Instead, then, of relying upon the material ready to his hand, Hooker conceived that his salvation lay in the efforts of his flying wing under Sedgwick, some fifteen miles away.  He fain would call on Hercules instead of putting his own shoulder to the wheel.  His calculations were that Sedgwick, whom he supposed to be at Franklin’s and Pollock’s crossings, three or four miles below Fredericksburg, could mobilize his corps, pass the river, capture the heights, where in December a few Southern brigades had held the entire Army of the Potomac at bay, march a dozen miles, and fall upon Lee’s rear, all in the brief space of four or five hours.  And it was this plan he chose to put into execution, deeming others equal to the performance of impossibilities, while himself could not compass the easiest problems under his own eye.

To measure the work thus cut out for Sedgwick, by the rule of the performances of the wing immediately commanded by Gen. Hooker, would be but fair.  But Sedgwick’s execution of his orders must stand on its own merits.  And his movements are fully detailed elsewhere.

An excuse often urged in palliation of Hooker’s sluggishness, is that he was on Sunday morning severely disabled.  Hooker was standing, between nine and ten A.M., on the porch of the Chancellor House, listening to the heavy firing at the Fairview crest, when a shell struck and dislodged one of the pillars beside him, which toppled over, struck and stunned him; and he was doubtless for a couple of hours incapacitated for work.

But the accident was of no great moment.  Hooker does not appear to have entirely turned over the command to Couch, his superior corps-commander, but to have merely used him as his mouthpiece, retaining the general direction of affairs himself.

And this furnishes no real apology.  Hooker’s thorough inability to grasp the situation, and handle the conditions arising from the responsibility of so large a command, dates from Thursday noon, or at latest Friday morning.  And from this time his enervation was steadily on the increase.  For the defeat of the Army of the Potomac in Sunday morning’s conflict was already a settled fact, when Hooker failed at early dawn so to dispose his forces as to sustain Sickles and Williams if over-matched, or to broach some counter-manoeuvre to draw the enemy’s attention to his own safety.

It is an ungracious task to heap so much blame upon any one man.  But the odium of this defeat has for years been borne by those who are guiltless of the outcome of the campaign of Chancellorsville; and the prime source of this fallacy has been Hooker’s ever-ready self-exculpation by misinterpreted facts and unwarranted conclusions, while his subordinates have held their peace.  And this is not alone for the purpose of vindicating the fair fame of the Army of the Potomac and its corps-commanders, but truth calls for no less.  And it is desired to reiterate what has already been said,—­that