May 2023
Chancellor’s house for a visit. He was not home, but Mrs. Chancellor invited them in. Above the fireplace were images of Gen. Lee, Gen. Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. Moorhead noted that this house was Gen. O.O. Howard’s headquarters before Jackson’s May 2, 1863, flank attack swept
Howard’s XI Corps eastward. “Mrs. Chancellor spoke well of General Howard’s kindness and courtesy,” Morehead wrote, and he was “much pleased with the lady-like bearing of Mrs. Chancellor.”
After leaving Mrs. Chancellor, they took “a moment to look at the Wilderness Church across the road and further west.” They then “passed back to the spot where Jackson was wounded.” Traveling south they headed toward Catherine Furnace, and in doing so they wound up their sightseeing with a ride through “the scene of the principle
fighting” on May 3, 1863.
By taking a virtual tour with early battlefield visitors, we can still see some of sights they saw: Marye’s Heights, Willis Hill, the National Cemetery, Pelham’s Corner, Meade’s breakthrough, Salem Church, the Chancellor House ruins, Catherine Furnace, and the area of Rev. Chancellor’s farm; places that could have been wiped out by development if not for action from groups like CVBT, the National Park Service, and the American Battlefield Trust, who stepped in to save them. In reading early battlefield visitors’ accounts we can also live vicariously through them to do things like talk to Confederate veterans, see reinterment work at the National Cemetery, pick up a musket ball, and chat with Mrs. Chancellor. Through their accounts, we see a much different battlefield than we see through the fighting soldiers’ eyes, or our own modern perspective.
CVBT has helped save over 1,100 acres at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.
