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Fascinating Civil War Facts that Won’t be in the History Books

Khalid Elhassan February 8, 2021 33 min

Battle of Fort Sanders - American Civil War — Confederates in action during the Civil War. Buyenlarge Archive Photos

25. The Most Devastating Surprise Attack of the Civil War

Panicked stampede of the Union’s XI Corps at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Wikimedia

Robert E. Lee’s gamble and defiance of conventional wisdom by dividing his army in the face of a numerically superior enemy – not once, but twice – paid off on May 2^nd, 1863. That day, while Confederate cavalry screened his flank to keep the Union force from observing him, Lee had sent his chief subordinate, General Stonewall Jackson, to lead about 28,000 Confederates on a 12-mile roundabout march. It brought Jackson and his men, undetected, to the Army of the Potomac’s right flank near Chancellorsville.

Late that afternoon, Jackson launched a devastating surprise attack against the XI Corps on the Union army’s right flank, just as its men were sitting down for dinner. It caught them completely off guard, and sent them on a panicked rout that soon sowed confusion throughout Hooker’s army. Jackson’s advance was only halted by the fall of darkness. That took the fight out of Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker. Psychologically defeated and concussed from a shell that struck a post against which he was leaning, Hooker conceded defeat and withdrew. The Battle of Chancellorsville went down as Robert E. Lee’s “perfect battle”, and is taught in military academies to this day.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.