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No volume of this valuable series covers a period of more absorbing interest than
General Doubleday's account of
Chancellorsville and
Gettysburg.
These were two of the greatest battles of the war, and the last, though not the decisive struggle it is often represented, marked the supreme point of southern effort, and was followed by unmistakable and growing signs of exhaustion.
The book, as we might expect from the character and rank of its author, is a clear and painstaking narrative of events in which he bore a distinguished part.
It is valuable as the carefully prepared statement of a Federal
General officer who was a prominent participant, especially at
Gettysburg, in the great campaign of 1863.
It is well illustrated by fairly good maps, and in this respect contrasts very agreeably with most of the preceding numbers of the series.
General Doubleday's statement of the
Federal movements at
Chancellorsville is clear and good, and he apportions the blame for its disaster there much more justly between
Hooker,
Howard, and
Sedgwick than does
Colonel Dodge, in his more elaborate and most excellent work on this battle.
There can be no doubt that the overwhelming rout of the Eleventh corps by
Jackson was largely due to
Howard's taking none but the feeblest precautions against a flank attack, and that too in spite of the fact that he knew
Jackson to be moving all day across his front, and had been warned by
Hooker to be on his guard.
Again, though
Sedgwick showed tardiness and lack of enterprise in pushing up from
Fredericksburg,
General Doubleday sees so clearly the immensely greater blunder of
Hooker in lying idle at
Chancellorsville with (besides the troops that had been engaged) “37,000 fresh men” in front of “17,000 worn out men,” while
Sedgwick was being beaten, that he thinks
Hooker must have been incapacitated for command by his wounds of the day before.
He says: “The concussion must have effected his brain.”
General Doubleday is more of annalist than historian, and is of course mainly occupied with the blunders of his own superiors.
He could hardly be expected to describe in fitting terms the splendid strategy of
Lee, the no less magnificent audacity and skill of
Jackson, and the courage and determination of those 60,000 Confederates who throttled “the finest army on the planet,” (as
Hooker with pardonable pride termed it) on the south bank of the
Rappahannock and hurled it, though doubly as numerous, bleeding and powerless beyond that stream.
