“We have a great many wounded; the same old story—men mutilated in every possible way…. I am sick at heart at these scenes, and there seems to be little prospect of a change.”
KATE CUMMING, NURSE, ARMY OF TENNESSEE, CSA, DIARY ENTRY, JUNE 27, 18631
“One’s heart grows sick of war, after all, when you see what it really is; every once in a while I feel so horrified and disgusted—it seems to me like a great slaughter-house and the men mutually butchering each other—then I feel how impossible it appears, again, to retire from this contest, until we have carried our points.”
WALT WHITMAN, USA, LETTER TO HIS MOTHER, SEPTEMBER 8, 18632
“The army like General Hooker,” Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes observed, as his new commanding officer performed wonders reorganizing and revivifying the Union’s Army of the Potomac. “They like him because he is ‘fighting Joe Hooker.’ They like him because of the onions and potatoes he has furnished, and… because… they expect him to lead them to victory.” That was Hooker’s expectation as well, as he crossed the Rappahannock River the night of April 30, 1863, and joined the vanguard of his army at its camp in a seventy-acre clearing around the George Chancellor house (Chancellorsville). Hooker’s formidable force, primed and ready for battle, outnumbered by two to one the sixty-two thousand men of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia who were arrayed against it. It seemed the time had come for an Army of the Potomac victory, “the glory and blessing of which,” Dawes believed, “will repay us for the disasters and sufferings of the past.” Yet Hooker had begun his operations without a true appreciation for the character of the countryside in which he had chosen to fight. Chancellorsville was situated in one of the few cleared portions of the “Wilderness”—seventy square miles of tangled, ravine-pocked terrain centering on a nearly impenetrable forest that one Union infantryman would call “the most god forsaken looking place I ever saw.”
Major General Joseph Hooker (1814–1879), USA. Although he had done an exceptional job reorganizing the Army of the Potomac upon assuming its command, by June of 1863, many were beginning to wonder if Hooker was becoming “another McClellan.”
Captain Charles F. Morse (1839–1926), USA. Frontispiece from Charles F. Morse, Letters Written During the Civil War, 1861–1865, 1898. One of many eloquent and opinionated wartime letter-writers, Morse was furious at Major General Joe Hooker’s decision to withdraw from the field at Chancellorsville. Hooker, he deduced, “gained his position [as commander of the Army of the Potomac] by merely brag and blow.”
As Hooker awoke to his geographical problems on the morning of May 1, in the western theater David Dixon Porter’s naval fleet was ferrying Ulysses S. Grant and his forty-four-thousand-man army to a point on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River well below Vicksburg. From there, the question was how best to proceed. Grant’s daring decision worried his subordinates, including Fifteenth Corps commander William Sherman, as well as General in Chief Halleck and President Lincoln in Washington. Taking with them only a minimum of supplies, Grant’s men will not depend on the vulnerable supply line extending from U.S. encampments above Vicksburg; they will live off the land for what is bound to be a significant period of time as they move inland on a circuitous route. Vicksburg has been Grant’s primary objective since October 1862, and he remains bound to take the city. “One of my superstitions had always been,” he will write after the war, “when I started to go anywhere or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished.”3
