Glory Road (31 page)
The day came in warm and sunny, and the army held its lines and waited. It was hard to know just what was going on. The Wilderness was bewilderingly dense, and Jeb Stuart's men were knocking Hooker's inadequate cavalry patrols back into camp every time they stuck their horses' noses out. In front of Hancock and Slocum there was a good deal of firing. Rebel patrols kept prowling forward, batteries sprang to life here and there, and there was a lot of skirmishing and sniping going on. Hancock's advanced skirmish line, commanded by the youthful Nelson Miles who had just recovered from the throat wound received at Fredericksburg, took a good deal of punishment. The skirmish line held and there was no attack, but from headquarters it seemed that the Rebels were tapping for soft spots, looking for a good place to strike.
Hooker toured his lines that morning, looking at trenches and rifle pits and murmuring: "How strong! How strong!" The soldiers sprang to their feet when they saw him, the handsome general with his handsome mounted staff riding at his heels, headquarters flag fluttering in the May sunlight, and a tremendous cheer rolled up from the lanes and clearings. Here was Hooker, and he had saved these men from the head-on assault on the evil Fredericksburg lines, he had given them health and self-confidence again, he had promised that Lee's army would be destroyed, and the very look of him was the look of hope. So this morning, for the last time in its history, the Army of the Potomac sent up a wild cheer of genuine affection and enthusiasm for its commanding officer.
10
Back to headquarters went Hooker, to wait for destiny on the pillared veranda of the Chancellorsville house; and out in front Dan Sickles saw what he believed to be a dazzling opportunity beckoning from beyond the cedars.
Looking off to the south, Sickles's men had been getting glimpses of Rebels in motion—a big column, with guns and wagons and infantry trudging through the woods, apparently heading south.
11
The forest was thick and open vistas were few, but by noon it was clear that something big was under way and the high command took thought. It was just possible that Lee did have some notion of circling around and hitting the army's right, and Hooker sent a note to Howard suggesting that he consider the possibility of being flanked.
But th
is idea soon evaporated. There were many wagons in the line of march—Stonewall Jackson's ammunition train and ambulances, infinitely ominous if anyone had known—and it looked as if what Sickles's men saw might be Lee's army in full retreat. To be sure, intermittent firing was still taking place in front of Slocum and Hancock, but that was probably just rear-guard stuff. Lee was flying lest destruction overtake him, just as Hooker had predicted. Why should not Hooker's good friend Dan Sickles take a couple of divisions, lunge forward through the Wilderness, and smite this retreating column to make victory complete?
Hooker struggled against this idea only briefly. It was what he wanted to believe. Jubilantly he gave Sickles his orders. (Couch, still glum, permitted himself to wonder: If the enemy really is in retreat, why do we pursue with only a small part of our force?)
12
Sickles's soldiers had been having a quiet day of it so far. They had lounged under the trees, smoked, joked, and speculated about what was going to happen next. If a man put his ear to the ground he could hear the rumble of wheels and the tramp of many feet, and this seemed to jibe with the rumor that the Rebels were running away. Rookies, it was noticed, swallowed the rumor whole and rejoiced. Old-timers were more skeptical and said they could not quite see Lee and Jackson retreating without a fight. But while they speculated orders arrived, and Birney's and Whipple's divisions formed column and went south across the Hazel Grove plateau.
13
Going in front as an advanced skirmish line was Colonel Hiram Berdan's brigade, the 1st and 2nd regiments of U. S. Sharpshooters, one of the most unusual outfits in the army. In the summer of 1861 Colonel Berdan had got permission to enlist these two regiments, with eligibility restricted to men who, at two hundred yards range, could put ten consecutive bullets inside a ten-inch circle. Solid companies had been enlisted from the different states—four from New York, four from Michigan, three from Vermont, and so on—and the men had been given special physical training not unlike that given commando or ranger battalions in more recent times. After a struggle Berdan got them equipped with breech-loading Sharps rifles. The army chief of ordnance had wanted to give them smoothbores, old Winfield Scott had warned Berdan that "breechloaders would spoil his command," and standard army equipment for a sharpshooter was a huge muzzle-loader with ponderous telescope attached, the whole business weighing around thirty pounds and fit to be fired only from a fixed rest. It seems that Lincoln himself finally decided matters in Berdan's favor, and with their breechloaders and their skill as marksmen the two regiments had won fame in both armies. Usually the different companies were detailed for temporary duty with different divisions, but today the brigade was fighting as a unit, a very snappy-looking unit, the men wearing dark green uniforms instead of the regular blue, with plumed hats and leather leggings and fancy calfskin knapsacks, a
corps d'E
lite
and fully aware of it.
14
The sharpshooters went forward through dense thickets and over a soggy little creek, up the side of a ravine and through more thickets, until at last they reached open ground by an old iron foundry, where they got into a hot fight with Rebel infantry. Before long the Rebels wheeled up some guns and held the sharpshooters off, but Berdan took his men around a little hollow and captured two or three hundred of the Confederate infantrymen, neatly uniformed, husky-looking men from the 23rd Georgia, who remarked to their captors that they had come over to "help eat them eight-day rations."
15
The advance came to a halt. Sickles threw his divisions into line of battle and sent back word that he was among the enemy's trains and could do wonders if he were just reinforced.
This was what Hooker wanted to hear. Sickles was applauded and told to keep it up, Slocum was ordered to put some of his men in on Sickles's left, and from the right Howard was told to send Sickles a brigade. Such cavalry as Hooker had with him trotted forward to the Hazel Grove clearing so that it could ride out and slash fugitive Rebels as soon as the infantry broke through.
Cavalry got to the clearing, dismounted, and waited for orders. Past them came the Georgia prisoners, heading for the rear under escort, and the troopers jeered: "We'll have every mother's son of you before we go away." One stooped, elderly Confederate looked up sourly and replied: "You'll catch hell before night." Another was more specific: "You think you've done a big thing just now, but you wait until Jackson gets around on your right."
16
Major generals do not often pay much attention to what angry prisoners say when they are kidded, and these warnings were ignored. It was more pleasant to listen to Sickles, who was among the enemy's trains. Headquarters was happy, the whole army was happy—except for the despised Dutchmen of the XI Corps, who held the right in lonely isolation and who as the day wore on began to be very nervous indeed.
The corps had had a quiet morning and stacked arms at noon to eat a leisurely dinner. Then a feeling of unease developed, sifting up from the lower ranks. Pickets went forward, south of the turnpike which formed the line of the corps, and they sent back disturbing reports: Rebel cavalry was active, parties of Rebel infantry were moving behind it, lots and lots of Rebels were moving over toward the right. West Pointers at corps headquarters wagged their heads and spoke of a rolling reconnaissance. Lower ranks knew nothing of such fancy terms but did know that something was developing and that it did not in the least look like a retreat.
The Dutchmen that afternoon discovered several things overlooked by higher authority. One was that a large part of the Rebel army was coming in closer and closer, giving every indication that it was looking for a fight rather than running away from one. Another was that the advance of Sickles had left the XI Corps completely isolated, with a gap of more than a mile separating it from the rest of the army. A third was that when Howard sent Barlow's brigade off to help Sickles pursue the fleeing Rebels he took away the corps' only reserve. These facts were very likely to add up to a full-fledged military disaster, and some of the soldiers were well aware of it.
Their situation invited a catastrophe. The corps was spread out in a thin line that was more than a mile long but for the most part was only two ranks deep. It faced south, and if the attack came from that direction everything would be fine, but if the attack should come from the west or from northwest there would be no way on earth to keep the corps from being completely wrecked. As the afternoon passed and evening approached it became more and more obvious that the Confederates were going to attack from west and northwest in overwhelming strength, but the soldiers who detected this could not make anybody hear them when they tried to tell about it. Of all the tragic experiences which blunders in high places inflicted on the Army of the Potomac, the one which took place on this evening of May 2 was the most nightmarish.
Eastern end of the corps line, the end that had meshed with Sickles's line before that ardent man went forward to pursue distinction in the bogs south of Hazel Grove, lay in fairly open ground, with Dowdall's Tavern and its yard south of the turnpike and the cleared space around the Wilderness Church and the Hawkins farm extending for half a mile or so on the north side. There was a low ridge crossing the road just here, and corps artillery had been stacked up north of the highway. The tavern had been designated a strong point and was set off by gun emplacements and rifle pits, most of which faced due south.
About the rest of the corps line there was nothing remarkable. It ran west along the road through dense woods, and after a while it simply came to an end. At the place where it ended two guns had been planted in the middle of the road. North of them, at right angles to the rest of the line, two regiments had been posted, facing west. They had been formed in one rank, the men three feet apart—a heavy skirmish line rather than a line of battle—and in front of them was a flimsy slashing of brush and saplings. Neither Hooker, Howard, nor anyone else could possibly have supposed that that skirmish line would be a real defense against a flank attack, but nobody supposed that there would be a flank attack—nobody, that is, except a considerable number of men of no especial rank or distinction, who as evening approached were quite certain that there was going to be hell to pay before the sun went down.
By ill chance many of these belonged to the brigade commanded by Brigadier General Nathaniel C. McLean, a good soldier recently demoted from divisional command to make room for Brigadier General Charles Devens. Devens came from Boston, and he seems to have felt that he had been brought into this second-rate Dutch corps to bring the men up to snuff. As a result he tended to be very stiff and military with his subordinates—the more so, perhaps, when those dealings took place via General McLean, between whom and Devens the situation was slightly delicate.
At any rate, Devens commanded the western end of the corps line, and it was McLean's men who first discovered that the Rebels were about to attack. Colonel Lee of the 55th Ohio had got so many reports of Confederate masses moving off to the right that he went to see McLean, who promptly took him to Devens. Devens pooh-poohed at him, but Lee stuck to his story, insisting that big trouble was coming down the wind, whereupon Devens loftily remarked that Western colonels were more scared than hurt. McLean and Lee went away, and presently Colonel Richardson of the 25th Ohio appeared, saying that his scouts had seen huge masses of Rebel infantry deploying not half a mile from the right and rear of the corps. McLean took him to Devens, who said icily: "I guess Colonel Richardson is somewhat scared; you had better order him to his regiment." McLean obeyed orders and Richardson returned to his regiment, called in his company officers, and told them to have the men eat supper early. While he was doing that, McLean took Lieutenant Colonel Friend of the 75th Ohio to Devens with a duplicate of Richardson's story. Devens unbent just a trifle and explained that corps headquarters, which would surely know if a flank attack were in the making, had sent him no alert. As a result, Friend hurried off to corps headquarters, where Howard's aides laughed at him and begged him not to bring on a panic.
17
The brigade at the western knuckle of the line was commanded by Colonel Leopold von Gilsa, sometime major in the Prussian Army and a veteran of the Schleswig-Holstein war. Von Gilsa knew what was up, and when he received a note from his picket line saying that the enemy was massing, begging, "For God's sake, make dispositions to receive him!" he went to Howard with it. Howard explained that the forest west of Von Gilsa was so thick that no line of battle could ever get through it. Von Gilsa unhappily returned to his lines just as
Leatherbreech
es
came riding over from Carl Schurz's division.
was a character. He was Captain Hubert Dilger, former officer in the Baden Mounted Artillery, who had taken leave and come to America when the Civil War broke out and who was now skipper of Battery I, 1st Ohio Artillery, in Schurz's division. He was a scientific gunner and a man of fantastic daring, and he was known as Leatherbreeches because of a pair of doeskin pants he liked to wear. At this moment he was out to do a bit of scouting. Schurz, the one non-professional soldier among all the higher brass in the XI Corps, had taken the alarm along with Von Gilsa and McLean and was quietly rearranging some of his men in the clearing around Wilderness Church so that they could fight facing west if they had to. He had told Dilger to be ready to meet an attack from the rear, and Dilger had got his horse and gone out to look things over for himself.
Von Gilsa warned him not to go west on the turnpike beyond the picket lines or he would be captured. But Dilger was not going to take anybody's word for anything, and he rode on out of sight—rode for nearly a mile, ran smack into a battle line of Rebel infantry, and very nearly met the fate Von Gilsa had predicted. He galloped madly north, being cut off from the XI Corps lines, and after a long detour that took him nearly over to the Rapidan he got up to the Chancellorsville crossroads, where he went at once to Hooker's headquarters to tell what he had seen. He was received there by a long-legged cavalry major, a very superior person who did not see why the commanding general's people should bother with mere artillery captains, especially those who spoke with a strong German accent. The major told Dilger to trot along and peddle his yarn in his own corps, where doubtless there would be someone who could find time to listen.
So Dilger went next to Howard's headquarters. There it was made clear to him that corps command did not approve of artillery captains going off on unauthorized scouting trips, and it was explained that since the Rebel army was in full retreat, with Howard leading Barlow's brigade off to join in the pursuit, Dilger must have things all mixed up. Dilger went back to his battery, where he told his men not to take the horses to water but to keep them handy—they might have to move the guns fast at any moment.
18
On the picket line the men were more and more uneasy. They could see but a few yards in the bushes and vines and thick saplings, but the Confederate skirmishers were very close now and there was a good deal of shooting. Some oddity in the acoustics kept these shots from being heard by any generals, but the lower echelons were not fooled. Three of McLean's colonels rode out to compare notes with Von Gilsa, and when they came back Colonel Reily called his 75th Ohio together and said: "Some of us will not see another sunrise. If there is a man in the ranks who is not ready to die for his country, let him come to me and I will give him a pass to go to the rear, for I want no half-hearted, unwilling soldiers or cowards in the ranks tonight."
19
The sun was getting low. Far away beyond the woods to the south there was a muffled sound of musketry as Sickles's and Slocum's men fought a Confederate rear guard. Most of the private soldiers in the XI Corps, knowing that all alarms had been passed on to headquarters, assumed that the generals must know what they were doing, and tried to relax. Some regiments stacked arms and began to eat supper, sitting on their knapsacks in rear of the rifle pits. Behind the lines a few details were butchering cattle. One of the German bands was playing "The Girl I Left Behind Me," and a tune called "Come Out of the Wilderness." A private in Reily's 75th Ohio sauntered off to a spring in the wood and dipped his tin cup in the water for a drink. An officer in the 25th Ohio lay on his side in a farmyard just back of the front line, holding the end of his reins while his horse cropped the grass.
There was a ripple of laughter and cheering from the soldiers in the shallow trench along the road, and the officer sat up to see what was going on. Into a little clearing in front of the trench innumerable deer had suddenly emerged from the wood to the west and were galloping madly toward the east, while the soldiers waved their hats and whooped. Then as the deer scampered off into the underbrush the quiet of the spring evening caved in with a tremendous crash.
20
Out of the forest in the west there came a handful of rifleshots, then the wild weird falsetto of the Rebel yell, followed by great rolling volleys of musketry. A shell exploded against a tree beside the spring where the Ohio private was getting his drink, and he dropped his cup and ran for his regiment. Down the road two Confederate cannon suddenly wheeled into view and fired, and a solid shot crashed through the branches over the head of the officer who had sat up to look at the deer. Another shot slammed into a farmhouse beside which General Devens was lying on the grass taking his ease—he had bruised his leg the day before and it hurt him to stand—and the general belatedly realized that his subordinates had known what they were talking about. And Von Gilsa's skirmish line of two German regiments looked up to see all of the Rebels in the world shouldering their way through the tangle, firing their rifles and yelling like fiends, their line extending far beyond vision to right and left. The Germans got off a few hasty shots and then the flood rolled over them.
The men on the road were completely helpless. They spun about, trying to change position so they could at least face this onslaught, and were knocked out of the way before they could get started. The two guns at the knuckle were captured, and jubilant Confederates swung them around and began to fire down the packed roadway. Colonel Lee galloped to General Devens and begged him to order a change of front to the west. Devens, still trying to figure out what was happening, and perhaps also hoping that he would get some sort of word from corps headquarters, told him: "Not yet." Then the tide swept in, and the road was full of ninning men. Colonel Reily got his 75th Ohio swung around in the underbrush without waiting for orders and managed to hold out for ten minutes, fighting furiously. He was killed, the light of tomorrow's sunrise guttering out quickly, and 150 of his men were shot down, and then the 75th folded up and ran like all the others.
21
In a matter of minutes Devens's entire division had collapsed. There was nothing else it could have done, for Stonewall Jackson had hit it with the full power of twenty-eight thousand men, attacking in a line more than a mile wide and four divisions deep, his men crashing through the woodland that was supposed to be impassable by any line of battle, getting their uniforms ripped completely off at times by thorns and broken branches, but coming on regardless. Devens's men had not a chance in the world. The fighting came in from their right and rear. McLean had to put his men on the opposite side of their breastworks, and Colonel Lee wrote dryly after the battle that "a rifle pit is useless when the enemy is on the same side and in rear of your line."
22
There was nothing the men could do but run.
So a confused, yelling, stumbling, running horde of men and horses was jammed in the turnpike, dense woods on either side, Rebel cannon slashing through the mass with shrapnel and canister. Here and there, in the forest, regiments and parts of regiments tried to make a stand, but it was hopeless. Jackson's men beat them down and swept over them, their battle line so wide that any strong point could be surrounded and taken in no time. Brigade and regimental organizations were utterly lost. Fragments of McLean's Ohio regiments were mixed together, trying in vain to put up a fight, but fugitives from the broken line to the west plowed through them, and then a great gust of Confederate rifle fire blew them back toward Chancellorsville. Some of the fugitives drew knives and cut their knapsack straps as they ran, not taking time to stop and unbuckle them. It was noticed, though, that most of the men hung onto their rifles, and many individuals paused in the rout now and then to fire at their pursuers.
23
The disorganized mass rolled east and came presently to the open ground around the Hawkins farm and the Wilderness Church.- Here Schurz had posted a few German regiments facing west, and for twenty minutes they put up a good fight, while Leatherbreeches wheeled his guns into line and swept the Rebels off the turnpike. But the odds were too great. The line was outflanked at both ends and attacked with overpowering numbers from in front, and Schurz's Dutchmen finally had to go back like everybody else. Dilger found himself fighting alone, his infantry supports gone, and the Rebels were creeping in on him through ravines and thickets. He stayed there, firing double-shotted canister, until the enemy were almost among his guns, then limbered up to leave. As the guns began to move, three of the six horses attached to one piece were shot. Dilger tried furiously to drive the gun away with three dead horses dragging in the harness, found that it was impossible, and at last withdrew without it.
24
Last stand of the corps was made by the brigade of Adolph Buschbeck, another Prussian-trained soldier, who took over some inadequate rifle pits dug earlier in the day by the departed Barlow. Dilger paused here to help, elements of some of the retreating regiments tried to rally, and once more the Confederate tide was checked for a time. The sun went down, a vast cloud of smoke thickened the twilight, and there was an unceasing uproar. The Rebels paused to rearrange their lines slightly—they had got nearly as mixed up by all this Wilderness fighting as the Federals themselves—and at last they came on again, Buschbeck's line broke, and the rear guard withdrew toward Chancellorsville.
There was little disorder to this part of the retreat. Most of Buschbeck's men went back in regular columns, and Dilger stayed in the road as rear guard. The road was narrow and he could use but one gun, so he sent the others back, telling the men to report to the first artillery officer they found. Dilger himself stayed with his one gun, firing it like a pocket pistol—a couple of shots down the road, limber up
and go back a hundred yards, un
limber again and fire some more: one man and one gun, standing off the advance of Stonewall Jackson. A nucleus of infantry gathered around him with some higher officers. Howard had come galloping madly back from the excursion south of Hazel Grove, the staff of a flag tucked under the stump of his amputated right arm. If there was anything that plain personal bravery could do to stem the rout, Howard was going to do it.
25
Now they were going back across the big gap that had been created by the advance of Sickles's men, and there was no help in sight. For some odd reason the racket created by Jackson's assault had not penetrated far. Back at headquarters, Hooker had been standing on the veranda, surrounded by his staff, while his right wing was folding up, and nobody had known anything about it. Finally some echo of the firing reached the Chancellorsville house and an aide stepped out into the road to see what he could see. He got out there just in time to meet a tumult of horses without riders, men without officers, wildly bouncing wagons and guns, coming directly at him. He had time to yell, "My God—here they come!" and then the fugitives went streaming past headquarters, and Hooker vaulted into the saddle and went tearing forward to see what could be done.
Frantically Hooker ordered forward Hiram Berry's division—his own division in the old days, left in reserve when Sickles made his advance—and he rode forward with it, telling the men: "Receive 'em on your bayonets! Receive 'em on your bayonets!"
26
Someone was collecting cannon and posting them in a long line by Fairview Cemetery, facing west. Full night came down, and the moon came out, and the smoke and the noise rolled up over the thickets and the white narrow roadways.
The open clearing by Hazel Grove was another place which the first noise of battle failed to reach. Cavalry lounged at ease there, waiting for the order to go down and cut up Rebel wagon trains. With them were three or four batteries of artillery, likewise at ease, and a collection of ambulances, ordnance wagons, battery forges, and odds and ends of the rear echelon. Up to the 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry rode a courier, and to its skipper, Major Pennock Huey, he gave a message: General Howard was over by the Wilderness Church somewhere and he wanted some cavalry. There was no urgency to the message, no inkling that catastrophe had descended. Major Huey broke up his poker game, got his men on their horses, and took his regiment down a narrow woods lane in column of twos, sabers all in scabbards, the men talking casually of this and that.
A dozen yards from the turnpike the major suddenly realized that something had gone very wrong. He had barely time to order his men to draw their sabers and move at a gallop. Out into the turnpike came the cavalry, crashing squarely into the middle of Confederate General Robert Rodes's division of infantry. There was a wild confused melee, with nobody knowing what was happening, Rebels as surprised as Federals, troopers slashing with the sabers and taking bullets in return. A good many saddles were emptied, and Huey's survivors finally came drifting back to the Chancellorsville clearing, their mission unaccomplished.
27
This was in some ways the least significant incident of a night filled with blunders and things gone wrong, and yet it may have been the most important thing done by Union troops that evening. For the Confederates, pausing to straighten out their lines before resuming the advance, got the impression that Yankee cavalry was on the alert and could be expected to make sporadic assaults, and the advance guard grew extremely wary whenever unidentified horsemen loomed up in the uncertain moonlight. And just a little bit later, when Stonewall Jackson and his staff came riding in from a scouting mission ahead of the lines, an overeager North Carolina infantry regiment fired a volley that knocked Jackson out of the saddle with a wound that was to take his life.