May 4 The next morning Lee himself, with the three remaining brigades of Anderson, arrived upon the scene. Sedgwick, who had lost 5,000 men the preceding day, May had fortified a position covering Banks’ Ford, and occupied it with over 20,000 muskets. Lee, with the divisions of McLaws, Anderson, and Early, was slightly stronger. The attack was delayed, for the Federals held strong ground, difficult to reconnoitre; but once begun the issue was soon decided. Assailed in front and flanks, with no help coming from Hooker, and only a single bridge at Banks’ Ford in rear, the Federals rapidly gave ground.
Darkness, however, intensified by a thick fog, made pursuit difficult, and Sedgwick re-crossed the river with many casualties but in good order. During these operations, that is, from four o’clock on Sunday afternoon until after midnight on Monday, Hooker had not moved a single man to his subordinate’s assistance.[[10]] So extraordinary a situation has seldom been seen in war: an army of 60,000 men, strongly fortified, was held in check for six-and-thirty hours by 20,000; while not seven miles away raged a battle on which the whole fate of the campaign depended.
Lee and Jackson had made no false estimate of Hooker’s incapacity. Sedgwick’s army corps had suffered so severely in men and in moral that it was not available for immediate service, even had it been transferred to Chancellorsville; and Lee was now free to concentrate his whole force against the main body of the Federal army. His men, notwithstanding their extraordinary exertions, were confident of victory.
May 5 “As I sheltered myself,” says an eye-witness, “in a little farmhouse on the plank road the brigades of Anderson’s division came splashing through the mud, in wild tumultuous spirits, singing, shouting, jesting, heedless of soaking rags, drenched to the skin, and burning again to mingle in the mad revelry of battle.”[[11]] But it was impossible to push forward, for a violent rain-storm burst upon the Wilderness, and the spongy soil, saturated with the deluge, absolutely precluded all movement across country. Hooker, who had already made preparations for retreat, took advantage of the weather, and as soon as darkness set in put his army in motion for the bridges.
May 6 By eight o’clock on the morning of the 6th the whole force had crossed; and when the Confederate patrols pushed forward, Lee found that his victim had escaped.
The Army of the Potomac returned to its old camp on the hills above Fredericksburg, and Lee reoccupied his position on the opposite ridge. Stoneman, who had scoured the whole country to within a few miles of Richmond, returned to Kelly’s Ford on May 8. The raid had effected nothing. The damage done to the railroads and canals was repaired by the time the raiders had regained the Rappahannock. Lee’s operations at Chancellorsville had not been affected in the very slightest degree by their presence in his rear, while Stoneman’s absence had proved the ruin of the Federal army. Jackson, who had been removed by the Commander-in-Chief’s order to Mr. Chandler’s house, near Gurney’s Station, on the morning of May 5, was asked what he thought of Hooker’s plan of campaign. His reply was: “It was in the main a good conception, an excellent plan. But he should not have sent away his cavalry; that was his great blunder. It was that which enabled me to turn him without his being aware of it, and to take him in the rear. Had he kept his cavalry with him, his plan would have been a very good one.” This was not his only comment on the great battle. Among other things, he said that he intended to cut the Federals off from the United States Ford, and, taking a position between them and the river, oblige them to attack him, adding, with a smile, “My men sometimes fail to drive the enemy from a position, but they always fail to drive us away.” He spoke of General Rodes, and alluded in high terms to his splendid behaviour in the attack on Howard. He hoped he would be promoted, and he said that promotion should be made at once, upon the field, so as to act as an incentive to gallantry in others. He spoke of Colonel Willis, who had commanded the skirmishers, and praised him very highly, and referred most feelingly to the death of Paxton, the commander of the Stonewall Brigade, and of Captain Boswell, his chief engineer. In speaking of his own share in the victory he said: “Our movement was a great success; I think the most successful military movement of my life. But I expect to receive far more credit for it than I deserve. Most men will think I planned it all from the first; but it was not so. I simply took advantage of circumstances as they were presented to me in the providence of God. I feel that His hand led me—let us give Him the glory.”
It must always be an interesting matter of speculation what the result would have been had Jackson accomplished his design, on the night he fell, of moving a large part of his command up the White House road, and barring the only line of retreat left open to the Federals.
Hooker, it is argued, had two corps in position which had been hardly engaged, the Second and the Fifth; and another, the First, under Reynolds, was coming up. Of these, 25,000 men might possibly, could they have been manœuvred in the forest, have been sent to drive Jackson back. And, undoubtedly, to those who think more of numbers than of human nature, of the momentum of the mass rather than the mental equilibrium of the general, the fact that a superior force of comparatively fresh troops was at Hooker’s disposal will be sufficient to put the success of the Confederates out of court. Yet the question will always suggest itself, would not the report that a victorious enemy, of unknown strength, was pressing forward, in the darkness of the night, towards the only line of retreat, have so demoralised the Federal commander and the Federal soldiers, already shaken by the overthrow of the Eleventh Army Corps, that they would have thought only of securing their own safety? Would Hooker, whose tactics the next day, after he had had the night given him in which to recover his senses, were so inadequate, have done better if he had received no respite? Would the soldiers of the three army corps not yet engaged, who had been witnesses of the rout of Howard’s divisions, have fared better, when they heard the triumphant yells of the advancing Confederates, than the hapless Germans? “The wounding of Jackson,” says a most careful historian of the battle, himself a participator in the Union disaster, was a most fortunate circumstance for the Army of the Potomac. At nine o’clock the capture or destruction of a large part of the army seemed inevitable. There was, at the time, great uncertainty and a feeling akin to panic prevailing among the Union forces round Chancellorsville; and when we consider the position of the troops at this moment, and how many important battles have been won by trivial flank attacks—how Richepanse (attacking through the forest) with a single brigade ruined the Austrians at Hohenlinden—we must admit that the Northern army was in great peril when Jackson arrived within one thousand yards of its vital point (the White House) with 20,000 men and 50 cannon.”[[12]] He must be a great leader indeed who, when his flank is suddenly rolled up and his line of retreat threatened, preserves sufficient coolness to devise a general counterstroke. Jackson had proved himself equal to such a situation at Cedar Run, but it is seldom in these circumstances that Providence sides with the “big battalions.”
The Federal losses in the six days’ battles were heavy: over 12,000 at Chancellorsville, and 4,700 at Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford; a total of 17,287. The army lost 13 guns, and nearly 6,000 officers and men were reported either captured or missing.