There were those who laid this disaster to Hooker’s intemperance.  President Lincoln probably had such a suspicion, when, sending General Hooker west to join General Sherman, he admonished him in passing through Kentucky “to steer clear of Bourbon County.”  Though Hooker was not a total-abstainer, Chancellorsville is not to be explained by that fact any more than Jubal A. Early’s defeat by Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley is referrible to his use of apple-brandy.

Hooker did not create his own defeat, as Burnside may, with little exaggeration, be said to have done at Fredericksburg.  Lee defeated him, and deserved the immense fame which the victory brought.  No wonder he began to plan for the offensive again.  Soon the ever-memorable Gettysburg campaign was begun.

The details of this campaign, even those of the battle itself (July 1-3, 1863), we cannot give here.  Nor need we.  The world knows them:—­the first day, with Hill’s and Ewell’s success, costing the Union the life of its gallant General Reynolds, commanding the First Corps; the second day, when, back and forth by the Devil’s Den, Hood on one side and Dan Sickles on the other, fought their men as soldiers had never fought on the American continent before; and the third day, when for an hour a hundred cannon on Seminary Ridge belched hell-fire at a hundred cannon on Cemetery Ridge, prelude, in the natural key, to Pickett’s death-defying charge.

     “A thousand fell where Kemper led,
      A thousand died where Garnett bled. 
      In blinding flame and strangling smoke
      The remnant through the batteries broke
      And crossed the works with Armistead.”

The Union army was for the first time fighting a great battle on Union soil.  The homes of many who were engaged stood within sound of the Gettysburg cannon.  As the Confederates did in many other engagements, the Federals here felt that they were repelling an invader, and they fought accordingly, with a grim iron resisting power which they had never displayed before.

Great praise was due to General Hancock, and perhaps still more to General Howard, for early perceiving the strength of Cemetery Hill as a defensible position.  On the first day, after General Reynolds had fallen at his post of duty with the First Corps, General Doubleday, next in command, was on the point of ordering a retreat, the attack seeming too fearful to be withstood.  But Howard, coming up with the Eleventh Corps and assuming command of the field, overruled Doubleday, and, by enforcing a most stubborn resistance against Hill’s and Ewell’s desperate onsets, probably saved Cemetery Hill from capture that evening.