By December of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had had quite enough. 

South Carolina’s secession from the Union, the proximate cause of the current troubles, had taken place two years earlier.  Since then, events had gone from bad to worse.  The campaign in July of the previous year, the March to Richmond designed to end the South’s illegal tomfoolery, ended in a fiasco near the town of Manassas, Virginia, as the green and panicked Federal draftees turned tail and ran across a creek known as Bull Run.  Only the disorganization of the Rebel forces had prevented them from crossing the Potomac and sacking the Federal capital of Washington.

A change of Union commanders, from the outmatched General Irvin McDowell to the boy wonder of the West, General George B. McClellan, was followed by a period of training and organization, and by a change in outlook.  The war was not likely to be won with just a show of Union numerical superiority.  The Federals would have to achieve victory the old-fashioned way:  they would have to earn it.

But McClellan proved to be an unmitigated disaster.  Fraught by indecisiveness, prone to believing his forces were vastly outnumbered when the opposite was true, “Little Mac” frittered away time and tactical advantage.  His bold amphibious landing on the Virginia coastline and subsequent march to Richmond along the lines of the York and James Rivers were marked by delays and false starts, allowing the Confederate forces time to build up the defenses around their capital and, under the bold and decisive direction of General Robert E. Lee, to tip the momentum to their side.

After fighting and losing a second battle on the Bull Run battlefield, the Union was forced into defensive mode, shadowing Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia as it crossed into Federal territory.  On 17 September 1862, the two forces clashed at Antietam Creek near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland.  Despite enjoying a two-to-one superiority in forces and having had a copy of Lee’s battle orders fall into his hands, McClellan nearly lost the fight, avoiding defeat only through the courage and valor of the units fighting under his command.  That day remains the bloodiest day in American military history, with a combined 23,000 casualties in less than twelve hours of fighting.

By November, President Lincoln had replaced the ineffective McClellan with General Ambrose Burnside, one of McClellan’s subordinates.  The commander-in-chief stressed to Burnside the need for decisive and forthright action in taking the fight to the enemy, and demanded to see a plan for the taking of Richmond forthwith.  Burnside accommodated him, outlining a scheme to advance on the river town of Fredericksburg and then on to Richmond along the line of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad.

On 11 December the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rappahannock River and seized the lightly-defended town of Fredericksburg.  Lee had deployed the Army of Northern Virginia along the high ground southwest of the city itself and gathered his units into defensive positions on the commanding heights.

Burnside’s plan involved the separation of his forces into three Grand Divisions.  The Right Division under the command of General  Edwin “Bull” Sumner and the Center Division under General Joseph Hooker would attack the entrenched Confederate forces situated on Marye’s Heights overlooking the city, while the Left Division under General William Franklin would engage in a secondary assault of the Rebel lines about ten miles downstream from Fredericksburg.  The principal attack on Marye’s Heights would be supported by 220 pieces of artillery massed on the opposite shore of the Rappahannock.  The assault would be launched on 13 December.

The morning broke cold and foggy.  Franklin’s attack on the Confederate right found an opening in the Rebels’ lines, and an aggressive and decisive assault there might have rewritten the result of the battle.  But Franklin suffered from his former commanding general’s lack of “get up and go” and offensive spirit and allowed the attack to bog down.  The Left Grand Division was unable to cross in force the rail line of the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac less than a mile from the southern bank of the Rappahannock.  Another Union opportunity frittered away.

Meanwhile, the assault on Marye’s Heights above Fredericksburg was launched.  The Union troops under Sumner left the city and approached the steep embankment by crossing a drainage ditch and an open field devoid of cover and concealment that stretched about five hundred yards.  Wave after wave of Union assaults was decimated by Confederate sharpshooter and artillery fire, while the fog and mist kept the union batteries across the river silent.  The lucky few that crossed the field and scaled the embankment of Marye’s Heights were forced to take cover behind a stone wall about fifty yards short of the Rebel lines.  A few brave souls from the Irish Brigade managed to reach a sunken road a few yards from the Dixie troops at the top of the Heights; this road proved to be the high water mark of the attack.

Six Union divisions had been sent into the attack, one brigade after another, sixteen charges in all; each failed to scale the Heights, at a loss of as many as 8,000 casualties.  In the Irish Brigade, one of the most highly decorated units of the war, all but one officer involved in the assault made the supreme sacrifice for their adopted country.

By 15 December, the Union Army had retreated across the Rappahannock and went into winter quarters in the area of Falmouth.  General Ambrose E. Burnside, whose facial hair was copied by men of the day and were known as “Burnsides” before being reversed into the contemporary “sideburns,” was dismissed from his command a little over a month later, not quite three months’ tenure.

Historians love to engage in “what if” scenarios, and the one I always pose about Fredericksburg is this:  what might have happened had Burnside placed the more timid and cautious Franklin in charge of the Marye’s Heights assault, while employing “Bull” Sumner downriver?  Would Franklin, seeing the futility of the attack on the entrenched heights, have called a cessation to the slaughter?  Would Sumner have attacked the Confederate right with the same vigor and determination that he launched against Marye’s Heights?  Unfortunately, we’ll never know.

Watching the slaughter taking place above Fredericksburg, General Robert E. Lee remarked to his aides, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”

After having toured the battlefield, Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin visited the White House and informed Lincoln, “It was not a battle, it was a butchery.”

And in the aftermath of the failed battle, Lincoln himself wrote, “If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it.”

© 2009, Kenneth M. Rhodes

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