Controversies and Commanders by Stephen W. Sears

Author:Stephen W. Sears
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

[7]

In Defense of Fighting Joe

Major General Joseph Hooker

MAJOR GENERAL JOSEPH HOOKER has long received a uniformly bad press from Civil War historians. “Fighting Joe” invariably lags toward the bottom of any ranking of the commanders of the Army of the Potomac, clumped together with John Pope and Ambrose Burnside. The old whispers that he was drunk at Chancellorsville, his one battle as army commander, are whispered anew. Alternatively, if it is allowed that in fact he was sober at Chancellorsville, it is said his fault was going teetotal upon assuming his new responsibilities; better for the army had he downed a few whiskeys when the fighting began in the Virginia Wilderness. As T. Harry Williams put it, “The sudden shutting off of his familiar stimulant was bad for Hooker. He depended on whiskey to brace his courage.”1

But the historians’ primary charge against Joe Hooker is that, drunk or sober, when he was confronted by Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville he lost his nerve and thereby lost the battle. James McPherson describes the scene metaphorically: “Like a rabbit mesmerized by the gray fox, Hooker was frozen into immobility. . . .” These authorities point to firm documentation for their case: an admission of his loss of nerve by Hooker himself. In their acclaimed studies, Shelby Foote, Bruce Catton, and Kenneth P. Williams all quote the general’s confession. Hookers biographer Walter Hebert adopts the confession as a chapter title—“Hooker Loses Confidence in Hooker.” A profile of Hooker in American Heritage trumpets, “He was close to winning the Civil War when he suffered an almost incredible failure of nerve.” In a kind of final sanctification, Hookers words are given voice in Ken Burns’s 1990 television epic, “The Civil War.”2

Is it any wonder, then, that Fighting Joe Hookers military reputation has fallen into such low repute? What could be worse than an army commander losing his nerve in the midst of a battle? In fact, there is something worse—that general confessing his failing. For the historian seeking to document how the Union lost the Battle of Chancellorsville, here is the clear and simple answer, in the clear and simple words of the commanding general himself. And so in the books and the articles and the biographical studies—and on television—Joe Hooker has become fixed forever, as if in amber, as the general who lost his nerve.

It was not always thus. The revelation of Hookers confession came nearly half a century after the occasion for it, in May of 1863, and not all that many of his wartime comrades were still alive then to hear of it. Joe Hooker was always tremendously popular with his men—a popularity the equal of McClellan’s—and he was widely known and admired as the general who fed his troops as well as he led them. When he assumed command of the Army of the Potomac, in January 1863, Hooker was regarded, and deservedly, as the fightingest general in that army. On the Peninsula, in the Seven Days, at Second Bull Run

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