Chancellorsville Quotes

“The advance of a political general to corps command was disturbing enough to the old guard without the additional fact that Dan Sickles was, in a word, notorious. In 1859, in broad daylight a block from the White House in Washington, Sickles had shot down and killed his wife’s lover. Worse, the lover was Philip Barton Key, son of the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sickles’s trial was the most sensational of its day. After lurid testimony he was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity, a pioneering defense that one of his attorneys, Edwin M. Stanton, helped construct. Sickles then proceeded to compound his notoriety by taking Mrs. Sickles back to his bed and board. There were those in the officer corps who shuddered at the prospect of Joe Hooker, Dan Butterfield, and Dan Sickles at the same headquarters.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville

“Confederates in Jackson’s column reported seeing a Yankee balloon—it was the Eagle—and assumed that if they could see it, it could see them. Yet such were conditions aloft that not a single report reached General Hooker that day from the aeronautical corps that an enemy column was marching to the south and west of Chancellorsville.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville

“At one point they passed a newly abandoned Rebel encampment, and Captain Bowers was surprised to see that it looked just like one of their own. “In every respect it was as good a camp as any we have had. . . .” (Rummaging through this campsite, men of the 2nd Maine came upon a packet of photographs of Federal soldiers. Someone recognized a name on one of them as a man in their brigade, and before long Sergeant Walter Carter, 22nd Massachusetts, was handed the pictures he had lost on the Fredericksburg battlefield five months earlier. And scavengers in the 83rd Pennsylvania recovered some of the fancy French knapsacks they had lost at Gaines’s Mill the previous June.)”
― Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville

“the long roll called William Wofford’s Georgia brigade to fall in for duty. Orders were issued to fill haversacks with snowballs and form line of battle, and behind its color guards the brigade marched two miles to the camp of Joseph Kershaw’s South Carolina brigade. “We were in line of battle on a hill and Kershaw’s formed and come out to fight us,” Georgian Jim Mobley wrote his brother. “The field officers was on their horses and when they come against us, they come with a hollar! and, Benjamin, Great God, I never saw snow balls fly so in my life.” The order to open fire was given at 100 feet. Charge and countercharge were spirited by the Rebel yell. Combat was hand-to-hand, prisoners were taken. “I tell you it beat anything . . . ,” Mobley exclaimed. “There was 4000 men engaged on both sides, and you know it was something!”
― Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville