Who won the Battle of Chancellorsville?
The Confederacy won. At Chancellorsville, Virginia, between 30 April and 6 May 1863, Robert E. Lee's army of about 60,000 defeated Joseph Hooker's Union army of about 130,000. Stonewall Jackson's flank march routed the Union right on 2 May, but that night Jackson was shot by his own men, and he died on 10 May.3
At Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee did everything a general is told never to do. Facing an enemy more than twice his size, he split his army in two, then split it again, and won the victory that is still called his masterpiece. It was fought in a dark, tangled forest where nobody could see far, and it cost Lee the one man he could not spare.4
A battle of the American Civil War, part of the greatest battles of the Civil War · Related: the Wilderness, Second Fredericksburg · Before: The Battle of Fredericksburg · Next: The Battle of Gettysburg
A new commander after Fredericksburg
The road to Chancellorsville began with a Union disaster. In December 1862 Ambrose Burnside threw the Army of the Potomac against Lee's entrenched lines at Fredericksburg and lost badly, and a miserable winter "Mud March" in January finished his career in command. Abraham Lincoln replaced him with Joseph Hooker, a 48-year-old Massachusetts man known to the newspapers as "Fighting Joe".5
Hooker was a gifted organizer. Over the winter his reforms restored the army's health and morale so quickly that he proudly called it "the finest army on the planet." By spring the two armies faced each other across the Rappahannock River, the Union camps on the northern bank and Lee's men dug in along the heights behind Fredericksburg.6 › Battle of Fredericksburg, 1862
Hooker's plan
Hooker's plan for the spring campaign was genuinely good. First his cavalry would ride deep behind Lee toward Richmond and cut the Confederate supply line. Then most of his infantry would march upstream, cross the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers beyond the end of Lee's defenses and sweep east against the Confederate left. The rest of the army, under John Sedgwick, would cross at Fredericksburg and pin Lee in place, the second blade of a pair of shears. "My plans are perfect," Hooker boasted, "and when I start to carry them out may God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none."7
The campaign opened on 27 April and at first went exactly to plan. Within three days the flanking column had splashed across the fords, and on 29 April Sedgwick's men laid pontoon bridges below Fredericksburg. By the afternoon of 30 April the main Union force stood at Chancellorsville, which was not a town at all but a large brick inn at a crossroads where the Orange Turnpike met the Orange Plank Road. Around it lay the Wilderness, a scrubby second-growth forest so thick that a regiment could vanish into it.8
The armies and their commanders
On paper the contest was lopsided. Hooker had about 130,000 men, well fed and well equipped. Lee had about 60,000, because in February he had sent James Longstreet with two strong divisions to gather food and supplies around Suffolk in southeastern Virginia, and they would not be back in time. Outnumbered more than two to one, Lee was expected to retreat south toward Richmond.9
The two commanders could hardly have been more different. Hooker was brave and confident in camp but, as the campaign would show, he lost his nerve when Lee refused to behave as planned. Lee was the opposite: calm, aggressive and willing to gamble. Beside him was Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, his Second Corps commander, a devout and secretive former professor at the Virginia Military Institute whose speed of marching had already made him famous in the Shenandoah Valley.10
1 May: Hooker loses his nerve
Lee did not retreat. Guessing correctly that the real danger lay to the west, he left about 10,000 men under Jubal Early to hold the old lines at Fredericksburg and turned the rest of his army toward the Wilderness. Jackson left the Fredericksburg trenches at 3 a.m. on 1 May, found two divisions under Richard Anderson and Lafayette McLaws digging in near Zoan Church, and ordered them to stop digging and attack.11
Late that morning the Union columns moving east out of the forest ran into Jackson's aggressive brigades on the Turnpike and the Plank Road. Open country lay just ahead, where Union numbers would count. Instead Hooker ordered his generals back into the Wilderness to dig in around Chancellorsville, convinced that Lee would now have to attack him on ground of his own choosing. His corps commanders were dismayed. The American Battlefield Trust calls this first day a small action whose significance far exceeded its scale.12
Lee divides his army
That evening Lee and Jackson met at a crossroads in the woods to weigh their options. Confederate scouts reported the Union line strong in front, and a frontal attack on entrenchments was something Lee's small army could not afford. Then, around midnight, Lee's cavalry chief J. E. B. Stuart rode up with the news that changed everything: the Union right flank was "in the air", resting on no river, hill or fortification.13
Before dawn on 2 May the two generals settled on one of the boldest gambles of the war. Jackson would take his whole corps, nearly 30,000 men, on a long march along hidden country roads and woods paths to strike that open flank. Lee would keep only about 14,000 to 15,000 men to face Hooker's main army and hold his attention. Counting Early's men at Fredericksburg, the Army of Northern Virginia would be split into three pieces, any one of which could be destroyed if Hooker moved. Jackson's partisans later credited him with the idea, but the plan was Lee's; Jackson was trusted with its execution.14 › Robert E. Lee
2 May: Jackson's flank march
Jackson's column set off early on 2 May down the Furnace Road. It was not invisible. Union lookouts at Hazel Grove spotted the marchers crossing a clearing near Catharine Furnace, and Hooker briefly guessed that Jackson was heading for his right. As the morning wore on, though, he persuaded himself that Lee was retreating, and he sent Daniel Sickles' Third Corps south to harass the "retreating" Confederates. Sickles' advance drew thousands of Union troops away from the very flank Jackson was about to hit, and warnings from officers on the right were dismissed as panic.15
The march covered more than 12 miles of narrow tracks and ended around 3 p.m. on the Orange Turnpike, beyond the end of the Union line. Jackson took two more hours to deploy his brigades in the silent forest. Facing him was Oliver O. Howard's Eleventh Corps, with only a handful of regiments and guns turned to the west. At about 5 p.m. bugles sounded, and Jackson's men burst out of the thickets with the Rebel Yell. "Along the road it was pandemonium," a Massachusetts soldier remembered, "and on the side of the road it was chaos."16
Many of Howard's men fought bravely and tried to form new lines, but they were hit from the flank and rear and the whole corps was driven from the field. Jackson's assault rolled the Union army back more than two miles before darkness and the tangling of his own units forced a halt at nightfall. Afterward the Eleventh Corps, full of German-American immigrants, became the army's scapegoat, although no corps could have withstood such a surprise from such an angle.17
The wounding of Jackson
Jackson did not want to stop. He hoped to push on in the moonlight, get between Hooker and the river fords and destroy the Union army. While A. P. Hill's division came forward, he rode ahead of his lines with a small party to look for a road. Coming back through the dark woods, the horsemen were taken for Union cavalry, and a North Carolina regiment fired two volleys into them.18
Jackson was hit three times, twice in the left arm and once in the right hand. His bearers dropped him twice as they stumbled through the forest, and that night surgeons amputated his left arm. Hill was wounded soon afterward, and command of the corps passed to Stuart, who wisely called off the night attack. When Lee heard the news he sent word that Jackson had lost his left arm, but that he, Lee, had lost his right.19 › Stonewall Jackson
3 May: Hazel Grove and the Chancellor house
Despite the rout, Hooker still held the advantage on the morning of 3 May. He had received reinforcements, and Sickles' corps on the high, open clearing at Hazel Grove split the Confederates into two wings, Stuart's to the west and Lee's to the south. Then Hooker ordered Hazel Grove abandoned. Confederate infantry took it at dawn, and the artillery officer Edward Porter Alexander massed about 30 guns on the plateau to pound the Union position at Fairview.20
The fighting between dawn and mid-morning on 3 May was the bloodiest of the battle. Stuart sent brigade after brigade against Union entrenchments on both sides of the Turnpike in a slugging match through smoke-filled woods. The National Park Service estimates that the five hours of fighting between Hazel Grove and Fairview cost a man killed, wounded or captured every second. Union guns began to fall silent as their ammunition ran out, and no fresh infantry came forward to help.21
At the height of the crisis a Confederate cannonball struck a pillar of the Chancellor house porch that Hooker was leaning on and threw him to the ground. He was stunned, by some accounts unconscious for half an hour, and when he recovered he ordered the army back to a prepared line nearer the river. By mid-morning the Confederate wings had united in the Chancellorsville clearing, the inn was burning, and Lee rode in to a storm of cheering from his men.22
Salem Church and the Union retreat
Lee had no time to celebrate. A courier arrived from Fredericksburg: Sedgwick had stormed Marye's Heights, driven off Early's thin force and was marching west into the Confederate rear. For the third time in the campaign Lee divided his army. He left Stuart to watch Hooker and sent McLaws east, and on the afternoon of 3 May the Confederates stopped Sedgwick at Salem Church, about four miles west of town.23
On 4 May Lee attacked Sedgwick and pushed him back across the Rappahannock at Banks Ford. Then he turned back toward Hooker, whose army still outnumbered his own. But Hooker had seen enough. Against the advice of most of his corps commanders, he ordered a retreat, and on the night of 5 May the Army of the Potomac slipped back across its pontoon bridges. By 9 a.m. on 6 May the last Union troops were over the river and the campaign was over.24
How many died at the Battle of Chancellorsville?
About 30,000 men were killed, wounded or captured. The American Battlefield Trust counts 30,764 casualties, 17,304 Union and 13,460 Confederate; the National Park Service gives more than 17,000 and about 13,000. Roughly 3,200 to 3,400 were killed outright: 1,606 to 1,694 Union and 1,581 to 1,724 Confederate, according to the Official Records and the Trust.25
Chancellorsville was a stunning Confederate victory, but the numbers were cruel to the winner. Hooker's losses were about 13 percent of his army; Lee's were about 22 percent of his, and those men were far harder to replace. The park's historian notes that some 40,000 Union soldiers had done no fighting at all. The American Battlefield Trust counts it as the bloodiest battle in American history up to that time.26
Why was the Battle of Chancellorsville important?
Chancellorsville is remembered as Lee's greatest victory, won against an army more than twice the size of his own. It convinced Lee that his men could beat any Union force and led directly to his invasion of Pennsylvania and the Battle of Gettysburg two months later. It also cost the Confederacy Stonewall Jackson, a commander Lee never replaced.27
Jackson at first seemed to be recovering. He was carried to a small farm office at Guinea Station, south of Fredericksburg, where pneumonia set in, and he died there on 10 May 1863. His death left a hole at the top of Lee's army that was never filled. Lee reorganized his infantry into three corps under Longstreet, Richard Ewell and A. P. Hill, but neither of the new men matched Jackson.28
The victory also made Lee bolder. Convinced that his army could beat any Union force, he persuaded the government in Richmond to approve a second invasion of the North. Hooker followed him north but, distrusted in Washington, resigned on 28 June 1863, and George Meade took command of the Army of the Potomac three days before the armies met at Gettysburg.29 › Battle of Gettysburg, 1863
Legacy and memory
Chancellorsville is still studied as a case of a commander breaking a central rule of war and winning. The American Battlefield Trust points out that Clausewitz's first principle of war was to keep one's forces concentrated; Lee divided his three times in front of an enemy twice his size, and the gamble worked because he read Hooker correctly and Jackson moved fast. Britannica judges that the maneuver further cemented Lee's reputation among friend and foe alike.30
For the South the victory was bittersweet. Jackson became a martyr of the Confederate cause, second only to Lee among Southern heroes, and after the war the question "what if Jackson had lived?" became part of the Lost Cause legend. Encyclopedia Virginia's historian points out that Chancellorsville was also the last decisive victory the Army of Northern Virginia ever won.31
The battle lived on in fiction, too. According to the American Battlefield Trust, Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895), about a frightened young Union private, is almost certainly set at Chancellorsville and drew on the stories of veterans of the 124th New York.32
Visiting the battlefield today
Chancellorsville is part of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, which also protects the battlefields of Fredericksburg, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House. The Chancellorsville Battlefield Visitor Center stands near the place where Jackson was wounded, and a short trail around it follows the events of that night. A driving tour leads to the Chancellor house site, the Lee and Jackson bivouac, the ruins of Catharine Furnace, the start line of Jackson's flank attack, and Hazel Grove and Fairview, joined by a walking trail between the two artillery positions. The small farm office at Guinea Station where Jackson died is preserved as the Jackson Death Site.33
The ground of the flank attack itself was entirely unprotected until 1990, when the park boundary was expanded. Since then the American Battlefield Trust and its partners have bought more than 400 acres of the battlefield, including the 85-acre Wagner Tract in 2009, but significant parts of it, crossed today by busy Route 3, remain unprotected.34 › Battle of the Wilderness, 1864
