History of the Civil War in 10 Battles, Part 10: Battle of Chancellorsville

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2018

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Battle of Chancellorsville is considered Robert E. Lee’s masterpiece. His reputation as a military genius was sealed by fighting an incredibly successful offensive battle despite being outnumbered 2-to-1 and launching attacks on multiple fronts.

After another humiliating Union defeat at Fredericksburg, On January 26, Lincoln replaced Gen. Ambrose Burnside with Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker as the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, with 120,000 troops. Hooker's plan was to send his cavalry on a raid behind Lee to cut off Lee’s communication with Richmond. He would leave 40,000 troops in front of Lee near Fredericksburg, and Hooker himself would march up the Rappahannock River and try to go around Lee’s left. If he didn’t defeat Lee at that time, he would at least force Lee to retreat. But Lee managed to achieve victory despite splitting up his forces into vastly inferior numbers and fighting the Union on multiple fronts. The outcome was 17,000 Federal casualties to 13,000 Confederates

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1:19.2	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
1:25.3	Welcome back to our series on the most important battles in the Civil War.
1:31.2	On the last episode, we looked at the Battle of Fredericksburg,
1:34.7	the Union suffered a humiliating loss.
1:37.9	McClellan, the general, had been swapped out for another general, Burnside,
1:42.1	who in turn was swapped out with Hooker.
1:44.6	So the Union is really entering its low point.
1:46.9	It's sort of like Britain after Dunkirk and World War II,
1:50.4	before it's able to start to go on the offensive.
1:53.7	So things are going poorly for the Union,
	...

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