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Battle of Chancellorsville

Britannica

Originally aired on June 09, 1995 - In part 41 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes the horror on the battlefield during the 1863 Battle at

Chancellorsville. Here,  General Lee won his most spectacular victory but lost his most dependable lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson.

#41 – The Real Picture of War

Hollywood and the hot-blooded always think of battle as something all so neat and orderly, full of excitement and gallantry, enhanced as well with pinches of romanticism and nostalgia. If you wish to believe that, turn your dial now to something else.

Only soldiers know the hell of combat. Only participants of a battle can depict it exactly as it was. Any Civil War buff in Virginia is familiar with the basic facts of the 1863 battle of Chancellorsville. There Lee won his most spectacular victory; there he lost his most dependable lieutenant, “Stonewall” Jackson. Lost in the big picture are some eyewitness accounts of the genuine Chancellorsville: namely, the human debris of dead and wounded. Listen, if you will.

A New York soldier went down with gunshot wounds in the jaw and hip. Stretcher-bearers were able to take him about fifty yards to a small creek whose banks offered some protection. “When I reached the stream,” the soldier stated, “I found it already lined with many dead and wounded men. Some had been carried there, others had dragged themselves to the place; … some of the wounded were then slowly and needlessly bleeding to death.” Not a surgeon could be found.

Ted Barclay of Lexington served in the 4th Virginia Infantry Regiment. After the fighting moved away from his sector at Chancellorsville, he and several compatriots went out onto the battleground. Barclay noted: “Our own dead had been buried and wounded removed, but the Yankee dead and wounded lay thickly over the field. Many had not yet had their wounds dressed and lay groaning on the wet ground, praying every passerby to change their position or give them a drink of water….          

‘The dead lay thick over the ground. Some seemed as though they had died without a struggle. Others could hardly be recognized as human bodies…And the poor horses were not spared. Here laid some literally torn to pieces, others with feet shot off endeavoring in vain to get up. Our men humanely shot them…’”

In the midst of the fight, gunfire set the thick woods on fire. A Virginia soldier who went out in one of the details to bury the dead commented that the woods “burnt rapidly and roasted the wounded men alive. As we went to bury them we could see where they had tried to keep the fire from them by scratching the leaves away as far as they could reach. But it availed not; they were burnt to a crisp.” A Union officer who saw the charred corpses noted soberly: “Fortunate were those who had to die, that they did so before the holocaust began.”

Lost today amid the clutter of commercialism on Virginia Route 3 on the western outskirts of Fredericksburg is Salem Church. It was first a focal point in one stage of the Chancellorsville fight; it then became a field hospital. A Georgia colonel went there searching for his friends. “The spacious church yard,” he exclaimed, “was literally covered with wounded and dying”. Inside the church, “every available foot of space was crowded with wounded and bleeding soldiers. The floor, the benches, even the chancel and pulpit, were all packed almost to suffocation with them. The amputated limbs were piled up in every corner almost as high as a man could reach; blood flowed in streams along the aisles and out the doors; screams and groans were heard on all sides, while the surgeons, with their assistants, worked with knives, saws, sutures and bandages to save all they could from bleeding to death.”

These views were not microcosms. Conservative figures given for the casualties at Chancellorsville are 3,200 killed, 18,400 wounded and 5,900 missing.

Such details should be told, one survivor declared, in order that future Americans might “know something of the price that was paid to insure the peace we now enjoy”.

Dr. James I. "Bud" Robertson, Jr., is a noted scholar on the American Civil War and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech.