies applauding the gallant cavalrymen, and Stuart gave it just a little too much of his attention; the result being that on the next day Federal cavalry crossed the Rappahannock unexpectedly and brought on the biggest cavalry battle of the war on the fields and hills near Brandy Station. Yankee cavalry was no longer totally outclassed by Confederate cavalry, it knew how to ride and fight now, and this battle was a hard one. Stuart's men gave ground, and for a time seemed in danger of being driven from the field altogether, and although Stuart rallied them and at last forced the Federals back to their own side of the river he had obviously been taken by surprise, which was most humiliating. Also, the new Federal cavalry commander, Brigadier General Alfred Pleasonton, had discovered what was going on, and he was able to tell Hooker that Lee's army was going north. Pleasonton got a major general's commission for his efforts, and Hooker began to suspect that Lee was making a bad move. He thought that he himself ought to march at once for Richmond.

He suggested this to President Lincoln, who shared Hooker's suspicion but had a different idea about the proper response. He told Hooker that Lee's army, not Richmond, was the proper objective. If Lee went north of the Rappahannock, Hooker ought to follow him, stick to his flank, attack him when he could—and, "if he stays where he is, fret him and fret him."⁹ Hooker took the advice, the Army of the Potomac moved up to the line of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, and A. P. Hill got the last Confederate infantry out of Fredericksburg and moved on to overtake the rest of the army.

What might have happened if Hooker had marched on Richmond belongs with the might-have-beens and is subject to debate, but the President had seen one thing clearly: wherever Lee was, the center of the stage was there and not elsewhere. His army had to be looked at because it meant trouble, and now its advance was going into action. Ewell had gone past Longstreet's corps and was in the lead. He was bald, eccentric, oddly bird-like, with a nose like a hawk's beak jutting out between the bulging eyes of an affronted owl. He wore a wooden leg, carried crutches, and rode in a buggy because the Yankees had shot a leg off of him at Groveton, nine months earlier, but he was full of bounce and energy all the same. Now he took his corps down the lower Shenandoah Valley as if the furies were on his back, and at Winchester he smashed a Federal force of 6900 men under the excitable Major General Robert Milroy. Swell's men overwhelmed these Federals, capturing more than half of them and driving the rest off in hopeless confusion; then they crossed the Potomac and moved on, over Maryland and into Pennsylvania, and there was no longer any question about what Hooker's objective was.

A. P. Hill followed Ewell, Longstreet faded back through the mountain gaps to bring up the rear, and Hooker took his own army up close to the Potomac to look for an opening. And Jeb Stuart, who was under orders to go north and protect the army's front and flank, got permission to do it by riding clear around Hooker's army en route. (This would be spectacular, bringing shame to the Yankees and restoring the Stuart image that was so badly tarnished at Brandy Station; also, being cavalry would be fun once more, as in the old days.) But Hooker's army was not where Stuart thought it was, so Stuart got crowded off the roads he wanted and his cavalry spent eight days on a trip that should have taken two, and could not rejoin the army until July 2, which was much too late. When Lee entered Pennsylvania he moved in darkness; he had cavalry (for Stuart took only three brigades) but he had no Stuart to handle it for him, and he never knew where his enemies were until he collided with them.

Although Lee did not know it and could not have been expected to know it, his real opponent now was Abraham Lincoln, a man not trained for command but nonetheless commanding. No one on either side saw Lee's advance into Pennsylvania quite as Mr. Lincoln did. He recognized it, of course, as a dire threat, but he also saw it as a limitless opportunity for the Union cause. He had grasped a strategic point of importance: when a Confederate army left its own territory and went north it exposed itself to outright destruction. It could be cut off, forced to fight its way out of a trap, and in the end removed from the board; by the mere act of invasion it risked its very existence, and the chief responsibility of the Federal commander was to make sure that what was risked was lost.

It was hard to get generals to see it. McClellan had not seen it in Maryland, and Buell had not in Kentucky, so two armies of invasion had got away. As a civilian Mr. Lincoln could not be entirely certain that he was right and that the trained soldiers were wrong. Yet the belief grew on him, and as this invasion month of June passed the President actually seemed to grow more composed. In the middle of the month he abruptly stopped leaning over General Hooker's shoulder, anxious to counsel about every move, and turned the man over to the War Department.

Until now, Hooker had ignored Halleck and had dealt solely with the President, and although this arrangement was grossly irregular it had worked tolerably well and Mr. Lincoln obviously had liked it. Now, with Lee's vanguard about to cross the Potomac, Hooker was growing querulous. He began to complain that he was outnumbered, he alternately chafed at the orders that came from Washington and then complained because the orders were not specific enough, and at last he protested that he did not enjoy the confidence of General Halleck. At this point Mr. Lincoln cut him off.

Lee, the President told Hooker, was definitely moving north, an action which "gives you back the chance I thought McClellan lost last fall." To be sure, the President might have been wrong then and he might be wrong now, "but in the great responsibility resting upon me I cannot be entirely silent." Meanwhile, Hooker hereafter must communicate through channels: "To remove all misunderstanding I now place you in the strict military relation to Gen. Halleck, of a commander of one of the armies to the General-in-Chief of all the armies."¹⁰ From this moment the flow of messages between Hooker and the President ceased, as the flow between McClellan and the President had ceased after Harrison's Landing, a year earlier. Hooker was a professional, and now he must answer to a professional. As far as possible (and this to be sure might be no great distance) the President would keep his hands out of it.

Washington would have been surprised, and possibly a little outraged, to know this. Living by politics, the capital had responded to Chancellorsville with the purely political assumption that a defeat so resounding was bound to create an opening for somebody, and the city had been a windy cave of rumors ever since, growing windier as Lee's army moved north. Naturally, the name of General McClellan was back in circulation; like the price of gold, his prospects rose when the country's military fortunes sank and sank when those fortunes rose. His stock was rising now, and it was impossible for anyone to speculate on Hooker's future without also speculating on McClellan's. It went so far that a good McClellan Democrat examined the pro-McClellan maneuvers and wrote in disgust that "the stinking aroma of party politics has tainted the whole concern," and a young officer in the Army of the Potomac, reflecting on the claims and counter-claims that had sprung up since that appalling battle, said that as far as he could see "the only use or purpose of all this effusion of blood is to show which is the greatest general and which has committed the more blunders, McClellan or Hooker or Burnside."¹¹

Yet the President himself was not part of it. As loyal a Republican as Alexander K. McClure, the Pennsylvania publisher who often helped mend political fences for the administration, sent word from Philadelphia that McClellan must be recalled to active duty and given command in Pennsylvania, where militia levies were hastily being called to the colors; he added, sapiently, "without military success we can have no political success, no matter who commands." Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey went further, proposing that McClellan be restored to command of the Army of the Potomac forthwith.

Mr. Lincoln refused to be drawn. He quietly asked McClure, "Do we gain anything by opening one leak to stop another?" and to command militia in Pennsylvania he sent, not McClellan but General Darius Couch, who was so disgusted by Hooker's bungling at Chancellorsville that he flatly refused to serve under the man any longer. Mr. Lincoln assured Governor Parker that the whole case was much more intricate than Parker supposed. He refused to consider bringing McClellan back, and he did not bother to argue about it. It was no longer necessary to believe that the salvation of the Union depended on the political views and personal popularity of the commander of the Army of the Potomac.

The complexion of the war had changed, and so had the President's attitude. He had turned Hooker over to Halleck, and anyone could guess how that was going to come out; what was harder to see was that the President's attention now was focused largely on other matters. T. J. Barnett gave Barlow a hint of this, pointing out that Mr. Lincoln was looking westward: "He is in great spirits about Vicksburg, and looks to that as the beginning of the end of organized opposition to the war." Near the end of May Mr. Lincoln wrote to a friend in Illinois: "Whether General Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg, his campaign from the beginning of this month up to the twenty-second of it is one of the most brilliant in the world."¹² The fact that Lee's army was in Pennsylvania might mean less than the fact that Grant's army was deep in Mississippi.

So the powerful support Hooker got from the radical Republicans no longer had its old value, and Hooker seems to have been aware of it. He got his army north of the Potomac shortly after Lee crossed, formed a loose concentration in the neighborhood of Frederick, Maryland, nursed the idea of moving troops over by the Harpers Ferry route to block Lee's rear and cut off Lee's tenuous communications with Virginia—and then got into a torrid row with Halleck over proper use of the Harpers Ferry garrison. The point was not nearly as important as subsequent arguments made it seem, but Hooker let it irk him, and at last—on June 27, with Lee's vanguard approaching Harrisburg—Hooker stiffly asked that he be relieved of his command.

Halleck replied that since Hooker had been appointed by the President the general-in-chief had no power to act, but he promised to see the President about it; did see him, with remarkably little delay, and found Mr. Lincoln willing to part with this general. Before the day ended the Adjutant General's office issued a formal order. Hooker had been relieved at his own request and command of the army, "by direction of the President," had been given to Major General George Gordon Meade, a regular, a Pennsylvanian, currently commander of V Corps, a good soldier who found room in his spirit for strangely contrasting qualities—a violent, often uncontrollable temper, and a streak of genuine humility not touched by cant. To a large extent he was an unknown quantity, the one certainty being that he was a man who did not scare easily.¹³

It was an odd time to make a change in command, with a battle so close; the general officers respected Meade but the rank and file had barely heard of him. The army had had leaders whom it adored and leaders whom it detested, and it had had poor luck under all of them; now, facing its supreme test, it must fight under a stranger, its spirit sustained not by loyalty to a man but by loyalty to a cause. Somewhere off to the north of the sprawling camps in Maryland it must show the full measure of its devotion ... on its own. Perhaps the President believed that it had at last come of age.

5. Mirage on the Skyline

MARCHING INTO Pennsylvania was like entering a different world. General Lee's men were used to Virginia, where the country had been trampled and ravaged and fought over until whole counties were desolate. Pennsylvania had never been touched. Its farms looked incredibly rich, with barns so big that the men said a whole brigade might be quartered in each one, and all ranks were getting plenty to eat. General Lee had issued stern orders against pillage, specifying that supplies could be seized only by quartermaster and commissary officers, who must pay (in Confederate currency) for everything they took; but even his massive authority could not keep private soldiers from going about in the evening to do some unofficial foraging. Perennially hungry, the Confederate soldier now was in a land of plenty. Also, he knew how Yankee soldiers behaved in Virginia and he saw no harm in a little retaliation.

In the main the invaders behaved with restraint. An Austrian military observer was impressed to the point of asserting, perhaps inaccurately, that "teetotalers will rejoice to hear that none of the Confederate soldiers ever touch spirits," and most of the citizens' complaints came because the army methodically carried off all the livestock. A Louisiana soldier boasted that the men now "lived on the very fat of the land—milk, butter, eggs, chickens, turkeys, apple butter, pear butter, cheese, honey, fresh pork, mutton and every other imaginable thing that was good to eat," but he said the men paid for what they got, the only oddity being that everything they bought came at a standard price of twelve and one-half cents, whether by the pound, the dozen, or the single portion. This, he said, happened because "the old farmers were so awfully frightened that I believe they forgot the denomination of any other piece of currency."

The citizens seemed to be remarkably lukewarm, as a matter of fact. It had been different in western Maryland, where Union sentiment was robust, and an army chaplain wrote scornfully that Sharpsburg was "a miserable Union hole" whose people "looked as though vinegar had been their only beverage since the battle in that neighborhood." But these Pennsylvania farmers appeared to be apathetic, and some of them said openly that they did not care much who won as long as they themselves were let alone.

The rank and file grew confident. For the first time the Army of Northern Virginia was unmistakably in enemy country. The invasion of Maryland in 1862 had not been quite the same, even though most of the citizens were Unionists, because Maryland was a slave state with a certain Southern coloration so that being there was much like being at home. This was Pennsylvania, Yankee-land incarnate, and on close inspection it seemed to be rich and naked and careless, wide open and ready to be had; confronted now by a lean and sinewy army whose spirits rose day by day. An army doctor predicted that Lee's men "will fight better than they have ever done, if such a thing could be possible," and said that the Yankees were bound to be whipped when the big battle came.¹

This reading of the case seemed logical, and as the dusty columns threaded their way east through the mountain passes an old mirage took shape on the skyline ahead—the vision of a North whose heart was not really in the war and whose people might before long give up the struggle altogether. These Pennsylvanians were too well-off, too self-centered, too anxious to save what they had; they were not at all warlike, and Federal soldiers as well as Confederates made pointed remarks about their seeming lack of patriotism.² Furthermore, was not this a fair representation of Northern spirit generally? Ohio was all in a ferment, with troops putting down mobs and arresting a candidate for governor, in Illinois a Federal regiment had mutinied, and the army commander at Cairo warned that "we have a population in southern Illinois ready to spring up and join any organization opposed to the government that offers itself."³ It was easy to suppose that under all of this a true Northern peace party was rising; tilt the balance just a little more and the Lincoln administration must fail. The belief that this was so was a collateral reason for Lee's advance; also, deep in his mind, it was basic to the hope that the Confederacy could yet win despite the odds. In Richmond, Mr. Davis even now was preparing to put forth a feeler regarding peace.

Strong and confusing currents were moving in the North, and the line between stout patriotism and weary defeatism was not easily drawn. One state could contain both—one state, or one county or even (in thousands upon thousands of cases) one man. A deep desire to win the war could be married to passionate bitterness over the things that were being done to win it; if, beyond the reunion that final victory would bring, there was to be a restoration of the happy past, it followed that on the road to victory destruction should be held to a minimum. The Pennsylvania farmers, criticized by friend and by foe, were trying in their own stolid way to prevent breakage. They could easily have made their own the defiant Southern cry: All we ask is to be let alone.

The desire to be let alone can have explosive effects. It can also be deceptive. Pennsylvania had many things on its mind just now, but it had not lapsed into indifference. In the Army of the Potomac there were more contingents from Pennsylvania than from any other state—sixty-eight regiments of infantry, nine of cavalry, and five batteries of field artillery, volunteers to a man, many of them coming from precisely these farms whose people looked so phlegmatic. Some of them, too, came from parts of the state that apparently were on the edge of outright revolt—the anthracite fields, to which it had been necessary recently to send Federal troops to put down draft riots. It was easy to misinterpret these coal-field riotings. In the only way that was open to them, the anthracite workers were protesting— blindly, angrily, and without much hope—against woes that the war had not so much caused as emphasized: against autocratic mine bosses, against squalid company towns, against evil working conditions. In the hated enrollment officer they probably saw little more than a new reminder of the fact that their lives were hard.⁴

The currents ran both ways at once. If most of the discontent now so visible in the North came from men who had much to lose and wanted to save as much of it as possible, some of it came from men who had little to lose and might welcome a general overturn. At the moment their common protests were given unity by a new law which had gone into effect in March: the national conscription act, the cause of a great deal of dismay and some outright disorder. To men who had little to lose, this was a warning that the little they did have was likely to be taken: to the others, the men with much to save and a deep desire to save it, this law was an indication that the happy past was gone forever. Either way, the new law was highly unpopular.

Under its terms, all male citizens between twenty and forty-five were "declared to constitute the national forces," and the President could make them go into the army—the President, in faraway Washington, and not some familiar elected official of state or town or county. The measure was obviously necessary, volunteering having fallen off and the need for troops being great, and as a matter of fact the Confederacy had adopted an even stiffer measure a year earlier; yet this law had unquestionably changed the American form of government, and the President now had a power no President ever had before—the power to reach directly into the remotest township and exercise the power of life or death over the individual citizen. Senator Henry M. Rice of Minnesota, a war Democrat of unquestioned loyalty, spoke for many when he cried that this was a bill "violating the constitutions of the states"; and he warned soberly, "The moment you touch upon those rights, I say there will be a rebellion in the North."⁵

No rebellion took place; but there were scattered outbreaks of a rebellious character. In Holmes County, Ohio, for instance, in the middle of June, certain embattled farmers rose, took up arms, established themselves in a stone house on a hill near the village of Napoleon, and proclaimed defiance of the draft. Colonel William Wallace of the 15th Ohio Infantry was sent up from Columbus with 400 soldiers and a section of artillery, there was a brief exchange of shots in which two of the farmers were killed and three were wounded, and the uprising was put down; but although Colonel Wallace reported that the insurgents were "an ignorant and misguided class who hardly knew what they wanted," it was all too clear that they knew what they did not want. They had fought United States troops to make their point, and they did it while Lee's army was coming north across the Potomac.⁶

To bring matters to a head there was the excessive zeal displayed by General Ambrose E. Burnside.

After he lost command of the Army of the Potomac, Burnside was sent to Cincinnati to command the Department of the Ohio—roughly, the Middle West plus Kentucky. This was mostly peaceful country and the commanding general did not have much to do, which was why Burnside was sent there; but he arrived in this springtime of discontent, looked about him with the eyes of a frontline commander, and concluded that the Ohio country was displaying dangerous disloyalty. On April 19, with a tactical judgment no better than that of Fredericksburg, Burnside issued General Orders No. 38, announcing that "the habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy will no longer be tolerated," and threatening dire punishment for all who aided the rebellion. The order concluded: "It must be distinctly understood that treason, expressed or implied, will not be tolerated in this department."⁷ Having published this the general awaited developments.

The first development was provided almost at once by Clement L. Vallandigham, who was just the man to respond to this kind of challenge and who probably was the man Burnside had chiefly in mind in the first place. Vallandigham, who was running for the Democratic nomination for the governorship (and making a good deal of headway) went to Mount Vernon, Ohio, and on May 1 addressed a large and enthusiastic audience. He voiced straight Vallandigham doctrine: the national administration did not want to make peace but was fighting to free the blacks and enslave the whites, General Orders No. 38 was a base usurpation of arbitrary power, men who meekly submitted to the conscription act did not deserve to be called free men, and "King Lincoln" must eventually be dethroned by the action of citizens at the ballot box. At this distance the speech sounds like little more than an ordinary, arm-flapping stump speech made in the heat of a lively political campaign, but to Burnside (who had an agent present, making notes) it sounded like treason, either expressed or implied. A few days later Burnside sent a company of infantry to Vallandigham's home in Dayton and the soldiers broke in the doors at midnight, caught Vallandigham in his underwear, gave him time to dress, hauled him forth despite his vigorous protests and took him to Cincinnati, where they put him in prison. Citizens of Dayton rioted vigorously to express their disapproval, burning the office of a Republican newspaper, several unoffending retail stores, and a livery stable; which helped not at all. On May 6 Vallandigham went on trial before a military commission, accused of violating Burn-side's order, of expressing sympathy for the secessionists and of trying to weaken the government's efforts "to suppress an unlawful rebellion."⁸

Caught in the net, Vallandigham took on a new quality, dignity, and refused to plead. He scorned the authority of the soldiers, reading a formal statement saying that if he had violated any law he ought to be arrested by the civil authority, indicted by a regular grand jury, and tried in a civilian court; adding that he demanded his rights under the Constitution. It got him nowhere. The military commission found him guilty and ordered him imprisoned "in some fortress of the United States" for the balance of the war.

It had gone this far; for making a stump speech, a candidate for governor could be seized by the army, tried by army officers and locked up in an army prison—largely, when all was said and done, because General Burnside did not approve of what Candidate Vallandigham had been saying. In faraway Richmond, an official of the Confederate War Department made his comment: "This only was wanting to demonstrate how utterly that people" (meaning of course the lost-to-salvation Yankee race) "have lost every pretence of civil liberty. Shades of John and Samuel Adams! To what have your descendants come?" In less-faraway Albany there was a mass meeting in front of the state capitol, and people cheered when they heard a message from Governor Seymour declaring that Vallandigham's arrest "has brought dishonor upon our country" and predicting that Mr. Lincoln's handling of the case "will determine, in the minds of more than one half of the people of the loyal states, whether this war is waged to put down rebellion at the South or destroy free institutions at the North."⁹

There were formalities. Through counsel, Vallandigham appealed for a writ of habeas corpus, and the motion was heard by Judge Humphrey H. Leavitt in Federal Court.

Judge Leavitt noted that President Lincoln had suspended the right of the writ, and that General Burnside was unquestionably the President's agent. Apparently the President was trying to exercise his constitutional authority, the chief problem being that the Constitution did not say exactly what the President's authority in time of war really was. It seemed clear to the judge that "the President is guided solely by his own judgment and discretion, and is only amenable for an abuse of his authority by impeachment, prosecuted according to the requirements of the Constitution." Therefore: Burnside had not exceeded his authority, the application for a writ was denied, and Vallandigham stayed arrested.¹⁰

It all landed, of course, on Mr. Lincoln's desk. He had several things to think about, beginning with the cold fact that what Burnside had done was making a martyr out of Vallandigham and might make him governor of Ohio, and going on to the need to strike a balance between the ancient right of freedom of speech and the overpowering necessity to win a war. Winning the war came first. Mr. Lincoln commuted Vallandigham's sentence, ordering him sent, not to prison, but into the Confederacy. On May 25 Federal cavalry took Vallandigham through Rosecrans' lines near Murfreesboro and turned him over to surprised Confederate pickets, who hastily sought guidance from the rear and then, lacking anything better to do, accepted their charge. An unwilling exile, Vallandigham flitted across the Confederacy, got at last to a seaport, took ship for Canada, went to lower Ontario, and waited across the river from Detroit for a proper chance to get back to his constituency. He had been the victim of sharp practice, but his real trouble was that he had finally run into a middle western politician who played his own game a little faster than he himself did . . . and all without due process of law. Meanwhile, the President had a barbed answer for those who complained. To leading Democrats of New York, who had set forth their protests at length, he posed a question: "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?"¹¹

Unfortunately, Burnside was not yet out of ammunition. On the night of June 2 a squad of soldiers, at his order, entered the offices of the Chicago Times and stopped the paper's publication.

Publisher of the Times was Wilbur Storey, who was admittedly a hard case. He had bought the paper early in 1861, and with skill and vigor had made it one of the most influential Democratic organs in the west. Originally, he had supported the war and called for subjugation of the South, but when the administration struck at slavery his tone changed; he denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as "the most wicked, atrocious and revolting deed recorded in the annals of civilization," and of late he had been demanding peace as the only means of saving American freedom. He wrote without restraint, and his editorials had a hard bite to them; he spoke for the Northerners who detested abolition and wanted the war taken back to its old, limited aims, but he spoke with more fury and a more bitter invective than anyone else was using, and to a man like Burnside he looked as dangerous as a Confederate army. One exasperated Union officer asserted later that Storey's Times was "chief among those instigators of insurrection and treason, the foul and damnable reservoir which supplied the lesser sewers with political filth, falsehood and treason." That was the tone Storey himself used and that was the tone he provoked in others, and now Federal soldiers occupied his editorial rooms and kept his presses from operating.

Naturally, the suppression of this newspaper stirred up immense trouble. The lower house of the Illinois legislature resolved that the act was "so revolutionary and despotic" that it was "equivalent to the overthrow of our government." A mass meeting of Chicagoans held that whatever the Times had said the remedy (if any remedy was needed) lay with the courts and not with the army, and in New York fifteen newspaper and magazine editors met, with none other than Horace Greeley presiding, and unanimously affirmed "the right of the press to criticize firmly and fearlessly the acts of those charged with the administration of the Government, also those of all their civil and military subordinates." The administration could not resist this kind of storm, and at Mr. Lincoln's direction Secretary Stanton got off a hurried message to Burnside: revoke the order of suspension, get the soldiers out of there, and in the future arrest no speakers or editors without first getting clearance from Washington. The Times resumed publication, jubilantly proclaiming that

"the right of free speech has not passed away ... we have, then, still a free press."¹²

The cases of orator Vallandigham and editor Storey had long echoes heard far to the south. With the Yankees in such trouble at home, might not this be a good time to suggest a peace settlement? To Vice-President Alexander Stephens it seemed that some sort of opening existed, and from his home in Georgia he wrote to President Davis about it.

The Confederate government had been wanting to make a new arrangement with the Federals regarding prisoner exchanges, and Stephens suggested that he be appointed to try it. If he could confer with President Lincoln about prisoners, he said, "I am not without hope that indirectly I could now turn attention to a general adjustment upon such basis as might ultimately be acceptable to both parties and stop the further effusion of blood in a contest so irrational, unchristian and so inconsistent with all recognized American principles." He admitted that the odds were against him; "but still, be assured, I am not without some hopes of success." (He explained that the "general adjustment" he wanted would of course be based on acceptance of the idea of Southern independence.) Mr. Davis read this letter, and promptly invited Mr. Stephens to come to Richmond. Late in June the President, the Vice-President, and the cabinet conferred on the matter.¹³

Characteristically, Stephens himself by now had lost faith in his own proposal. He felt certain that Mr. Lincoln would not see him, and he doubted that the attempt should even be made, but Mr. Davis and the cabinet saw it otherwise. Agreeing that Mr. Lincoln would not ordinarily want to talk to any Confederate emissary, they pointed out that since Stephens wrote his letter the picture had changed: the Army of Northern Virginia was in Pennsylvania now, and it probably would win a victory before long. As Stephens remembered it, they held that "the prospect of success was increased by the position and projected movements of General Lee's army." So, armed with a letter signed by Mr. Davis, Stephens went to Hampton Roads and sent a note to Rear Admiral S. P. Lee, Federal naval commander there, identifying himself as "a military commissioner" and asking permission to go to Washington under flag of truce to talk with President Lincoln.

The presidential letter Stephens carried was unusual, for in it Mr. Davis did something that he had not done before and would not do again. He identified himself, not as President of the Confederate States of America, but simply as "commander-in-chief of the land and naval forces now waging war against the United States." As all men knew, Mr. Lincoln refused to admit that there was a Confederate States of America, and he would accept no message signed by its President, because if he did he might thereby, inadvertently, recognize the existence of whatever it was that the letter-writer was president of. He could not fail to admit, however, that certain land and naval forces were making war against the United States, and to accept a letter from the commander of those forces would commit him to nothing. If flexibility would help, Mr. Davis could be flexible.¹⁴

It accomplished nothing. Admiral Lee notified Washington of Stephens' mission, and Mr. Lincoln discussed the matter with his cabinet; suggesting, to the statesmen's horror, that he just might go down to Fort Monroe and see what Stephens had on his mind. Secretary Seward opposed this, considering Stephens dangerous (it seems an odd epithet for Stephens, somehow) and in the end Stephens was rebuffed: if his people had anything to say about prisoner exchanges they could say it through regular military channels, but neither he nor any other person could go to Washington. Stephens went back to Georgia, and he wrote to a friend: "The prospect before us presents nothing cheering to me."¹⁵

He would have been no more cheerful if he had actually had that talk with Mr. Lincoln, because there was nothing the two men could have said to one another. The situation in the North offered much less than hopeful Southerners believed. What was taking shape was not a peace party at all. It only looked like one, as tipster Barnett pointed out to leading Democrat Barlow. Even Ohio's Sunset Cox, who did his best to get Vallandigham out of Burnside's grip, said that his fellow Democrats "want security at home even more than peace in the land" and reported that it would be easy to line them up in support of McClellan—who hated the Lincoln administration but as a soldier believed in keeping on with the war until the Confederacy surrendered.¹⁰

Northern discontent, in short, in 1863 reflected no readiness to give up the fight for the Union. It did reflect deepseated fears—that civil liberties were being crushed, that the mere act of going on with the war was changing America permanently, that peace had become unattainable when the administration came out for emancipation—but it was not defeatist. It reflected, too, the existence of the Northerner's own mirage: the faith that Southerners did not really mean what they said about independence and would happily return to the Union once the administration suppressed the abolitionists and gave up the attempt to outlaw slavery. In the spring of 1863 there was no foundation at all for this belief, but it had a hardy life.

Conservative men believed it because they had to, for their own peace of mind. The war had changed immeasurably in two years, it had finally become what Mr. Lincoln long ago had hoped it would not become-—a remorseless revolutionary struggle—and at its revolutionary heart lay precisely this decision to free the slave and so to create a new sort of America. To believe that this decision was all that stood between the old republic and a lasting peace was to do no more than make a profession of faith: the orthodox American faith, sorely beset now by diverse heresies. These conservatives were not in any real sense a peace party. They were simply a party of moderates in a revolutionary situation, faring about as moderates always fare in revolutions, ground pitilessly between two extremes. One extreme, of course, was the Lincoln administration, in the White House and in the Capitol. The other, unmistakably, was the Army of Northern Virginia, which was about to go into battle on the rolling hills surrounding the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

6. Encounter at Gettysburg

THE COMMANDING GENERALS never meant to fight at Gettysburg. The armies met there by accident, led together by the turns of the roads they followed. When they touched they began to fight, because the tension was so high that the first contact snapped it, and once begun the fight was uncontrollable. What the generals intended ceased to matter; each man had to cope with what he got, which was the most momentous battle of the war.

On June 28 Lee's army was loosely arrayed in a forty-five-mile crescent. Longstreet's corps was at Chambersburg, Hill's was eight miles to the east, and Ewell’s was far in front at York and Carlisle. The army was much too dispersed to fight, but as long as Meade's army remained south of the Potomac—it must be there, because vigilant Stuart had sent no warning of any move—this dispersion could do no harm. Until the Yankees came north, Lee's army could roam across southeastern Pennsylvania at will, alarming the government at Washington and collecting the supplies whose abundance had been one of the prime reasons for invasion.

But on the night of June 28 Lee learned that things had gone terribly wrong. Somewhere, somehow, Stuart had been blocked out of the play, and the Yankees had stolen a long march; their army now was at Frederick, Maryland, nearer to the scattered pieces of Lee's army than those pieces were to each other, arid for its life's sake the Army of Northern Virginia must concentrate. Lee sent off galloping couriers with orders: Ewell was to retreat, Longstreet was to advance, and the army would reunite at or near Gettysburg, which was a convenient road center. Lee was worried, but as always he seemed calm, and he remarked lightly that it was time for him to go to Gettysburg and see what Meade was up to. (The same scout who told him that the Federals were in Maryland had also brought news of the change in command.)¹

Meade's plans as June came to an end were somewhat like Lee's: sketchy, subject to instant change, tinged strongly by wait-and-see. He had been shifting to the east, to keep Lee from crossing the Susquehanna and striking down toward Philadelphia, and when he learned about Ewell's retreat Meade felt that this part of his job had been done. Now he had to bring Lee to battle and defeat him, and it seemed that the best way to do this was to get between Lee's army and Washington and await Lee's attack. He probably would not have to wait long, because Lee was deep in hostile territory, had no real supply line, and could not remain inactive. With Meade's army in his immediate front, Lee must either fight or go back to Virginia, and the chance that he would go back without first fighting a battle was too small to think about twice.

So while Lee was concentrating Meade chose what looked like a strong defensive position behind a stream called Pipe Creek, in northern Maryland some fifteen miles south and a little east of Gettysburg, and notified his corps commanders to prepare to go there. To mask this movement, he ordered John F. Reynolds to take his I Corps up to Gettysburg, which was lightly held by John Buford and three brigades of Federal cavalry. Behind this screen the rest of the army would have time to assemble at Pipe Creek, and if at Gettysburg Reynolds saw something that would make a different course advisable he could notify Meade without delay.

Trusting Reynolds implicitly, Meade gave him a free hand. He also gave him command of the left wing of the army, the three corps nearest Gettysburg—Reynolds' own I Corps, which was just south of the town, Howard's XI Corps a few miles to the rear, and Sickles' III Corps, east of nearby Emmitsburg. Reynolds would be strong enough to stay on the scene until he saw what the Confederates proposed to do. If attacked, he could retire slowly. Meanwhile, Meade would not definitely commit himself to the Pipe Creek plan until he heard from Reynolds in detail.²

Reynolds led his army corps into Gettysburg on the morning of July 1 and found that the shooting had already started. A Confederate battle line was coming in astride the Chambersburg Pike, west of town: Henry Heth's division of A. P. Hill's corps, with other troops on the road behind it. Buford had several regiments of dismounted cavalry and a few fieldpieces drawn up on a low ridge to contest this advance. There was a good deal of noise, and there was a rising cloud of smoke, but the fighting was not especially serious. Infantry could always push dismounted cavalry out of the way and everybody knew it, and Heth's men were performing a routine task in a routine way.

There was no very good reason why these Confederates had to get into Gettysburg, except that A. P. Hill was a pugnacious man who liked to fight whenever he had a chance; and there was no especial reason why Yankee cavalry should try to keep them out of Gettysburg, except that Buford felt the way Hill felt about fighting. Now Reynolds, as pugnacious as either of these two, looked at the firing lines and heard Buford's situation report: the Rebels' main body lay westward, but Ewell's corps was off to the north and east and would probably show up before long. Reynolds sent a staff officer pelting back to Meade with a message which said, in effect, that there was going to be a big fight at Gettysburg and that every Federal soldier Reynolds could lay his hands on was going to be in it. Reynolds would oppose these oncoming Confederates: "I will fight them inch by inch, and if driven into the town I will barricade the streets and hold them as long as possible."⁸ He notified Howard to hurry forward with his XI Corps, and then he put his leading division into line, relieved Buford's troopers, and smashed into Heth's infantry head-on.

Nobody had told Reynolds to fight for Gettysburg, inch by inch or otherwise, any more than Hill had been told to seize the place. By his orders Reynolds would have been justified in falling back, watching the Confederates and delaying them until Meade was securely posted at Pipe Creek, and the story of the next few days would have been different if he had done this. The end result would probably have been much the same, and about the same number of men would have been killed; but they would have been killed at a different place in a different way, and the ifs and might-have-beens that seem so important today would be replaced by other ifs and might-have-beens, and there is no point in speculating about it. Reynolds did what was in character for him to do. He was an instinctive, inch-by-inch fighter, and now he rode up to the battle line to see that his men struck the blow that he wanted them to strike. As they surged forward a bullet hit him and he toppled from his saddle, dead . . . and the Battle of Gettysburg had begun, brought on without choice of Lee or Meade by the fact that the roads that crossed here brought together men possessed by a blind, driving urge to fight.⁴

The flame fed itself. The Confederate attack was beaten back, and Hill put a fresh division into action. The Federals, led now by Abner Doubleday, spread out along the crest of their ridge, facing west, to receive this new attack, and suddenly found themselves under fire from the north. Ewell's corps was coming in, exactly as Buford had predicted, and its leading division began to attack Doubleday's right and rear. Just in time, Howard's corps came into Gettysburg— sadly under strength, and in bad repute because of Chancellorsville, but most welcome in this crisis. By seniority Howard took general command. He sent most of the XI Corps north of Gettysburg to stave off Ewell's assault, the Federal lines stiffened—and at this moment Lee himself, riding east from Chambersburg to the sound of the guns, came up in rear of Hill's battle line.

Lee was not ready for a general engagement. He had less than half of his army on the field, he still did not know where the bulk of Meade's army was, and his first impulse was to suspend the attack. But a Confederate victory was taking shape before his eyes. Off to the northeast the second of Ewell's divisions was coming into action, hitting Howard's line in flank and rear, striking the right place at the right moment entirely by accident but as effectively as if it had been planned that way. If Howard's men were driven off, which obviously was about to happen, Doubleday's men could not hold their ground in front of Hill. This was the moment of opportunity, and Lee quickly reversed himself and ordered a general advance.

For half an hour or an hour—no one counted minutes very carefully that day—there was a desperate fight on the open plain to the north and the long ridge to the west. This battle that involved only fractions of the armies grew far beyond its size, and like the war itself it became bigger and more destructive than anyone intended. The right half of the Federal line collapsed first; taken in front, flank and rear by the expanding Confederate offensive, Howard's Dutchmen finally broke and ran off, victims of sheer bad luck and of their own low morale. Brigadier General Francis C. Barlow, one of Howard's division commanders, wounded and captured in this fight, wrote a few days later that the Confederate soldiers "are more heroic, more modest and more in earnest than we are," and felt that "their whole tone is much finer than ours"⁵; and however this may have been, the right half of the Union line folded up and the downfall of the left half soon followed. The prodigious fight the Federals made on the western ridge—some regiments here lost 75 percent of their strength this afternoon—went for nothing, and by half-past three or thereabouts the survivors of the two defeated Federal corps were going helter-skelter back through Gettysburg to take refuge on the high ground south of town, where Howard had posted a brigade of infantry and some artillery to stem the rout.

The flight through town was confused and costly. Federal and Confederate regiments ran into each other unexpectedly, stray field pieces pulled up at intervals to blast canister down smoky streets, and Ewell's exultant Confederates rounded up so many Yankee prisoners that their own ranks were all disordered. A measure of the general confusion was the unhappy plight of one of Howard's brigade commanders, Brigadier General Alexander Schimmelfennig—a good man who deserved better of fate—who was trapped by armed foes, clambered over a high board fence to get away, and to avoid capture had to take refuge in a pigpen, staying there for the rest of the battle, living on what the prodigal son lived on during his dreary exile. . . . Late in the afternoon most of the Federals had reassembled in the new position. Meade had sent Major General Winfield Scott Hancock up to take charge, Hancock put a new battle line together, fresh troops began to come up, and the Confederates did not press their advantage. In killed, wounded, and captured the Federals had lost 9000 men, half of all they had put into action: the Confederates, with substantial losses of their own, had swept the field, and this first, unplanned encounter between the two armies had been a smashing victory for General Lee.⁸

But the victory meant little except that it robbed both Lee and Meade of their freedom of action. They had to finish what had been so violently begun and they had to finish it here. When darkness came on July 1 each commander accepted this fact and ordered the rest of his troops forward, Lee planning to resume the offensive as soon as possible, Meade planning to make his fight here rather than at Pipe Creek. Meade himself reached the field late that night. He found that his army had a powerful defensive position— from Culp's Hill, southeast of Gettysburg, west to Cemetery Hill and then south two miles along Cemetery Ridge to a rocky knoll called Little Round Top—and he knew that all of his army except John Sedgwick's big VI Corps would be on hand ready for action by the middle of the morning. Sedgwick, driving his men hard on a thirty-mile march, could not come up until late afternoon, but even without him Meade had enough men to hold his ground and it even seemed to him that with good management he might take the offensive himself. The qualms that had paralyzed Joe Hooker when he found himself facing the Army of Northern Virginia had no place in Meade's makeup.⁷

Lee had won the first round, but he was under a profound handicap. None of his other battlefields had given him a problem like this one. The pressure of time and circumstance was on him, not on his opponent, and the Federal army—larger than his own. as always—was for the first time standing on the defensive on its own soil. The old equalizers were not available here. Lee could use neither the dogged defensive that had served so well at Antietam and Fredericksburg nor the dazzling shifts and feints that had won the Seven Days and Chancellorsville. He was on the offensive, but he did not quite have the initiative: this time, Lee's antagonist could not be compelled to fight Lee's kind of battle. The armies were bound together by the first day's fight, without room for maneuver, and to resume the battle— inescapable, all things considered—was simply to engage in a slugging match, the one kind of fight which when the campaign began Lee hoped to avoid.

Longstreet, to be sure, proposed that the army circle to its right to get into Meade's rear, but Lee quickly dismissed the idea. He no longer had Stonewall Jackson, the one man who could have led such a move; furthermore, in Stuart's absence he did not know just where Meade's rear was or what he might run into if he tried to go there. He answered Longstreet in the only way that was open to him: "The enemy is there and I am going to fight him there."⁸ He at last knew in general terms where Stuart was—northeast, somewhere near Carlisle—but the knowledge was not helpful. Stuart and his cavalry would rejoin the army in twenty-four hours, and that would be twenty-four hours too late. Lee needed Stuart now, and because he did not have him now he had to go on with this battle where it had begun—with the odds against him.

What came out of this on July 2 was a tremendous battle that settled nothing, except for the thousands on both sides who were shot, and possibly for their next of kin. Lee's army, the incomparable instrument for finding and exploiting weak spots, struck on this day against strong points and wore itself out. It pounded the Federal left, head-on and heads-down, in a peach orchard and a wheat field and in the craggy ravines of a tumbled rock pile known as Devil's Den, and a Confederate who watched from the steeple of the Lutheran Seminary could see little but a dense fog bank of shifting gunsmoke that hid fields and woods and fighting men; a fog bank that was forever sparkling and pulsing with the sharp red flames from the muzzles of invisible cannon, whose gunners found that this fight was even worse than Antietam itself, the battle they always remembered as Artillery Hell.⁹ This was one of many battles that swung up and down the long length of the Federal line, each battle desperate but each one somehow separate from the others.

The Army of Northern Virginia tried to storm Little Round Top, fought in a gloomy valley behind that hill, swept across the Emmitsburg Road to touch the crest of Cemetery Ridge, wrecking Dan Sickles' III Corps, mangling the V Corps of George Sykes, beating one division of Hancock's II Corps; and each time it came within an inch of success but had to fall back before that final inch could be gained. It took a long row of guns in the heart of the Federal position but could not hold them, and it fought once in a farm yard against massed artillery that lacked infantry support, losing at last because canister at close range could dismember foot soldiers faster than the replacements could get into action. (After the battle, men who crossed this part of the field said that war could show nothing more hideous than the human fragments that lay on the ground where infantry had been broken up by close-range artillery fire.) A division from Ewell's corps struck the Federal right on Culp's Hill, clambering up steep slopes full of young trees and fallen timber, reaching the Federal trenches, occupying parts of them, falling back down hill when the rifle fire was too heavy; hanging on in the darkness, with the sputter of musketry making flickering firefly lights in the dark woods; hanging on to renew the fight at dawn. In the evening Lee's army assaulted the sagging ridge between Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill, broke the XI Corps line in the twilight, got into Howard's artillery, and was driven off after a furious hand-to-hand fight amid the wheels of the guns. Late at night, soldiers from the two armies went to a spring beyond the Federal right to get water, recognized one another in the shaded moonlight as enemies, and fell into a meaningless fight that went on until after midnight and did nothing but add to the casualty lists.