Chancellorsville Was Lee Right to Attack at Chancellorsville? Did He Fall For Hooker's Trap?

And going back to the OP, you cannot say well he lost Jackson as a result so he should not have attacked. That's over the top Monday morning qb work. Jackson or any other important commander could be lost at any moment in any battle. He wasn't the only one that was killed at that level of leadership.

Jackson yes your correct but heavy losses no. He could have easily also lost A.P. Hill and countless others. I think Lee knew the cost would be great attacking what seemed to be dig in positions. This may have been worth it however.

It seems to me that Hooker's Plan, was based upon on placing Lee in an impossible situation, him to Retreat, i.e., assuming the opponent will do what you plan(expects) he will do, rather than what he could do.

Hooker seems not have been prepared to fight. Perhaps, IMO, because he expected to maneuver Lee into retreating without serious fighting?

I think he would have preferred Lee retreated. He was certainly not ready to go on the attack and drive Lee off. Going in I think he was hoping Lee would run but if he didn't he would immediately switch over to the defense like he did when Jackson arrived. Stoneman's raid was supposed to be more effective and have Lee looking at his rear. This seems to have completely failed why I'm not sure. Kinda wish Hooker had Sheridan available.
 
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And going back to the OP, you cannot say well he lost Jackson as a result so he should not have attacked. That's over the top Monday morning qb work. Jackson or any other important commander could be lost at any moment in any battle. He wasn't the only one that was killed at that level of leadership.

That's a factor in realistic "hard" alternate history fiction. If we start to imagine a scenario in which history diverges from that with which we are familiar, we have to account for completely unexpected events.
 
Hooker made a brilliant move which by rights should have forced Lee off the river line.
That it didn't work was due to Lee not doing what he was supposed to do and Hooker not knowing what to do next.
I do feel that this was Lee in all his glory and his best move in the war.
I have wargamed this battle and there is simply no way to do what Lee did againist anyone sober or sane.
The original question of this thread is Did Lee fall for Hooker's brilliant plan and for me the answer seems to be no, he stymied Hookers brilliant plan.
 
Hooker made a brilliant move which by rights should have forced Lee off the river line.
That it didn't work was due to Lee not doing what he was supposed to do and Hooker not knowing what to do next.
I do feel that this was Lee in all his glory and his best move in the war.
I have wargamed this battle and there is simply no way to do what Lee did againist anyone sober or sane.
The original question of this thread is Did Lee fall for Hooker's brilliant plan and for me the answer seems to be no, he stymied Hookers brilliant plan.


Hooker had him. he totally had him. he just had to keep going.
 
I don't believe that Hooker when conceiving his plan, brilliant as it was in strategy, figured on Lee attacking him. Had its execution been more skillful, the AOTP should have completely flanked the ANV after crossing the Rappahanock and Rapidan Rivers. Of course, before this happened Lee took the initiative away from Hooker by dividing his forces and advancing on the AOTP. Once that happened, Hooker abandoned his plan and assumed a defensive position.
 
Here's Stephen Sears take on it, tell me what you all think.

'Fought in early May 1863, Chancellorsville has been called Lee's greatest victory. More than that, the triumph convinced Lee that his Army of Northern Virginia was invincible, a notion that emboldened him to start his ill-fated Gettysburg campaign a month later. The traditional story says that Lee, outnumbered 2 to 1 and taken by surprise, quickly seized the offensive and, through a series of outstanding tactical maneuvers, dodged, weaved and finessed his way to victory. The audacious Virginian simply outwitted the inept, timid (and, some said, drunken) Hooker, in all previous accounts the dupe of Lee's wizardry.

Mr. Sears sees it differently. He patiently explains the circumstances surrounding the campaign and provides very nearly an hour-by-hour account of the battle. He dismantles the old assumption that once Hooker's army made contact with Lee, the Union general suddenly lost his nerve, retreated and allowed Lee to dictate events. Hooker had always intended to fight a defensive battle, Mr. Sears insists, a battle in which Lee, known for his aggressiveness, would bleed his army to death in senseless frontal assaults.

Hooker made mistakes, Mr. Sears admits, but not the sort that should have lost the battle. He misused his cavalry and artillery, needlessly surrendered one strategically vital area and missed at least one golden opportunity to counterattack the Rebels. Yet ultimately, Mr. Sears says, Hooker was done in by incompetent subordinates and, equally important, by ''chance and mischance.''

The interpretation of Lee is just as provocative. Lee was a great general, and Chancellorsville remains his masterpiece, Mr. Sears acknowledges, but he preserved his reputation by the narrowest of margins in the spring of 1863. He badly underestimated Hooker's generalship and had ill prepared his army for battle. His bold tactical moves were desperate acts of improvisation. Lee won the contest because he ''was repeatedly blessed with astonishingly good fortune.''

Stephen Sears knows the Army of the Potomac, as he has proved with an earlier insightful biography of George B. McClellan, who commanded the army before Hooker, and two other excellent campaign studies. ''Chancellorsville,'' likewise, is a solid, readable work. It provides a needed corrective to many of the myths and misconceptions that have shrouded the battle and the Union commander. For scope, analysis, drama and richness of detail, there is no better book on the subject. And yet, in seeking to give Hooker his due and persuade us of Lee's mortality, Mr. Sears may have tipped the balance too far in the other direction. He lets Hooker off too easily on several scores, and he seems to have missed something important about both Lee and Hooker.

The insightful 19th-century soldier-scholar Karl von Clausewitz insisted that the object of defensive war is preservation, an essentially passive purpose in contrast to the positive goal of conquest that we associate with the offensive. As well executed as Hooker's Chancellorsville campaign may have been, he had chosen a defensive strategy. Hooker enjoyed an enormous advantage in manpower, benefited from a superior intelligence system and could rely on limitless resources. He could have destroyed Lee's army; yet by deciding that his best chance for doing so was to hope that Lee would assault him, Hooker relinquished the initiative. Lee did attack, but not at the places or the times that Hooker had anticipated. The lesson of Chancellorsville is this: It is one thing to formulate a grand, even brilliant battlefield plan. But victory belongs to those who seize it."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/nnp/sears-charlottsville.html
 
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I think he would have preferred Lee retreated. He was certainly not ready to go on the attack and drive Lee off. Going in I think he was hoping Lee would run but if he didn't he would immediately switch over to the defense like he did when Jackson arrived. Stoneman's raid was supposed to be more effective and have Lee looking at his rear. This seems to have completely failed why I'm not sure. Kinda wish Hooker had Sheridan available.




Hooker's Plan was very good. For the first time a Union General(in the AoP) planned a campaigned based upon the fact, that the Union Army was considerably larger than the ANV.

The plan was working, right up until Hooker decided to stop and consider options, rather than Act boldly(with the larger army) and force Lee to consider his options..
 
Was Lee Right to Attack at Chancellorsville? Did He Fall For Hooker's Trap?
...

Here's my opinions on the questions:

1) Was Lee right to attack at Chancellorsville? With hindsight I would say maybe the immediate results were good but long terms effects were bad. I would be curious as to what other options were available.
  • Yes, I think Lee was right to attack at Chancellorsville (although I doubt I would have the character to do so).
  • The only immediate alternative available was to abandon Fredericksburg and fall back towards Richmond, hoping to gain enough time for Longstreet to disengage from the Suffolk Campaign and return to join Lee's ANV, hoping to avoid a serious battle until that happened.

2) Did he fall for Hooker's trap? I would say yes Lee fell for Hooker's trap. Despite the errors the overall battle was going according to Hooker's plan. Had he not been injured and kept his nerve Lee would have been defeated.
Thoughts?

I doubt there was a trap. Hooker fell back because he was unsure, not because he had an involved plan to trap Lee. Meade and Reynolds had finally been won over to hooker's side that day, seeing his plan working, only hours from a major victory -- and then Hooker cancelled the advance and pulled back. That left a road out for Lee, letting him escape if he wanted to do so.
 
It was basically the same plan McDowell had at 1st Bull Run just with a bigger, more experienced army. Hold the left in place while swinging the hammer around the right. There wasn't anything brilliant about it and the results were the same.
 
Hooker's Plan was very good. For the first time a Union General(in the AoP) planned a campaigned based upon the fact, that the Union Army was considerably larger than the ANV.

The plan was working, right up until Hooker decided to stop and consider options, rather than Act boldly(with the larger army) and force Lee to consider his options..
Back at his HQ opposite Fredericksburg, Hooker probably had the best communications with his units any commander had ever had up to that point. He had direct observation of the Confederates from his position on the heights and the balloon. He was connected by telegraph, so he got those reports almost in real-time. Even the reports from his outflanking columns were being relayed by messenger and telegraph, so Hooker and his staff were as up-to-date as it was possible to be. In command-and-control terms, this was amazingly good information.

When Hooker rode forward to Chancellorsville, this was all supposed to continue. Telegraph lines were rushed forward to connect to the north side of the ford, where messengers would bring them forward to Hooker at Chancellorsville.

Instead, disaster struck. The telegraph decoding machines broke down at the receiving end above the ford. The civilian operators reported to Stanton in Washington, not Hooker's military command, and were not well-trained in receiving messages without the machines. The volume of traffic could not be handled. It was taking up to 12 hours to get a message decoded, they had to decode them to figure out which was important, and they weren't being decoded in order of receipt. Worse, many of the incoming messages were not time-stamped, so it was impossible to tell how messages fit together when reporting enemy movements, for example.

Then, when a message was finally decoded and sent forward, it took ungodly amounts of time to get to Hooker: up to 3 hours, for a ride a staff officer on a good horse could have made in less than 30 minutes. This introduced further confusion and delay, because some couriers did the trip quickly and some took a long time, meaning that later messages might arrive earlier and earlier messages later, further confusing the timeline.

So when Hooker took that short ride to Chancellorsville, it was like he had fallen into a deep pit after being in bright sunshine. Where everything had been clear in the morning, by afternoon it was chaos and darkness.

This is where it all falls apart. Early in the day, even Meade (not a Joe Hooker fan) had been starting to get enthusiastic. Everything was going great, Meade was pushing down the river road, outflanking the Confederates, and the columns were about to break out of the Wilderness on the rear of the Maryes Heights position at Fredericksburg. It looked like a great triumph, with Lee forced to run -- and then Meade gets the order from just-arrived Hooker to pull back to Chancellorsville, and blows up.

Later, Hooker supposedly would say "I just lost faith in Joe Hooker" (although Stephen W. Sears is regarded as debunking that myth in his 1996 Chancellorsville). Another good recent book to look at is Ernst B. Ferguson's Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave, about 1993.

I think that Hooker came across the river, rode to Chancellorsville, and felt like a man who'd fallen into a coal chute. Everything that was certain at Noon was unsure at 3 PM. For a while there was a complete information blackout -- no messages at all -- from his HQ. Then messages began to arrive in fits and starts, out of order. Union communication discipline is horrendous. Messages do not contain references to identify what they are referring to (Like "received your message of 1 PM" or "the rebel column in my 1:30 PM message is now ..." or they contain no time notation at all.) Even when messages do arrive, without a matrix to put them in they are often more confusing then helpful.

Now the "best" way to resolve all this was for Hooker to continue the drive, get out of The Wilderness, and see for himself what was what. That would also re-establish more direct communications with his HQ and open up US Ford. But this is also perhaps the most dangerous thing Hooker could do if the situation is not what he thinks it is.

Although there aren't many messages getting through from HQ, some of them (particularly the balloon reports) speak of Confederate troops moving west (i.e., towards Hooker) Some seem to imply reinforcements for the rebels are arriving. Some make little or no sense at all.

So there's Hooker, sitting in the woods at Chancellorsville, suddenly blinded. What does all this mean? What should he do?

If Lee is retreating west (why the heck west instead of south?) towards Hooker, then Hooker might stay where he is until Sedgwick crosses the river, then hit Lee in the flank while Sedgwick hits his rear. Sounds good, huh?

If Lee is coming to attack Hooker, then Hooker can defend and hold him off until Sedgwick crosses and hits him in the rear. Then they can try to crush lee between them. Sounds good as well.

If Lee is actually moving south, he might get off unscathed, but the AoP will be across the river in impressive and nearly bloodless fashion. Hooker can quickly pursue, on short supply lines. Good for morale, at least, and not to be despised after the bloodbath at Fredericksburg in December and the fiasco of the "Mud March".

But if Lee has been reinforced (maybe one of Longstreet's divisions is suddenly arriving from Suffolk, or unknown reinforcements by RR through Richmond), then maybe Lee is about to launch one of those sledgehammer blows at the head of Hooker's columns as they emerge from The Wilderness. In that case, plunging ahead through this stuff might be exactly the wrong thing to do. Meade, over on the river road, might be particularly vulnerable, or the Corps on the right if the Confederates got around their flank. The stiffening Confederate resistance to the front might be the first sign of that.

Hooker has to guess, and he has to guess right then and there, in this sudden isolation. He decides to play it a little safe. He stops the forward movement. He calls the leading elements back, and he orders them to entrench around Chancellorsville. If Lee wants to attack him there, dug in, with some of the little clear ground in The Wilderness, Hooker will bleed him all he can before coming out after him. If Lee doesn't, he can advance tomorrow when everything is in better order.

This is when men like Couch and Meade blow up. They're further forward. They've been marching through this tunnel-like growth for a couple of days, anxious as soldiers are when they can't see around them well. They aren't out of this dank woods yet, but they can see the way out in another couple of hours advance. They're eager and psyched up one moment; angry and sullen the next. They pull back as ordered.

This is the mistake everything else pivots on. There were no reinforcements, but Lee was coming to attack anyway. He and Jackson work their magic, XI Corps gets flanked, events start rolling downhill for Hooker, and then maybe he gets stunned into near insensibility by that cannonball.

From here we see the inactivity while Lee turns on Sedgwick, and the decision to retreat when Lee is coming back. Hooker, once he started moving backwards, hit by many sudden blows, again stepped back. Facing Lee, facing Jackson, facing Stuart, facing the ANV, that was exactly the wrong thing to do.

That, really, is what all the criticism of Hooker was about. Many commanders, thrust into the same situation, might have done something similar. It isn't about military technical knowledge or professionalism; it isn't about skill in execution. It isn't about courage -- certainly not the kind of courage it takes to go where the bullets are flying, because Hooker had that in abundance. Schofield doesn't look much different at Spring Hill and Franklin when Hood comes down on him, but Schofield had better luck when Hood smashed his own army in the assault at Franklin.

IMHO, in Hooker's position, a Lee, a Jackson, a Grant, a Sheridan, a Thomas might have continued the advance. It fits their style and personality. A Bragg might have continued the advance out of sheer determination: he rarely changed a plan once made. Meade and Sherman might have continued the advance a bit slower than the others, or pulled back; a Hood undoubtedly would have pushed the advance to the utmost (but I can also picture him falling into a trap the easiest). I can't say I feel strongly what any of the other high commanders of the war might have done, but I can see many of them thinking like Hooker did that fateful afternoon.

OTOH, Meade and Sherman were not retreaters. They were stubborn fighters. I can't picture them falling back across the river at the end, as Hooker did. I can see either being not-quite-aggressive-enough when Lee turns on Sedgwick.
 
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Everyone usually refers to Lee's mastery of achieving the initiative, when in fact it is the corollary of maintaining the initiative that was, to me, his real mastery. It of course, helped immensely, that most AoP commanders were afraid of Lee(hidden under the cover of professed respect)
 
I'm not an expert on Chancellorsville but didn't most of the casualties come from McLaw's and Anderson's brigades to the east around the same time as the famous flank attack?

You make a very good point. The attacks on the east side were high in casualties on both sides. Sears: Anderson lost 1,498, Mclaws 1,889, on the Union side Slocum's casualties were pretty high at 2,426 and Couch another 1,923. I don't think they were equal to the damage done to Hill/ Rodes and Howard/Sickles but they were still high.
 
Here's Stephen Sears take on it, tell me what you all think.

'Fought in early May 1863, Chancellorsville has been called Lee's greatest victory. More than that, the triumph convinced Lee that his Army of Northern Virginia was invincible, a notion that emboldened him to start his ill-fated Gettysburg campaign a month later. The traditional story says that Lee, outnumbered 2 to 1 and taken by surprise, quickly seized the offensive and, through a series of outstanding tactical maneuvers, dodged, weaved and finessed his way to victory. The audacious Virginian simply outwitted the inept, timid (and, some said, drunken) Hooker, in all previous accounts the dupe of Lee's wizardry.

Mr. Sears sees it differently. He patiently explains the circumstances surrounding the campaign and provides very nearly an hour-by-hour account of the battle. He dismantles the old assumption that once Hooker's army made contact with Lee, the Union general suddenly lost his nerve, retreated and allowed Lee to dictate events. Hooker had always intended to fight a defensive battle, Mr. Sears insists, a battle in which Lee, known for his aggressiveness, would bleed his army to death in senseless frontal assaults.

Hooker made mistakes, Mr. Sears admits, but not the sort that should have lost the battle. He misused his cavalry and artillery, needlessly surrendered one strategically vital area and missed at least one golden opportunity to counterattack the Rebels. Yet ultimately, Mr. Sears says, Hooker was done in by incompetent subordinates and, equally important, by ''chance and mischance.''

The interpretation of Lee is just as provocative. Lee was a great general, and Chancellorsville remains his masterpiece, Mr. Sears acknowledges, but he preserved his reputation by the narrowest of margins in the spring of 1863. He badly underestimated Hooker's generalship and had ill prepared his army for battle. His bold tactical moves were desperate acts of improvisation. Lee won the contest because he ''was repeatedly blessed with astonishingly good fortune.''

Stephen Sears knows the Army of the Potomac, as he has proved with an earlier insightful biography of George B. McClellan, who commanded the army before Hooker, and two other excellent campaign studies. ''Chancellorsville,'' likewise, is a solid, readable work. It provides a needed corrective to many of the myths and misconceptions that have shrouded the battle and the Union commander. For scope, analysis, drama and richness of detail, there is no better book on the subject. And yet, in seeking to give Hooker his due and persuade us of Lee's mortality, Mr. Sears may have tipped the balance too far in the other direction. He lets Hooker off too easily on several scores, and he seems to have missed something important about both Lee and Hooker.

The insightful 19th-century soldier-scholar Karl von Clausewitz insisted that the object of defensive war is preservation, an essentially passive purpose in contrast to the positive goal of conquest that we associate with the offensive. As well executed as Hooker's Chancellorsville campaign may have been, he had chosen a defensive strategy. Hooker enjoyed an enormous advantage in manpower, benefited from a superior intelligence system and could rely on limitless resources. He could have destroyed Lee's army; yet by deciding that his best chance for doing so was to hope that Lee would assault him, Hooker relinquished the initiative. Lee did attack, but not at the places or the times that Hooker had anticipated. The lesson of Chancellorsville is this: It is one thing to formulate a grand, even brilliant battlefield plan. But victory belongs to those who seize it."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/nnp/sears-charlottsville.html
Gen. Lee, like most folks, made his own luck. "Fortune favors the bold" isn't far off the mark.
 
Was Lee Right to Attack at Chancellorsville? Did He Fall For Hooker's Trap?

Been reading about Chancellorsville some more and have been reassessing my views on the battle a bit. Despite being considered by many to be Lee's greatest victory the battle doesn't seem as clear cut as many make it out to be. A number of threads on this site have explored the relatively even casualties and the irreparable damage the battle did to the AoNV including the loss of Jackson. Lee himself was depressed by the heavy losses and that the battle did not yield decisive results. This has me questioning the wisdom of Lee's attack at Chancellorsville and that other options might have been better.

From the Union perspective Lee seemed to have fallen right into the trap Hooker set for him. Hooker's entire plan rested on fighting a defensive battle that would see Lee destroy his army attacking prepared positions. This seems to have been what occurred to an extent. The only reason Jackson's attack wasn't more costly was due to Howard's open flank and Reynold's delayed arrival due to a mix up in orders. Had everything gone as Hooker planned Jackson would have smashed into a heavily defended line by both 11th and 1st Corps. Even with the disaster of May 2nd, Hooker was still in a very good position. He had a massive superiority in numbers, Reynold's had arrived and Meade's Corps had been brought up to support, together they had over 30,000 men that had yet to see any action.

According to Ethan Rafuse Lee's plan for the following days was to launch a new full scale attack against the Union positions. According to Rafuse " He (Hooker) makes a huge mistake withdrawing his forces across the Rappahannock Rver because Lee is planning an all out assault on his fortify positions which Hooker had 2-3 days to prepare. Had Lee launched that assault it would have been Pickett's Charge a couple months earlier."

View attachment 150876


Here's my opinions on the questions:

1) Was Lee right to attack at Chancellorsville? With hindsight I would say maybe the immediate results were good but long terms effects were bad. I would be curious as to what other options were available.

2) Did he fall for Hooker's trap? I would say yes Lee fell for Hooker's trap. Despite the errors the overall battle was going according to Hooker's plan. Had he not been injured and kept his nerve Lee would have been defeated.

Thoughts?

Hooker began to lose the battle on day one, May 1st when he pulled back both the 2nd and 5th Corps from the high ground east of Chancellorsville. May 2nd the AOP gets hit with the flank attack because Hooker believed the enemy was doing what he wanted them to do, retreat. May 3rd Hooker pulls back 3rd Corps and gives gives the Confederates Hazel Grove almost without a fight, allowing them to mass their cannons there and hammer his forces at Fairview. He also failed to reinforce his troops in the southern sectors during the morning attacks by Stuart. His subordinates failed to act when he was incapacitated. Any one of them could have at that point taken charge and still likely have turned the battle around. Sedgwick was pushing west from Fredericksburg. Instead the Union army pulled back and went into a defensive position leaving Sedgwick to his own devices with no support.

The Union army did not IMO lose the battle, the Generals did. Now Hindsight is 20/20, but he failed on so many levels.
 
Was Lee Right to Attack at Chancellorsville? Did He Fall For Hooker's Trap?

Been reading about Chancellorsville some more and have been reassessing my views on the battle a bit. Despite being considered by many to be Lee's greatest victory the battle doesn't seem as clear cut as many make it out to be. A number of threads on this site have explored the relatively even casualties and the irreparable damage the battle did to the AoNV including the loss of Jackson. Lee himself was depressed by the heavy losses and that the battle did not yield decisive results. This has me questioning the wisdom of Lee's attack at Chancellorsville and that other options might have been better.

From the Union perspective Lee seemed to have fallen right into the trap Hooker set for him. Hooker's entire plan rested on fighting a defensive battle that would see Lee destroy his army attacking prepared positions. This seems to have been what occurred to an extent. The only reason Jackson's attack wasn't more costly was due to Howard's open flank and Reynold's delayed arrival due to a mix up in orders. Had everything gone as Hooker planned Jackson would have smashed into a heavily defended line by both 11th and 1st Corps. Even with the disaster of May 2nd, Hooker was still in a very good position. He had a massive superiority in numbers, Reynold's had arrived and Meade's Corps had been brought up to support, together they had over 30,000 men that had yet to see any action.

According to Ethan Rafuse Lee's plan for the following days was to launch a new full scale attack against the Union positions. According to Rafuse " He (Hooker) makes a huge mistake withdrawing his forces across the Rappahannock Rver because Lee is planning an all out assault on his fortify positions which Hooker had 2-3 days to prepare. Had Lee launched that assault it would have been Pickett's Charge a couple months earlier."

View attachment 150876


Here's my opinions on the questions:

1) Was Lee right to attack at Chancellorsville? With hindsight I would say maybe the immediate results were good but long terms effects were bad. I would be curious as to what other options were available.

2) Did he fall for Hooker's trap? I would say yes Lee fell for Hooker's trap. Despite the errors the overall battle was going according to Hooker's plan. Had he not been injured and kept his nerve Lee would have been defeated.

Thoughts?
Hooker subsequently said that the problem was that he lost confidence in Joe Hooker. His initial plan, minus the gloriously pointless Stoneman raid, was brilliantly conceived & executed. He did steal a march on Lee & got on his flank & rear. By all the rules of war he should have destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia - with or without Longstreet.

I take the view that it is a mark of Lee & Jackson's combined genius that they went on the offensive a took the initiative off Hooker who never recovered. Hooker. Having obligingly got shot of his cavalry, was blind when he came out of the wilderness & got cold feet. Even then he had more men between Lee & Jackson then they had combined - & they still won.

Lee was not in any sense responsible for Jackson's death. Jackson was. He should not have gone out at night between the lines. I also think Stuart did a splendid job commanding the 2nd Corps & probably would have done better than Ewell (or himself as cavalry commander) at Gettysburg.

I don't see what else Lee could have done to keep his army intact. He was outmaneuvered to begin with, but it's one of the greatest recoveries in military history. He read Mr F J Hooker like book. He outgeneralled him.
 
Hooker began to lose the battle on day one, May 1st when he pulled back both the 2nd and 5th Corps from the high ground east of Chancellorsville. May 2nd the AOP gets hit with the flank attack because Hooker believed the enemy was doing what he wanted them to do, retreat. May 3rd Hooker pulls back 3rd Corps and gives gives the Confederates Hazel Grove almost without a fight, allowing them to mass their cannons there and hammer his forces at Fairview. He also failed to reinforce his troops in the southern sectors during the morning attacks by Stuart. His subordinates failed to act when he was incapacitated. Any one of them could have at that point taken charge and still likely have turned the battle around. Sedgwick was pushing west from Fredericksburg. Instead the Union army pulled back and went into a defensive position leaving Sedgwick to his own devices with no support.

The Union army did not IMO lose the battle, the Generals did. Now Hindsight is 20/20, but he failed on so many levels.
I'd put the critical error a day earlier - April 30. That's when Hooker surrendered the initiative to Lee and guaranteed the fight would be in the Wilderness. By May 1, although still doable, V Corps was running into opposition.
 
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