RATING:
Mathew Brady portrait of Joseph Hooker.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Bright, aggressive, personally courageous, tactically skilled, an effective leader of men, and a competent administrator, Joseph Hooker had the makings of a fine general officer, but he was also afflicted with an abrasive personality, an egocentric orientation, overweening ambition, opportunistic lapses in loyalty, and a lack of personal discipline, all of which tended to turn subordinate officers, colleagues, seniors, and civilian politicians against him. Hooker’s great strength was his individual aggressive initiative, a quality sorely lacking in Union commanders early in the war. This, however, was also the source of his greatest weakness, what U. S. Grant described as a personal ambition that cared “nothing for the rights of others” and a tendency “when engaged in battle, to get detached from the main body of the army and exercise a separate command.” In more modern terms, Hooker was not a team player. When his brash, self-centered self-confidence was put to the ultimate test against Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville, Hooker failed catastrophically and for this reason is remembered—unjustly—far more for his personal peccadilloes (a legendary, probably exaggerated, overfondness for strong drink and women of easy virtue, and an addiction to gambling) than he is for his very real, if flawed, achievements as a military officer.
Principal Battles
PRE–CIVIL WAR
Second Seminole War, 1835–1842
U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848
CIVIL WAR
Desperate for anything hopeful to say about George B. McClellan’s perpetually stalled Peninsula Campaign, Northern newspapers ran a story wired from the field about III Corps, Second Division and its commander, Joseph Hooker. The reporter who wrote the piece headlined it, “Fighting—Joe Hooker Attacks Rebels,” but the papers all picked it up as “Fighting Joe Hooker Attacks Rebels,” and with this omission of a lowly em dash was born a Civil War sobriquet and reputation to live up to.
There was good reason to believe Hooker could in fact live up to his accidental name, and there was perhaps even more compelling reason to believe that he could do no such thing.
Born on November 13, 1814, Joseph Hooker was the fifth in a line of Joseph Hookers reaching back a century and a quarter through the history of Hadley, Massachusetts. Though locally prominent, the Hookers were no longer wealthy since Joseph’s father was, at the time of his son’s birth, in the process of losing his fortune in business speculations during the ongoing War of 1812. He soon had to take a menial job as a cattle purchaser while the children, three daughters and Joseph, worked whatever odd jobs they could find as soon as they came of age. Keeping up appearances remained a high priority despite financial hardship, and the family managed to hold onto their large and comfortable house and to finance a fine education for all four children at the local Hopkins Academy.
There was much talk in the Hooker household of young Joseph’s preparing for the ministry—his mother, Mary, certainly wanted this—but he himself found the law far more appealing. As the family continued to struggle financially, however, the question became increasingly moot, since college funds were unavailable. That is when one of Joseph’s teachers used his influence to wrangle a West Point appointment as an alternative to a civilian college. Thus, like Grant, Sherman, and some others who would fight the Civil War, training for a military career was a matter of expedience rather than the answer to some distinct martial calling.
Joseph Hooker enrolled at the U.S. Military Academy in 1833 as a member of the Class of 1837. He was eighteen, melancholy at having to leave the only home and only life he had known, yet eager to excel academically and especially zealous to proselytize fellow cadets on the thorny subject of abolition. He read avidly and learned rapidly, earning high academic grades but also acquiring a reputation for arrogant argumentativeness in the classroom, as he freely challenged both his classmates and his instructors. This was often abrasive enough, but far more offensive to many—for a large proportion of West Point cadets were plantation Southerners—was Hooker’s self-righteous insistence on the absolute rightness of abolition and the absolute evil of Southern slavery. Although his academic achievements should have put him near the top of his class, his overbearing and obnoxious conduct earned him a formidable bundle of demerits, so that he graduated in 1837 twenty-ninth out of a class of fifty.
Second Lieutenant Hooker’s middle-of-the-pack class ranking was insufficient to merit placement in the engineers—reserved for top-ranking graduates—but just barely good enough to get him into the First U.S. Artillery. He was dispatched to Florida to fight in the Second Seminole War. The insurgent nature of the conflict, combined with the dense tangle of the swampy terrain, meant that artillery was of little use, and Hooker found himself involved in sporadic infantry skirmishes rather than anything resembling the kind of Napoleonic battles for which West Point cadets of the era were trained.
In the spring of 1838, with the capture of the Seminole war leader Osceola, the main phase of the war wound down, though not before Hooker achieved promotion to first lieutenant. In 1841, he returned to West Point, this time as adjutant, a position awarded to those marked by their superiors as likely candidates for eventual higher command.
The fact was that Lieutenant Hooker cut an impressive military figure. A fellow officer recalled him as “handsome” and “polished in manner, the perfection of grace in every movement.” If anything, growing up in the distinguished but financially strained Hooker household had taught the young man the art of making an impressive appearance. Beneath the elegant surface, however, some who served with him already noted a certain brash recklessness, boastfulness, and an overfondness for hard liquor, soft women, and the high life.
Still, he had reason to look forward to a successful career, especially when war broke out with Mexico in 1846. Most New Englanders, especially old Massachusetts folk like the Hooker family, opposed the war as an instance of cynical expansionist aggression aimed at extending slavery into the Southwest. Lieutenant Hooker may well have felt this to be the case; however, he did not allow his moral qualms—if he had any—to trump an opportunity for martial glory and rapid professional advancement. Like others of his West Point vintage, he plunged into the war with a passion.
Hooker was assigned as a staff officer successively under three generals, P. F. Smith and two who would play important roles in the Civil War, Benjamin Butler and Gideon J. Pillow. His staff assignments were not quiet desk jobs; Hooker spent much of his time on the front lines, acting as liaison between headquarters and field commanders and ensuring that orders were properly executed. His performance was so outstanding that he was brevetted three times for staff leadership and gallantry. As a result of the Battle of Monterrey (September 21–24, 1846), he was brevetted to captain (and earned among local senoritas the appellation of “the Handsome Captain”); after the Battle of National Bridge (March 29, 1847), he was jumped to brevet major; and after Chapultepec (September 12–13, 1847), lieutenant colonel. It was a record of brevet promotion that no other first lieutenant broke during the war with Mexico. General Pillow officially acknowledged that Hooker had “distinguished himself by his extraordinary activity, energy, and gallantry,” and no less a figure than Winfield Scott singled him out for his performance at Chapultepec and the capture of Mexico City.
Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Hooker had achieved what all of his West Point brethren had hoped to achieve in Mexico: a shower of glory. Yet he soon managed to cloud this achievement. Tennessee-born Gideon Johnson Pillow used his friendship with President James K. Polk to obtain promotion to major general on April 13, 1847, and in September of that year, he was given credit for the American victories at Contreras and Churubusco in a letter signed “Leonidas” and published in the Orleans Delta. The letter outraged Winfield Scott, the actual commander in both of these battles, who then exploded in vengeful fury when he discovered that “Leonidas” was in fact none other than Pillow himself. Accusing him of gross insubordination, Scott arrested and held Pillow for court-martial. Both Scott and Pillow had praised Hooker. Scott was general-in-chief of the army, but Pillow had the continued support of the president of the United States. Weighing his options, Hooker decided to testify on Pillow’s behalf, thereby making an enemy of the most senior officer in the U.S. Army.
After reverting to his regular army rank at the conclusion of the war, Hooker was promoted to regular army captain in the 1st Artillery Regiment on October 29, 1848. The appointment was vacated the very day it was made. No one knows why, and although he retained his promotion to captain, the record of his military activities is strangely silent until June 9, 1849, when he was named assistant adjutant general for the Pacific Division.
By 1851, the boredom that characterized life in the peacetime army had taken a particularly heavy toll on Hooker. Reportedly, he beguiled his tedious days and nights with liquor, ladies, and gambling, all financed with loans from the likes of William T. Sherman and Henry Halleck. (Though no one denies his penchant for gambling, several historians believe that his reputation as an imbiber was greatly exaggerated in that he was never reported as drunk on duty. As for his womanizing, a persistently popular folk etymology claims that hooker—as a synonym for prostitute—originated in Joseph Hooker’s notorious appetite for ladies of the evening. Some authorities have suggested that the word was born at this time, the product of Hooker’s locally notorious habits. Others assert that the word arose from the disreputable atmosphere of Hooker’s headquarters encampments during the Civil War, which were said to be so rife with prostitutes that people took to calling the women “hookers.” In fact, the word was in widespread use in Britain and America long before the Civil War as a synonym for streetwalker, a woman who entices, snares, or hooks her clients.)
Burdened by debt, Hooker took a leave from the army before the end of the year, and when his leave was over in 1853, he resigned his commission on February 21—without bothering to make arrangements to repay either Sherman or Halleck. Like Scott, they would not forget the wrong that Hooker had done them.
“The dashing army officer,” Civil War historian Bruce Catton wrote of the next five years of Hooker’s life, “descended almost to the level of beachcomber.” Settling in Sonoma County, California, he farmed, tried his hand at real estate, and took a stab at state politics, all without success. At last, in 1858, he appealed to Secretary of War John B. Floyd to present his name to President James Buchanan as a candidate for a commission in the regular army as a lieutenant colonel. Presumably due in some measure to the intervention of Winfield Scott, nothing came of this entreaty, and from 1859 to 1861 Hooker served only as a colonel in the California Militia.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Hooker drew upon the militia ranks to organize a California regiment that he intended to offer for service in the Union army back east. When no orders to federalize the regiment materialized, however, Hooker wrote another letter to the president. This time, the president was his personal friend, Abraham Lincoln. Friend or not, however, Lincoln passed the appeal on to General-in-Chief Scott, who promptly buried it in a recess of his War Department desk. Still intent on getting a hearing, Hooker borrowed enough money for the long trip to Washington. Like many another civilian in the Washington area, Hooker followed Brigadier General Irvin McDowell as he led the newly created Army of Northeastern Virginia out of the capital and down to Manassas. Here Hooker closely observed the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861. Afterward, he called on President Lincoln at the White House. “I was at the Battle of Bull Run the other day,” he told him, “and it was neither vanity nor boasting in me to declare that I am a damned sight better general than you, sir, had on the field.”
Far from being insulted by Hooker’s brash words and insolent tone, Lincoln was receptive. McDowell had proven inept, the army and its officers were demoralized, and most of Lincoln’s other generals were full of ifs, ands, or buts. Here, in welcome contrast, was a forthright man brimming with confidence.
“Colonel—not Lieutenant Colonel—Hooker,” Lincoln cooed to him, laying a large hand on his shoulder, “Stay. I have use for you and a regiment for you to command.”
Drunk, reprobate, deadbeat, “beachcomber,” spurned by no less than Winfield Scott, Joseph Hooker had nevertheless gotten himself back into the army and into a field command. Remarkably, he regarded the colonelcy as a toehold only, and he immediately put the moves on other influential men of his acquaintance to exchange his regimental eagle for the single star of a brigadier general in command of an entire brigade. His efforts quickly paid off, and on August 3, 1861 (retroactive to May 17), he was commissioned a brigadier general of volunteers, occupying a slot two positions above Brigadier General Ulysses Simpson Grant.
Despite his own notable absence of personal discipline, Hooker was very much in tune with the efforts of his commanding officer, George B. McClellan, to create in the newly constituted Army of the Potomac a disciplined military formation of the highest morale. His own brigade of that army, which was camped just outside of Washington, became a model of thoroughly drilled spit and polish, tempered by Hooker’s insistence that the men under his command be given the best food and uniforms available. They adored him for this, and they responded enthusiastically to his demands. Within two months, Hooker’s command was expanded from a single brigade to a full division.
He was also given a mission at this time, assigned to sweep southern Maryland clean of Confederate spies and sources of Confederate supply. The timidity and narrow scope of the assignment were all too typical of McClellan, and Hooker, eager to achieve much more, repeatedly appealed to his commander to allow him to lead raids across the Potomac and into rebel territory. McClellan would have none of this, however, and, descending once again into the familiar boredom of army routine, Hooker reputedly retreated into the bottle.
After McClellan, in March 1862, finally commenced his Peninsula Campaign, Hooker’s division was called into action in April. Its mission was not to engage in glorious battle but to dig trenches for McClellan’s laborious siege of Yorktown. Hooker resented the work, and he empathized with his men, who had signed on to be soldiers, not common laborers. Accordingly, he rewarded them in a way he himself apparently appreciated: with a special ration of whiskey. By and by, a lowly private made bold to present the general with a sample of the ration. Hooker smiled, accepted the soldier’s canteen, quaffed a shot, then spat it out. It had been watered shamelessly by officers who, as the portion passed down the chain of command, each siphoned off their share. Promising his men that they would never again be subjected to diluted “rations,” Hooker announced that, from then on, the whiskey would be issued directly and exclusively from his own headquarters. He gave his soldiers reason to believe he could do no wrong.
As Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston made a mockery of McClellan’s Yorktown siege by withdrawing his troops and falling back on Richmond early in May 1862, Hooker, supremely frustrated by his superior’s inaction, led Second Division, III Corps in a reckless assault on Johnston’s rear guard. Confederate major general James Longstreet, commanding the rear guard, counterattacked furiously, taking a heavy toll on Hooker’s division. Throughout, the tenacious and gallant Hooker rode through the ranks of his troops, issuing a string of clear personal commands that held his division together. After Hooker directed the placement of artillery, the opening cannon volley spooked his horse. The animal first threw him and then fell on top of him. As his dazed men watched, Hooker crawled out from under the mount and continued to rally his troops.
While ferocious, Hooker’s aggression achieved little in proportion to its heavy cost. Nevertheless, the press ate it up. It was in reporting this action that the “Fighting—Joe Hooker Attacks Rebels” headline was printed without the dash, and Hooker would complain about the nickname from then on, claiming that it made people think he was “a hot-head, furious young fellow” who sacrificed his men needlessly. Nevertheless, he made liberal use of the platform the press coverage provided to denounce McClellan for his persistent unwillingness to support his aggressive initiative.
At the Battle of Seven Pines (May 31–June 1, 1862), Hooker’s aggressive swagger was well on its way to becoming the stuff of legend. He told a fellow commander, whose troops were moving too slowly ahead of him, to “get out of the way” and make room for his own “two regiments . . . that can go anywhere.” To McClellan he boasted that he could hold his position against a hundred thousand of the enemy. Soon the New York Times assigned a reporter to cover Hooker and his division exclusively. Yet if he was capturing the attention of the press and public, Hooker noted bitterly that McClellan was ignoring him altogether. There was not one mention of Hooker and the Second Division in the commanding general’s report on Seven Pines. “If I had commanded,” Hooker testily declared, “Richmond would have been ours.” McClellan, he sputtered, “is not only not a soldier, but he does not know what soldiership is.”
When, instead of relieving the braggart for insubordination, McClellan notified him that he intended to recommend him for corps command, Hooker executed an abrupt about-face, suddenly shifting all blame from McClellan to McClellan’s present roster of corps commanders. “If these officers are still to be imposed upon him [McClellan],” he wrote to Senator James Nesmith of Oregon, “God help him.” Then he went on to issue a threat of resignation: “If I cannot be placed upon the same footing of other officers of the Army, the sooner I quit it the better. I will not fight their battles for them with the doors of promotion closed to me.” This missive was but one of a veritable barrage he delivered to a number of influential senators. The result? In July 1862, Hooker was duly promoted to major general of volunteers.
Beaten down by the Seven Days Battles (June 25–July 1, 1862), McClellan began a slow and ignominious withdrawal from the peninsula under orders to link up with the newly constituted Army of Virginia commanded by Major General John Pope. Hooker and his 2nd Division, still part of III Corps under Major General Samuel P. Heintzelman, were transferred from the Army of the Potomac to the Army of Virginia.
Hooker fought with his customary aggression and confidence in the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 28–30, 1862) and was one of the very few Union commanders to come out of this catastrophe looking good. There was talk not merely of elevating him to corps command but of relieving Pope and making Hooker commanding officer of the entire Army of Virginia. Lincoln nipped this conversation in the bud with a vague comment that the others seemed to understand perfectly. Hooker, Lincoln said, “gets excited.”
Postmaster General Montgomery Blair put his own objection in more concrete terms, calling Hooker “too great a friend of John Barleycorn.”
At a loss for Pope’s successor, Lincoln turned back to none other than George B. McClellan, reaffirming him as commander of the Army of the Potomac, which would be enlarged by its absorption of the Army of Virginia. On September 6, 1862, Joseph Hooker was given V Corps in the combined army.
He and his new corps soon found themselves at the tip of the spear in confronting Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia as it invaded Maryland. At the Battle of South Mountain (September 14, 1862), he was relentlessly aggressive in checking Confederate major general D. H. Hill at Turner’s Gap, then moved on to Sharpsburg on the Antietam Creek, where, on September 17, he made the opening attack in what would prove to be the bloodiest single day in U.S. history. Hooker slammed into Stonewall Jackson’s corps, at first pushing it back, then fighting it to a standstill.
Hooker was at his best in this assault. He inspired his men to carry out a sustained main-strength effort, but his presence on the battlefield ended prematurely when he received a severe wound in the foot. He claimed—and seems sincerely to have believed—that Antietam would have been a decisive rather than a razor-thin Union victory if only he had been able to remain in the field to keep his men pushing. Remarkably, McClellan, perpetual butt of Hooker’s criticism, expressed this very same opinion: “Had you not been wounded when you were,” he wrote in a letter immediately after the battle, “I believe the result of the battle would have been the entire destruction of the Rebel’s army.”
As it was, Hooker moved once again into the running for Army of the Potomac command, this time to replace McClellan. To Lincoln and others who came to visit him as he recovered from his wound, Hooker unabashedly touted his prowess in contrast to McClellan’s feebleness. If he had had just three more hours on the field, he said to Lincoln, he would have made “the rout of the enemy sure.”
The president listened, but he could not bring himself to choose Hooker. Twice, he had tried to recruit Ambrose Burnside to command the Army of the Potomac, and each time, Burnside protested that he was not up to the task. At last, Lincoln stopped asking. Instead, he issued General Order No. 182, which relieved McClellan and replaced him with Burnside. When Major General Catharinus Putnam Buckingham delivered the order to him, Burnside once again protested his inadequacy. This time, Buckingham knew precisely how to respond. Very well, if you don’t accept the order, Joe Hooker will. Affable to a fault, there was, it seemed, no one Burnside didn’t like and admire. No one, that is, except Joseph Hooker, whom Burnside (like so many others) condemned as hyper-ambitious, disloyal, and unreliable. Faced with Buckingham’s ultimatum, Burnside took the job.
On assuming command of the Army of the Potomac, Burnside carried out an operational reorganization as sweeping as it was ill-advised. He replaced the time-honored conventional corps structure with three huge and inherently unwieldy “grand divisions,” assigning Hooker to command the largest, composed of forty thousand men. Eager to show himself as boldly decisive as McClellan had been overcautious, Burnside proposed a frontal assault on the elaborately defended Confederate positions in the hills behind Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Hooker dismissed the plan as “preposterous.” Had he appended the adverb “tragically” to this word, his assessment would have been entirely accurate. Hooker protested each of the fourteen futile assaults Burnside ordered, but he always attempted everything the commander required. In the end, the Army of the Potomac suffered 12,653 killed, wounded, captured, or missing—for which Hooker tore into Burnside immediately after the battle, describing him as a “wretch . . . of blundering sacrifice.” Later, he elaborated on this in testimony before the congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. For his part, Burnside sought Lincoln’s approval to remove Hooker from command as insubordinate and “unfit to hold an important commission during a crisis like the present.” When Lincoln refused to dismiss Hooker, Burnside challenged the president to choose between them. If his choice was Hooker, Burnside would tender his resignation.
In fact, as Lincoln saw it, the choice was no longer between Burnside and Hooker, but between Hooker and George Gordon Meade. Burnside was out as commander of the Army of the Potomac.
Meade was a solid, if uninspired performer. Although notoriously prickly and ill-tempered, there was never a question of his loyalty. Hooker, however, had incurred widespread resentment and distrust over the years. His reputation as a schemer was well deserved, yet most of the army had begun to see his elevation to command of the Union’s biggest, most important force as well-nigh inevitable. Whatever else he had shown himself to be, he was consistently and undeniably aggressive. And that was the kind of general the president and the public demanded.
Fighting Joe Hooker was appointed to command the Army of the Potomac on January 26, 1863. On that day, Abraham Lincoln sent him a letter remarkable for the absolute frankness of its appraisal of the addressee:
I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon what appear to me to be sufficient reasons. And yet I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and a skillful soldier, which, of course, I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm. But I think that during Gen. Burnside’s command of the Army, you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. The government will support you to the utmost of its ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all commanders. I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the Army, of criticising their Commander, and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far as I can, to put it down. Neither you, nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army, while such a spirit prevails in it.
And now, beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.
Yours very truly
A. Lincoln
What nobody expected of Hooker was the skill with which he administered his new command. He saw his most important task as rebuilding the morale of the Army of the Potomac. Toward this end, he substantially improved rations, he saw to it that camps observed basic principles of sanitation and hygiene, he did much to end inefficiency and corruption in the quartermaster system, he modernized hospital services, and he created a generous and equitable furlough system to give personnel more opportunities to visit their loved ones. Hooker also cracked down on deserters (they were to be shot, summarily) and generally improved training and drill. He scrapped Burnside’s unwieldy grand divisions and returned to the more traditional corps structure, but, at the same time, made a radical reform of the cavalry—always a weak link in the Union forces—by consolidating it into its own corps. He introduced one further innovation, assigning to the men of each of the seven Army of the Potomac corps distinctive hat badges to identify their corps membership. The emblems worked wonders for morale, as the soldiers came to regard them not merely as badges of identification, but badges of honor. In the end, Hooker boasted—not, this time, about himself, but about what he called “the finest army on the planet . . . the finest army the sun ever shone on.”
And he continued: “May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.”
Much as Burnside had sought to distinguish himself from the chronically dilatory McClellan by quickly planning an offensive, so Hooker laid out a fresh campaign plan for an advance against Richmond. In contrast to Burnside, Hooker planned carefully and subtly. He did not intend to repeat Burnside’s catastrophically simplistic frontal assault. Instead, he would send his newly created cavalry corps deep behind enemy lines to disrupt supply and communications from the rear. This would serve to draw Lee’s attention from the main attack. Then, exploiting his far superior numbers, Hooker planned to use a portion of the Army of the Potomac to hold down Lee at Fredericksburg from the front while most of the rest of his army made a wide flanking sweep to hit the Army of Northern Virginia from the rear. With Lee battered into submission, the next step was on to Richmond at long last.
It was a good plan, and Hooker had done a fine job of conditioning his army. Yet it all nevertheless went wrong, very wrong in the execution.
Under an overly cautious Brigadier General George Stoneman, the cavalry corps failed totally in its mission of penetration, and the large-scale raid was ineffective. In the meantime, although the infantry and artillery accomplished their flanking march and were positioned for a surprise attack on Lee’s rear, Hooker suddenly and uncharacteristically suffered a failure of nerve. The first reports of contact with the Army of Northern Virginia on May 1, 1863, should have been his signal for all-out effort at Fredericksburg. Instead, Hooker relinquished the initiative by withdrawing to nearby Chancellorsville, where he deployed his troops into positions not for an offensive, but to respond to Lee’s anticipated attack.
Robert E. Lee, however, did not oblige by attacking in the manner Hooker expected. It is an inviolable tactical maxim that a general never divides his army in the face of the enemy. But this is precisely what Lee did, splitting his forces, outnumbered though they were, so as to confront both elements of Hooker’s own divided army. Even more remarkably, he split his forces a second time, dispatching Stonewall Jackson’s corps on a flanking march to hit Hooker’s vulnerable right. This attack routed XI Corps, prompting Hooker to assume a fully defensive posture. At Chancellorsville, the Army of the Potomac numbered nearly 134,000 men against just under 71,000 in the Army of Northern Virginia. His nerve failing him at the last minute, Hooker squandered this huge advantage, absorbed a staggering 17,197 casualties, killed, wounded, or missing, and went into retreat. About half his men had never even been committed to the battle.
History has tended to oversimplify what happened by portraying Chancellorsville as nothing more or less than “Lee’s masterpiece.” There is no denying that it was an extraordinary achievement. Using daring high-risk tactics, the Confederate commander defeated a much larger adversary.
Captain Andrew J. Russell photographed these Confederate dead, killed during the Battle of Chancellorsville, behind the stone wall of Marye’s Heights, Fredericksburg. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
But it wasn’t that simple. Even in victory, the cost to Lee was terrible. Of 60,892 Army of Northern Virginia men actually engaged in the battle, 13,303 became casualties, killed, wounded, or missing—nearly a 22 percent casualty rate versus about 13 percent for the Union. Perhaps worst of all, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was mortally wounded by friendly fire during the battle. Upon Jackson’s death, Lee moaned: “I have lost my right arm.” His “masterpiece” was, in fact, a Pyrrhic victory.
As for Hooker’s reported “failure of nerve,” it is important to note that, in the thick of combat on May 3, a Confederate cannonball struck his headquarters, splintering a wooden pillar against which he was leaning. Half of it (Hooker later wrote) struck him “in an erect position from my head to my feet.” Knocked unconscious, Hooker was out cold for more than an hour. Groggy, he nevertheless refused to yield command, even temporarily. It is possible that the immediate and lingering effects of this trauma to the brain adversely affected his performance throughout the rest of the battle.
Abraham Lincoln’s verdict on Chancellorsville was stark. “My God!” he groaned. “My God! What will the country say?”
For his part, Hooker first tried desperately to shift blame for the defeat on subordinates, especially (with some justification) cavalry commander Stoneman, whom he summarily relieved. The ultimate, inescapable fact of the battle, however, even Hooker could not bring himself to evade. In a jumble of botched execution, he had failed to commit fully half of his forces to the battle, and he had employed the rest (as one officer remarked) like a “disjointed army.” Reportedly, Hooker himself admitted, “Well, to tell the truth, I just lost confidence in Joe Hooker.” Some historians doubt he actually said this, but, if he did, it was surely the most candid and least political statement he ever made.
President Lincoln was not quick to remove Hooker; however, while Lincoln had earlier agreed to allow him to bypass General-in-Chief Henry Halleck (whom Hooker despised and who, in turn, despised him) and to communicate instead directly with the White House, the president now ordered Hooker to communicate only with Halleck before taking any major action.
In the wake of Chancellorsville, Hooker seemed to those close to him (in the words of a friend from California days) “broken . . . dispirited, and . . . ghostlike.” Nevertheless, he had a new plan. After Chancellorsville, Lee had pulled out, clearly intending to launch a new invasion of the North. Instead of pursuing Lee or otherwise defending against the invasion, however, Hooker proposed making an immediate assault against Richmond, arguing that this would bring Lee out for a showdown battle that would destroy him.
Whether from his kneejerk conservative conventionality or a desire to thwart Hooker and thereby prompt his resignation, Halleck vetoed the plan, and, what is more, Lincoln concurred. Hooker was admonished to keep the Army of the Potomac north of the Rappahannock, its mission first and foremost to protect Washington, D.C., and Baltimore and, only secondarily, to locate the Army of Northern Virginia as it slipped down the Shenandoah Valley into Pennsylvania, intercept it, and defeat it.
The undeniable truth was that Abraham Lincoln had lost confidence in Hooker. When Hooker subsequently fell into a dispute with Halleck over the status of defensive forces at Harpers Ferry, he impulsively offered his resignation. This time, the president didn’t blink. On June 28, three days before the Battle of Gettysburg, he replaced Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac with Major General George Gordon Meade.
Relieved as Army of the Potomac commander, Hooker was assigned command of XI and XII Corps and sent to reinforce the Army of the Cumberland around Chattanooga, Tennessee. On November 24, he sent three of his divisions against Confederate positions on the northern slope of Lookout Mountain. In a remarkable action, the Union troops completely dislodged the Confederates, forcing Braxton Bragg to abandon his mountain defenses. For this, Hooker was rewarded with a brevet to major general in the regular army, only to be mortified by General Grant’s pointed omission of the triumph in his official report.
Hooker’s next major command was in Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign (May 7–September 2, 1864) at the head of a unit now designated the XX Corps. On July 20, 1864, Hooker’s corps was instrumental in repulsing an attack by the Confederate Army of Tennessee under John Bell Hood against the Union’s Army of the Cumberland. Visiting Hooker’s headquarters the next day, Sherman brutally dismissed both the accomplishment and the great sacrifice it had cost. To Hooker’s report of his heavy losses, Sherman responded, “Oh, most of ’em will be back in a day or two,” implying that his brave men had neither been killed nor wounded but had (in the word of the day) “skedaddled.”
Sherman’s ill will toward Hooker was confirmed after Major General James McPherson, the Union Army of the Tennessee commander, was killed on July 22, 1864, during the Battle of Atlanta. In terms of seniority, Hooker was an obvious choice to replace McPherson. Sherman chose O. O. Howard, a former Hooker subordinate, instead. To his immediate superior, Army of the Cumberland commander Major General George H. Thomas, Hooker submitted his resignation. “I have learned that Major General Howard, my junior, has been assigned to the command of the Army of the Tennessee,” he wrote to Thomas. “If this is the case, I request that I may be relieved from duty with this army. Justice and self-respect alike require my removal from an army in which rank and service are ignored.”
Thomas thought sufficiently of Hooker’s claim to refer the matter to Sherman and President Lincoln. Siding with Hooker, Lincoln sent Sherman a telegram requesting that he name Hooker to replace the slain McPherson. Sherman, however, stood firm on his choice of Howard, and when Lincoln pressed him, he offered his own resignation. With this, Lincoln bowed to the inevitable, and Hooker was allowed to resign from the Army of the Cumberland.
For his part, Sherman was glad to be rid of a man he deemed an “envious, imperious . . . braggart,” for whom “[s]elf ” always “prevailed.” In his 1885 Personal Memoirs, Grant finally gave Hooker the credit he had earlier withheld for his achievements at “Lookout Mountain and into Chattanooga Valley,” calling them “brilliant.” But, he added, “I nevertheless regarded him as a dangerous man. He was not subordinate to his superiors. He was ambitious to the extent of caring nothing for the rights of others.” Grant condemned him as a lone wolf: “His disposition was, when engaged in battle, to get detached from the main body of the army and exercise a separate command, gathering to his standard all he could of his juniors.”
Having resigned from the Army of the Cumberland, Fighting Joe Hooker was effectively exiled from further significant participation in the war. In September 1864, he was assigned command of the Northern Department, which encompassed Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. His mission was to supervise the draft, to guard the Confederate prisoners of war confined in the region’s large and squalid camps, and to stand guard over the northern frontier. He found time to court and (shortly after the war) to marry the sister of Ohio congressman William S. Groesbeck, Miss Olivia Augusta Groesbeck, and on June 27, 1865, he assumed command of the Department of the East, which took in New England plus New York and New Jersey. Later in the year, Hooker was gratified by a report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War that exonerated him for the defeat at Chancellorsville. In November, however, he was felled by a stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed on his right side. Recovering by the summer of 1866, he resumed active command of the Department of the East, only to be felled by another stroke in 1867, which forced him to obtain a leave of absence. Seeking a cure in travel, he and his wife set sail for Europe, returning in July 1868. A short time after this, Mrs. Hooker died, and on October 15, 1868, Joseph Hooker retired from the army with the regular army rank of major general. Although he took up the writing of a memoir, he did very little else before he, too, died—on October 31, 1879.
Another Brady image of Hooker. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS