Joseph Hooker

In an army all too often marked by caution, Joseph Hooker was a fighter. Aggressive on the battlefield and sometimes brilliant, he led from the front and knew how to sustain the morale of his men, who loved him. At least as bold behind the scenes, the ambitious Hooker was also an intriguer and self-promoter who criticized superiors and angled for high command. Before Lincoln elevated Hooker to head the Army of the Potomac, his predecessor Ambrose Burnside recommended the generals dismissal. In his letter of promotion, Lincoln told Hooker bluntly: “I am not quite satisfied with you.” After the war Ulysses Grant called him “a dangerous man.”

In this landmark new biography, the first in more than eighty years, Darrin Wipperman narrates the rise and fall of this colorful and perplexing Civil War commander.

After the disaster at First Bull Run in 1861, Lincoln needed generals, and the pugnacious Hooker fit the bill. He became “Fighting Joe” during George McClellan’s Peninsula campaign. At Antietam in September 1862, the war’s bloodiest day, Hooker’s First Corps spearheaded the Union attack, slashing through the Cornfield at dawn and fighting the legendary Stonewall Jackson to a stalemate. Three months later at Fredericksburg, he vocally opposed Burnsides plans.

Appointed to lead the Army of the Potomac in the wake of the Fredericksburg debacle, Hooker rejuvenated the army in a masterly feat of reform and reorganization and then crafted an audacious plan to defeat Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville in May 1863. But Hooker suddenly became tentative and Lee scored perhaps his most brilliant tactical victory of the war. Hooker recovered, but he had few friends left to save him when tensions boiled over during Lee’s invasion of the North in the summer of 1863. He was relieved three days before the Battle of Gettysburg and was sent West, where he skillfully led two corps at Chattanooga, which would be renamed the Twentieth Corps for the Atlanta Campaign. When Sherman passed him over for army command. Hooker resigned and spent the rest of the war in the backwater of Cincinnati.

Drawing on new sources that have become available during the past eight decades, this biography offers fresh perspectives on General Joseph Hooker, a man of obvious talent whose ambition made him a respected battlefield leader but ultimately undermined him. Among other questions, Wipperman answers how Hooker ended up in high command, what went wrong at Chancellorsville, and what made him “a dangerous man.” Informative as well as entertaining, this is essential Civil War reading.