This plan was certainly excellent, and seemed sure to succeed.  It was, however, open to some criticism, as the event showed.  General Hooker was detaching, in the beginning of the movement, his whole cavalry force for a distant operation, and dividing his army by the ruse at Fredericksburg, in face of an adversary not likely to permit that great error to escape him.  While advancing thus, apparently to the certain destruction of Lee, General Hooker was leaving a vulnerable point in his own armor.  Lee would probably discover that point, and aim to pierce his opponent there.  At most, General Hooker was wrapping in huge folds the sword of Lee, not remembering that there was danger to the cordon as well as to the weapon.

Such was the plan which General Hooker had devised to bring back that success of the Federal arms in the spring of 1863 which had attended them in the early spring of 1862.  At this latter period a heavy cloud rested upon the Confederate cause.  Donaldson and Roanoke Island, Fort Macon, and the city of New Orleans, had then fallen; at Elkhorn, Kernstown, Newbern, and other places, the Federal forces had achieved important successes.  These had been followed, however, by the Southern victories on the Chickahominy, at Manassas, and at Fredericksburg.  Near this last-named spot now, where the year had wound up with so mortifying a Federal failure, General Hooker hoped to reverse events, and recover the Federal glories of the preceding spring.

Operations began as early as the middle of March, when General Averill, with about three thousand cavalry, crossed the Rappahannock at Kelly’s Ford, above its junction with the Rapidan, and made a determined attack upon nearly eight hundred horsemen there, under General Fitz Lee, with the view of passing through Culpepper, crossing the Rapidan, and cutting Lee’s communications in the direction of Gordonsville.  The obstinate stand of General Fitz Lee’s small force, however, defeated this object, and General Averill was forced to retreat beyond the Rappahannock again with considerable loss, and abandon his expedition.  In this engagement fell Major John Pelham, who had been styled in Lee’s first report of the battle of Fredericksburg “the gallant Pelham,” and whose brave stand on the Port Royal road had drawn from Lee the exclamation, “It is glorious to see such courage in one so young.”  Pelham was, in spite of his youth, an artillerist of the first order of excellence, and his loss was a serious one, in spite of his inferior rank.

After this action every thing remained quiet until toward the end of April—­General Lee continuing to hold the same position with his right at Fredericksburg, his left at the fords near Chancellorsville, and his cavalry, under Stuart, guarding the banks of the Rappahannock in Culpepper.  On the 27th of April, General Hooker began his forward movement, by advancing three corps of his army—­the Fifth, Eleventh, and Twelfth—­to