Ol’ Joe Hooker, Won’t You Come out of the Wilderness?

Ol’ Joe Hooker, won’t you come out of the Wilderness?
Come out of The Wilderness, come out of the Wilderness?
Ol’ Joe Hooker, won’t you come out of the Wilderness?
Bully boys, hey! Bully boys, ho!

If you want to have a good time, jine the cavalry!
Jine the cavalry! Jine the cavalry!
If you want to catch the Devil, if you want to have fun,
If you want to smell Hell, jine the cavalry!

Today, 150 years ago, on the second bloodiest day of the War of Northern Aggression, General “Stonewall” Jackson lay wounded, having been hit by friendly fire the previous night during a recon of the battle lines after dark. Command of his corps, that had routed so much of the Army of the Potomac the previous day, fell to General A. P. Hill, who also fell wounded in turn.

General Rodes was next in line to take command, but by mutual agreement, General J.E.B. Stuart, the glamorous cavalry comander, took charge instead. It was his first time commanding infantry, but by all accounts he acquitted himself more than manfully, continuing to push the advantage that Jackson had gained on the 2nd. Said Stephen W. Sears,

It is hard to see how Jeb Stuart, in a new command, a cavalryman commanding infantry and artillery for the first time, could have done a better job. The astute Porter Alexander believed all credit was due: “Altogether, I do not think there was a more brilliant thing done in the war than Stuart’s extricating that command from the extremely critical position in which he found it.”

Stuart also spontaneously invented a new verse to the his theme song, “Jine the Cavalry,” which mocked the Union Commander, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, and Stuart sang the song all day while leading Jackson’s men into battle.

Hooker spent a good portion of the morning unconscious from an artillery blast that blew him off the porch of his command post, and accordingly, probably did not hear Stuart’s musical embellishments first hand.

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“The Enemy Fled Like Chaff Before the Wind”

You can go forward then.

-Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, to Gen. Robert E. Rodes, May 2, 1863, approximately 5:45 p.m.

All across the nearly two-mile width of Jackson’s front, the woods and fields resounded with the rebel yell as the screaming attackers bore down on the startled Federals, who had just risen to whoop at the frightened deer and driven rabbits. Now it was their turn to be frightened — and driven, too. For the Union regiments facing west gave way in a rush before the onslaught, and as they fled the two guns they had abandoned were turned against them, hastening their departure and increasing the confusion among the troops facing south behind the now useless breastworks they had constructed with such care. These last took their cue from them and began to pull out too, in rapid succession from right to left down the long line of intrenchments, swelling the throng rushing eastward along the road. Within 20 minutes of the opening shows, Howard’s flank division had gone out of military existence, converted that quickly from organisation to mob. The adjoining division was sudden to follow the example set. Not even the sight of the corps commander himself, on horseback near Wilderness Church, breasting the surge of retreaters up the turnpike and clamping a stand of abandoned colors under the stump of his amputated arm while attempting to control the skittish horse with the other, served to end or even to slow the rout. Bareheaded and with tears in his eyes, Howard was pleading with them to halt and form, halt and form, but they paid him no mind, evidently convinced that his distress, whether for the fate of his country or his career or both, took no precedence over their own distress for their very lives.

-Shelby Foote, The Civil War, A Narrative, Vol. 2

My God it is horrible. To think of it — 130,000 magnificient soldiers so cut to pieces by less than 60,000 half starved ragamuffins.

-Horace Greeley, on the Battle of Chancellorsville

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The High Water Mark

Right about now, 149 years ago, more than 12,000 Confederate soldiers under the command of General Robert E. Lee set off across three-quarters of a mile of open field in Pennsylvania, just south of the town of Gettysburg, in a desperate attempt to break the Union line.

The Rebels advanced under withering artillery and musket fire from their front and flanks, but were not turned until after their charge reached the Union line and they were engaged in hand-to-hand combat. They suffered greater than 50% casualties.

This moment will forever hold me in its grip, and I’ll be damned if I really know why. But William Faulkner spelled it out to an extent in Intruder in the Dust:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.

And apparently that instant is there for Southern boys thirty-three years old, too, because it is there for me right now. Every time I read an account of the battle. Every time I watch Gettysburg. Every time I even think about it, I find myself crossing my fingers and whispering, maybe this time it will work. Maybe this time we will win. I don’t know if I can really explain it to you any more clearly if it’s not lodged into your psyche the way it is lodged into mine. I think its something that has to be felt: brave and sad, hopeful and hopeless.

But whether you understand it or not, I do, and so I salute the heroes who fell on that day.

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