Apart from Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, Joseph Hooker was the least deserving of being relieved of command.
By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2022, All Rights Reserved
Editor’s note: The subject of the annual Dick Crews Debate at the January 2022 Roundtable meeting was: “Apart from Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, which Civil War officer was the least deserving of being relieved of command?” Four members made presentations on the topic; the article below was one of those four presentations .
I am here to speak of General Joseph Hooker. More specifically, I am here to rehabilitate him, or to try to, because he has gotten an undeserved bad rap for 156 years, the most unfairly and unjustifiably maligned officer in the Union army.
We are all familiar with his alleged deficiencies, especially his failure, at Chancellorsville, to defeat General Robert E. Lee, who commanded an army about half the size of his. That failure, we are told, can be attributed to the fact that he had too much to drink before the battle, that he was therefore drunk on the field, or that he didn’t have enough to drink, needing a belt or two to brace his nerve and not getting it.
In addition to his fondness for John Barleycorn, we are told that he was a gambler and a ladies’ man. The first charge has an odor about it: a straw grasped by an enemy or rival who had nothing more damning to talk about than the fact that Hooker played cards for money in California after the Mexican War and found pleasure and excitement in games of chance, as countless millions–billions in fact–have found throughout history. The second charge probably has something to do with the myth that the slang term for a prostitute comes from his name. Not so; the word “hooker” was in use long before the Civil War and is probably related to means employed by ladies of the night to obtain clients, i.e., to “hook” them. Further, I’m not sure what a ladies’ man is. Is this a man who is smitten by ladies or a man whom ladies are smitten by? I dunno, but I hear things. It seems to me that too much negativity is laid on the smiting business. After all, if it didn’t exist, neither would we, so let us be grateful for it.
The truth is that he patronized prostitutes, which was common enough for bachelors during the Victorian era, because the supply of free stuff was not equal to the demand. When has it ever been? There’s a reason it is called the world’s oldest profession. We read in Jeremiah 5:8 that the Israelite men “were as fed horses in the morning: everyone neighed after his neighbor’s wife.” In any case, all of the men and many of the women in this room have been drawn to the devil’s workshop at one time or another in their lives, usually in times of great tedium, stress, disappointment, or loss. The lawyers like to say de minimis non curat lex, which is to say that the law does not concern itself with trifles. And neither should we. I am quite aware, of course, of excess, and of the ruination of lives that excessive drinking, gambling, and sex cause, but there is no evidence that Hooker did any of these excessively or ruined anyone’s life because of it. Indeed, there is much eyewitness commentary on Hooker’s sobriety. Let us not judge men by what their enemies say and write about them.
Hooker picked up the nickname “Fighting Joe” from a journalist’s clerical error, rather than because of his performance in combat. He said he didn’t like it, but I suspect he did. There are few things that men like more than recognition. The truth is that he gained a reputation as a fierce fighter in the Second Seminole War and in the Mexican War, receiving three brevet promotions in the latter war for staff leadership and gallantry in the battles of Monterrey, National Bridge, and Chapultepec, before resigning. In the Civil War he solidified his reputation by distinguishing himself at Williamsburg, Seven Pines, South Mountain, Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg.
At Antietam, he left the battlefield early with a foot wound after fighting Stonewall Jackson to a standstill. He just might be the only Union general who ever fought Stonewall Jackson to a standstill. If you know of another, I’d like to hear of it. The foot wound was the first of his chance misfortunes that might well have determined the outcome of a battle that would have been more favorable to the Union had it not occurred. He thought so. He said that if he had not been forced to leave the battlefield prematurely because of his wound, Antietam would have been a decisive Union victory rather than the draw that it is commonly regarded as. His record as a soldier to that time suggests that he knew what he was talking about.
Because of General Ambrose Burnside’s terrible blunders at Fredericksburg and the Mud March that followed, Lincoln appointed Hooker to replace him as commander of the Army of the Potomac in January 1863. Hooker had opposed all 14 of the failed frontal assaults that Burnside ordered against Marye’s Heights. As commander of the Army of the Potomac, Hooker had now reached the highest rank in the Union armies, a height which, based on his performance in battle, his administrative skills, and his popularity with the men under his command, was fully deserved by him and a height from which he was soon to fall for reasons not clearly identified then nor at any time since.
Along the way, and perhaps inevitably, he got on the wrong side of people who could hurt him, and did, such as Winfield Scott, general-in-chief of the Army, Henry Halleck, his successor, and Generals Ambrose Burnside and George McClellan, commanders of the Army of the Potomac. Here, too, we should not make too much of internecine conflict. It plagued both sides in our war and doubtless every war ever fought. Conflict and polarization are, after all, what we humans do. Asked by a frog, who was carrying a scorpion across a river to safety, why the scorpion had stung him, thus causing the drowning of both, the scorpion answered “I couldn’t help it; it’s my nature.”
In addition to his reputation as a spirited and dogged combatant, Hooker acquired a reputation as a commander who cared as much or more about the welfare and morale of his men as he cared about his own. His men loved him for it. He took command of the Army of the Potomac when its morale was at its lowest, following Burnside’s debacles. By the time he was done reforming it, he could say, and did say, that, “I have the finest army on the planet. I have the finest army the sun ever shone on…If the enemy does not run, God help them. May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.”
At Chancellorsville (April 30-May 6, 1863), Hooker’s plan made eminently good sense. If properly executed and barring intervention of a freakish happening or happenings, for which no one could be held responsible, it would almost certainly have resulted in a Union victory. Indeed, if it had then been followed by a successful attack on Richmond, which seems likely, it would have ended the war. The operative word in all this is, of course, “if,” because, as most of us know, the plan wasn’t properly executed and there was a freakish happening, both of which made defeat a near certainty.
The plan called for Brigadier General George Stoneman’s cavalry corps to raid the Confederate rear, behind Lee’s lines, for the purpose of disrupting supply lines and keeping the enemy off balance. The raid was ineffective. The cautious Stoneman was no JEB Stuart, Nathan Bedford Forrest, or Phil Sheridan. None of its objectives was achieved, and Lee was therefore free to formulate his main attack, being more interested in how to deal with Hooker than in his supply lines.
The plan also called for Hooker to pin down Lee’s army before Fredericksburg, using John Sedgewick’s VI Corps for the purpose, and then take the greater part of the Army of the Potomac westward to flank Lee from that direction. He posted General Dan Sickles’ III Corps to command the Union center and General Oliver Otis Howard’s XI Corps to anchor the extreme right of his line with orders to hold the line against any Confederate move to flank it. The XI Corps was made up of many German regiments, called “Dutchmen” and not highly regarded by the rest of the army. Not surprisingly, their commander, the pious Howard, was not highly regarded by them. It was an unhealthy mix and boded ill for the outcome of the battle.
Sickles attacked those elements of Jackson’s force that were in front of him, accomplishing nothing more than creating a big gap in the Union line and isolating the Union right and thereby putting it “in the air,” a fact quickly noted by JEB Stuart, who chose not to follow Stoneman’s cavalry on their pointless raid, but to stay close to Lee at all times, to give him the eyes and ears he needed. Sickles’ call for reinforcements was met by a brigade sent to him by Howard, which further weakened the XI Corps. Howard, the so-called Christian Warrior because of his high moral standards, utterly failed Hooker. When Jackson threw his 26,000-man force against Howard, at about 5:00 p.m. on May 2, he was not only totally isolated because of Sickles’ move, but also totally unprepared for such a hammer-blow, with his men at ease and preparing supper, many with their arms stacked. Indeed, they were all facing south when Jackson struck from the west and northwest, Jackson’s men roaring and crashing out of the woods. Not surprisingly, the XI Corps collapsed utterly, taking the Union center with it. So now we have three subordinates–Stoneman, Sickles and Howard–who failed Fighting Joe. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Recall that Hooker posted Sedgwick before Fredericksburg to keep Lee in place. Sedgwick had 47,000 men under his command. When Lee realized that Sedgwick wasn’t going to attack him, he left 10,000 men under Jubal Early to deal with Sedgwick and then took the main part of his force westward to deal with the main part of Hooker’s force. Sedgwick thus had Early outnumbered by almost 5 to 1 and could, therefore, make minced meat of him and come to the rescue of his commander, but he did not. When ordered to move, Sedgwick did push Early aside (finally carrying Marye’s Heights with the order: “You will start at double-quick, you will not fire a gun, and you will not stop until you get the order to halt. You will never get that order”), but then got bogged down at Salem Church, six miles from Hooker and the rest of the Army of the Potomac, losing an encounter there with elements of Lee’s army and being forced, therefore, to retreat across the Rappahannock rather than saving his commander’s fortunes. The failure of Hooker’s subordinate officers was now complete.
And now the freakish happening. While leaning against a porch pillar of the Chancellor House, which was his headquarters, a cannonball struck the pillar, split it lengthwise, and hurled half of it against Hooker, striking him in an erect position from his head to his feet. He lay unconscious for about 30 or 40 minutes and was assumed to be dead. When it was discovered that he still lived, Dr. Jonathan Letterman, his medical director, expressed doubt that he would survive. When he had regained consciousness, he tried to mount his horse, to reassure his troops, but collapsed and vomited.
Clearly, he was very seriously injured, and it was not the kind of injury that incapacitates a man physically, which would not have impeded Hooker that day in a way that mattered much, but an injury, rather, that incapacitates a man in the worst possible way under the circumstances, namely mentally. In a word, he was knocked senseless, spending the rest of the day in a comatose condition most of the time, having to be woken to communicate, or wandering, without a clear head, according to the records of those who were around him. He was, from the moment the cannonball struck, hardly a man in a position to command an army of 133,000 men.
What else could have gone wrong for Hooker that day? Not much. Four ineffective subordinate officers and a blow from a missile that almost killed him were quite enough to sink him, as they would sink any commander, regardless of the number of opposing forces. Yet he still wears the jacket of blame for the defeat. Why? Believe it or not, because of nothing worse than a footnote. It appeared in a book titled The Campaign of Chancellorsville by John Bigelow, Jr., a highly regarded author and a highly regarded work, which proves, if proof were needed, that even the masters go astray sometimes. The footnote recounts an alleged conversation between Hooker and I Corps division commander Abner Doubleday on the march to Gettysburg a couple of months after Chancellorsville. In response to Doubleday’s asking what was wrong with him at Chancellorsville, Hooker allegedly said, “Doubleday, I was not hurt by a shell, and I was not drunk. For once, I lost confidence in Hooker, and that is all there is to it.”
Because of Bigelow’s reputation, this quote, or some variation or derivative thereof, has found its way into the works of almost every historian of Chancellorsville, of Hooker, or of the change of command before Gettysburg. That the exchange never occurred, and is not even a flagrant corruption of one that did occur, is immediately manifest from the fact that we know with certainty that Hooker was seriously injured by the shell, from his own statements as well as those made by men who were with him at the time, a fact wildly inconsistent with the alleged confession that he was not so injured. Further, in the weeks following the battle, Hooker had said often that he attributed the defeat not only to the injury caused by the shell, but also to the failures of his lieutenants. Still further, a tracking of the movements of Hooker’s headquarters and of the I Corps headquarters during this period shows that they were dozens of miles apart and that Hooker and Doubleday could therefore not have met at any time between the march north from the Rappahannock and the date of Hooker’s resignation. The source of the footnote was one Major E. P. Halstead, one of Doubleday’s wartime staff, who included it in a letter written 40 years after the event, a letter which was unfortunately acquired by Bigelow as part of his research and which is replete with inaccuracies pertaining to the I Corps actions at Chancellorsville.
So Lee scored a major victory, said to be his greatest in the war. Or was it? Here is Lee’s summary of it:
“At Chancellorsville we gained another victory; our people were wild with delight—I, on the contrary, was more depressed than after Fredericksburg; our loss was severe, and again we gained not an inch of ground and the enemy could not be pursued.”
And here is Hooker’s:
“You would like to know my opinion of the battle of Chancellorsville. I won greater success on many fields in the war, but nowhere did I deserve it half so much.”
The rest is almost anti-climactic. Hooker remained in command of the Army of the Potomac for almost two months. Lincoln, apparently, had a clearer view of what had happened at Chancellorsville than many of his contemporaries did, and certainly a clearer one than future historians would have, owing to the fabricated meeting between Hooker and Doubleday in a letter written 40 years after the battle and its inclusion in a major work on the battle by a highly regarded author. Hooker and Henry Halleck, however, were like oil and water, and this led, inevitably, to Hooker’s resignation, prompted by Halleck’s refusal to give Hooker the garrison at Harpers Ferry. It needs to be said, however, that the army that Hooker handed over to General George Gordon Meade, and that triumphed at Gettysburg three days later, was not the demoralized and disorganized one that had been handed over to him by Burnside, but “…the finest army on the planet…the finest army the sun ever shone on.” Hooker therefore deserves much of the credit for what happened at Gettysburg.
Though he accepted Hooker’s resignation, Lincoln considered him too valuable a commodity to retire him or to give him a desk job. He said “I have not thrown General Hooker away.” To placate those who opposed a fighting role for Hooker in the East, and still put his skills and talents to the service and benefit of the country, Lincoln, in October 1863, sent Hooker west, as commander of the XI and XII Corps of the Army of the Potomac, to reinforce General William Rosecrans, then in command of the Army of the Cumberland, which was heavily engaged in and near Chattanooga. Hooker’s spirited taking of Lookout Mountain (the Battle Above the Clouds) contributed greatly to General Ulysses S. Grant’s victory at the battle of Chattanooga. But here, too, he was short-changed, because Grant, in his official report, gave greater credit to Sherman for the victory than he gave to Hooker. Nevertheless, for his success, Hooker was brevetted to the rank of major general in the regular army.
Hooker’s two corps, now consolidated as the XX Corps, fought well under Sherman in the advance upon Atlanta from Chattanooga, and this despite the fact that Hooker was displeased with Grant and Sherman, justifiably, because that dynamic duo had treated the easterner as a foreigner. Indeed, Hooker’s corps did most of the fighting and took most of the casualties. When Oliver Otis Howard was named by Sherman, doubtless with Grant’s blessing, to replace General James B. McPherson, commander of the Army of the Tennessee, who was killed before Atlanta on July 22, 1864, Hooker resigned. He had the most seniority and the most experience and therefore deserved the appointment. Giving it to Howard was therefore a double insult: appointing a man who had less seniority and experience than he and appointing a man whom Hooker blamed more than any other for the defeat at Chancellorsville. There are unverified stories to the effect that Lincoln attempted to persuade Sherman to appoint Hooker to replace McPherson, but that Sherman refused.
After his resignation, Hooker was appointed commander of the Northern Department, which consisted of the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and which was headquartered in Cincinnati. He held this position from October 1, 1864 through the end of the war. During this period, he married Olivia Groesbeck, who was the sister of Congressman William S. Groesbeck. Presumably, the drunken, high rolling whoremonger from Massachusetts, land of the Puritans, had had enough of the high life. Doubtless his brother-in-law, Congressman Groesbeck, had something to do with taming him.
After the war, Hooker led Lincoln’s funeral procession in Springfield, Illinois, on May 4, 1865. He served in command of the Department of the East and the Department of the Lakes. He retired from the U.S. Army on October 15, 1868 with the regular army rank of major general. He died on October 3, 1879 and is buried in Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery.
Here is an objective summary of the man and the soldier. Contrary to what the wags said–his enemies and rivals–he was not an excessive drinker or gambler, and he had no greater libido than the average man had then or has now. He was a great soldier, if being one is defined as always being brave, obedient, and respectful of his superiors. He was a great general, if being one is defined as providing for his men at all times as well or better than he provides for himself, as never losing his sangfroid or his bearing in battle, and as always making decisions based upon the facts and circumstances as he knew them to be at the time. His combat record is better than that of any other general in the Army of the Potomac.
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