Glory Road (28 page)

He had with him enough men to force a crossing—Sheridan or Bedford Forrest would have got over while Stoneman was counting noses—and in any case Davis was coming down from above to take the Rebels in flank, so that the resistance could not have been prolonged. But they were thirty miles or more from the rest of the army, and Stuart occasionally had unpleasant surprises for rash Yankee cavalrymen. Stoneman decided to wait so that he could have everything ready, and then it began to rain. It rained harder and harder, so that it was difficult for Stoneman to move his artillery, and while the cavalry waited the river began to rise prodigiously. Before long the water at the ford was deep and foaming and the rebuilt railroad bridge was wobbly, and Stoneman began to feel that the whole project was pretty risky. Messages were got to the other side, round about, and Davis angrily brought his brigade back and returned to the northern shore.
⁷

Back in Falmouth, Hooker waited for news. On April 15 he wired Mr. Lincoln that the rain was a bad break, but added: "I am rejoiced that Stoneman had two good days to go up the river, and was enabled to cross it before it had become too much swollen. If he can reach his position the storm and mud will not damage our prospects." A few hours later Hooker messaged Lincoln that Stoneman's guns were stuck in the mud but that he had been ordered to go ahead without them. Lincoln, who was beginning to have his doubts, replied that as far as he could see "Stoneman is not moving rapidly enough to make the expedition come to anything." The President tallied up times and miles on his fingers. "He has now been out three days, two of which were unusually fair weather, and all three without hindrance from the enemy, and yet he is not twenty-five miles from where he started. To reach his point he still has sixty to go, another river [the Rapidan] to cross, and will be hindered by the enemy. By arithmetic, how many days will it take him to do it?" All of which, Lincoln concluded, was beginning to smell like another failure.

Lincoln was quite right. Hooker got the bad news from Stoneman next day—every creek and brook swimming-deep, roads impassable for guns and wagons and nearly so for horses, Rappahannock out of its banks and still rising. All the cavalry was north of the river, said Stoneman, and he thought this was a very good thing, for if it had crossed it would have an impassable river in its rear and the doubtless equally impassable Rapidan in front of it, with malevolent Rebels all about. All in all, the omens were bad. They were being cursed, he added, with "one of the most violent rainstorms I have ever been caught in."
⁸

For the time being, that was that. Hooker fumed and entered a debit against Stoneman's name in his little black book, and the army huddled in its camps
and waited for the rain to end, having missed a chance once again because a general lacked a driving spirit. And yet it may be that the army had not really lost much. Hooker's plan looked good on paper, but there may have been something too hopeful about the idea that Lee's whole army would meekly retreat just because some cavalry was threshing about in its rear. When Hooker set to work to make a new plan he adopted a different line.

This time he would not rely so much on cavalry. He would move by his right with infantry, flanking Lee out of his lines. Cavalry, as before, would cross far upstream and maneuver around to get on Lee's supply route, but the rest of the army would not wait for it. It would go upstream also, and if it moved fast and with proper secrecy it should be able to get across before Lee knew that it was doing anything, and when the infantry was south of the river it would move east. Instead of putting ten thousand cavalry in Lee's rear, Hooker would put seventy thousand infantry there, accompanied by artillery, and the cavalry would frolic about farther south and destroy railroads and supply depots.

Hooker had raised his sights. Originally he had been looking for a good way to make Lee pull back to the defenses of Richmond. Now he was thinking about annihilating the Rebel army outright. "I not only expected victory," he said later, "but I expected to get the whole army." Butterfield recalled that the real purpose of the campaign was "to destroy the army of General Lee where it then was."
⁹

In general terms, Hooker's idea was that he would move so many men in behind Lee's left that Lee would have to retreat in a great hurry. The retreat would in effect be a flank march across Hooker's front, Hooker would attack, and that would be the end of the Army of Northern Virginia. Duly inspired, staff went to work to translate this plan into orders.

Staff had problems, because in making these plans one point was clear. If the infantry was going to outflank the enemy and take a position close in rear of the Rebel left it would have to go on a very long hike.

It could not move downstream for a flanking maneuver because the river below Fredericksburg was too wide and deep to ford and would have to be bridged. Also, moving in that direction would leave Washington uncovered, a point on which Mr. Lincoln was notoriously sensitive. Upstream there were two handy crossings—Banks Ford, not far from Falmouth, and United States Ford, half a dozen miles farther on. The Rebels held these in some strength and had dug trenches and gun pits, and anyway, these fords were so close to Fredericksburg that Lee could get his entire army to them on short notice. If it crossed the river at all, the Union Army would have to go some distance upstream.

There the problem began to get complicated. Just above United States Ford there was a fork in the river, with the Rappahannock corning down from the northwest and the Rapidan slanting in from the west to meet it in a looping, irregular angle. Operating in this angle was tricky business. John Pope had nearly come to total disaster there a fortnight before he fell into trouble at Bull Run, and from one end of the war to the other this area represented a puzzle which the Federals could never quite solve. To cross above United States Ford meant crossing two rivers instead of one. In addition, on the southern bank of the Rapidan lay the scrambled, brambly maze of the Wilderness, a long stretch of second-growth forest with narrow winding roads and infrequent clearings, where a soldier might walk into ambush at any moment and where the magnificent Federal artillery would have little room to operate.

Cutting across this Wilderness was one decent road, the Orange turnpike, which ran west from Fredericksburg to hit the Orange and Alexandria Railroad at Orange Courthouse. If Hooker proposed to cross the Rappahannock upstream, what he was up against was the job of getting over both rivers, striking the Orange turnpike, and moving east on it until he had emerged from the Wilderness—and all before the Confederates found out what he was up to and came out to waylay him.

His immediate strategic goal would be a tiny crossroads with the overgrown name of Chancellorsville, a dozen miles behind Lee's extreme left. If he could put his army there undetected, he might be able to make some of his boasts good. A simple march of four or five miles from Chancellorsville would get Hooker clear out of the Wilderness onto open ground southwest of Fredericksburg, and there, if he could just get there intact, he would have a fine chance to destroy the enemy.

This was a glittering vision for a general who had announced—perhaps just a shade ahead of time
-
that
he would soon have the Rebels by the short hairs, and Hooker undertook at once to turn it into a reality. He was known as a slam-bang head-down fighter, but now he became the cool executive, concerned with matters of organization and logistics. Wagons* would delay the march, so except for irreplaceable ammunition wagons and a few ambulances he would take no wagons. The soldiers could carry extra loads on their backs, and what they could not parry would be borne by some thousands of pack mules especially bought for the occasion. The foot soldier would have more than sixty pounds to carry, exclusive of his rifle, but he would just have to make the best of it.
¹⁰
It would not be for long, and victory would make up for everything. Pontoons would be sent up to the fords just in case the river began to rise again, and details would be appointed to strengthen that railroad bridge which had given Stoneman the jitters.

Stoneman still led the cavalry, and his function would be to cross where he had been supposed to cross before, to strike south, smashing up all Rebel cavalry outfits which crossed his path, and in general terms to create as much trouble as possible. His orders specified that he was to get in close to the enemy: "If you cannot cut off from his column large slices, the general desires that you will not fail to take small ones. Let your watchword be fight, fight, fight."

The rains stopped at last and the roads dried, the sun came out, and the Virginia spring was at its warmest and balmiest, and the Army of the Potomac pulled itself out of its camps and took to the highways.

The men were feeling good. As they started northwest on back roads, well out of sight of prying Rebels, the soldiers felt that this time they were headed for a victory, and their spirits went sky-high. As they left camp the bands played "The Girl I Left Behind Me," for leaving Falmouth seemed almost like leaving home, and along the roads the anemones and violets were growing, with dogwood in blossom in the groves and the peach trees glowing pink around deserted farmhouses. All along the river, cavalry patrols were rounding up local residents and making them stay inside their houses. There were going to be no secessionist civilians slipping across the river with news of this march if Joe Hooker could help it.
¹¹

The weather was hot and there was a long way to march, and the loads the men carried were heavy. The inevitable happened, and the roads soon began to be littered with discarded coats, shirts, blankets, and other things. The army found that it was being followed by people whom the soldiers dubbed "ready-finders"—civilians eager to collect the riches which the soldiers were dropping. A slightly scornful man in the 12th New Hampshire described them:

"An old horse or mule, sometimes, but oftener an old ox, a steer or a cow, strangely tackled by means of an old harness or yoke, spliced together and tied up by ropes, strings, and pieces of twisted bark to a primitive kind of a two-wheeled, nondescript kind of cart that no Yankee would care to make or imitate if he could, with an old man or woman or a young boy, and sometimes a girl, for a driver, and a cord or string of some kind tied to the bits or horns—as the animal motive power might belong to the equine or bovine order—for reins, and the pen picture is by no means complete, but only a scratch-sketch of some of the picking-up teams of the stay-at-home natives that used to follow our armies."
¹²

By the evening of April 28 the first part of the job had been done, and there was a general feeling, as one man put it, that the Army of the Potomac at last "had got a leader who knew what to do and was going to do it."
¹⁸
In the woods and fields just back from Kelly's Ford—a few miles below Rappahannock Bridge, thirty-odd miles from Falmouth—were three army corps, V, XI, and XII, forty thousand men in all, with the skipper of the XII Corps, Major General Henry Slocum, in general command of the lot. These troops were there secretly, with Stoneman's cavalry screening all the crossings. Back at Banks and United States fords, close to Falmouth, was the II Corps, showing itself on the riverbank in order to make Lee think that the major effort was going to be there. In and below Fredericksburg, likewise keeping in plain sight and being busy with pontoons and the like preparatory to making a crossing, were the I Corps and the VI Corps under John Sedgwick, recovered now from the three wounds he had received at Antietam. Behind these two corps was Dan Sickles with the III Corps, awaiting orders. So far the troops were exactly where the plan said they ought to be, and the Rebels had caught onto nothing except that the Yankees seemed at last to be on the move. Stuart's patrols were suggesting that Stoneman and his cavalry might be preparing to move up into the Shenandoah Valley.

Slocum got his three corps over the Rappahannock without much trouble. Stuart's patrols were alert, and as the Yankee infantry formed up on the southern side the Confederate squadrons stabbed at them with galloping detachments, seeking to take prisoners for purposes of identification. A few men on each side were killed in these little forays—killed just as dead as if they had fallen dramatically in some great battle, although none but the next of kin ever knew anything about it—and Stuart found out what he was looking for and sent word back to Lee: three army corps coming o
ver the river, looks like somethi
ng big. Stoneman's cavalry went trotting down the line of the railway, and Slocum led the infantry off south
-
easterly toward the two fords over the Rapidan, Ely's and Germanna.

The boys crossed the Rapidan the next night, April 29. April had brought too much rain, and the river was deep and swirling, black under the moonlight with flecks of bubbling white foam. As the endless columns came down to the crossings huge fires were lit on each bank to help the men see where they were going, and the flames put a ruddy tinge on the dark water. Foot soldiers went slogging across, waist-deep and more, and a few were swept away and drowned in the strong current, and cavalry patrols took station in the crossings to pick up the casualties. On the northern bank soldiers unloaded the pack mules so that the animals could swim across, infantrymen carrying the mules' packs and not liking it much. In some outfits the officers forbade the men to take their pants off at the ford—Rebels might attack as soon as they got across, and a line of battle couldn't be formed without pants—but in others the commanders were more sensible, so the men did not have to spend the rest of the night in wet clothing. Men who were there remembered that the river was extremely cold, and not everybody had a chance to get around the big bonfires and dry out. The men and animals came out of the river dripping, of course, so the climb to higher ground on the south side was soon very slippery and muddy for men carrying heavy loads.