Joseph Hooker

Hooker, Joseph

(1814–79) soldier; born in Hadley, Mass. He graduated from West Point (1837), served with distinction in Mexico (1846–47), and left the army in 1853 to farm in California. Recalled on the outbreak of Civil War, he led a corps at Antietam and Fredericksburg (both 1862) and in January 1863 succeeded Ambrose Burnside as commander of the Army of the Potomac. He had a reputation as an aggressive commander, although his nickname, "Fighting Joe," resulted from a dropped hyphen in a news dispatch (that was supposed to have read, Fighting—Joe Hooker) rather than from action in the field. (The claim that "hooker" as the term for a prostitute is derived from the campfollowers he allegedly tolerated is a completely false attribution.) Confident, efficient, and boastful, Hooker reorganized the army, improved soldiers' conditions, and promised to defeat Lee. Instead, the Confederate commander overmastered him at Chancellorsville (1863). Lincoln accepted his resignation on the eve of Gettysburg. He later held corps commands in the West under Grant and Sherman, and retired as a regular army major general in 1868.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.