February 5, 1863

February 5, 1863

---General Joseph Hooker, the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, announces the re-organization of the army, and the new corps commanders:

I Corps           John F. Reynolds

II Corps          Darius Couch

III Corps        Daniel Sickles

V Corps          George G. Meade

VI Corps         John Sedgwick

XI Corps         Franz Sigel

XII Corps       Henry Slocum

Cavalry           George Stoneman

Hooker re-organizes the Cavalry into its own corps, a departure from the practice of all previous commanders, who kept the cavalry parceled out to the infantry units. 

 

---Cold weather and heavy snow have kept both the Union and Confederate armies inactive in Virginia.  The soldiers mostly stick with their huts.  In the Confederate camp, a religious revival is sweeping the troops, and gains momentum. 

---The New York Times publishes an editorial that condemns the Copperheads (anti-war elements in the North) and argues for a consolidation of loyalties: that all who are not pro-Confederate must support the government:

The political controversy has at last come to this supreme and plain issue: War and Union, or Peace and Separation. All other issues have dwindled, and are fast disappearing. People have differed about the Emancipation Proclamation, about arbitrary arrests, about the financial policy of the Administration, about the comparative merits of different Generals, and about many other matters, and the rebel sympathizers of the North have done their best to magnify these differences and turn them against the Government. It was the consummate art with which this variance was stimulated, under false professions of devotion to the war and the Union, that was the chief agency in giving the Fall elections their strange results. But their management no longer answers its purpose. Its impelling motive is at last understood; and so, too, is its fatal tendency. All true National men are agreeing to bury these differences, and bend their energies to the one great end of crushing the rebellion. All others are going over outright to an Anti-War position. . . .

---George Templeton Strong writes more reflections on the war in his journal, dwelling mostly on the North’s seemingly futile efforts, and the short patience of the Northern people:

These be dark days.  Of course, every man’s duty is to keep a stiff upper lip. . . . I do so very valiantly.  It’s fearful and wonderful the way I blow and brag about our national invincibility, the extent of our conquests during the last twenty months, and our steady subjugation of the South.  It is the right kind of talk for the times, and is more than half true . . . . But (between me and my journal) things do in fact look darker and more dark every day.  We are in a fearful scrape, and I see no way out of it.  Recognition of the “Confederacy” is impossible.  So is vigorous prosecution of the war twelve months longer. . . . How can these two contraditions be reconciled? . . . North cannot defeated and South cannot be conquered.  (Of course, this is taking the worst view of the case.)