"Evidence of two sorts makes the initial hypothesis that Crane used Chancellorsville probable. In the first place, Crane said so in his short story "The Veteran," which was published less than a year after The Red Badge. In this story he represented an elderly Henry Fleming [the name of the young protagonist in The Red Badge] as telling about his fear and flight in his first battle. 'That was at Chancellorsville,' Henry said. His brief account is consistent in every respect with the more extended account in The Red Badge; old Henry's motives for flight were those of the young Henry, and he referred to Jim Conklin [a character who dies in The Red Badge] in a way which made it clear that Jim was long since dead.

Stephen Crane

           ". . . Furthermore, the battle was [,according to The Red Badge,] the first major engagement of the year, occurring when the spring rains were nearly over. [And in the four years of the Civil War, the Battle of Chancellorsville is the only battle whose timing fits that description.]

            ". . . [Moreover,] the battle in Crane's novel is closely and continuously parallel to the historical Chancellorsville."

            ". . .This long recitation of parallels, I believe, demonstrates that Crane used Chancellorsville as a factual framework for his novel. . . .Why, with the whole Civil War available, should Crane have chosen Chancellorsville? Surely, in the first place, because he knew a good deal about it. Perhaps he had learned from his brother, 'an expert in the strategy of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville' (Beer, p. 47). More probably he had heard old soldiers talk about their war experiences while he was growing up. Many middle-aged men in Port Jervis [New York, where Crane lived as a young boy] had served in the 124th New York; Chancellorsville had been their first battle, and first impressions are likely to be the most vivid. It is hard to imagine that men in an isolated small town could have resisted telling a hero-worshiping small boy about the great adventure of their lives.

            "Moreover, Chancellorsville surely appealed to Crane's sense of the ironic and the colorful. The battle's great charges, its moments of heroism, went only to salvage a losing cause; the South lost the war and gained only time from Chancellorsville; the North, through an incredible series of blunders, lost a battle it had no business losing. . . . And when the battle ended, North and South were just where they had been when it began. There is a tragic futility about Chancellorsville just as there is a tragic futility to The Red Badge.

            "Finally, Chancellorsville served Crane's artistic purposes. It was the first battle of the year and the first battle for many regiments. It was therefore an appropriate introduction to war for a green soldier in an untried regiment. . . ."