Fighting Joe

Joe Hooker was a man poised for greatness.  The grandson of a Revolutionary War officer, he graduated

from West Point and served with distinction in the Seminole and Mexican Wars, earning three promotions in the process. In the first two years of the Civil War, he proved to be a brave, aggressive and effective division and corps commander, eliciting praise for his combat leadership in the Peninsula Campaign, the Second Battle of Manassas, Antietam (where he was wounded) and the debacle that was Fredericksburg.  Promoted by Abraham Lincoln to Commanding General of the Army of the Potomac, Joe Hooker was within reach of the ultimate prize: If he could destroy Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and win the war, he would be acclaimed a national hero and the Presidency would be his for the asking.

Greatness has a price, though, and sometimes you have to step on toes to get it. Hooker testified against his old commanding general, Winfield Scott, during a court-martial proceeding in the 1850’s, resigned his commission, openly criticized Union generalship during the First Battle of Manassas and asked President Lincoln to reinstate him, brazenly highlighting his own qualifications for command. He mocked George McClellan in the press and was insubordinate to McClellan’s successor, Ambrose Burnside, during and after the Battle of Fredericksburg, going so far as to propose setting up a dictator.  Having been promoted to lead the Union’s premier land force, Hooker reformed and strengthened the Army of the Potomac to such a point that he boasted, “May God have mercy on General Lee for I shall have none.”  True, he was a hard-drinking man and a womanizer, but he had a great army and a great plan which, if executed, would indeed annihilate the Army of Northern Virginia, open the road to Richmond and end the war.

So far, so good.  In late April 1863, Hooker ordered a cavalry raid behind Lee’s lines which, although conducted cautiously, nonetheless distracted and confused Lee enough to enable Hooker to cross the Rappahannock River and appear on Lee’s left flank.  By dawn of Friday, 01 May 1863, he had 70,000 men on Lee’s side of the river and with light resistance, threatened to envelop the Rebels from the east and the west.  As the day progressed, resistance increased but by 2:00 PM, the Federals had pushed through to the eastern edge of the dense forest called the Wilderness and it was then that things began to come apart.  Hooker started to lose his nerve and rather than continue the attack, he ordered his men to withdraw and then dig in, hoping that Lee would be forced to attack his larger army.  Having witnessed Lee baffle and humiliate successive Union generals while outnumbered and outgunned, maybe Hooker was afraid of the wily Virginian, but for whatever reason, Hooker’s confused and frustrated subordinates fell back, passing the initiative to their worst enemy.

Defying all military logic, Lee had divided his army to hold the Federals threatening Fredericksburg and then deal with Hooker’s attack, and then did it again, sending Stonewall Jackson’s entire corps of 28,000 men on a looping march around the Union lines.  Besides noticing Hooker’s sudden timidity, Lee also saw that Hooker’s right flank was left exposed and vulnerable, so rather than attack Hooker head-on as “Fighting Joe” had hoped, Lee chose to assault Hooker’s weakest position and, if he was successful, roll up the entire Federal army and turn looming defeat into overwhelming victory.  For nine hours on Saturday, 02 May 1863, Stonewall Jackson’s II Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia marched across the front of the Federal positions, partially screened by Jeb Stuart’s cavalry but repeatedly observed by men of the Union III Corps and the reconnaissance balloon Eagle.  Reports of the Confederate movements reached Hooker who issued desultory orders to prepare for an attack but took no assertive action to either bolster his right flank or fall on Jackson’s corps while on the march, essentially allowing the Rebels freedom of maneuver until, at 5:30 PM while troops of the Federal XI Corps were preparing their supper, 28,000 screaming Confederates exploded out of the woods and the rout was on.  The Union right flank collapsed, and though Stonewall Jackson was himself mortally wounded that night and there was hard fighting the next day, the battle was lost.  To add insult to injury, Hooker was stunned by a cannonball that struck a roofpost at his headquarters on 03 May, knocking him senseless for an hour. At this critical time, while he was stupefied and probably concussed, he refused to relinquish command, paralyzing the Army of the Potomac when it desperately needed strong, professional leadership, and the Battle of Chancellorsville would become Robert E. Lee’s greatest victory and the Union’s most humiliating defeat.  Despite overwhelming advantages in men and materiel, Joe Hooker went down in history not as a national hero but as a national laughingstock.

Barack Hussein Obama, Priest-King of the Americas, Generalissimo of the People’s Revolution and Keeper of the Golden Flame, assumed office in January 2009 and inherited the world’s top economy and the world’s best military.  America was in the depths of a serious recession (caused by liberal social engineering as reported in detail in this space and elsewhere) but the underlying structure was sound, and rather than relieve the burden of heavy taxes and onerous regulations to spur growth, Obama defied logic by increasing taxes and issuing thousands of new rules and adding trillions of dollars in additional debt. While Joe Hooker’s highest level of competence was as a corps commander, Priest-King’s highest level of competence was as a social gadfly, a community organizer who spurs other people to action while assuming no responsibility himself, and also like Joe Hooker, a goad who found it much easier to criticize someone else’s leadership than to exercise command himself. Like Hooker, Obama had an ambitious plan that he couldn’t execute and when faced with a situation he didn’t understand or anticipate, he froze – his reactions to the Iranian elections in 2009, the comatose economy, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt times two, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iran’s nuclear program, Iraq, Europe’s financial crisis, the burgeoning conflict between Israel and Hamas, the invasion on our southern border and the various scandals plaguing his administration.  He has been outmaneuvered by Vladimir Putin, Bashar Assad, by Iran and by everyone living in Central America, he can’t believe, he cannot accept what is happening right in front of him, he watches transfixed as the disaster unfolds, motionless, unblinking, “like a duck that’s been hit on the head” as Lincoln described Hooker.  The common thread running through all of these situations is a crying lack of leadership, the fumbling, slow-witted paralysis of a man outmatched by circumstances, a college professor whose ideas, so fashionable at liberal cocktail parties, are proven to be inadequate after five years of hard experience.  His bold promises and boasting are now known to be lies, his strategy of “soft power” and “lead from behind” is a late-night punchline, he is a proud man who can hear the snickering behind his back, the PhD who can’t change a tire. Yet he remains in charge, too arrogant to pass command to abler hands, and we have no Lincoln to relieve him, so we will suffer more, the world will suffer more, someone will carve him in marble to great acclaim and we will hope to God that we never hear of him again.