Against a Rock and a Hard Place
December 13, 1862: The Battle of Fredericksburg
Doug Niles
By mid-autumn of 1862, Abraham Lincoln had had enough of General George B. McClellan. Although “Little Mac” (aka “the Young Napoleon”) had finally won a victory, of sorts, at Antietam, McClellan—true to form—had never gotten his entire army involved in the battle, and had allowed Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to retire unmolested across the Potomac River. McClellan was a genius at organizing, training, and preparing an army, but he seemed almost pathologically unwilling to bring about a decisive battle, a clash that—while risky—stood at least a chance of destroying the Army of Northern Virginia and bringing about a speedy end to the war.
After the bloody but indecisive fight at Antietam, Mac resisted all of the president’s entreaties to pursue the retreating Rebels, arguing—again, as usual—that he lacked supplies, that he was outnumbered, that his troops needed more preparation before they could be employed in combat operations. In effect, he refused to obey the direct orders of his commander in chief, except in the most reluctant, glacially deliberate fashion.
When McClellan replied to yet another of the president’s prodding suggestions with several telegrams declaring that, now, his horses were too weakened and broken down to move the army’s heavy equipment properly, Lincoln became positively waspish. “Will you pardon me for asking what your horses have done since the Battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?” he demanded.
Finally, on November 7, 1862, President Lincoln removed George McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. In his place he appointed Major General Ambrose Burnside, a general who had earlier won some small successes along the coast of North Carolina. Lately Burnside had been one of the army’s corps commanders, where he had displayed stolid determination but little imagination. His corps had been badly bloodied at Antietam with little to show for its efforts, save that one stone bridge across the eponymous creek, forever after known as “Burnside’s Bridge.” He didn’t ask for the army command—and he privately admitted that he was not certain he was capable of handling a force that numbered more than 100,000 men.
But he was a soldier—indeed, a West Point graduate, ranked eighteenth in a class of thirty-eight—and he would obey orders. When he took command, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had retreated south to the Rappahannock River, where they were resting and refitting following the withdrawal from Maryland. Lincoln wanted a general offensive against Lee, so an offensive he would get.
Burnside’s initial plan was not a bad one: instead of relying on the single rail line through Manassas as his supply corridor, ever vulnerable to Rebel cavalry raids, he proposed to move the army nearer to the coast and rely on the navy to keep him supplied as he began a drive on Richmond. He wasted little time in moving the Army of the Potomac to the small town of Falmouth, Virginia, on the northern bank of the Rappahannock River across from the city of Fredericksburg.
So swift was the movement that Burnside had two corps in Falmouth, with the rest of his now 110,000 men closely following, before Lee had time to react. But here the first example of Burnside’s great shortcomings popped up to delay further Union operations: the commanding general needed to have his engineering units and their pontoon bridges in place before he could advance across the river. Yet Burnside had an uncanny knack for failing to communicate his wishes to his subordinates. In this instance, in early December 1862, the result was that it took more than a week for the bridging companies to join the army.
By this time Lee had his entire army, some 75,000 men divided between Longstreet’s and Jackson’s corps, entrenched around and behind Fredericksburg. The city itself had been evacuated of most of its civilian population, and the Army of Northern Virginia occupied a very strong position indeed. Since here the Rappahannock flowed around a bend so that it passed the town from the north to the south, the Yankees were to the east and the Rebels to the west of the deep waterway.
Longstreet’s corps, on the Confederate left, dug itself in on a series of hills that, while not very high, commanded the entire city. The most formidable of these was called Marye’s Heights and was distinguished by a fine antebellum mansion with a classic columned portico that provided a splendid view of the city and river valley below. Longstreet’s left was protected by the river itself, which curved westward just north of the city, while his right extended along the hills for another two miles south of Fredericksburg.
There Jackson’s position took over, extending two miles more to the south until the hills gradually petered out. Jackson’s right was posted at a small crossroads and rail junction known as Hamilton’s Crossing. Beyond that crossing, J.E.B. “Jeb” Stuart’s cavalry had charge of the far right of the Confederate line.
On the whole it was a very strong position, and it was an obviously tough objective to the Union soldiers looking at it from across the river. While secure against a frontal attack, it could conceivably have been flanked either upstream or down, but now that Burnside had his objective in his sights he wasn’t about to waver in his focused and determined concentration. He realized that Lee might anticipate a sudden move to the left or right flank, so Burnside resolved to surprise his opposing commander by attacking right here!
Lee was surprised, all right—surprised that any army commander could be so foolhardy as to attack his obviously strong position. But for Burnside, the bridging companies were up, and it was high time to move.
The commanding general planned to make his attack with two of what he styled as grand divisions. Each of these consisted of two corps, while a fifth corps would remain on the east side of the river, ready to exploit any success that might be gained by the initial attack. Major General Sumner was in charge of the right grand division, the one charged with taking Fredericksburg itself, while Major General Franklin commanded the left, which would cross the river south of the city and try to turn Lee’s flank.
A total of six bridges would be thrown across the river, three to support each side of the attack. Beginning in the chilly predawn hours of December 11, the engineers started to place their spans. To the south, the bridges would cross from the Union shore anchor to an exposed field along the riverbank, and—since there was no place for Rebel soldiers to conceal themselves in opposing the crossing—these were established with little resistance. Under the protection of a steady artillery bombardment, the engineers did their job handily, and by midday on the 11th all three bridges in front of Franklin’s position were installed and ready to handle traffic.
Things were not so sanguine on the Fredericksburg waterfront, however. Though darkness and, for a few hours after dawn, a thick fog concealed the labors of the engineers from Rebel observers, there was no doubt that the enemy knew what was happening. Despite their most diligent efforts at silence, the men building the pontoon bridges could not help making audible clues as to their activities. As the fog began to lift around midmorning, Confederate sharpshooters—most notably a brigade of Mississippians concealed in the houses and other buildings of Fredericksburg—started to find targets.
Constructing a military pontoon bridge in the Civil War era was a fairly straightforward enterprise. The “pontoons” themselves were flat-bottomed, open-topped boats anchored with their hulls oriented up- and downstream. As these pontoons were placed side by side, gradually extending out from the near shore, stringer beams would be placed across them to stabilize the bridge—think of the boats as railroad ties, the stringers as railroad tracks. These stringers would then be covered by planking, so that the bridge surface would be solid enough for marching men, horses, and wheeled conveyances. Most significantly, each boat anchored, each stringer and section of planking, had to be placed by men who stood fully exposed at the end of the completed section of bridge. The farther the bridge extended, the closer these men were to the rifleman on the far side of the river.
As soon as the fog cleared enough for them to see their targets, the Mississippians opened up, killing and wounding many of the engineers while the rest raced for the security of the friendly bank. At first the northerners replied with volleys of musketry, hundreds of infantrymen lining up to plaster the city with their slugs. The sharpshooters, unscathed, would duck down and wait for the engineers to venture forth again, and then the whole process would resume. The cycle was repeated several times with nothing to show for it except more dead engineers.
Clearly some heavier persuasion would be required, and to this end Burnside turned to his artillery commander, Brigadier General Henry Hunt. Hunt had some 140 guns—the heaviest and longest-range pieces in the Yankee arsenal—in commanding positions on the high ground on his side of the river, and he turned the full force of these batteries against the city of Fredericksburg. Each crew was ordered to expend fifty rounds, taking deliberate aim with each shot.
For nearly two hours the thunderous barrage wracked the brick and timber buildings of the city. Witnesses on the Union side reported it to be the largest barrage of the war to date, and they watched uneasily at the wholesale destruction unleashed upon an essentially civilian target. (The entrenched Rebel army mainly occupied the heights beyond the town.) Beams and bricks flew through the air, walls tumbled, and fires erupted, all concealed within a churning murk of smoke and dust. Finally the bombardment ended and the engineers sallied forth again—only to discover that, while the explosive shells could knock down buildings, they could not kill all, or even most of, the men taking shelter therein. The Mississippians had taken some losses, to be sure, but they still numbered enough to make the exposed bridges deadly zones for any Yankees who dared to venture there.
Finally, Burnside and Sumner sent across several regiments in boats. These men, too, took losses in the crossing, but they fought their way ashore and, after being reinforced, were able to drive the Rebels from the town by nightfall so that the spans could be completed. For the next twenty-four hours, Sumner moved nearly all of his men across the bridges. They took up positions in the city, many of them embarking on an orgy of looting and pillaging among the battered buildings of Fredericksburg. Many eyewitness accounts report garish scenes, with men capering about in women’s dresses and undergarments, and pianos and other musical instruments hauled onto the streets to be kicked into splinters amid the chaos. Any stocks of unbroken liquor bottles were quickly confiscated to further the war effort. Meanwhile, to the south, Franklin moved the men of his grand division across the river, after which they took up assault positions on the plain in front of Jackson’s position.
As December 13, the day of battle, dawned, Burnside had already made enough mistakes to doom his offensive. He intended for Franklin to make a strong effort to break into Jackson’s position and then turn the Rebel army by driving in the right flank. Yet his written orders to his grand division commander suggested to Franklin only that he advance part of his force to determine where in his front the enemy had strong positions. The commanding general never directed Franklin to prosecute a vigorous attack! There was no chance of him executing Burnside’s plan, since he had no clear understanding of what the plan was.
Nevertheless, as the fog lifted in the midmorning, some of Franklin’s men moved forward. A division of Pennsylvanians under the command of General George Meade encountered success when it forced its way into a ravine that split Stonewall Jackson’s defenses. That erstwhile Rebel general had failed to appreciate the lone weakness of his position, and for an hour or more Meade’s men met with considerable success, driving a deep, sharp wedge between the two halves of Jackson’s line.
Yet Franklin (who was thinking “reconnaissance in force”) failed to send any more men to support the Pennsylvanians’ potential breakthrough, while Jackson and Lee wasted no time in countering the Federal thrust. Several Rebel divisions advanced against Meade, hitting the spearhead in front and from both sides, driving him back from the breakthrough and closing the breach in the Confederate line. Before long they pushed the Pennsylvanian division right out of the woods and into the open, where, finally, Union artillery posted across the river broke up the counterattack. But the damage had already been done, as the only Yankee thrust with any potential for success on this grim day was soundly bloodied and rebuffed.
On the plain between Fredericksburg and Marye’s Heights, the day’s drama was just getting started. The fog’s dissipation raised the curtain on one of the most futile and bloody acts in a long and bloody war. Here, too, Burnside’s communication failures manifested themselves in thousands of Union dead and wounded. It was his wish that Sumner’s men attract the attention of the Rebel defenders, fixing them in place until Franklin’s attack to the south should develop into a solid blow against the enemy’s flank.
Sumner intended to attack Longstreet’s corps with a broad front of blue waves, many brigades organized into a powerful blow, but the terrain just outside the city proved sufficient to block his intentions. The ground over which these brigades were to attack was discovered to be scored by ravines and a muddy drainage ditch, and was bracketed by sections of impassable marshy ground.
Instead of cautiously holding his foe’s attention, Sumner, who also seems to have been hazy on Burnside’s actual plan, dispatched his men in a series of attacks—fourteen of them—that all yielded the same result. Because of the constricting terrain, only one brigade could form up and attack at a time. This they did, heroically, each brigade marching forward under a hail of shot and shell from the Rebel cannons emplaced all across the steep slopes of Marye’s Heights.
At the bottom of that hill, placed almost diabolically so as to block the Union advance, was a sunken roadway protected by a solid stone wall more than half a mile in length. Rebel soldiers could stand behind this wall, almost fully protected from enemy fire, and blast away at the fully exposed Yankees with so much musketry that the effect of the volleys resembled the lethal blasts of the machine guns that would come to characterize later wars.
The Federal brigades each followed the same pattern, marching stolidly, enduring the deadly storm, until they reached a very low, almost unnoticeable rise the ground, some hundred yards short of the Sunken Road. Here the Yankees would fire, almost impotently, against their sheltered tormentors, and die in great numbers. First was Nathan Kimball’s brigade, and then the other two brigades of French’s division, II Corps. Hancock’s division of the same corps was next: one, two, three more brigades advancing in order to provide fodder for the Rebel guns. The proud Irish Brigade of New Yorkers went into the attack with 1,400 men; that night, 250 made it back to the regimental camps. And for the whole of the afternoon this butchery was repeated like some factory assembly line in hell, with divisions from the III and V corps joining the carnage, and always one brigade at a time. They kept coming through the afternoon and into the evening, apparently because Burnside was determined to attack and couldn’t think of any other way to go about it.
After those fourteen brigades had been shattered against this impregnable position, with countless officers and men sacrificed in one of the most useless attacks of the war, darkness finally called a halt to the madness. One northern reporter recorded his reaction: “It can hardly be in human nature for men to show more valor, or generals to manifest less judgment,” than he had witnessed on that bloody day.
Burnside, distraught by the disaster, wanted to personally lead a charge against the position the next day with his old VI Corps, but his subordinate commanders talked him out of it. Finally, on December 15, the Army of the Potomac withdrew to the north bank of the Rappahannock, and the Battle of Fredericksburg was over.
It was one of the most horrifyingly costly, one-sided, and futile battles of the war. Union losses numbered more than 12,500 men, while the Rebels lost a little more than 5,000. Absolutely nothing had been gained. Following a few weeks of muddy maneuvers at the end of the year, Burnside was relieved of his army command (January 26). Yet another general commanding the Army of the Potomac had been bested by Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia.
And the war marched into its third year.