Chancellorsville, Part Two

Tonight, the anniversary of second day of the battle, which was the day of Jackson’s flank march and devastating flank attack, I will address the implications of the Battle of Chancellorsville for the Army of the Potomac.

The Chancellorsville Campaign was Joseph Hooker’s single battle in command of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker had a lot of strong points. He was an able administrator, and he instituted some real reforms in the Army of the Potomac. Among the reforms were furloughs for soldiers, corps badges, improved supplies, and he did away with Burnside’s cumbersome and unmanageable Grand Division scheme. He took a badly beaten and terribly demoralized army and turned it into a fearsome fighting machine in a matter of just weeks.

Hooker also designed and implemented a superb campaign plan that actually stole a march on Robert E. Lee. And that’s where it ended.

Once the guns began to roar, Hooker completely lost his nerve. Instead of proceeding aggressively, Hooker instead gave up critical high ground, turned passive, and assumed a defensive posture. In so doing, he gave up a more than two-to-one numeric advantage and ceded the initiative to Robert E. Lee. Hooker demonstrated, beyond doubt, that he was not suited to command a large army in the field, and set back the Army of the Potomac once again. To put it in Hooker’s own words, “I lost faith in Joe Hooker.” His loss of faith cost a lot of good men their lives.

In the process, Hooker gave a superb demonstration of how NOT to use cavalry. Instead of using his 12,000 man Cavalry Corps to scout, screen, and lead the army’s advance into the tangled undergrowth of the Wilderness, Hooker instead sent his entire Cavalry Corps off on a long and ill-fated raid deep behind enemy lines. Hooker had only a single brigade of cavalry–the smallest in the Cavalry Corps–with him as he went into battle at Chancellorsville. That, in turn, left the Union right flank uncovered and set the stage for Jackson’s flank attack. Incredibly, the Union high command never learned a lesson from this failure–Grant did exactly the same thing on almost the same ground a year and a couple of days later when he sent Sheridan off on a raid toward Richmond with the entire Cavalry Corps, with pretty much the same results.

Daniel E. Sickles, commander of the Third Corps, demonstrated that he was not inclined to do what the army command expected of him. Sickles set the stage for his insubordination at Gettysburg. His experience at Hazel Grove convinced him that he should never willingly give up what he believed was good ground. This set the stage for a disaster at Gettysburg. Perhaps Sickles should have been relieved of command after Chancellorsville.

Likewise, O. O. Howard amply demonstrated that he was not competent to hold corps command at Chancellorsville. He simply ignored multiple reports of a large Confederate force moving on his flank and did little to prepare for a flank attack beyond refusing a single brigade. In spite of hard fighting, his corps was swept from the field.

Howard’s command, the Eleventh Corps, in addition to being the unfortunate target of Jackson’s flank attack, ended up getting a bad rap because of Chancellorsville. Its men fought hard–in some pockets, long, hard, and as well as any unit in the Army of the Potomac–but because of the impossible position in which they were put, they became scapegoats for the Union defeat at Chancellorsville and were called the Flying Dutchmen for breaking under the onslaught of Jackson’s attack. It was grossly unfair to men who were good fighters.

Alfred Pleasonton showed his true colors early. Pleasonton, a notorious liar and toady, wrongly claimed credit for saving Hooker’s army from destruction at Chancellorsville. Pleasonton claimed that he alone had the foresight to place artillery at the key spot to halt Jackson’s momentum, for which he improperly received credit for saving the army when he did no such thing. However, because he was the ranking subordinate in the Cavalry Corps after George Stoneman went on medical leave and W. W. Averell was fired by Hooker, Pleasonton ended up in command of the Corps even though he was not competent to command a corps.

Finally, Chancellorsville cost the Army of the Potomac the services of Maj. Gen. Darius N. Couch, the capable commander of the II Corps. Couch, utterly disgusted by Hooker’s terrible performance, refused to serve under Hooker’s command again after Chancellorsville and was sent to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to assume command of the Department of the Susquehanna. While he performed good service during the Gettysburg Campaign, Couch never again commanded troops in the Army of the Potomac, meaning that wretched corps commanders such as Sickles, Howard, and Slocum in place. Allow me to suggest that had Couch remained with the army, one of these other incompetents might have been removed from command.

Fortunately, the Army of the Potomac did not suffer permanent harm from the crushing defeat that its commander inflicted upon it at Chancellorsville. It recovered quickly and fought superbly at Gettysburg in spite of what it had been through at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, a testament to the fighting spirit of the men who made up its ranks.

Tomorrow night, I will wrap up this series of posts by discussing the links between Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.