The battle of chancellorsville - overconfidence or just bad tactics?

[StandardUser]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rMDr4P9BOw

In this video you can listen to malcolm gladwell talking about the effects of overconfidence, and he uses the battle of chancellorsville as an example.


Now, ive read about the battle. Malcolm says that the reason( its one of the reasons, but its gladwell after all...) that the union lost was because joseph hooker was deeply overconfident as of his superiority in numbers, intelligence, and positioning, that he disregarded reports about Lee's troops moving south and flanking Oliver O Howards corps. Malcom said that even a senior officer pleaded hooker to ready his troops for an attack - and hooker wouldnt even listen.

Problem is that i saw this :"We have good reason to suppose the enemy is moving to our right. Please advance your pickets for purposes of observation as far as may be safe in order to obtain timely information of their approach."

Now, i am not a general - but this seems like he was pretty damn aware of an oncoming attack.

And the south suffered heavy casulties in the flanking attack, and the flanking meanuver even created an even better position for hooker by dividing lees army into two parts. From what ive read, the turning point for that battle wasnt the flanking done by stonewall jackson, but the abandoning of the hazel grove highground, which was the single thing that kept lees main army from joining jackons, and a critical artillery position. Hooker could have just stormed lees main force and be done with it. He could have also been more precise with his orders to Sedgwick - but thats another thing.



What do you think?

[conon394]

A couple things. First not overconfidence so much as still a fair amount of the misma of Little Mac's under confidence and worry.

Hooker did just about everything right but once he got over the river he seemed to loose confidence not be over confident. He really should have push hard no matter the cost to get father south and in more open country. Even failing that with the quality I Corps not even ever firing a shot he should have stood his ground and attacked. I think Hooker was affected by his almost death by shell fire and should likely have passed on the command for the day.

But overall Hooker was not overconfident he had the bigger, more well supplied army and he surprised Lee with his movements - I was his sudden lack of confidence that caused the loss to the CSA