CHAPTER XIV.

FROM CHANCELLORSVILLE TO GETTYSBURG.

THE rank and file of the army did not suffer demoralization through the failure of Chancellorsville. They were indignant that the army, although it had not been fought, had been obliged to bear the stigma of having been disgracefully defeated. Naturally, the relation of the higher officers to the affair was different. They too felt indignation at what had occurred, but additionally, their superior position brought greater responsibility and greater power to control events. It would be to expect more than human beings are capable of, more than in high-spirited and capable officers would be duty, to imagine that they should not wish and endeavor to make it impossible for the future that the army should be helplessly offered to the blows of the enemy. The losses that the enemy had sustained might, it is true, equal their own, but losses in killed and wounded do not alone settle the question of victory, for the victors sometimes sustain the greater losses in these. Lee had not only caused the army, half-fought, to retreat, but while the two forces had remained arrayed against each other, had dictated the whole course of events as though toying with his opponent. Hooker, in relative repose, actually let his adversary play his own game. Two whole corps, and parts still intact of a third, had been either idle spectators or auditors of battle. The sting of this disgrace naturally made officers of high rank freely communicate to each other their fears for a future under Hooker's command. Hooker, on his side, must have known of the general sentiment

against him, for he took the honorable course of paving the way for free expression of opinion to the President as to the conduct of affairs.

It could not have escaped the attentive reader, in connection with the episode of recrossing the Rappahannock, narrated in the last chaper, that General Meade was highly regarded by other corps-commanders besides Reynolds, between whom and himself there was the warmest friendship. That the inference is correct is clearly shown by an occurrence that took place soon after the battle of Chancellorsville. Reynolds and Couch were successively sounded by the authorities in Washington as to whether or not they would be willing to accept the command of the army, and we know now more than General Meade himself for a long time did, that they both declined it, and recommended him as the fittest man for the place. In addition to the feeling which any officer would have under the circumstances, that his succession would be to a command in which there had been three conspicuous failures, there was the much-to-bedreaded military administration of affairs at Washington, represented chiefly by the position of Halleck as generalin-chief of all the armies of the United States. It is no wonder that, under these circumstances, even such men as Reynolds and Couch should have shrunk from accepting the command of the army, even if they both had not had the conviction that Meade was the man for the place. If Couch, moreover, was not willing, even although senior corps-commander of the army, to accept the command of it, he was not even able to bear the anticipation of being again found amidst active operations under the command of Hooker, and therefore, alarmed at a demonstration across the Rappahannock which Hooker was making with the Sixth Corps, he requested to be relieved from the command of the Second Corps, and on the 10th of June bade it fare

well, and proceeded to take charge of the newly created Department of the Susquehanna, succeeded in command of the Corps by General Hancock.

Lee's forces had been largely increased by the return of the two divisions of Longstreet which had been south of Richmond, and by the addition of troops levied by conscription, while at the same time Hooker's had been diminished by the expiration of the short terms of service of certain levies. There was no longer between the two armies the disparity in numbers which had existed at Chancellorsville. Hooker's army was reduced to about eighty-five thousand men, including cavalry, and that of Lee increased to an amount very slightly over that number. Under these circumstances, to which must be added the low condition of Lee's commissariat, the need of an effective invasion to replenish it, and the prevalent desire of the South to make an invasion as a political stroke which might have the effect of causing the recognition of the independence of the Confederacy by foreign powers, involving the breaking of the blockade and the triumph of the Southern cause, the authorities at Richmond resolved upon an irruption into the North under what they deemed more favorable conditions than those under which it had been previously attempted.

Hooker, through floating reports in Southern newspapers, had suspected this design, and was on the alert to discover the beginning of any movement. On the 3d of June, 1863, Hood's and McLaws's divisions, of Longstreet's corps, marched from different positions to concentrate at Culpeper, off to Hooker's right, about midway between the Rapidan and Rappahannock, while the corps of A. P. Hill continued to occupy the lines south of the Rappahannock. The movement could not, however, be so completely disguised that Hooker should remain in entire ignorance that something