This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[246]
around by Wilderness Tavern, and General Lee directed Jackson to make his arrangements to move early next day around the Federal right flank, The sun rose on this eventful 2d of May unclouded and brilliant, gilding the hill tops and penetrating the vapors of the valley — as gorgeous as was the sun of Austerlitz, which produced such an impression upon the imagination of Napoleon.
Its rays fell upon the last meeting in this world of Lee and Jackson.
The Duke of Wellington is reported to have said: “A man of fine Christian sensibilities is totally unfit for the position of a soldier” ; but here were two great soldiers who faithfully performed all their duties as Christians.
Lee, erect and soldierly, emerged from the little pine thicket where he had bivouacked during the night, and stood on its edge at sunrise to see Jackson's troops file by. When Jackson came along he stopped and the two conversed for a few moments, after which Jackson speedily rejoined his troops, now making their famous flank march.
Bold, but dangerous, was Lee's strategy.
He had decided to keep some 14,000 men, under Anderson and McLaws, in front of Hooker's 73,000, while Jackson marched by a wide circuit with less than 30,000, to gain the Union right rear.
Reynolds's First Corps on that day was marching from Sedgwick to Hooker.
It numbered 19,595, and reached Hooker at daylight on the 3d. General Hooker then had around Chancellorsville 92,719 men.
At Austerlitz, when the Russians made the flank movement around the French right, Napoleon moved at once upon the weakened line of the allies in his front and burst through it. Leaving some battalions to h6ld the right wing, he wheeled the remainder upon the left and destroyed it, and then, turning toward the right wing, he directed upon it a terrible onset, and it too was no more.
In some places the men in Lee's thin gray line in front of Hooker were six feet apart.
Jackson marched rapidly diagonally across the front of Hooker's line of battle, screened from view by the forest and by three regiments of cavalry which had been ordered to mask the movement as well as to precede it.
As early as 8 A. M. Birney, of Sickles's corps, reported a
Scanned printed text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.