THE COMMANDERS OF CHANCELLORSVILLE
By Edward G. LongacreRutledge Hill Press
Copyright © 2007 Edward G. Longacre
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-40160-142-3Contents
Acknowledgments...................................................viiIntroduction......................................................1The Antagonists...................................................5One: A Man of Honor, a Soldier of Genius..........................21Two: On the Brink of Greatness....................................43Three: Officer and Gambler........................................67Four: Bravo for Joe Hooker........................................87Five: Plans and Preparations......................................111Six: Crossing Over................................................129Seven: A Most Extraordinary Twenty-Four Hours.....................149Eight: Confidence Lost............................................167Nine: Trusting to an Ever Kind Providence.........................183Ten: My God, Here They Come!......................................203Eleven: Attack and Counterattack..................................225Twelve: What Will the Country Say?................................251Epilogue: Out of the Woods........................................271Notes.............................................................281Bibliography......................................................313Index.............................................................329
Chapter One
A Man of Honor, a Soldier of Genius
Early on the frigid afternoon of December 13, 1862, Robert E. Lee, from a hilltop along the right-center of his army's lines southwest of Fredericksburg, Virginia, became a spectator to mass murder. Shortly before noon, thousands of armed men in blue caps, pants, and overcoats-members of Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside's Army of the Potomac-had poured out of the streets of Fredericksburg and onto a vast, open plain that fronted an array of hills, ridges, and lower elevations occupied by their gray- and butternut-clad enemy. In common with many of those sixty thousand waiting Confederates, General Lee had stared in disbelief at the sight of so many soldiers moving in well-aligned ranks and with apparent nonchalance across ground that provided little protection against the thousands of rifles and the dozens of cannons pointing in their direction. Lee's senior subordinate, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who for much of the day shared the army commander's vantage point, noted that "the flags of the Federals fluttered gayly, the polished arms shone brightly in the sunlight, and the beautiful uniforms of the buoyant troops gave to the scene the air of a holiday occasion rather than the spectacle of a great army about to be thrown into the tumult of battle."
That tumult commenced as soon as the leading ranks came within range of the nearest guns, those along the Confederate right, the sector supervised by Lee's Second Corps commander, Lt. Gen. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson. With Jackson's guns, followed by Longstreet's, "tearing through their ranks, the Federals pressed forward with almost invincible determination, maintaining their steady step and closing up their broken ranks." Although men fell at every step, comrades pressed ahead toward a stone wall along a sunken road at the foot of Marye's Heights, a position held by one of Longstreet's brigades. "As they came within reach of this brigade," Longstreet recalled, "a storm of lead was poured into their advancing ranks and they were swept from the field like chaff before the wind. A cloud of smoke shut out the scene for a moment, and, rising, revealed the shattered fragments recoiling from their gallant but hopeless charge."
For a time, Longstreet's superior feared the attack was far from hopeless. As soon as one charging column was reduced to human debris, another double-quicked forward to take its place. Burnside's great advantage in manpower-attackers outnumbered defenders nearly two-to-one-appeared to give him the unlimited ability to close the gaps torn in his lines. When a third wave swept forward as if determined to succeed where its predecessors had failed, Lee turned toward the subordinate he called his "Old War Horse," and said in a tone of deep concern: "General, they are massing very heavily and will break your line, I am afraid." He appeared unreassured by Longstreet's sweeping reply: "If you put every man now on the other side of the Potomac on that field ... and give me plenty of ammunition, I will kill them all before they reach my line."
Longstreet's boast was no exaggeration. Although Burnside's troops achieved a temporary breakthrough along Jackson's line, they could make no headway against the Confederate left and center. For the better part of the day Lee and his First Corps commander watched in horrified fascination as column after column of bluecoats appeared about to seize Marye's Heights and other equally well fortified sectors of Lee's six-mile-long line, only to be blown apart short of their objectives. The unrelieved carnage imparted such a macabre rhythm to the spectacle that at one point Lee-at last assured that Burnside could gain no advantage over him no matter how many troops he sacrificed to the effort-exclaimed to Longstreet and everyone else within earshot:
"It is well that war is so terrible-we should grow too fond of it!"
Despite the cautionary note thus expressed and the morality lesson it conveyed, Robert E. Lee was fond of warfare. A devout Christian, his natural inclination was to regard war as a detestable blot on the human character. But although he professed to abhor its violence and destruction, combat exerted an exhilarating effect on him that appears to have satisfied a basic need. When away from the field of conflict he could be moody, depressed, even morose, but invariably his spirits rose when battle beckoned.
Expressions of his enthusiasm for combat predated Fredericksburg by almost fifteen years. During the war with Mexico, in which he had served as an engineer officer on the staff of the commanding general, Winfield Scott, he had won plaudits not only for his technical acumen but for his cool-headedness and soldierly bearing under fire. The battlefield held no terrors for him; as he confided to a fellow participant in the Mexican campaign, "a little lead, properly taken, is good for a man." To this colleague Captain Lee confessed to the excitement he derived from battling the army of that "miserable populace" below the Rio Grande. Short weeks after he had distinguished himself and won promotion during the storming of Mexico City, he expressed his desire for another go at the enemy: "Should they give us another opportunity, they will be taught a lesson.... They will oblige us in spite of ourselves to overrun the country and drive them into the sea."
At least one historian has suggested that Lee's enthusiasm for battle was the symptom of a repressed personality overcompensating for habitual passivity. While a psychologist may reject this diagnosis as simplistic, it is true that in early youth Robert Edward Lee developed an affinity for self-control and self-denial, qualities that would characterize him throughout his life. These traits were, in large part, products of his upbringing in a family that was both a bastion of Virginia aristocracy and a source of notoriety and scandal. His parents were the primary motivators in his life. His pious and longsuffering mother taught him the virtues of self-denial, while his obsessive, prolifigate father showed him the depths to which one devoid of self-control could sink.
He came into the world on January 19, 1807, the next-to-last of six children born to Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee and his second wife, Ann Hill Carter Lee. Four other Lee children-brothers Charles and Sidney Smith, and sisters Ann and Catharine-lived to maturity (the firstborn, a son, had died at sixteen months). For the first six years of his life Robert lived with his parents and siblings-including a half brother twenty years his senior, the product of his father's first marriage-at Stratford, one of the most imposing estates in Westmoreland County, Virginia.
The first two years of this period were relatively happy and tranquil for the Lee family, whose prominence in Virginia society appeared inviolate. In addition to having won military fame in the Revolution, Robert's father had served several terms in Virginia's General Assembly and three in the governor's mansion in Williamsburg. During the presidential administration of his commander and friend, George Washington, Henry had led the army that had suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion. He had even gained support in some quarters as a presidential successor to the man from Mount Vernon.
Robert's mother was the daughter of Charles Carter, one of the wealthiest residents of the Old Dominion. Although public office and private interests kept Henry away from Stratford for long intervals, he and Ann gave every indication of enjoying a happy home life. Mrs. Lee doted on her children, although Robert was clearly her favorite. The two became almost inseparable when, as Robert entered his teens, his brothers departed the home and his sister contracted a chronic illness, transforming the youngest son into his mother's principal companion. When at eighteen he, too, left the nest, to attend the U.S. Military Academy, their estrangement was keenly felt by both. "How can I live without Robert?" Ann asked dolefully. "He is both son and daughter to me."
The stability of the Lee household was painfully brief. Before Robert turned three his father had twice been jailed for failure to pay debts. Obsessed with his family's financial health and enamored of money-making schemes, Henry Lee had lost thousands of dollars in a series of speculative enterprises that a levelheaded investor would have avoided like the cholera. By 1810, when at last released from prison, he had descended into poverty, but creditors continued to hound him. The Lee children never forgot the chains their father placed across the doors of Stratford to prevent sheriff's deputies from serving him with court papers.
By 1811, having bequeathed Stratford to his eldest child (also named Henry), Light-Horse Harry moved his wife and children to Alexandria, where they settled into a modest brick house, one more in keeping with the family's reduced circumstances. Briefly, peace returned and Ann gave birth to her last child, Catharine. But in the summer of 1812 the family fell apart, never to be reassembled. Upon the outbreak of America's second conflict with England, Henry Lee, a committed Federalist, became a vocal opponent of the Madison administration's military and diplomatic policies. That summer his desire to champion antiwar activists lured him to Baltimore, where a young editor named Hanson whose newspaper had condemned the war in print had come under attack by angry neighbors who considered him unpatriotic and even treasonous.
Along with other supporters, Henry Lee was in the editor's home when a vengeful mob, whipped into a frenzy by Hanson's latest editorial, lay siege to the place and threatened to kill everyone inside. Militia broke up the assemblage before it became a riot. But after Lee, Hanson, and the other targets of the crowd's ire were remanded to jail-ostensibly for their own protection-attackers gained entrance and savagely beat the inmates, one of whom died as a result. Ignorant of, or unmoved by, Henry Lee's celebrated service to the nation, the mob not only pummeled him into unconsciousness but maimed his apparently lifeless body, nearly blinding him.
By some miracle, Henry survived the ordeal, but his health had been permanently impaired. After a long and uncertain convalescence, he staggered back to Alexandria, where he remained for less than a year. In the summer of 1813, seeking both restoration of health and escape from his most persistent creditors, he took ship for Barbados, leaving his sorrowing family behind. The money-making ventures he pursued in the West Indies failed to materialize, but he never again saw his wife, sons, and daughters. Long before his death in March 1818, Ann Lee began to refer to herself as a widow.
Irrespective of the grief it caused, Henry Lee's abandonment of his family had a profound effect on his youngest son, who was mortified by this blot on the Lee name. His shame was only intensified when in later years his half brother (known forever afterward as "Black-Horse Harry Lee") further sullied the family's reputation through financial mismanagement, which eventually forced the sale of Stratford, and sexual scandal, the result of dalliance with a minor-his wife's sister-whom he impregnated and whose estate he looted.
As if in reaction to these much publicized sins, young Robert Lee resolved to make himself into a model of rectitude and integrity. In this effort he received unwavering support from Ann Lee, who, as biographer and historian Douglas Southall Freeman observes, had been shaken to the depths of her being by her husband's fall from grace: "She was determined that his grim cycle of promise, overconfidence, recklessness, disaster, and ruin should not be rounded in the lives of her children. Self-denial, self-control, and the strictest economy in all financial matters were part of the code of honor she taught them from infancy."
Robert proved particularly responsive to his mother's patient, kindly, but unyielding efforts at character-molding. He saw in her instruction evidence of an abiding love, which he reciprocated measure for measure. To the day of her death in 1829, he showered Ann Lee with affection and care. He rarely strayed from her side while she enjoyed fair health and after she fell victim to sickness he constantly attended her, reading to her, joining her in singing hymns from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, squiring her about when she felt well enough to leave home, and nursing her day and night.
He resented having to leave her side even to attend to his own education. Returns on a small trust her father had established gave Ann enough money to support her children's schooling. For Robert this included a term of unknown duration at a school in Fauquier County established by his Carter relations, where his classmates included many of his cousins.
He did well enough at his early studies, but he was always happy to leave school on holiday to return to his family, which at some point after 1815 had moved to a larger house on Washington Street. The family's financial situation had improved somewhat following the death of Henry Lee during a failed attempt to return by ship to the home and family he had deserted five years before. A year or two afterward, Robert quit the school in Fauquier County and matriculated at the Alexandria Academy, which offered a classical education free of tuition to the sons of local families. Freeman notes that under the tutelage of the headmaster, for the next three years the boy "read Homer and Longinus in Greek. From Tacitus and Cicero he became so well grounded in Latin that he never quite forgot the language.... In mathematics he shone, for his mind was already the type that delighted in the precise reasoning of algebra and geometry." Presumably at this time, if not earlier, he was introduced to chess, with its mathematical underpinnings and highly structured strategy.
The family's marginal prosperity did not last. While Light-Horse Harry's passing stayed the hand of his creditors, by the time Robert reached college age his mother lacked the funds to send him to a four-year institution such as Harvard, from which his oldest brother, Charles, had graduated, second in his class, in 1819. Ann's second son-known in the family by his middle name-had not required higher education, for in 1820 Smith had received a commission as a midshipman in the U.S. Navy. A formal education was neither contemplated nor considered necessary for Robert's sisters. But in Robert's case-given the special hopes his mother entertained for him-it was considered both a requirement and a problem that by 1823 could not be put off much longer.
To a great extent, the question of where the sixteen-year-old should be educated depended on the profession he chose to enter. His apparent preference was to become a gentleman farmer. Since early youth he had entertained a fondness for the soil, one he might have indulged had the family remained in the Westmoreland County countryside. But he had no land on which to begin his husbandry, nor the prospect of acquiring any. Although a devout Episcopalian like his mother, he had no desire to enter the ministry. Nor, it seems, did he give serious thought to other professions deemed worthy of his pedigree.
In the end, it was decided that the family should apply to their political representative in hope of securing a military academy appointment for Robert. This course was thought proper because, although the youth had no discernible interest in the profession of arms, he had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the family's military history. This history naturally centered around his father's campaigns in the southern colonies, on the subject of which Henry Lee had published a lengthy memoir. The overriding issue, however, was securing an affordable education for the boy-that academy nestled in the Hudson River Valley charged neither tuition nor board.
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