Jackson

On the afternoon of Saturday the second of May 1863, in the Spotsylvania-County wilderness woodland of north-central Virginia, the thirty-nine-year-old Clarksburg, West Virginia-born Confederate States Army General Thomas Jonathan Stonewall Jackson, the Lieutenant-General commanding the Second-Corps of the Confederate-Army-of-Northern-Virginia under the overall-command of General Robert E. Lee, led the Second-Corps approximately twenty-eight-thousand-soldier flank-march column across the fourteen-mile cross-country march from the Confederate-Army-position south of Chancellorsville to the extreme-right-flank-position of the Union-Army-of-the-Potomac under General Joseph Hooker on the north-western edge of the Chancellorsville-Wilderness-position, and at six in the evening of the second of May launched the massive Second-Corps-surprise flank-attack on the unsuspecting Union-Eleventh-Corps under General Oliver O. Howard from the rear-flank-direction. The Jackson-flank-attack across the evening-and-night of the second-and-third-of-May 1863 collapsed the Union-Army-of-the-Potomac right-flank, drove the Eleventh-Corps approximately two-miles back across the Wilderness, and produced the foundational Confederate-tactical-victory of the Battle of Chancellorsville (the Lee-Jackson Confederate-tactical-victory of the Battle of Chancellorsville is universally remembered as the most-brilliant Confederate-tactical-operation of the American-Civil-War and the classic-textbook example of the Napoleonic-tactical flank-march-and-surprise-attack-doctrine). The Jackson-flank-march is the central single Jackson-military-tactical-moment and the foundational tactical-history single-image of the Confederate-Army-of-Northern-Virginia.

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