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First Day at Chancellorsville
Pivot Point of a Campaign
"The battle of Chancellorsville was lost right there."
-- Union Staff Officer.
Here, in a few hours on the afternoon of May 1, 1863, the Chancellorsville Campaign took a dramatic turn. Just a day earlier, Union Gen. Joseph Hooker had congratulated his army on a successful campaign. As Hooker's army stood on Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's left flank, he boasted, "Our enemy must either ingloriously fly or ... give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him."
On May 1, the head of Hooker's column under Gen. George Sykes ran into Lee's Confederates on the ground just in front of you. The Union troops formed in line of battle, and for three hours the fighting raged here. More than 500 men fell.
The impact of the fighting far exceeded its scale - it convinced Hooker to abandon his advance and fall back to the Chancellorsville intersection. Lee took the high ground east of Chancellorsville and, in the three days that followed, inflicted a punishing defeat on the Union army. Having seized the initiative, Lee then embarked upon his second invasion of the North -- an invasion that would end at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. |