Virginia at War, 1863

Land Operations in Virginia in 1863

High-water Mark and Beginning of the Ebb

A. Wilson Greene

The Union army of the Potomac awakened on New Year’s Day 1863 in a bad mood. Their cheerless, mud-soaked camps in southern Stafford County contributed to their foul humor, but memories of December’s fiasco at Fredericksburg explained most of their discontent. The recent battle was only a murder, for which [army commander] . . . A. E. Burnside [is] responsible, wrote one Michigan survivor of the slaughter on the far side of the Rappahannock. South of the river, the Army of Northern Virginia basked in the praise of its beloved commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee, who had just the night before lauded the fortitude, valor, and devotion of his soldiers while acknowledging their great victory.¹

Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside, the genial but now discredited Union commander, determined to spare his army a winter of humiliation and despair. Overcoming the political machinations of scheming and disloyal subordinates and the grave doubts of President Abraham Lincoln and his military brain trust in Washington, Burnside gained permission to launch a new offensive in January. He planned to march secretly up the left bank of the Rappahannock and cross at Banks’s Ford, four miles above Fredericksburg and beyond the strongest portions of Lee’s river defenses. Feints orchestrated farther upstream and below the city would keep Lee guessing long enough to allow Burnside to maneuver the main body of his army across the river to Spotsylvania County. From there, the Federals could move on Lee’s dangling left flank and compel the Confederates either to fight at a disadvantage or to retreat southward, closer to their capital at Richmond. The movement would begin on January 20.

The plan was not without merit and might have succeeded—had it not been January. A fierce nor’easter, laden with a cold rain that turned Stafford County into a sea of boot-gripping mire, stopped the Army of the Potomac in its tracks. Whatever confidence the soldiers—and the country—had retained in Burnside after the Fredericksburg debacle washed away with the topsoil that drained into the roiling Rappahannock. Burnside’s tenure as army commander concluded on January 25, when Lincoln named one of his primary detractors, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, to replace him.²

Hooker, a boastful man whose ego far exceeded his ethics, took immediate steps to improve the army’s fighting trim. Although known as Fighting Joe, Hooker demonstrated a firm grasp of organizational principles and army administration. He improved camp sanitation and rations, granted furloughs to the dispirited men, established a Bureau of Military Information to gather intelligence, and instituted a corps badge system, which provided the troops with unit esprit de corps while making it easier to identify malingerers. He also reconfigured the army, adding a separate cavalry corps, the first step toward revolutionizing the usefulness of that combat arm.³

Lee and his army struggled with different administrative challenges, primarily the fundamental need for supplies. Central Virginia already endured a deteriorating economy, and providing enough food for the soldiers and fodder for the horses and mules during the winter months proved difficult. "The Yankees say that we have a new gen’l in command of our army & say his name is General Starvation & I think for once they are about right, wrote a Georgia soldier. We generally draw rations for three days at a time & eat them up in two, & do without untill we draw again."⁴

General Lee and the Confederate War Department looked covetously at southeastern Virginia and neighboring North Carolina, where huge volumes of grain, preserved meat, and livestock lay ripe for the taking from the Tidewater’s occupying bluecoats. In February, Lee detached his old war horse, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, along with two veteran infantry divisions to mount a campaign aimed at collecting those supplies. Lee would remain on the defensive around Fredericksburg, but he warned Longstreet that should Hooker cross the Rappahannock, Longstreet must hurry north to meet the foe.

Hooker spent the season honing his army—the finest on the planet, he pronounced it—and allowing his new cavalry corps to flex its muscles. The Federal horsemen broke the calm of the waning winter on March 17 with a bold operation twenty-five miles up the Rappahannock to Kelly’s Ford. In the war’s largest all-cavalry battle to date, the Union horsemen encountered the Virginia troopers of Brig. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee, the Confederate commander’s nephew. After spirited combat, the Yankees withdrew with the honors, although the outnumbered Virginians had given as well as they took. Maj. John Pelham, the renowned young Confederate artillerist who had garnered Lee’s praise at Fredericksburg, fell mortally wounded at Kelly’s Ford, plunging both Virginia and Pelham’s native Alabama into mourning.⁵

A month later, Longstreet’s forces launched their campaign toward Suffolk in southeastern Virginia. Their operation drew little blood, and the Confederates managed to extract more than one million pounds of bacon and other needed edibles from Virginia and Tarheel farms. But while Longstreet gathered rations, Lee and Stonewall Jackson were left to cope with Hooker’s spring offensive.⁶

Ironically, Hooker’s plan borrowed liberally from the premise of Burnside’s infamous Mud March. As Burnside did in January, Hooker would bait the Confederates with feigned offensives both opposite Fredericksburg and a few miles downstream. Mesmerizing Lee and Jackson with this show of force, Hooker’s main body would sneak well upriver—to the scene of the recent cavalry battle at Kelly’s Ford—and there cross the Rappahannock beyond the Confederate river defenses. Four Federal infantry corps would rendezvous at a rural intersection dominated by the red brick Chancellor house—endowed with the pretentious name of Chancellorsville—ten miles west of Fredericksburg. Hooker would send his cavalry corps on an even wider sweep to the west, where it would eventually cut Lee’s communications with Richmond. If all went as planned, Lee’s army, trapped between superior forces at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, would flee south, be slowed by the cavalry, and then face destruction from the blue wave that would engulf it in pursuit. May God have mercy on General Lee, Hooker intoned, for I will have none. Hooker’s confidence was not without substance. With Longstreet absent in southeastern Virginia, Lee’s 60,000 soldiers faced odds of more than two to one.⁷

Information about the Federal movements gradually arrived at Lee’s headquarters near Fredericksburg, but deciphering what it all meant puzzled the Confederate high command. Were the Yankees intending to attack below Fredericksburg? Was the flanking movement to the west, reported by cavalry chief J. E. B. Jeb Stuart, a lunge toward the railroad junction at Gordonsville, a diversion toward the Shenandoah Valley, or the business end of a giant strategic pincers? On the night of April 29, Lee sent one division west to watch the gathering enemy.

By the next evening, he determined that Hooker’s flanking movement represented the true threat. Lee ordered one of Jackson’s divisions, reinforced by a brigade, to remain on the high ground overlooking Fredericksburg while the bulk of Stonewall’s force marched west through the night to assume a blocking position east of Chancellorsville. This would be but the first of a series of gambles executed by Lee and Jackson during five days of maneuver and combat that would demonstrate that inspired generalship could trump superior firepower.⁸

Jackson arrived at an important intersection six miles west of Fredericksburg on the morning of May 1. The division that preceded him had begun to dig earthworks covering both the Orange Plank Road and Orange Turnpike leading from Chancellorsville toward Fredericksburg. Told by Lee only to make preparations to repulse the enemy, Stonewall instructed the soldiers to lay down their shovels and pick up their rifles. Jackson would attack.

The Federals had unwisely halted their advance on April 30 to consolidate their forces (the first of Hooker’s many mistakes in this campaign), but by the morning of May 1 the Union commander had assembled more than 65,000 men in the Chancellorsville area; Jackson had fewer than 20,000 on the ground. Hooker expected the Confederates to ingloriously fly when confronted with the reality of their situation, but instead he found himself the target of a bold and aggressive offensive. Jackson’s audacity drained the conviction from Fighting Joe’s swagger. The Northerners slowly retired to Chancellorsville, where Hooker ordered his army to assume defensive positions, squandering the advantages gained by his successful marching. Thus handed the initiative, General Lee joined Jackson at an obscure country crossroads, and the two great Virginians pondered their next move.⁹

Chancellorsville occupied the eastern margins of what residents called the Wilderness of Spotsylvania. This area of some eighty square miles contained quantities of iron ore that at once limited the fertility of the soil and gave birth to a modest smelting industry. Old furnaces dotted the landscape, now entangled by second- and third-growth scrub oak and pine, the by-product of several generations of charcoal making. Roads were scarce, as were clearings and homesteads. The open ground around Chancellorsville provided one of the few places in the Wilderness where contending armies might see their foes. In this Virginia jungle, Lee and Jackson first had to locate their opponent.

Scouts penetrated the darkness of that chilly night, eventually returning to the commanders’ little bivouac with the news that the Yankees had created a strong perimeter guarding the Chancellorsville crossroads. No practical means existed of attacking them in their lair. Then Jeb Stuart dashed into the camp with important information. Hooker had failed to anchor his right flank on any natural or artificial obstacle. In the parlance of the time, Hooker’s flank was in the air. Lee and Jackson immediately appreciated this potential weakness, but they still faced the problem of exploiting it. More scouts, guided by local citizens and aided by Jackson’s chaplain, who knew the area well, identified a series of hidden charcoal roads that might provide an avenue to pounce on Hooker’s exposed flank.

The two generals sat on abandoned hardtack boxes around a modest campfire. What do you propose to do? asked Lee, knowing full well that both men had the same plan in mind. Go around here, came Jackson’s response, as he pointed to the twelve-mile hike outlined by the scouts. What do you propose to make this movement with? countered Lee. With my whole corps, Jackson replied. Jackson’s audacity momentarily surprised even the bold Lee. Stonewall’s proposal possessed the virtue of providing enough punch to do serious harm to Hooker’s vulnerable army—assuming he could march his men to their attack points without being detected and in time to exploit their opportunity. But while Jackson marched, Lee would be left with only 13,000 men to bemuse Hooker. Should the Union commander regain his vigor, or even detect the nature of his divided enemy, the Army of Northern Virginia could face destruction.¹⁰

Lee assented without further hesitation. The two officers spoke briefly on the morning of May 2, and then Jackson led his 30,000 troops into the green maze of the Wilderness. It was the last time Virginia’s two greatest soldiers would meet.¹¹

Jackson’s flanking march began about 7:00 A.M. on May 2 and would continue all day. Stonewall took precise steps to maintain discipline and to keep his ranks closed as the men negotiated narrow roads that snaked through the thick foliage. Despite all of these precautions, the Federals discovered Jackson’s movement within an hour after it commenced. Lookouts located in trees atop high ground called Hazel Grove spotted the gray column as it passed a clearing about a mile to the south. Quickly, word of this ominous development spread through the Union high command. Hooker authorized his gunners to fire at the marching Confederates, and he sent warnings to his right flank commander, Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard, to be on the alert for a possible Confederate offensive. Jackson diverted his men away from the clearing, detached a few troops as a rear guard facing Hazel Grove, and continued his mission.

Hooker, however, developed a change of heart. By noon he had convinced himself that the Confederates were in the process of retreating, not maneuvering for an attack. After all, this was the outcome he had anticipated all along. Eventually he ordered a large portion of his army to sally forward from Hazel Grove and gobble up the Confederate rear guard around Catharine Furnace. By then Stonewall was in place and ready to strike.

Jackson’s flank attack ranks among the most famous of all Civil War offensives. He arrayed his brigades on both sides of the Orange Turnpike and at about 5:00 P.M. signaled the advance. General Howard had done little to heed Hooker’s morning warning, and, in fact, had been assured that the Confederates were in retreat. The troops once in his immediate support were now around Catharine Furnace among the Union units scooping up Jackson’s rear guard. Howard stood truly isolated, and Jackson’s assault caught the Federal corps completely by surprise. The Northerners put up a better fight than is usually acknowledged, but by nightfall Howard’s entire corps had been routed, and Jackson’s advance forces halted less than one mile west of Hooker’s headquarters at Chancellorsville.¹²

Not content with the day’s remarkable accomplishments, General Jackson sought to deliver a knockout blow. He ordered fresh troops, who had arrived too late to be involved in the flank attack, to make their way to the front lines in preparation for a night assault. While they moved into position, Jackson and a small party of staff officers, couriers, and scouts plunged into the inky darkness of the Wilderness to determine the precise condition and location of the Union lines. As Jackson’s mounted party returned from its reconnaissance, a regiment of North Carolina infantry mistook it for the enemy. First a few ragged shots and then a determined volley pierced the air. Jackson fell wounded, struck by three balls fired, tragically, by his own men.

Aides removed the wounded general to a field hospital. After midnight a surgeon amputated his left arm. His senior division commander, Maj. Gen. A. P. Hill, had also been wounded, so Stuart took command of Jackson’s corps. Any victory is a dear one that deprives us of the services of General Jackson, even for a short time, said Lee. The Confederate commander realized that despite Stonewall’s commendable achievement on May 2, the Army of Northern Virginia still faced dire peril. Hooker had received fresh levies during the night, and his reinforced Goliath stood firmly between the separated wings of Lee’s outnumbered forces. If he wished to avoid the possibility of piecemeal destruction, Lee must immediately unite the two segments of his army.¹³

The high ground at Hazel Grove held the key. If Stuart could capture the clearing there, Lee’s divisions could link and move against Hooker’s center at Chancellorsville. Stuart vowed to try. Then Hooker made it easy for him. Wishing to shorten his defensive lines, the Union commander unwisely ordered his units on Hazel Grove to fall back one-half mile to another clearing called Fairview. Lee and Stuart made their connection and then turned to attack.

The fighting between Hazel Grove and Fairview on the morning of May 3 proved to be the bloodiest of the year on Virginia soil. Stuart sent wave after wave of determined troops against the Union position, only to have the brave Northerners repulse them each time. Hooker, however, seemed to have lost control of the fighting and failed to send fresh ammunition to his beleaguered men at Fairview. When a Confederate artillery shell struck the Chancellor house, sending part of a pillar crashing into the Union commander and rendering him temporarily unconscious, the Army of the Potomac became literally leaderless. The Confederates eventually overwhelmed the blue-clad defenders at Fairview and formed to attack a hard knot of Union soldiers at Chancellorsville, which provided a rear guard for the now-retreating Federals. They, too, disappeared into the Wilderness by late morning, and General Lee rode into the burning clearing at Chancellorsville experiencing his finest moment as a soldier. It must have been from such a scene that men in ancient times rose to the dignity of gods, thought a staff officer.¹⁴

Events at Fredericksburg cut short the Confederate celebration. Word arrived that a portion of Hooker’s army had overpowered the thin Confederate defenses behind the city and were even now marching west toward Lee’s rear. Ever the gambler, Lee divided his army yet again, sending all but 25,000 of his men to deal with this new threat. The Confederates stopped the Union advance at Salem Church on the afternoon of May 3, and then drove the Federals back across the Rappahannock River at Banks’s Ford the following day.

Lee then intended to unite his army and attack Hooker north of Chancellorsville, but rain on May 5 slowed his plans. That night, Hooker abandoned his final line of defense (one too strong for Lee to have hoped to capture) and crossed the river in defeat. The battle of Chancellorsville, Lee’s greatest victory, had come to an end.

American history knows few engagements more illustrative of what an outnumbered army can accomplish if boldly led. Hooker lost more than 17,300 men between May 1 and May 5, and his army returned to Stafford County as thoroughly whipped as it had been in December. Yet unlike the battle of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville had serious consequences for Lee.¹⁵

The Army of Northern Virginia suffered more than 13,000 losses, a far greater percentage of its strength than represented by Hooker’s casualties. The most important of those losses was Thomas Jackson. Physicians fully expected Stonewall to recover from his wounds. As a precaution against capture, however, Lee ordered Jackson moved to a place of safety, convenient to the railroad to Richmond, where Stonewall could recuperate before regaining the field. On May 4 the stricken general endured a twenty-seven-mile wagon ride to a plantation in Caroline County. Six days later Jackson died there, a victim of pneumonia. General Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia, and the Confederate cause would never replace him.¹⁶

For the Confederates, Jackson’s death (along with the loss of so many less renowned soldiers) seemed, at the time, the only repercussion of the Chancellorsville campaign. In hindsight, Lee’s victory paved the way for another Confederate tragedy in the summer of 1863. Lee had long subscribed to the strategic vision of bringing the war to the North, despite his misadventure in Maryland the previous year. President Jefferson Davis hesitated to adopt that risky approach, but after the improbable victory at Chancellorsville, who could deny that Lee’s army would be invincible on the attack? After reorganizing his divisions into three infantry corps, Lee laid plans for his second major campaign across the Potomac.

The Army of Northern Virginia would use the Blue Ridge Mountains as its shield during the movement north. One by one, Lee’s corps would slip up the south bank of the Rappahannock, cross the mountains, and enter the Shenandoah Valley. Lee had no particular destination in mind, although railroads, rich farms, and industrial facilities in Pennsylvania provided attractive objectives. The Confederate commander also hoped that by removing the war from the Old Dominion, he could resupply his troops on Northern soil, allow Virginia farmers a respite from combat to plant and harvest their crops, and defeat the inevitable Union effort to drive them back across the Potomac.¹⁷

Jeb Stuart had concentrated his cavalry corps in Culpeper County, thirty miles northwest of Fredericksburg, in position to screen Lee’s infantry as it headed toward the Potomac. Lee arrived near Brandy Station on June 8 and watched approvingly as Stuart, the personification of grace and gallantry combined, conducted a review of his superb horsemen. The next day Stuart was to ride north and use his renowned skills as a cavalryman to block the gaps in the Blue Ridge to keep Hooker from interfering with Lee’s march down the Valley. The largest cavalry battle fought on American soil would cancel those plans.¹⁸

Hooker’s mounted forces had discovered Stuart’s concentration a few days before Lee’s grand review. Worried that the Confederate troopers meant mischief, Hooker ordered his own cavalry, under Brig. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, to attack Stuart in his camps and destroy his ability to conduct a raid. Dividing his troopers into three wings, Pleasonton converged on Stuart’s bivouacs on June 9.

The resulting battle of Brandy Station engaged some 20,000 mounted troops. Stuart had been caught completely by surprise, despite the failure of Pleasonton’s envelopment to unfold as crisply as he had diagrammed. The first Union attack struck at dawn, the Federal horsemen crossing the Rappahannock at Beverly Ford and pounding toward little St. James Church and the dominating terrain beyond, called Fleetwood Hill. While Stuart’s men poured everything they had against this Federal column, another of the Union wings appeared at last from the south, aiming for the rear of Fleetwood Hill, held at this time by one lone piece of Confederate horse artillery.

The moment of crisis had arrived. Stuart’s veteran cavalry galloped over the crest of Fleetwood Hill from the north as Union horsemen, led by an English soldier of fortune named Sir Percy Wyndham, appeared on the ridge from the southwest. The landscape turned crimson with the blood of thundering horses and their reckless riders, an indescribable clashing and slashing, banging and yelling, as one trooper recalled it. Sabers whirred and pistols exploded at point-blank range as blue and gray waves pulsed back and forth over the smoke-enshrouded hilltop. Both sides launched reinforcements into the fight. By 4:30, the worst of the combat had passed, and Pleasonton, satisfied that he had sufficiently disrupted any imminent plans Stuart might have for an offensive, slowly withdrew across the Rappahannock.¹⁹

Nearly 1,400 troopers became casualties at Brandy Station. Never again would anyone sarcastically inquire, Whoever saw a dead cavalryman? The vaunted Jeb Stuart held the field at the end of the day, but his ego had been as badly bruised as his command. Our victory was near akin to defeat, thought the Prince George County fire-eater Edmund Ruffin, & but for the desperate bravery of our troops, the result must have been a most disastrous defeat. The Virginia press took Stuart to task for the delinquency that led to his surprise, and Stuart felt the weight of a compromised reputation.²⁰

The battle of Brandy Station delayed Stuart’s ride to the north, but Lee did not wait for his cavalry to recover. By June 13, Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell’s Second Corps, 19,000 strong, approached the outskirts of Winchester in the lower Shenandoah Valley, held by a Union garrison of nearly 7,000 men commanded by Maj. Gen. Robert H. Milroy. The Washington brass had urged Milroy to abandon his advanced position at Winchester, but the stubborn Hoosier had confidence in his position, anchored by three strong forts west and north of town.

Ewell divided his corps, and after some skirmishing prepared to attack the Federals on several fronts. A late afternoon assault on June 14 captured one of Milroy’s forts, and the Union commander, finally appreciating his precarious position, ordered a full-scale retreat north toward Harpers Ferry. Ewell had anticipated Milroy’s move and placed a blocking force across the road near Stephenson’s Depot. The Federals struck the Confederate column at dawn on June 15, desperately trying to cut their way through what had now become a murderous trap.

It was no use. Ewell’s forces controlled every avenue of escape, and the bluecoats had no choice but to hoist a white flag. Although Milroy managed to get away, some 3,300 of his men were not so lucky. This battle of Winchester . . . was one of the most perfect pieces of work the Army of Northern Virginia ever did, thought one Virginia cannoneer. Ewell lost fewer than 300 soldiers in what would prove to be the highlight of this Virginian’s military career.²¹

By this time, Lee’s entire army was on the move, including Stuart’s humbled horsemen. Hooker’s Army of the Potomac had also started north, following the footprint of the Bull Run Mountains, a low range separated from the Blue Ridge to the west by the Loudon Valley. Here, Stuart would have to block Pleasonton’s probes and prevent the Yankee cavalry from discovering and interfering with Lee’s infantry as it padded toward the Potomac.

Three small but intense cavalry clashes resulted. The first occurred on June 17 near Aldie. During four hours of vicious fighting, Federals led by Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick tested Virginia regiments under Col. Thomas T. Munford. One Massachusetts unit lost 198 out of 294 men during the engagement, but Union reinforcements arriving near sunset forced the Confederates back. Kilpatrick suffered more than 300 casualties during the fight, almost three times as many as the Confederates. Meanwhile, a few miles to the west, a lone Union regiment under Col. Alfred Duffié had reached Middleburg, forcing Stuart to abandon his headquarters and the social events he had planned for the evening. Stuart directed a brigade to descend on the isolated Federals, and by next morning only four officers and twenty-seven Union troopers had managed to escape.

The now-cautious Pleasonton advanced toward Middleburg from Aldie on June 18, and Stuart withdrew to a strong elevation west of town, setting the stage for another blood-soaked day on June 19. In temperatures that approached one hundred degrees, Union horsemen assaulted from the east and the north, finally forcing the tenacious Confederates to retire westward.

A welcome downpour on June 20 ended a drought in the Loudon Valley and allowed Stuart to consolidate his brigades. The Confederate commander hoped to rest his men on Sunday, June 21, but Pleasonton, under pressure to penetrate Stuart’s screen, would not allow it. Reinforced by infantry, Pleasonton rode forward, encountering the Confederates in a running battle near the village of Upperville. Stuart seemingly took advantage of every rise in the ground and each stone wall east of the mountains. The Union wave gradually enveloped each of Stuart’s stands, and eventually the Confederates retired to Ashby’s Gap in the Blue Ridge. There the sun . . . setting behind the mountains made a glorious ending to a day filled with the . . . excitement of battle, wrote a Federal trooper. But Pleasonton, although tactically victorious at Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville, had failed to reach the mountains, and Lee’s army was already splashing across the Potomac unhindered and undiscovered. For his part,