Review - "The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford in Spring 1863" by Erik Nelson

[The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford in Spring 1863 by Erik F. Nelson (Kent State University Press, 2024). Softcover, 21 maps, appendix section, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxiii,280/407. ISBN:978-1-60635-480-3. $39.95]

Of the single-volume Chancellorsville histories produced over the more than eleven decades that have passed since the 1910 publication of John Bigelow's groundbreaking study, those from Edward Stackpole, Ernest Furgurson, and Stephen Sears have contributed most to the popular understanding of the campaign and battle, the last being the most detailed in addition to being the most recent. Generally speaking, the fighting between the main bodies of each army, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Joseph Hooker's far more numerous Army of the Potomac, within the tangled forests and clearings surrounding Chancellorsville has garnered the lion's share of popular and scholarly attention. Presenting the battle primarily through that lens is not unexpected given that the intense combat in that sector produced the great bulk of the campaign's very heavy casualties and witnessed Stonewall Jackson's famous flanking attack and subsequent mortal wounding.

Even so, just over a quarter of the total losses to both armies during the campaign were suffered on the eastern half of the battlefield, an area that comprised an expansive military chessboard in its own right. Within that sector—bounded on its northern side by the Rappahannock River, its southern edge the unfinished railroad running roughly parallel to the Orange Plank Road, and, from west to east, the ridge atop which sat Salem Church all the way to the city of Fredericksburg itself—the possibility to alter the entire character and result of the battle loomed large. In 2013, Savas Beatie published a book-length study of the fighting that occurred at Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and during the Union Sixth's Corps's fighting withdrawal toward its pontoon bridge communications near Banks's Ford. That excellent study, Chris Mackowski and Kristopher White's Chancellorsville's Forgotten Front: The Battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church, May 3, 1863, provided readers with the first comprehensive narrative history of those events. Now, more than a decade later, Erik Nelson's The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford in Spring 1863 revisits the same ground with noteworthy coverage of a complementary nature as well as new interpretation¹.

Nelson's book possesses all the highlights and components that the most demanding readers of modern Civil War battle studies expect to find. Nelson's research, heavily weighted toward primary source materials of all kinds, feeds a sequence of battle narratives that are noteworthy for their small-unit detail and seamless incorporation of first-hand accounts left behind by the officers and men of both armies. Terrain analysis is exceptionally fine. The author's intimate knowledge of the sector's urban and rural fighting landscapes, from the streets of Fredericksburg to the surrounding hills, ridges, ravines, canals, river crossings, fields, forests, and streams, is used to convey a highly nuanced understanding of the ways in which the environment shaped how each of the engagements examined in the text was fought. The volume's twenty-one maps, all produced by noted cartographer Steven Stanley, thoroughly enhance reader comprehension of events through their tracing of troop movements described in the text atop a finely detailed rendering of underlying elevation contours and terrain features.

The better books of this type never fail to express proper regard for the artillery support arm, but Nelson's narrative is exceptional in the amount and depth of attention directed toward the batteries employed by both sides. Few battle studies, even the very good ones, offer the amount of information that Nelson provides when it comes to denoting the composition of individual batteries and describing their tactical deployment, the type and weight of the gun tubes being critical factors in determining where they were deployed and what effect they had on enemy units at various ranges². While much of the tale of the use of the long arm during the Chancellorsville Campaign is focused on the opposing concentrations of firepower at Fairview and Hazel Grove, it could be argued that artillery produced its most outsized contributions to the campaign on the eastern half of the battlefield. There, the artillery of both sides materially impacted events through effective firing at ranges both close and extreme, the Confederates frequently employing ad-hoc concentrations of rifled sections (though their efforts were often hindered by faulty shell fuzes). Additionally, for front coverage Confederate artillery batteries often had to substitute for infantry, which was stretched thin on the eastern sector before reinforcements from the main body arrived at Salem Church following the Union breakthrough at Fredericksburg.

Specialist troops were another support arm whose efforts came to the fore on the eastern half of the Chancellorsville battleground. Nelson's study offers fresh details about the challenges and struggles involved in getting the Army of the Potomac's pontoon trains to the river and getting set up once they arrived. While inevitable friction spawned by the need to strike a balance between secrecy and speed put the bridging operations hours behind schedule, they were successful. Engineer officer Henry Benham, a Civil War figure often ridiculed for his heavy drinking as well as the disastrous offensive action he directed outside Charleston in 1862, is credited by Nelson for creating well-trained engineer troops for the Army of the Potomac and praised for his efforts in coordinating their use on the Rappahannock in May 1863. US Signal Corps and Military Telegraph Corps specialists also went to work to establish communications between the Union army's widely separated wings. As Nelson explains, ill-timed interruptions caused by certain orders to the Signal Corps detachments and problems with deteriorated wire contributed mightily to the creation of lengthy lapses in communication between Hooker and Sixth Corps commander John Sedgwick at critical moments.

Nelson also highlights how staff work problems affected each side. Lee staff officer Robert Chilton nearly caused disaster by prematurely ordering Jubal Early to withdraw his division from Fredericksburg, that potential catastrophe only narrowly averted by a timely reversal that put Early's command back in the trenches before Sedgwick's main attacks. Though Hooker's own muddled orders to Sedgwick and indecisive leadership at the top led to cascading problems, Nelson is unrelentingly critical of the manner in which Hooker's chief of staff, Daniel Butterfield, handled communications between army headquarters and Sixth Corps headquarters.

After the campaign ended, Hooker attempted to attach blame for the disaster to three high-ranking subordinates: Thirteenth Corps commander O.O. Howard, Cavalry Corps commander George Stoneman, and the man he assigned to lead the eastern sector of the battlefield, John Sedgwick. That self-serving assessment of what went wrong at Chancellorsville is largely dismissed in the text for what it was, a disgraced commander seeking to scapegoat others for his own profound leadership failures. Though the overall result of the Chancellorsville Campaign, which got off to a tremendous start, was a fiasco for Union forces, Nelson sees the performance of Sedgwick's Sixth Corps as the one shining light. "Success" at Fredericksburg was arguably not terribly impressive given how thinly the defenders were distributed in comparison to the previous December, but the breakthrough forced Lee to detach a total of seven brigades (in two stages) to contain Sedgwick's advance and keep it away from the rear of Lee's main forces facing Hooker. In Nelson's view, this was the moment for Hooker's forces to resume the offensive against an even more diminished foe, but instead Hooker refused to risk leaving his fortified bridgehead north of Chancellorsville. Curiously, Nelson is not critical of Sedgwick's failure to adequately cover his southern flank and rear as Sixth Corps pressed westward toward Salem Church, an oversight that allowed Early's Division to return to the scene, reclaim the high ground above Fredericksburg, and threaten the Sixth Corps spearhead's sole remaining line of retreat and communications (the floating bridges below Banks' Ford). Also, to be more convincing, Nelson's claim that Sedgwick's attacking success at Fredericksburg created a larger sense of confidence that carried over to Gettysburg could have used more development.

In addition to providing arguably the literature's best tactical-level discussion of events east of Chancellorsville, Erik Nelson's study of Second Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks' Ford strongly argues for greater recognition and appreciation of a sector of the battlefield that produced a significant proportion of the combined casualties suffered during the first week of May 1863 and gifted the Union army commander with a golden opportunity to reclaim squandered initiative in a campaign he had no business losing after such a promising start. Highly recommended.

Additional Notes:
1 - The site review of that earlier title can be found here. Both books cover the same series of topics in very fine fashion overall and preferring one or the other might best be judged a matter of taste. If you have a deep interest in the topic there's no reason not to read both. Generally speaking, both works devote a great deal of space to the initial river crossings, both offer excellent tactical discussion of the various engagements, and both emphasize human and technological communication breakdowns and confusion as substantially hindering coordination between Hooker and Sedgwick. Mackowski and White focus more than Nelson does on praising Cadmus Wilcox's noteworthy efforts in organizing and situating a blocking force to stop Sedgwick's advance toward Salem Church, and they are much more critical of Sedgwick's post-breakthrough leadership (which they deemed overcautious in both allowing Early to escape relatively intact and employing an unnecessary delay in organizing the Sixth Corps order of march for its westward advance). Nelson's analysis of the former is not of a reproving nature, and the latter point does not enter into his own discussion as a matter of pointed criticism. Nelson's map coverage is the more thorough of the two.
2 - For future reference purposes, the artillery data presented throughout the main text is also compiled into a helpful appendix. The appendix section also contains orders of battle as well as analytical discussion of the Fredericksburg flag of truce controversy that dogged those involved with it and complicated future historical interpretation of the battle.