General Fighting Joe Hooker

 

Everyone called Joseph Hooker Fighting Joe, but he was never comfortable with that sobriquet. “It sounds to me like a fighting fool,” he said. “People will think I’m a highwayman or a bandit.”

His men liked him well enough, but his fellow officers had their doubts. Hooker often spoke before he thought. He called Lincoln “incompetent” and proclaimed the saving hope of the country required a “military dictatorship.”

The day before Lincoln appointed Hooker commander-in-chief, Ambrose Burnside recommended that the president dismiss him from the military. He accused Hooker of creating dissent among his fellow officers and suggested he was nothing but a big bugaboo who “made statements which were calculated to create incorrect impressions.”

Like many of his fellow West Point classmates, Hooker fought in the Mexican and Seminole Wars, then resigned from the peacetime army hoping to find success in civilian life. He tried his hand at farming, real estate speculation, and even took a crack at politics in California, but nothing seemed to work for him.

When the civil war broke out, Hooker rejoined the army as a brigadier general and served at Williamsburg, South Mountain, and then at Antietam.

Everyone agreed, Joseph Hooker cut the most dashing figure in the Union army. He was tall and handsome, with big blue eyes and long flowing blonde hair. If that didn’t make him stick out like a sore thumb, picture the general dashing everywhere on the battlefield sitting astride a big white stallion.

General John Pope appeared to have a man-crush on Hooker. “He remembered him as a handsome young man, with a florid complexion and fair hair, and with a figure agile and graceful.” As a corps commander, with his whole force operating under his own eye,” said Pope, “it is much to be doubted whether Hooker had a superior in the army.”