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 19 Aquia Creek Interlude M a y – J u n e 1 8 6 3 “We Congratulate the Army” The regiment came back to the same campground at Aquia Creek they had occupied for a week on their way down to Chancellorsville. They had left this same place a few days earlier the best equipped army on the earth and came back to it looking as if they had been tossed about inside a cyclone. Soldiers had come out of the battle hatless, coatless, and in some cases without their shoes. Chaplain Ames helped the quartermaster issue uniform parts and a variety of gear to soldiers who had lost or worn out what they had carried to battle. One-half of Slocum’s soldiers had lost shelter tents, rubber blankets, and even their knapsacks. Franklin Manderbach had lost his knapsack. It was returned to him, but not in time for use in this war. Pvt. Isham Blake, Fifth Florida Infantry, Perry’s brigade, McLaw’s division, CSA, had picked up a souvenir in Candy’s trench line at Chancellorsville.1 In 1888 a parcel was delivered to the governor’s office in Columbus, Ohio, accompanied by a letter from Isham Blake’s sister. Her brother had picked up the object packed inside at Chancellorsville, and she requested that it be returned to the owner, if he had survived the war and was still living. Inside was a Union army knapsack, which had stenciled on its flap “29th O.V.I.” Its owner was identified by a paper her brother had found folded inside. The document was a certificate of promotion belonging to Cpl. Benjamin F. Manderbach of Company G. The governor saw the healing properties of such a gesture, located Manderbach in Akron, and forwarded the knapsack to him.2 They had gone in with nearly a million rounds of rifle ammunition and many came back with nothing but a few loose grains of gunpowder in the bottoms of their cartridge boxes.3 The loss of equipment in the Twelfth Corps expressed the general wreckage of its men. Almost three thousand soldiers, nearly one-quarter of the Twelfth Corps’s men, had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.4 Slocum’s corps had been so roughly handled in the late battle that some of the Twenty-Ninth’s soldiers debated whether the Twelfth Corps would continue to exist.5 When Lincoln learned of Hooker’s defeat, and the magnitude of it, he asked, “What will the country say, what will the country say?” In the part of the country defined by the boundaries of Ohio’s Western Reserve the country said little. First stories of the battle were culled from the New York and Philadelphia papers and ran in the Reserve’s newspapers under headlines set in type no larger than that announcing the everyday train wreck: “Terrible Battle! Great Loss on Both Sides,” and in the same edition , “Hooker’s Victory Complete.”6 Jackson had thrown himself “impetuously” on the Union right, and the “German corps” (Eleventh Corps) had fled in disgraceful panic, that much was admitted. But Jackson’s advance had been m ay – j u n e 1 8 6 3 237 handsomely checked by Hooker personally when he rushed to the point of crisis on his magnificent charger and rallied the boys with quotable orders such as “Receive the enemy on your bayonets!” The casualties had been high, but the payoff magnificent. First reports said Lee’s army was being driven back and slaughtered all along the line from Fredericksburg to Chancellorsville, and the Federals were tearing up rebel railroad, capturing supplies, and overwhelming whole batteries and regiments of the enemy. A wire had been intercepted from Lee to his government, in Richmond, crying out for aid: he could hold out only two days longer if not immediately reinforced.7 As proof positive of the Federal triumph, a thousand rebel prisoners fresh from the battlefield were seen marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the old capitol prison, looking not only beaten but starved.8 Later dispatches from the battlefield reported that Hooker had withdrawn back across the river, but this had not been a retreat. Indeed, as reported by the Conneaut newspaper, the retrograde movement had been a calculated ruse. Hooker had crossed his army back to the safe side of the river to hold Lee in place. In the meantime, Union Generals John J. Peck and Erasmus D. Keyes had taken Richmond, which had been Hooker...

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