The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (64 page)

It was past 2 o’clock by now, and Anderson was not yet in position. Time was running out for Lee today, as it had done the day before for Sedgwick. Already he was finding what it cost him to be deprived even temporarily of the services of Jackson, of whom he would say before the week was over: “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.” More hours were spent examining the approaches and correcting the alignment of the columns so as to avoid collisions. While Anderson continued to balk, McLaws was strangely apathetic and Early floundered in the ravines across the way; it was 6 o’clock before all the troops were in position and the signal guns were fired. The fighting was savage
at scattered points, especially on Early’s front, but McLaws got lost in a maze of thickets and scarcely made contact, either with the enemy or with Anderson, whose men added to the confusion by firing into each other as they advanced. Fog thickened the dusk and the disjointed movement lurched to a halt within an hour. Sedgwick had been shaken, though hardly demolished. Anxious to exploit his gains, such as they were, before the Federals reintrenched or got away across the river, Lee for the first time in his career ordered a night attack. While the artillery shelled Banks Ford in the darkness, attempting to seal off the exit, the infantry groped about in the fog, dog-tired, and made no progress. At first light, the skirmishers recovered their sense of direction, pushed forward, and found that the works to their front were empty; Sedgwick had escaped. Though his casualties had been heavy—worse than 4600 in all, including the men lost earlier—he had got his three divisions to safety across a bridge the engineers had thrown a mile below Banks Ford, well beyond range of the all-night interdictory fire.

Word came presently from Barksdale that Gibbon too had recrossed the river at Fredericksburg and cut his pontoons loose from the west bank. This meant that for the first time in three days no live, uncaptured bluecoats remained on the Confederate side of the Rappahannock except the ones intrenched above Chancellorsville; Lee had abolished the threat to his rear. Though he was far from satisfied, having failed in another of a lengthening sequence of attempts to destroy a considerable segment of the Union army, he had at least restored—and even improved—the situation that had existed yesterday, when he was preparing to give Hooker his undivided attention. Once more intent on destruction, he allowed the men of McLaws and Anderson no rest, but ordered them to take up the march back to Chancellorsville, intending for them to resume the offensive they had abandoned for Sedgwick’s sake the day before. Stuart reported that the Federals, though still present in great strength behind their V, had made no attempt to move against him, either yesterday or so far this morning; yet Lee did what he could to hasten the march westward, not so much out of fear that Hooker would lash out at Stuart, whom he outnumbered better than three to one, as out of fear that he would do as Sedgwick had done and make his escape
across the river before the Confederates had time to reconcentrate and crush him.

In point of fact, Lee’s fears on the latter count were more valid than he had any way of knowing, not having attended a council of war held the night before at his opponent’s headquarters. At midnight, while Sedgwick was beginning his withdrawal across the Rappahannock, Hooker had called his other corps commanders together to vote on whether they should do the same. Couch, Reynolds, Meade, Howard, and Sickles reported promptly, but Slocum, who had the farthest to come, did not arrive until after the meeting had broken up. Hooker put the question to them—remarking, as Couch would recall, “that his instructions compelled him to cover Washington, not to jeopardize the army, etc.”—then retired to let them talk it over among themselves. Reynolds was much fatigued from loss of sleep; he lay down in one corner of the tent to get some rest, telling Meade to vote his proxy for attack. Meade did so, adding his own vote to that effect. Howard too was for taking the offensive; for unlike Meade and Reynolds, whose two corps had scarcely fired a shot, he had a reputation to retrieve. Couch on the other hand voted to withdraw, but made it clear that he favored such a course only because Hooker was still in charge. Sickles, whose corps had suffered almost as many casualties as any two of the other five combined, was in favor of pulling back at once, Hooker or no Hooker. Fighting Joe returned, was given the three-to-two opinion, and adjourned the council with the announcement that he intended to withdraw the army beyond the river as soon as possible. As the generals left the tent, Reynolds broke out angrily, quite loud enough for Hooker to overhear him: “What was the use of calling us together at this time of night when he intended to retreat anyhow?”

Their instructions were to cut whatever roads were necessary, leading from their present positions back to U.S. Ford, while the army engineers were selecting a strong inner line, anchored a mile above and a mile below the two pontoon bridges, for Meade’s corps to occupy in covering the withdrawal. All were hard at work on their various assignments before dawn on the 5th, at which time Hooker crossed in person, accompanied by his staff. Then at noon, with the pull-back to the inner line completed, rain began to fall.
It fell in earnest, developing quickly into what one diarist called “a tremendous cold storm.” By midnight the river had risen six feet, endangering the bridges and interrupting the retreat before more than a handful of regiments had reached the opposite bank. Cut off from Hooker, Couch believed he saw his chance. “We will stay where we are and fight it out,” he announced. But peremptory orders arrived at 2 a.m. for the movement to be continued. One of the bridges was cannibalized to piece out the other, and the crossing was resumed. By midmorning Wednesday, May 6, it was completed. Except for the dead and missing, who would not be coming back, the army’s week-long excursion south of the river had come full circle.

Lee was up by then, after being delayed by the storm the day before, but when his skirmishers pushed forward through the dripping woods they found the enemy gone. He lost his temper at the news and scolded the brigadier who brought it. “That is the way you young men always do,” he fumed. “You allow those people to get away. I tell you what to do, but you won’t do it!” He gestured impatiently. “Go after them, and damage them all you can!” But no further damage was possible; the bluecoats were well beyond his reach. At a cost of less than 13,000 casualties he had inflicted more than 17,000 and had won what future critics would call the most brilliant victory of his career, but he was by no means satisfied. He had aimed at total capture or annihilation of the foe, and the extent to which he had fallen short of this was, to his mind, the extent to which he had failed. Leaving a few regiments to tend the wounded, bury the dead, and glean the spoils abandoned by the Unionists on the field, he marched the rest of his army back through the rain-drenched Wilderness to Fredericksburg and the comparative comfort of the camps it had left a week ago, when word first came that the enemy was across the Rappahannock.

Back at Falmouth that evening, while his army straggled eastward in his wake, Hooker learned that Stoneman’s raid, from which so much had been expected, had been almost a total failure. Intending, as he later reported, to “magnify our small force into overwhelming numbers,” the cavalryman had broken up his column into fragments, none of which, as it turned out, had been strong enough to do more than temporary damage to the installations in Lee’s rear. According to one disgusted trooper, “Our only accomplishments were the burning of a few canal boats on the upper James River, some bridges, hen roosts, and tobacco houses.” Stoneman returned the way he had come, recrossing at Raccoon Ford on the morning of May 7, while other portions of his scattered column turned up as far away as Yorktown. His total losses, in addition to about 1000 horses broken down and abandoned, were 82 men killed and wounded and 307 missing. These figures seemed to Hooker to prove that Stoneman had not been seriously engaged, and it was not long before he removed him from command. However, his own
casualties, while quite as heavy as anyone on his own side of the line could have desired—the ultimate total was 17,287, as compared to Lee’s 12,821—were equally condemning, though in a different way, since a breakdown of them indicated the disjointed manner in which he had fought and refrained from fighting the battle. Meade and Reynolds, for example, had lost fewer than 1000 men between them, while Sedgwick and Sickles had lost more than four times that number each. Obviously Lincoln’s parting admonition, “Put in all your men,” had been ignored. Hooker was quick to place the blame for his defeat on Stoneman, Averell, Howard, and Sedgwick, sometimes singly and at other times collectively. It was only in private, and some weeks later, that he was able to see, or at any rate confess, where the real trouble had lain. “I was not hurt by a shell, and I was not drunk,” he told a fellow officer. “For once I lost confidence in Joe Hooker, and that is all there is to it.”

In time that would become the registered consensus, but for the present many of his compatriots were hard put to understand how such a disaster had come about. Horace Greeley staggered into the
Tribune
managing editor’s office Thursday morning, his face a ghastly color and his lips trembling. “My God, it is horrible,” he exclaimed. “Horrible. And to think of it—130,000 magnificent soldiers so cut to pieces by less than 60,000 half-starved ragamuffins!” An Episcopal clergyman, also in New York, could not reconcile the various reports and rumors he recorded in his diary that night. “It would seem that Hooker has beaten Lee, and that Lee has beaten Hooker; that we have taken Fredericksburg, and that the rebels have taken it also; that we have 4500 prisoners, and the rebels 5400; that Hooker has cut off Lee’s retreat, and Lee has cut off Sedgwick’s retreat, and Sedgwick has cut off everybody’s retreat generally, but has retreated himself although his retreat was cut off.… In short, all is utter confusion. Everything seems to be everywhere, and everybody all over, and there is no getting at any truth.” Official Washington was similarly confused and dismayed. When Sumner of Massachusetts heard that Hooker had been whipped, he flung up his hands and struck an attitude of despair. “Lost—lost,” he groaned. “All is lost!” But the hardest-hit man of them all was Lincoln, whose hopes had had the longest way to fall. Six months ago, on the heels of Emancipation, he had foreseen clear sailing for the ship of state provided the helmsman kept a steady hand on the tiller. “We are like whalers who have been on a long chase,” he told a friend. “We have at last got the harpoon into the monster, but we must now look how we steer, or with one flop of his tail he will send us all into eternity.” Then had come Fredericksburg, and he had said: “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.” Now there was this, a still harder flop of the monster’s tail, and Hooker and the Army of the Potomac had gone sprawling. Even before the news arrived, a White House caller had found the President “anxious and harassed beyond any power of description.” Yet this was
nothing compared to his reaction later in the day, when he reappeared with a telegram in his hand. “News from the army,” he said in a trembling voice. The visitor read that Hooker was in retreat, and looking up saw that Lincoln’s face, “usually sallow, was ashen in hue. The paper on the wall behind him was of the tint known as ‘French gray,’ and even in that moment of sorrow … I vaguely took in the thought that the complexion of the anguished President’s visage was like that of the wall.” He walked up and down the room, hands clasped behind his back. “My God, my God,” he exclaimed as he paced back and forth. “What will the country say? What will the country say?”

Within the ranks of the army itself, slogging down the muddy roads toward Falmouth, the reaction was not unlike the New York clergyman’s. “No one seems to understand this move,” a Pennsylvania private wrote, “but I have no doubt it is all right.” He belonged to Meade’s corps, which had seen very little fighting, and he could not quite comprehend that what he had been involved in was a defeat. All he knew for certain was that the march back to camp was a hard one. “Most of the way the mud was over shoe, in some places knee deep, and the rain made our loads terrible to tired shoulders.” Others knew well enough that they had taken part in a fiasco. “Go boil your shirt!” was their reply to jokes attempted by roadside stragglers. Turning the matter over in their minds, they could see that Hooker had been trounced, but they could not see that this applied to themselves, who had fought as well as ever—except, of course, the unregenerate Dutchmen—whenever and wherever they got the chance. Mostly, though, they preferred to ignore the question of praise or blame. “And thus ends the second attempt on the capture of Fredericksburg,” a Maine soldier recorded when he got back to Falmouth. “I have nothing to say about it in any way. I have no opinions to express about the Gen’ls or the men nor do I wish to. I leave it in the hands of God. I don’t want to think of it at all.”