The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (54 page)

Three days later, however—April 30—his plans were shattered by a wire from Adjutant General Cooper in Richmond, quoting a dispatch just received from Lee. Hooker was over the Rappahannock in great strength, above as well as below Fredericksburg, Lee had announced, “and it looks as if he was in earnest.” Cooper’s instructions to Longstreet were brief and to the point: “Move without delay your command to this place to effect a junction with General Lee.”

Longstreet inquired by telegraph whether this meant that he was to abandon his wagons, still scattered about on foraging operations, and risk a quick withdrawal of his men, which would bring out the Federals hot on his heels. By no means, Cooper replied on May Day. What had been intended was for him “to secure all possible dispatch without incurring loss of trains or unnecessary hazard of troops.” Having thus avoided going off half-cocked, Old Peter turned to the always difficult task of designing a disengagement. After the wagons had been called in and sent rearward, orders were issued on May 2 for all the troops to withdraw from the intrenchments the following evening and retire westward under cover of darkness, burning bridges and felling trees in their wake to discourage pursuit. This came off on schedule, and after some sharp skirmishing by rear-guard elements, the whole command was across the Blackwater by sundown of the 4th. Leaving French to defend that line, Hood and Pickett moved to Petersburg next day. Dawn of the 6th found them on the march for the James, leg-weary but eager, and Longstreet himself was in Richmond before noon, making preparations to speed both divisions northward by rail for a share in the great battle reportedly still raging along the near bank of the Rappahannock. All this ended the following day, however, when he received a wire from Lee: “The emergency that made your presence so desirable has passed for the present, so far as I can see, and I desire that you will not distress your troops by a forced movement to join me, or sacrifice for that purpose any public interest that your sudden departure might make it necessary to abandon.”

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“Go forward, and give us victories,” Lincoln had written, and that was what Hooker had in mind when he crossed the Rappahannock. Nor was
that all. “I not only expected victory,” he would recall when the smoke had cleared, “I expected to get the whole [rebel] army.” That this had indeed been his intention was confirmed by his chief of staff, who also declared in retrospect that the real purpose of the campaign had been “to destroy the army of General Lee where it then was.” Earlier, on the eve of committing what he called “the finest body of soldiers the sun ever shone on,” Fighting Joe had expressed his resolution in terms that were even more expansive. “My plans are perfect,” he announced, “and when I start to carry them out, may God have mercy on Bobby Lee; for I shall have none.”

Just what those plans were he was not saying, even to those whose task it would be to translate them into action. In point of fact, however, they were influenced considerably by the man who had preceded him in command. In addition to having demonstrated the folly of launching headlong attacks against prepared intrenchments—intrenchments which, incidentally, had been enormously strengthened and extended since December—Burnside had explored, at least on paper, several other approaches to the problem of how to prise the rebels loose from their works and come to grips with them in the open, where the advantage of numbers would be likely to decide the issue in favor of the Union. Now he had departed, taking “his deportment with him out of the Army of the Potomac, thank God,” but Hooker could remember how the lush-whiskered general had stressed the need for secrecy and then proceeded to talk with all and sundry about his plans, with the result that his opponent’s only surprise had been at his foolhardiness. So the new commander, who, by ordinary, was anything but a close-mouthed man, profited in reverse from his predecessor’s example. He kept his plans to himself.

Not that he did not have any; he did, indeed, and he did not care who knew it, so long as the particulars remained hidden. These too had been inherited, however, for the most part. Originally, like Burnside on the eve of his bloody mid-December commitment, Hooker had planned to cross the Rappahannock well below Fredericksburg; but this had two serious disadvantages. It would uncover the direct route to Washington, which he knew would distress Lincoln, and it would have to be announced to the Confederates in advance by the laying of pontoons. Upstream, on the other hand, the river narrowed and was comparatively shallow. There were fords in that direction—Banks Ford, five miles above the town, and United States Ford, seven miles farther west—behind which he could mass and conceal his troops in order to send them splashing across in a rush that would smother the south-bank gray outpost detachments, thus forcing Lee to face about and meet his assailants without the advantage of those formidable intrenchments. This had been Burnside’s intention in the campaign that ground to a soggy halt in January, but Hooker, by waiting for the advent of fair weather, had greatly
reduced the likelihood of the movement’s coming to any such premature and ignominious end. Besides, there would be tactical embellishments, designed to increase the Federal chances for an all-out victory.

Principal among these was a plan for taking advantage of the recently demonstrated improvement of the blue cavalry. With Stoneman outnumbering Stuart better than three to one—just over 11,500 sabers opposed to just under 3500—it was Hooker’s belief that if his troopers crossed the river in strength they would be able to have things pretty much their own way in the Confederate rear. Damage to Lee’s communications and supply lines, coupled with strikes at such vital points as Gordonsville and Hanover Junction, might throw him into sudden retreat; in which case the Federal infantry, coming down on the run from the upstream crossings, would catch him in flight, strung out on the roads leading southward, and destroy him. No one so far in this war had been able to throw Lee into such a panic, it was true, but the reason for this might be that no one had dared to touch him where he was tender. At any rate Hooker thought it worth a try, and he had his adjutant general draw up careful instructions for Stoneman. His entire corps, less one brigade but accompanied by all 22 of its guns, was to cross Rappahannock Bridge, thirty miles above Fredericksburg, not later than 7 a.m. on April 13, “for the purpose of turning the enemy’s position on his left, throwing the cavalry between him and Richmond, isolating him from his supplies, checking his retreat, and inflicting on him every possible injury which will tend to his discomfiture and defeat.” Lest there be any doubt that the cavalry chief was to be vigorous in his treatment of the fleeing Lee, the adjutant then broke into what might one day have become the model for a pregame Rockne pep talk: “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, bearing in mind that time is as valuable to the general as rebel carcasses.”

Stoneman and his 10,000 chosen troopers, along with their 22 guns and a train of 275 wagons containing enough additional food and forage to sustain them for nine days beyond the lines, were poised for a crossing at the specified hour. One brigade had already forded the river a few miles above Rappahannock Bridge, with instructions to come sweeping down and clear out the rebel horsemen watching from across the way. But as the three divisions stood to their mounts, awaiting the order that would send them about their task of cutting slices large and small from Lee’s retreating column, rain began to patter and then to drum, ominously reminiscent of the downpour that had queered the Mud March. Now as then, roads became quagmires and the river began to swell, flooding the fords and tugging at the shaky pilings of the bridge. Stoneman decided to wait it out. Recalling the brigade that had crossed, he wired headquarters that his rolling stock was stalled. Hooker replied that he was to shuck his guns and wagons and proceed without
them. Stoneman said he would, and set dawn of the 15th as his new jump-off time. Then the wire went dead. Hooker, having promised to keep the President posted on the progress of the movement, struck an optimistic note in a dispatch sent to Washington on that date: “I am rejoiced that Stoneman had two good days to go up the river, and was able to cross it before it had become too much swollen. If he can reach his position [deep in the enemy rear] the storm and mud will not damage our prospects.” Lincoln was not so sure. It was his belief, he replied within the hour, that “General S. is not moving rapidly enough to make the expedition come to anything. 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 25 miles from where he started. To reach his point he still has 60 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? … I greatly fear it is another failure already.”

His fears were confirmed the following day when a courier reached Falmouth with a letter from upstream. “I cannot say what has been the state of affairs away from this vicinity,” Stoneman wrote, “but here, at the hour of my last dispatch, the condition of things may be judged of when I tell you that almost every rivulet was swimming, and the roads next to impassable for horses or pack-mules.… The railroad bridge has been partly carried away by the freshet. The river is out of its banks, and was still on the rise a few hours ago.… My dispatch [setting a new date for the crossing] was based upon the expectation that we were to be favored with a continuation of fair weather. It certainly was not predicated upon the expectation of being overtaken by one of the most violent rainstorms I have ever been caught in.” There was much else by way of explanation and excuse, including the news that three men and several horses had been drowned that morning while attempting to cross what had been a nearly dry stream bed the day before. But the gist of the long letter came about midway: “The elements seem to have conspired to prevent the accomplishment of a brilliant cavalry operation.”

Hooker was disappointed. He told Stoneman to stay where he was, keep up his reserve supply of rations, and be ready to take off southward “as soon as the roads and rivers will permit.” However, the rain showed no sign of a real letup. For nearly two weeks it kept falling, with only a few fair days mixed in to mock the army’s immobility, and all this time Hooker was champing at the bit, anxious to put his troops in motion for the kill. As the days went by, his bitterness increased. He began to doubt that Stoneman and the cavalry were up to carrying out the mission he had assigned them; he began, in fact, to see room for improvement in the plans he had called perfect. Since he had the Confederates outnumbered better than two to one—as he knew by reports from the excellent intelligence service he had established as part
of his staff—he had a rare chance to attack them, front and back, with separate columns each of which would be superior to the gray mass clamped between them. Instead of 10,000 cavalry, he would put 60,000 infantry and artillery in Lee’s immediate rear, blocking his retreat while the other 60,000 pounded his front and the troopers far in his rear slashed at his lines of supply and communication. Isolated and surrounded, prised out of his intrenchments and grievously outnumbered, Lee would be pulverized; Hooker would “get the whole army.” It was a pleasant thing to contemplate, not only because of its classic tactical simplicity, but also because it would involve what might be called poetic justice, a turning of the tables on the old fox who so often had divided his own army, but without the advantage of numbers, in hopes of destroying the very soldiers who now were about to destroy him.

What was more, as Hooker pored over his maps to plan the logistical details of the proposed envelopment, he found that the terrain seemed made to order for just such a maneuver. Banks Ford was stoutly defended from across the way, the rebels having honeycombed the dominant south-bank heights with trenches that formed the left-flank anchor of their line, and U. S. Ford was guarded nearly as heavily by an intrenched outpost detachment; besides which, the recent rains had swollen them both well past wading depth, so that his previous design to seize them in a sudden, splashing rush was now impractical. On the other hand Kelly’s Ford, fifteen miles above the junction of the Rappannock and the Rapidan, which occurred just over a mile above U. S. Ford, was lightly held, unfortified, and comparatively shallow. Although crossing there would call for a long approach march and would involve another river crossing when the column reached the Rapidan, the advantages greatly outweighed the drawbacks. For one thing, Kelly’s Ford was far enough out beyond the enemy flank to give hope that, with luck, the march and perhaps both crossings could be accomplished before the rebs knew what was afoot, and for another it would afford a covered approach, along excellent roads traversing a wooded region known locally as the Wilderness, to within striking distance of the Confederate rear. Moreover, as the column moved eastward along the south bank of the Rappahannock it would uncover both U.S. and Banks Fords, which would not only shorten considerably its lines of supply and communication, thereby making it possible for the two halves of the blue army to reinforce each other quickly if an emergency arose in either direction, but would also give the flankers, in the case of the Banks Ford defenses, control of high ground that dominated much of the present rebel line of fortifications; Lee would be obliged to come out into the open, whether he wanted to or not. All this sounded fine to Hooker. Admittedly he was about to engage in the risky business of dividing his army in the presence of the enemy, but Lee had proved on more than one occasion that the profits more than justified the risk, even though
he had done so with the numerical odds against him; whereas with Hooker it would be the other way around. It was this last that gave him substantial reason to hope for the Cannae which so far, and for all his vaunted skill in battle, had eluded Lee.