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Joe Hooker was surely expecting too much if he thought this declaration would result in Halleck’s dismissal as general-in-chief. What he apparently intended by it was to force a showdown, an acknowledgment by the president that their special arrangement for cutting General Halleck out of the Potomac army’s decision-making process was still in force. Or perhaps Hooker was just going on record, building a case in the event he needed to defend his tenure as general commanding. However that may be, he challenged his commander-in-chief—a challenge the president could not and did not ignore.
Lincoln sought first to reason with his troubled general. Taking the same friendly but candid tone that marked all his correspondence with Hooker, he composed a letter marked “private” and had it hand-delivered to the army’s new field headquarters at Fairfax Station, outside Washington. He explained, in regard to General Halleck, “You do not lack his confidence in any degree to do you any harm,” which may or may not have reassured General Hooker. The president then appealed for understanding at this critical time: “If you and he would use the same frankness to one another, and to me, that I use to both of you, there would be no difficulty. I need and must have the professional skill of both, and yet these suspicions tend to deprive me of both.” Finally, he spoke of what he saw as a rare opportunity: “As it looks to me, Lee’s now returning toward Harper’s Ferry gives you back the chance that I thought McClellan lost last fall…. Now, all I ask is that you will be in such mood that we can get into our action the best cordial judgement of yourself and General Halleck, with my poor mite added….”
Late that June 16 evening, after reading an exchange of less than enlightening telegrams between Halleck and Hooker over the defense of Harper’s Ferry, Lincoln determined to lay down the law. “To remove all misunderstanding,” he telegraphed Hooker, “I now place you in the strict military relation to Gen. Halleck, of a commander of one of the armies, to the General-in-Chief of all the armies…. I shall direct him to give you orders, and you to obey them.”
Possibly the president’s letter of earlier in the day softened the blow somewhat, yet Fighting Joe Hooker could hardly doubt he had now lost his private war with the general-in-chief, and that his days as general commanding might well be numbered.41
5. Into the Enemy’s Country
ON JUNE 15, 1863, in Washington, Elizabeth Blair Lee wrote her navy-officer husband, “Yesterday there was a panic in town made by the ambulance trains—which were so large & enough to affright the people….” In past months the sight of a grim procession of army ambulances, lumbering across the Long Bridge from Alexandria or up from the steamer wharves on the Potomac, bound for the capital’s military hospitals, signaled some great battle. This time, however, the alarm proved false. These were the sick from the Army of the Potomac, evacuated from Aquia Landing when the base there was closed. “That army is in motion,” Mrs. Lee concluded her letter, “& it is a race between Hooker and Lee, the first having the inside circle….“1
Official Washington was already reacting to the race. To better administer the defense of Pennsylvania, Secretary of War Stanton established the military Department of the Susquehanna, covering roughly the eastern two-thirds of the state. To head the new department Stanton appointed one of the chief dissidents in the Potomac army, Darius Couch, whose distaste for Joe Hooker was so strong that he had surrendered command of the Second Corps. On June 11 General Couch established headquarters at Harrisburg and looked around for something and someone to command. All he could find, for the moment, were several out-of-work, out-of-favor generals and a small company of elderly veterans of the War of 1812, the sole responders to Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin’s appeal for latter-day minutemen to defend “our own homes, firesides, and property from devastation.”
June 15 saw the president issue a proclamation summoning 100,000 militia to meet the threat of a Confederate invasion. Pennsylvania was called upon for 50,000 men, Ohio for 30,000, Maryland for 10,000, and the new state of West Virginia for 10,000. The term of federal service was to be six months “unless sooner discharged.” It was soon evident, particularly in Pennsylvania, that the minuteman tradition had not been passed down from the Revolutionary War generation.
Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin’s call for militia to meet Lee’s invasion. (American Antiquarian Society)
The essential problem in Pennsylvania was the lack of a standing militia organization. There was no one at hand to answer Lincoln’s call promptly except a token force in Philadelphia—an infantry unit called the Philadelphia Grays, two artillery batteries, and two troops of cavalry. After much pushing and pulling and paper-shuffling in Harrisburg and Washington, some 8,000 Pennsylvania “emergency men” were mustered in time to confront the Confederate invasion. As defenders of their home place, they were embarrassingly outnumbered by the 12,000 militiamen generously dispatched by New York in answer to the president’s appeal. The New Yorkers reached Harrisburg even before the contingent from Philadelphia. But from wherever they came, these were at best Sunday soldiers, no match for Lee’s veterans, and they knew it. As General Couch admitted, his home guardsmen in their camps seemed more interested in going home than anything else. 2
The Cabinet meeting on June 16 was thinly attended, which irritated Navy Secretary Welles. In this time of crisis, he thought, all should be present “for general consultation.” Earlier in the day Welles had been to the War Department for news, and came away frustrated and empty of any expert commentary. General-in-Chief Halleck, he complained, “sits, and smokes, and swears, and scratches his arm and shakes it, but exhibits no mental capacity or intelligence. Is obfusticated, muddy, uncertain, stupid as to what is doing or to be done.” At the meeting Treasury Secretary Chase, Joe Hooker’s one ally in the Cabinet, urged a demonstration be launched against Richmond if the Rebels should indeed come north, but (wrote Welles) “the President gave it no countenance.” Welles added that no suggestions of this kind ever came from General Halleck. There was the distinct impression that everything now lay in the hands of the Army of the Potomac.
As if to emphasize that point, as soon as Hooker advanced his headquarters to Fairfax Station, west of the capital, Secretary Chase visited the general to appraise his morale and that of the army. He was impressed by both. As Welles recorded his impressions, Chase found that “The troops are in good spirits and excellent condition as is Hooker himself. He commends Hooker as in every respect all that we could wish.” Welles still had grave doubts about Joe Hooker, but for the moment at least he was encouraged by this. He had earlier noted that Mr. Lincoln “has a personal liking for Hooker, and clings to him when others give way.“3
One of the arguments made by General Lee for invading the enemy’s territory was the encouragement it should give those he called “friends of peace at the North.” These were the peace Democrats—termed Copperheads for what Republican Unionists described as their poisonous views—and they had grown increasingly vocal since the Federal defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Those battles had taken place below the Mason-Dixon Line, however, and among Northerners there was some question about how the Copperheads would react to an invading Confederate army in their midst—and certainly doubts about how their peace message would be received should it be backed by enemy bayonets. An observant New Yorker, George Templeton Strong, noted in his diary on June 17, “Unless rebeldom gain some great decisive success, this move of Lee’s is likely to do good by bothering and silencing our nasty peace-democracy.” General Hooker made the same point, rather more forcefully. He called Lee’s move “an act of desperation…. It will kill copperheadism in the North.” 4
In these mid-June days, as he set his army in motion to keep pace with Lee’s, Joe Hooker began to formulate a campaign plan of his own. He explained to the president that if Lee chose to cross the Potomac “to make an invasion,… it is not in my power to prevent it.” Although he alerted General Reynolds to be prepared to attack the extended enemy column “if opportunity off
ers,” Hooker did not relish fighting a general battle in the Shenandoah or in the constricted areas of the Blue Ridge. “If they are moving toward Maryland,” he told Lincoln, “I can better fight them there than make a running fight.” In fact, although he did not choose to mention it to his superiors, Hooker was eager for Lee to cross from Maryland into Pennsylvania.
Colonel Sharpe of the Bureau of Military Information, in a private letter, said it was the current view at Hooker’s headquarters that if Lee headed toward Pennsylvania, “we propose to let him go, and when we get behind him we would like to know how many men he will take back.” Hooker’s chief of staff, Dan Butterfield, later recalled a conversation about this time with the general commanding on the same subject. The administration in Washington, Hooker said, was “finding great fault with me” for not preventing Lee from crossing the Potomac. “Why, I would lay the bridges for him” to ensure that he did cross, he said. In that event, “if Lee escapes with his army the country are entitled to and should have my head for a football.”
In his recollection Butterfield then has Hooker pointing to the vicinity of the town of Gettysburg on a map of Pennsylvania and saying, “we will fight the battle here.” Possibly at this point hindsight colored Butterfield’s remembrance. Nevertheless, it is clear enough that the impression of irresolution in Hooker’s dispatches to Washington in these days, stemming from his intramural battle with General Halleck, was an illusion. When he later described his campaign plan in testimony to a congressional committee, Hooker spoke of cutting in behind Lee’s army in Pennsylvania and severing his communications. “For this reason,” he said, “I felt that it was for me to say when and where I should fight him. I felt that I could choose my position and compel him to attack me.” That, of course, was exactly the plan of maneuver Lee and Longstreet had agreed to pursue once the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac into Yankee territory. 5
However confident in his mind Joe Hooker may have been of his own course, he quite failed to convince Washington of that fact. Nor—perhaps his biggest mistake—did he take his restless and discontented lieutenants into his confidence. Marsena Patrick, the army’s provost marshal, surely typified the majority view within the officer corps. General Hooker, Patrick entered in his diary on June 17, “acts like a man without a plan and is entirely at a loss what to do, or how to match the enemy, or counteract his movements. Whatever he does is the result of impulse….” The general commanding, he summed up, was merely a Mr. Micawber, “‘waiting for something to turn up.’…“6
BY JUNE 15, General Lee could feel confident that his plan was on course and his predictions were on track. By now it was evident that Hooker’s army was quitting the Rappahannock line and shifting northward, no doubt in response to Dick Ewell’s eruption into the Shenandoah Valley. As Lee had anticipated, the mere threat of a move toward Washington was drawing Hooker to the defense of the capital—and away from a countermove against Richmond. Having thus successfully disengaged from the enemy army without any entanglement, the next step was to consolidate his own army and thereby increase the pressure on the Yankees.
Powell Hill had already started his Third Corps west from Fredericksburg, bound for Culpeper. On the evening of the 15 th Lee gave James Longstreet his marching orders. First reports from Ewell at Winchester were highly favorable, Lee told his lieutenant, and it was time for the First Corps to support the movement. Rather than following Ewell directly into the Shenandoah, however, Longstreet was directed to march northward along the eastern face of the Blue Ridge. This ought to confuse the Federals about where the army was bound, Lee thought, and at the same time screen Ewell’s corps already in the Valley as well as Hill’s corps marching toward the Valley along Ewell’s track. Jeb Stuart’s cavalry would in its turn screen Longstreet in the Loudoun Valley, guarding the gaps in the Bull Run Mountains to the east. In due course, as Hill closed up on Ewell at the Potomac, Longstreet would cross into the Shenandoah to act as the army’s rear guard. Then, with Ewell in the van, the Army of Northern Virginia would drive on through Maryland and into Pennsylvania.7
In marked contrast to Joe Hooker, Robert E. Lee enjoyed harmonious relations with his masters in Richmond and with his subordinates in the army. Yet Lee and Hooker were alike in one respect—the frustration both were feeling just then over the matter of reinforcements. As he started his march north, Lee was optimistic that he would finally regain at least one of George Pickett’s two brigades earlier expropriated by D. H. Hill. But, once again, it was not to be. A new spasm of Federal activity on the Virginia Peninsula so alarmed Richmond that Montgomery Corse’s brigade was held back to guard the capital. When Pickett came up from Hanover Junction, it was with but three of his original five brigades, making his the weakest division in Longstreet’s First Corps. At the same time, and for the same reason, Lee’s hopes were dashed that another First Corps brigade, John R. Cooke’s, would be returned to him.
He was even denied a reinforcement in effigy. General Lee’s inspired thought of bringing P.G.T. Beauregard north from Charleston to command a mini-army of Richmond’s defenders or perhaps merely a mystery army—an army in effigy—in northern Virginia, while Lee’s army maneuvered in Pennsylvania, deserved a better fate than it met. “His presence,” Lee remarked of General Beauregard, “would give magnitude to even a small demonstration, and tend greatly to perplex and confound the enemy…. The good effects of beginning to assemble an army at Culpeper C. H. would I think, soon become apparent….” Those good effects, Lee thought, might include drawing Federal forces away from the Pennsylvania front to protect Washington from the Great Creole.
Lee had first raised the Beauregard matter with Mr. Davis back on May 7, and he brought it up again with the president a month later. But he did not submit his scheme as a concrete proposal until June 23, although then he pursued it vigorously. But this more than two-week delay sapped the idea of its promise. Perhaps it foundered on Mr. Davis’s personal antipathy toward Beauregard. Or perhaps in those weeks Lee was lulled by the thought that he might obtain all the reinforcing brigades he had sought. In any event, Richmond seemed unable even to grasp the proposal at that late date, and did not, or could not, act on it. General Beauregard remained in Charleston, and the Confederates missed one of the more intriguing opportunities of the campaign.8
Lee, then, had finally to settle for boldly invading the North with an army of 80,000 men, just 15,000 more than he had had at Chancellorsville. And more than half that increase was in the cavalry, the arm of least use on the battlefield proper. Lee’s infantry strength came to 61,500, an increase of only some 5,300 over his infantry count at Chancellorsville.9
The mood of the men of the Army of Northern Virginia was buoyant when they realized they were to march north and take the war to the Yankees. For too long the fighting and the destruction had scarred only the states of the Confederacy; now Northerners would feel the lash of civil war. And evident among a good many of Lee’s soldiers was a spirit of vengeance. Sometimes it was a personal vengeance. A Mississippi private who learned his home place had suffered at the hands of Federal raiders told his mother, “I can fight so much Harder since I have got a gruge against them it is my Honest wish that my Rifle may Draw tears from many a Northern Mother and Sighs from Many a Father before this thing is over.” Men who had witnessed depredations by the Army of the Potomac—the pillage visited on Fredericksburg at the time of the battle there in December was the worst example—spoke of retaliation. A Georgian in Hood’s division wanted the army to “take horses; burn houses; and commit every depredation possible upon the men of the North…. I certainly love to live to kill the base usurping vandals.”
There was as well a spirit within the army seeking potential retribution for the undeniably worsening news from Vicksburg. The Federal ring around the city had now become a stranglehold. Joe Johnston insisted he was too weak to hazard an attack to relieve the garrison. “Without some great blunder of the enemy…,“he said, he considered the situa
tion in Mississippi hopeless. “The news from Vicksburg is so meager and unsatisfactory that it carries much uneasiness,” General Lafayette McLaws wrote his wife. “Its fall would be so discouraging and its successful defense so inspiring that everything concerning it, is looked for with the greatest anxiety.“10
Before entering what he called “the enemy’s country,” General Lee issued General Orders No. 72, which prohibited the plundering of private property and specified rules for requisitioning supplies. It was Lee’s intention that his army live off the enemy’s country in every respect, paying market prices—in, of course, Confederate currency or vouchers. There was a certain vagueness about these prohibitions, however, requiring Solomonic judgments on the part of hungry and footsore (and vengeful) Rebel soldiers. Therefore, said one, “they paid no attention to any order of the kind, and took everything they could lay their hands on in the eating line.” At the time, to a Pennsylvania farmer or storekeeper, it was a matter of outright confiscation; anyone paid in Confederate currency or vouchers would recoup his losses only if the South should win the war. To Confederate eyes, of course, it was perfectly legal confiscation. Bemused Northerners noticed that Lee’s army transported its grossly depreciated currency in flour barrels.
Taliaferro Simpson of the 3rd South Carolina explained to his home folks that “most of the soldiers seem to harbor a terrific spirit of revenge and steal and pillage….” As for the prohibitions, “the soldiers paid no more attention to them than they would to the cries of a screech owl…. The brigadiers and colonels made no attempt to enforce Lee’s general orders. And Lee himself seemed to disregard entirely the soldiers’ open acts of disobedience.” Confirming the officers’ attitude is a letter by Clement Evans, colonel of the 31st Georgia. “The rascals are afraid we are going to overrun Pennsylvania,” Colonel Evans wrote his wife. “That would indeed be glorious, if we could ravage that state making her desolate like Virginia. It would be just punishment.“11