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Lee's Masterpiece: The Battle of Chancellorsville, Part I

© Michael J. Swogger

To hear from his own lips that the advantages gained by the successful marches of his lieutenants were to culminate in fighting a defensive battle in that nest of thickets was too much, and I retired from his presence with the belief that my commanding general was a whipped man. --Major General Darius Couch, May 1, 1863

Emerging from a long and cold winter, Lee's men were in high spirits in April 1863. With the exception of the bloody stalemate that resulted in a Southern retreat at Antietam, the Army of Northern Virginia had just been through two very successful years of campaigning. The most recent victory at Fredericksburg left the South confident and elated, and Lee's 60,000 men along the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg were prepared to begin another long summer of the War. Facing them were nearly double the number of bluecoats now under the command of "Fighting Joe" Hooker.

But Hooker certainly had no intention of repeating the ghastly assaults on Marye's Heights that Burnside so miserably failed at four months ago. Rather, Hooker devised a campaign of maneuver to force Lee from his hillside entrenchments into the open. It was then that Hooker foresaw his army crushing that of Lee's. "May God have mercy on General Lee," Hooker boasted, "for I will have none" (McPherson, 1988, p. 639).

Hooker's plan was intricate and sequential:

1.) 10,000 cavalrymen under General George Stoneman were to move 20 miles up the Rappahannock, cross this and the Rapidan River, and get behind Lee's army to sever Confederate lines of communication.

2.) The V, XI, and XII Corps (1/3 of the army) were to move north and cross the Rappahannock 20 miles from Fredericksburg; following this the XI and XII Corps (under Generals Howard and Slocum, respectively) would head south to cross the Rapidan while Meade's V Corps would move back towards Fredericksburg clearing out the heavily guarded Banks' and United States Fords, allowing for Darius Couch's II Corps to cross the Rappahannock.

3.) While Couch was to await orders at the river, the V, XI, and XII Corps were to reunite at the Chancellor House, some 10 miles west of Fredericksburg.

4.) Sedgwick's VI Corps and Reynolds' I Corps would feign an attack on Stonewall Jackson's men on the Confederate right, and Sickle's III Corps and Gibbon's division of the II Corps would remain across from Fredericksburg as to keep Lee from removing his troops from the town's heights (Goolrick, 1985).

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