Picketing along the Rappahannock, by details of Regiments, was the principal duty from January to
Battle of Chancellorsville.
April 29th, when the Army broke camp and started on a campaign intended to be brief, but sharp and decisive, fruitful of great and important results.
It was Hooker's plan, most intelligently conceived and thorough in its details. Without Jackson on the other side, it would have gone down in history as the battle of the War, and Hooker would have been the Lieutenant-General. No rebel army would thereafter have crossed the Potomac to make a Gettysburg. The Gettysburg of the War would have been on Southern soil.
The Regiment participated in the feint to the left of Fredericksburg, and on the
1st of May, moved toward Chancellorsville, the place of the campaign, crossing the Rappahannock at United States Ford.
On the 2d, late in the afternoon, Sickles was ordered to send two Divisions, the 2d and 3d, in the direction of the Old Furnace, to cut off the march of rebel troops toward the right of our line. Jackson, however, as was his custom, had already passed by and out of the way, excepting a regiment, which was captured.
While two-thirds of Sickles' Corps was in this exposed position, Jackson literally fell on the 11th Corps, away to the right of the Union line, at a time when the whole of that Corps was lying in supposed security, doubled it up, and in this way substituted the Field plan of Lee for the Camp study of Hooker; and Chancellorsville was become a ground to fight on but not a place of victory.
In the words of that memorable Order, the "Enemy was in a bag." But where was the string?