About three in the afternoon on that hot July day, the men in gray and butternut emerged from the woods and hollows near Seminary Ridge. With skirmishers in advance, they moved out smartly, confident they could once again whip the Yankees. They marched toward the Emmitsburg road and would converge on a clump of trees and a sharp angle in a stone wall on Cemetery Ridge. Only 13,000 they were, and yet they would have to cross three-quarters of a mile of gently rolling land to assault a formidable and well-prepared enemy.
Those soldiers, the men of Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second Corps—resting a bit after an earlier Confederate artillery barrage—beheld a stunning and magnificent and unforgettable sight: lines of troops moving across the undulating fields and climbing over fences, stopping to realign where the ground offered protection. Federal batteries began ripping the oncoming Rebs with shell and shrapnel. As the Confederates neared the Emmitsburg road, canister tore holes in the lines. Under this intense fire, the troops of James J. Pettigrew’s and George E. Pickett’s Divisions along with Isaac Trimble’s two brigades began losing their formations. Yet they continued to advance, their objective now in sight and seemingly in reach.
Most of the veterans on Cemetery Ridge knew how to prepare for what they termed hot work. As Pettigrew’s men crossed the Emmitsburg road and headed straight toward the stone wall north of the angle, soldiers from the 14th Connecticut poured a withering fire into them. “Give them Hell,” Sgt. Benjamin Hirst hollered. “Now We’ve got you. Sock it to the Blasted Rebels. Fredericksburg on the other Leg.”1 To the south, Pickett’s men also closed in on their objective. Except for a few sporadic shots, Alexander Hays’s and John Gibbon’s divisions held their fire until the Rebels got to within 300 or 400 feet of their line. With some skillful maneuvering and improvisation, they then poured their rounds into the front and both flanks of the still-advancing Confederates. As New Yorkers and Ohioans curled around Pettigrew’s left and some Vermont troops swept down on the Confederate right, brigades from Pickett’s Division became badly intermingled. The swirling mass nevertheless pushed toward some rocky ground just south and west of the clump of trees, a section of the Union line held by two brigades of Gibbon’s division. With the Confederates no more than 100 feet away, men from the 20th Massachusetts rose and fired. “We were feeling all the enthusiasm of victory,” Capt. Henry L. Abbott reported, “the men shouting out, ‘Fredericksburg,’ imagining the victory as complete” all along the line. “The moment I saw them [the Confederates] I knew we should give them Fredericksburg,” Abbott later told his father.2
It seems curious that in the midst of this desperate struggle, with the issue still in doubt, soldiers would suddenly invoke memories of a battle fought more than six months earlier. But both Federal regiments had good reason for recalling Fredericksburg. On December 11, 1862, Abbott’s 20th Massachusetts had crossed the Rappahannock River under fire to secure a bridgehead for the army’s long-delayed pontoons. The regiment had taken more casualties in street fighting with some tenacious Mississippians than it would suffer at Gettysburg. On December 13 Hirst’s 14th Connecticut, among the first regiments to charge the Confederate defenses on the outskirts of Fredericksburg, got cut to pieces. For these New England boys, Fredericksburg had been far bloodier work than Gettysburg.3 On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, both regiments could exact revenge on the Rebels, visiting upon them the same horrors the bluecoats had experienced at Fredericksburg.
Too often historians operating largely from hindsight have treated Fredericksburg as a large, costly, but not especially significant battle. Contemporaries viewed this engagement much differently, in ways ranging from the mundane to the metaphysical. For the Army of the Potomac and for the whole northern war effort, Fredericksburg was a nadir. The shouts of “Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg” did not merely reopen old wounds or relieve old frustrations; these cries summoned a host of memories for both sides. Fredericksburg had come to signify both courage and carnage, a costly and, some might say, meaningless valor. Recriminations, exultation, and most of all death dominated recollections of what had happened back in December.
The influence of the departed George B. McClellan remained with the Army of the Potomac; his most ardent friends, including a number of high-ranking officers, were still convinced that only Little Mac could effectively lead them. On the Confederate side, Robert E. Lee and his army seemed nearly invincible after their “easy” victory at Fredericksburg. There was also the hapless Ambrose E. Burnside, modest and likable, to be sure, and perhaps a victim of military and political intrigue. Doubts about his ability to command an army grew and festered, leaving deep demoralization and political trouble in their wake. Heavy questions of responsibility weighed down the army and the entire North.
For the soldiers, thinking about Fredericksburg and its aftermath stirred up painful memories of a winter campaign: hard marches in cold rain, wet clothes and blankets and shelter tents, smoky shanties, short rations, and cheerless holidays. There had been temporary logistical problems in the northern army, and more intractable and ominous shortages among the Confederates. Snow, sudden freezes, rapid thaws, and mud had only aggravated the loneliness of camp life and worries about home. For the Federals, massive bloodshed wedged between Thanksgiving and Christmas raised troubling doubts about God’s will and, for the Confederates, prompted cock-sure assertions of divine favor.
The agony, suffering, uncertainty, regrets, and assessments of defeat and victory extended far beyond the battlefield. Dead officers were sent home for burial. The wounded crowded the Washington hospitals, while Richmond received its own share of sufferers along with many refugees from Fredericksburg itself. It would be a tough winter in the Confederacy. Signs of civilian disaffection and political unrest became more evident, while manpower and supply problems refused to go away. Across the northern states, news of yet another disastrous defeat spread like a great smothering blanket. Republicans had fared poorly in the recent state and congressional elections; Abraham Lincoln had grown depressed, his leadership uncertain and tentative. Even his seemingly deft handling of a cabinet crisis only a few days after the battle and the final Emancipation Proclamation could not quiet nagging doubts about the administration. The rising price of gold in New York, talk of a negotiated settlement, the growing confidence of Peace Democrats, and nervous reactions in London, Paris, and even Vienna and St. Petersburg made the repercussions of Fredericksburg hard to exaggerate but also tricky to gauge. Were the Army of the Potomac and the northern public really so demoralized as they appeared? Was Burnside finished? Would McClellan return? Would Lincoln’s government collapse?
Battles are never isolated events, and the rippling effects of Fredericksburg respected few boundaries.4 Herman Melville wrote a poem, Louisa May Alcott tended the wounded, Walt Whitman visited the Union camps near Falmouth, and in London Karl Marx fumed over Burnside’s failure. Generals and common soldiers alike worried about the future as they shivered in winter quarters. Rumors, speculation, orders issued and canceled, and late or no pay all sapped morale. The Confederates fared no better in their equally squalid camps, but they exuded optimism to the point of overconfidence.
Whatever the despair over the carnage or the celebration of victory, the ways of God remained inscrutable. Who could look back on recent events without sadly noting the frightening costs of what at one time had seemed to both sides a glorious crusade sure to end in a quick, nearly bloodless victory? Perhaps patriotism was, in the common parlance of the camp, “played out,” though soldiers and civilians alike could be remarkably resilient. One thing was certain: despite some Confederate hopes for peace, the suffering and dying seemed destined to continue as if the war had escaped all bounds of human control.
It was not surprising, then, that Union soldiers in July 1863 still felt the reverberations of Fredericksburg. So many hard thoughts, so much effort to find meaning in random events... so hard a struggle merely to survive in a world given over to destruction and bloodshed where most of the ordinary joys, pleasures, challenges, and even sorrows of life became overshadowed by that ever present and insatiable demon, civil war.
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The story of Fredericksburg is, of course, much more complex than it appears at first glance. Battle studies, with only a nod toward the political context, all too often concentrate so much on strategy and tactics that they neglect many elements of vital importance to common soldiers and civilians.5 Such works often give short shrift to the aftermath of an engagement, especially the carnage and political reverberations. As a general observation—surely a few exceptions could be found—historians interested in political and especially military affairs naturally focus on particular, unique events and changes over time. In contrast, social, cultural, and to some extent economic historians examine patterns and constants.
Yet all people, and especially soldiers, are creatures of habit who are buffeted by unpredictable events. Campaigns and battles clearly intrude on the commonplace rhythms of military (and civilian) life, but at the same time all the ordinary and expected events shape reactions to the extraordinary and unexpected. In the pages that follow I have tried to illuminate and fuse both aspects of historical experience. Soldiers were never just cogs in the proverbial military machine; before they donned uniforms, they were husbands and sons and brothers, and so they remained. The state of their stomachs was not unrelated to how they assessed the course of the war. Their loneliness, spiritual longings, boredom, and frustration deeply influenced their reaction to military and political developments. Morale thus became a complex intermix of certain universals of camp life along with marching, fighting, carnage, and fear.
The “old” military history dealt largely with leaders, dissecting strategy and tactics carefully, sometimes brilliantly. The “new” military history has focused on soldier life and its connections to larger social themes. But gaining a fuller understanding of a battle requires looking at both sides of the equation and mixing the elements. It requires a blending of the everyday and the spectacular, the mundane and the sublime. It involves examining what the privates expected to happen as well as what the generals planned. It means treating the people involved as full human beings.