02 May 2007 by Published in: General musings 4 comments

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.

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Comments

  1. Ian Duncanson
    Wed 02nd May 2007 at 9:23 pm

    Was not Couch the senior corps commander and possibly in line for command of the AOP upon Hooker’s removal? 2nd question – How did Sickles behavior at Chancellorsville effect his bad decesion at Gettysburg? Did he not withdrawal his corps positions at Hazel Grove as ordered?

  2. Wed 02nd May 2007 at 9:31 pm

    Ian,

    The answer is yes, Couch was next senior and would have been entitled to command of the army. His leaving the army was critical, as it made it possible for Meade–behind Couch and Reynolds in terms of seniority–to assume army command seven weeks later.

    Yes, Sickles withdrew from the Hazel Grove position, but, as I will elaborate tomorrow, he apparently decided that he would never allow his command to be pounded after giving up high ground again as it had after giving up Hazel Grove. That, in turn, led specifically to the movement forward at Gettysburg.

    Eric

  3. Don
    Thu 03rd May 2007 at 7:33 am

    Eric,

    I would submit that one of the reasons the army didn’t capture the lesson of sending all of the cavalry away from the main body of the army was that the cavalry didn’t want the lesson captured.

    They wanted to go on Stoneman’s raid and take the fight to the enemy. “They” here meaning senior cavalry leaders, not just Stoneman. They also thought that they had rendered good service upon their return. Granted, it did more for their confidence than any real, tangible damage to the enemy, but that was a result. As I read through old accounts and unit histories of the battle and raid, rarely do I see anyone from the cavalry say, “We should have been there” or “Things would have been different had we been there.” So in their eyes I don’t think the lesson was there to be captured.

    The following year, again the cavalry wanted to be on the raid. I don’t think Sheridan was wrong in thinking that taking Stuart’s cavalry out of the area would hamper Lee and help Grant. I think he could have left Grant with a brigade or two of cavalry, though, and allowed him to better cover his flanks. But it’s not simply a case of blaming Sheridan. Everything that I’ve read indicates that all of the senior cavalry leaders favored the raid and were focused on taking the fight to Stuart’s cavalry.

    In both cases, however, senior cavalry leaders and advisors wanted to be off on raids and taking the fight to the enemy instead of performing its primary mission of reconnaissance and security for the army. The people who should have raised the issue to the army leaders were interested in doing something else. Cavalry raids were a great tool and accomplished a lot during the war, but they didn’t supercede the arm’s primary role.

  4. Dan
    Wed 16th May 2007 at 11:44 am

    As a counterpoint, it’s interesting to note that Stephen Sears drew a different conclusion about Hooker’s performance at Chancellorsville in his book on the subject. While Sears seems to invest Hooker with near-infallibility, and assigns his defeat there to the failings of subordinates (a familiar refrain, often used to explain away the defeats of Grant, Lee, and others), he does point out that, given how badly the AONV was wounded in its attacks on May 3rd, perhaps Hooker’s general idea—withdrawing to Chancellorsville, entrenching up to the eyeballs and letting Lee beat his brains out in vain trying to take the place—had merit, and, given at least a little initiative on Hooker’s part, such as perhaps perching the I or V Corps on the wings of the army to lanch a counterattack, or keeping a closer eye on Howard’s dispositions to receive an attack, might have proven to be the key towards winning the battle the way Hooker wanted to win it. Sears also contends that Hooker’s decision to withdraw back to Chancellorsville on the 1st, far from being an abject surrender of the intiative, might have been the most senisble thing to do, since the narrow roadways on which his army made contact with Lee’s that day would have severely hindered the sort of large-scale attack that his latter-day critics insist he should have made. On the other hand, I can’t quite recall how Sears attempted to explain Hooker’s refusal to commit the I and V Corps to battle on the 3rd, or why he chose to abandon Hazel Grove. I guess I’ll have to re-read that part.

    Also, Sears savages the “lost faith” quote that historians are so fond of quoting, pointing out that the officer who claimed to have been in on the conversation would, according to known troop dispositions, have been many miles away from Hooker’s HQ at the time it was supposed to have been said.

    Personally, I think the quote had to have come from somewhere; I just can’t see someone making up something like that out of whole cloth, and it seems to fit Hooker’s boastful personality quite well. But still…

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