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  Among the clutch of concerned visitors that descended on the Falmouth camps in these days were three prominent senators, Benjamin Wade, Zachariah Chandler, and Henry Wilson. Wilson headed the Senate’s Committee on Military Affairs, and Wade and Chandler were leaders of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, a body notorious among Potomac army generals for its partisan prying into military matters. While the visit of Republicans Wade and Chandler was not official—the joint committee was then in recess—they put their investigative noses to the ground. What they came away with was what they had come to find. Their favorite Joe Hooker was not at fault for Chancellorsville (“I have full confidence in Joe Hooker both as to his courage & ability as a commander,” Senator Chandler intoned); the responsibility for the reverse lay instead with certain of his generals. This finding was soon leaked to the press, providing further evidence, in the minds of the plotters, of the baneful (Republican) political influences that overlay the Army of the Potomac.6

  Before leaving Washington to return to his Falmouth headquarters, Hooker had discovered what was behind the president’s warning to him that certain of his lieutenants “are not giving you their entire confidence.” Governor Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania, yet another of those who hurried to Falmouth after Chancellorsville to appraise the army’s condition, had called on the two most prominent Pennsylvanians in the high command, corps commanders George Meade and John Reynolds. “In the familiarity of private conversation,” Meade recalled, he spoke frankly to the governor of what he believed were Hooker’s mistakes during the late battle. Reynolds apparently delivered a similar message. Curtin, who was something of an alarmist, rushed to the White House to report that both Meade and Reynolds “had lost all confidence” in army commander Hooker.7

  Hooker picked this up in the capital from an acquaintance of Curtin’s, and back in Falmouth on May 15 he summoned Meade for an explanation. It was a stormy session. Rumors of the attempted command coup of May 7 must have reached Hooker’s ears—the story was already all over Washington—and no doubt he was in a testy mood. Meade tried to explain that what he said to Curtin was during the course of a private conversation, which the governor had had no warrant to repeat. In any event, he said, every opinion he expressed to Curtin he had previously expressed directly to Hooker, as Hooker well knew, during the course of the Chancellorsville fighting. Therefore the general commanding had no cause “to complain of my expressing my views to others.”

  If General Hooker, in Meade’s phrase, “expressed himself satisfied” with that explanation, it was a resolution reached only after the most heated debate. According to Alexander’S. Webb of the Fifth Corps staff, Meade’s volcanic temper got the best of him and he became so mad that he “damned Hooker very freely.” At that Webb hastily left the tent so as not to become the witness required for court-martial charges. Eventually the two generals cooled off and parted without further fireworks, but permanent damage had been done. Afterward, relating the incident to a colleague, Meade was heard to say feelingly, “God help us all.” Within a matter of days he was writing his wife, “I am sorry to tell you I am at open war with Hooker”—an admission by the general who Fighting Joe had recently assured the president was his best corps commander.8

  Shortly after this contretemps, Tribune correspondent Smalley approached Meade “to lay certain matters before him.” During Smalley’s round of visits to the various corps headquarters, the chief dissidents—including at least Couch, Slocum, and Sedgwick—had prevailed upon him as a civilian and a neutral to present their case to Meade for allowing his name to be put up for the command. The correspondent, as he put it, was to “lay before him what my friends declared to be the wish of the army, or of a great part of the army.” The moment the drift of the conversation became clear, Meade interrupted to say, “I don’t know that I ought to listen to you.” Smalley said he was not there as a negotiator but only to tell the general “what others thought.” At that he was allowed to continue. “From beginning to end, General Meade listened with an impassive face…,” Smalley reported. “He never asked a question. He never made a comment. When I had finished I had not the least notion what impression my narrative had made on him.” But simply by agreeing to hear his visitor out, Meade revealed how strained his relationship with the general commanding had become. 9

  Hooker responded disingenuously to the president’s letter of warning, saying he had no idea of the identity of his disaffected lieutenants, and certainly he did not want any of his officers to think he suspected them of disloyalty. He preferred to leave it up to the president to investigate the matter. Officers who applied to him for permission to go to Washington would be urged to call at the White House. As he later testified, “I desired the President himself to ascertain their feelings … and he could then learn their views for his own information.”

  Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, Joe Hooker’s staunchest friend in the Cabinet, warned the general that it was a mistake “to have the Chiefs of Corps come up here to tell their several stories….” Naturally each would say how much better the battle would have gone “if his counsel or his ideas had been followed.” Chase preached that there must be no disaffected within the army’s high command; weed them out, he urged; make new generals “of the best captains or lieutenants.” Hooker disagreed. Although a veteran intriguer himself, he had never operated in the shadows. He saw no merit in conducting a witch-hunt among his lieutenants, as Burnside had vainly attempted in his last days of command. (Burnside’s first candidate for dismissal had been Joe Hooker.) He thought it best to force the disaffected into the open. Make them voice their opinions and take their stands in front of their commander-in-chief.10

  By Hooker’s account, most of his corps commanders did indeed visit the capital over the next two weeks or so, although he claimed he never learned the results of any interviews with the president. But the message these generals delivered was clear enough. “No one whose opinion is worth anything has now any confidence in General Hooker,” division commander John Gibbon wrote on May 25, “and the President has been told so….” Darius Couch was one of these White House visitors, and he told Lincoln he would serve no longer under Hooker and submitted his application for transfer. Couch was the most senior of the corps commanders, Hooker’s second-in-command at Chancellorsville, and the president sounded him out about his availability to command the army should it come to that. Couch excused himself by claiming his health was too fragile for the responsibility, but he took the opportunity to push George Meade for the post.

  Major General Joseph Hooker and his staff, photographed at Falmouth in June 1863. Seated from left: chief commissary Henry F. Clark, chief of artillery Henry J. Hunt, quartermaster Rufus Ingalls, Hooker, chief of staff Daniel Butterfield. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

  Other soundings were taken by the administration, more indirect and informal. John Sedgwick, another of the senior major generals, was one of those discussed for the army command, as he was well aware. “I think I could have had it if I had said the word,” Sedgwick later wrote his sister, “but nothing could induce me to take it.” Winfield Scott Hancock, a well-thought-of division commander in the Second Corps, was also given a look. He wrote his wife soon after Chancellorsville that he had been approached “in connection with the command of the Army of the Potomac.” Like Sedgwick, however, Hancock thought there were too many strings tied to the position. “I do not belong to that class of generals whom the Republicans care to bolster up. I should be sacrificed,” he declared.

  To be sure, General Hooker was not entirely friendless during all this infighting. The New York Herald reported on May 16 that Dan Sickles, the high-powered New York politico in command of the Third Corps, “has been closeted for two hours today” with the president, who was no doubt treated to a recital of Joe Hooker’s military virtues by the loyal Sickles. But in truth, Hooker’s best friend just then was Mr. Lincoln, who genuinely liked the general and admired his fighting ski
lls, and who appreciated how solidly Hooker had reconstructed morale in the Army of the Potomac since taking over its command in January. A Herald correspondent, asking about Hooker’s tenure, reported Lincoln’s response that, having tried General McClellan “a number of times, he saw no reason why he should not try General Hooker twice.” In any case, the president did not want to be perceived as so arbitrary that he had to continue changing generals after every battle.11

  That perception had begun to haunt the administration, for thus far in the war it exactly described the Army of the Potomac’s fortunes. Following that first and particularly inglorious defeat at Manassas in July 1861, Irvin McDowell was sacked in favor of George McClellan. In the summer of 1862, after the collapse of McClellan’s Peninsula campaign, the army was taken from Little Mac division by division and handed over to John Pope. Pope’s sad destiny after the next battle, at Second Manassas, was to watch the army handed back to McClellan. The terrible fight at Sharpsburg on Antietam Creek in September was a strategic standoff favoring the Union, but that did not save McClellan from dismissal. Burnside’s brief tenure as army commander was sealed by the Fredericksburg disaster in December 1862. Now yet another defeat, Chancellorsville, threatened yet another general. Joe Hooker found himself being pushed toward oblivion from behind, by insurgents within his own officer corps.

  It proved impossible to keep this high-command turmoil under wraps, and every day seemed to generate a new rumor about Hooker’s fate. Samuel P. Heintzelman, commanding the Washington defenses, was ever alert to the latest gossip about the high command. “All sorts of rumors of changes in the command of the Army of the Potomac, and who shall command it,” he recorded in his diary on May 15. Two days later he heard the capital’s newsboys giving voice to the latest unfounded rumor as they cried, “General Hooker removed!” On the 18th, Marsena Patrick, the army’s provost marshal, observed in his diary that “Hooker stock, in Washington, is rather low at present.“12

  At the core of General Hooker’s command problems, after Chancellorsville, was his lack of a constituency among his chief lieutenants. The only generals who owed their corps postings to Hooker were Dan Sickles of the Third Corps, Otis Howard of the Eleventh, and George Stoneman of the cavalry, and after publicly criticizing Howard and Stoneman for their Chancellorsville failings Hooker lost whatever good will they might have retained. The others had climbed the ladder of command under General McClellan. Couch of the Second Corps and Slocum of the Twelfth were the earliest avowed advocates of Meade for the army command. Sedgwick of the Sixth Corps, already leaning toward the Meade camp, took his place there after what was described as “a stormy scene” with Hooker over Sedgwick’s role at Chancellorsville. John Reynolds of the First Corps was the least vocal concerning the various controversies, but in time he too would take his stand behind Meade. And now Meade’s professed neutrality toward Hooker was compromised by mutual antipathy. Of the eight, then, only Dan Sickles remained a loyal supporter of the general commanding.

  Joe Hooker’s inability to keep his mouth shut contributed greatly to the mess he was in. He might have ridden out the storm by quietly accepting responsibility for his defeat, but that was not his way, and it lost him respect as well as friends. At the same time, the intrigues hatched by his lieutenants were in blatant violation of military order and indeed subject to court-martial under the Articles of War. All in all, it was an ugly situation without precedent in a Northern army, posing the gravest threat not only to Hooker’s ability to lead but to the very heart of the military command structure. Lincoln’s warning to his general—“This would be ruinous, if true”—proved to be only too true.13

  MORALE AMONG THOSE of lesser rank in the Army of the Potomac was far less compromised by the Chancellorsville defeat than was true of the generals. It had been a hard campaign to follow and it was hard to understand why it ended as it did, and that bred at least a certain frustration among the fighting men. Their initial reaction was well expressed by a Pennsylvania lieutenant, Francis Donaldson. “The men are morose, sullen, dissatisfied, disappointed, and mortified,” Donaldson wrote his brother on May 14. “We are a good deal discouraged because we feel that we should not have lost the battle. I don’t see how we can hope to succeed if we are not better handled.”

  Even so, Donaldson detected a new resiliency in the Falmouth camps: “But at the same time it must be confessed we are a remarkable army. I doubt very much if any other could have sustained two such tremendous disasters as Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and held together as we are doing. Why, do you know that not withstanding our discouragements we are now fast recovering and could make a big fight today if we had someone to inspire us with confidence?” Captain Stephen Weld, First Corps, was similarly impressed by the basic spirit in the ranks. “This Army of the Potomac is truly a wonderful army,” he told his family. “They have something of the English bull-dog in them. You can whip them time and again, but the next fight they go into, they are in good spirits, and as full of pluck as ever…. Some day or other we shall have our turn.”

  This attitude reflected a major change from the Yankee soldiers’ abyssal demoralization following the Fredericksburg slaughter in December. In the weeks after that battle embittered men deserted by the thousands. By the end of January one man in ten on the roles of the Potomac army was listed as a deserter. The whole structure of military discipline was breaking down. On January 24 General Carl Schurz warned President Lincoln that he should “not be surprised when you see this great army melt away with frightful rapidity.” Chancellorsville, however, triggered nothing like that mass exit of fighting men. Instead there was a calm (or at least resigned) acceptance of the defeat and a looking forward rather than back.

  Lieutenant Donaldson pointed to another major difference between then and now. At Chancellorsville, unlike Fredericksburg, the Army of the Potomac had inflicted severe loss on the Rebels. “The enemy must have been badly crippled or else they would have followed up their success,” he concluded, a view that was echoed in many home letters. There was general agreement that they had given as good as they got. “I think such getting whipped, on our part, will soon use up the Confederacy,” Lieutenant Edward Ketchum of the 120th New York observed. “Their loss must have been fearful; for they came up, time after time, right in front of our batteries, closed en masse,…when our guns, double-shotted with grape, would pile them in heaps, and send them back, utterly cut to pieces….“14

  Still another factor softening the humiliation of defeat was the presence of a handy scapegoat on which to heap the blame. Stonewall Jackson’s surprise assault on May 2 caught the Eleventh Corps entirely unsuspecting and facing in the wrong direction. The corps contained large numbers of Germans or men of German descent, known scornfully as Dutchmen by the nativist element in the army, and when they confronted the avalanche of screaming, charging Rebels the poor Dutchmen broke and ran. “But the Corps—I grant our Corps lost the day—and sorry enough I am to admit it,” wrote a New England Yankee in the Eleventh. “But for the Corps we might have been successful in our movements.” A great many men in the Army of the Potomac agreed with him.

  The attitude of the troops toward their commanding general was mixed. Some letter writers, reflecting the views of the officer corps (and of the newspapers), attacked Hooker for letting himself be outgeneraled at Chancellorsville by Lee and Jackson. Others derided him for the address he had issued in the middle of the campaign that brashly predicted victory. “I should think Hooker would feel rather small after bragging so much,” remarked Captain William Folwell of the engineers. “The only reasons I know for our repulse are, that Joe Hooker was outgeneraled and our soldiers, some of them, beaten by the superior daring and skill of the rebels.”

  Yet there remained in this army a strain of genuine liking for Fighting Joe that outlasted his defeat. He was well known for taking care of his men, and well remembered for cleaning up the messes of the Burnside regime, for making sure everyone was fed and clothed and
sheltered as they were supposed to be. Hooker had worked hard in the three months before Chancellorsville to restore the soldiers’ pride in themselves, with a result evident in the resilient spirit they displayed after the lost battle. Connecticut soldier John Willard, writing home on May 15, insisted that “Gen. Hooker has the confidence of the troops. The Army feel that he will do his duty and that in the hour of the greatest danger he will do all in his power, even by his presence, to protect it, and help us out.” (Willard added, however, in a reference to Hooker’s raffish reputation, “I wish he was a man of prayer.”)15

  By all appearances, then, the rank and file in the Army of the Potomac had not had their morale shattered at Chancellorsville, and seemed ready and willing to resume campaigning within a reasonable time—although, to be sure, this time with the hope that they would be better handled. The army’s officer corps, however, was considerably demoralized and in virtual revolt. It made no secret of its fervent desire to be rid of the general commanding, and in this objective it had an important ally in Washington in the person of General-in-Chief Halleck. For the moment, with all quiet on the Rappahannock, Joe Hooker still retained Mr. Lincoln’s confidence, but it remained to be seen how long that would last if the quiet was shattered.

  IN HIS RELUCTANT planning for a renewed offensive, sent to the president on May 13, General Hooker had pointed to an especially thorny problem—the need for what he termed a “partial reorganization” of the Army of the Potomac. This was necessary because of an ongoing, massive, and unavoidable reduction in his forces. During the next two months the Potomac army would have to come to terms with the mustering out of no fewer than fifty-three infantry regiments, 30,500 men. This came to better than 27 percent of the foot soldiers that had made the Chancellorsville fight.16