The first eighteen pages of The Smoothbore Volley That Doomed
the Confederacy, by Robert K. Krick, are reprinted here with
permission from the author and publisher, Louisiana State
University Press, which retains all republication rights.
Library copies of The Smoothbore Volley are available for check-
out. Nineteen men in two distinct groups rode forward from the
coalescing Confederate lines west of Chancellorsville at about
9:00 P.M. on May 2, 1863. Only seven of the nineteen came back
untouched, man or horse. Although one of those nearest the
offending musket muzzles, Major General A. P. Hill escaped among
the unscathed handful. Lieutenant General Thomas J. “Stonewall”
Jackson, among those farthest from the flash point, was one of
the five men killed or mortally wounded. The capricious paths of
a few dozen one-ounce lead balls caroming off the dense
shrubbery of Spotsylvania’s Wilderness that night had much to do
with the course of the Civil War. From every imaginable
perspective, the afternoon of May 2 had