Battle of Chancellorsville

Robert E. Lee faced the most daunting odds of his career in the spring of 1863. Joseph Hooker's Army of the Potomac — 130,000 men against Lee's 60,000 — had crossed the Rappahannock and taken positions near Chancellorsville, Virginia, in what Hooker called the finest movement of troops in army history. "The enemy must either ingloriously fly," Hooker declared, "or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground." Lee came out. He split his outnumbered army twice — against every principle of defensive warfare — and in five days turned Hooker's flanking operation into a Confederate tactical triumph that military historians still study.

The battle's decisive stroke was Stonewall Jackson's 28,000-man flanking march on May 2 — a 12-mile arc through dense woodland, hidden from Union observation, that materialized on the exposed right flank of the Union's 11th Corps at dusk. The attack rolled up the Federal line for two miles before darkness stopped it. It was Jackson at his most audacious, and it shattered Union cohesion at the battle's critical moment. Lee's victory came at the cost of more than 13,000 Confederate casualties he could not replace — and one general he absolutely could not.

That night, returning from a forward reconnaissance, Jackson was accidentally shot by his own troops — North Carolina infantrymen who fired at a party emerging from the tree line in the darkness. His left arm was amputated. Lee sent word that he had lost his right arm. Jackson died of pneumonia eight days later. Two months later at Gettysburg, the flank attacks that might have cracked the Union line were led by generals who did what they were told and no more. Jackson, his subordinates understood, would have done something else entirely.