The Battle of Fredericksburg, 1862

In December of 1862 Burnside brought the Union Army of the Potomac across the river into Fredericksburg, Virginia. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia stood on the high ground west of the town, and Longstreet held the hill called Marye’s Heights. On the thirteenth the Union infantry went at it.

There was a road at the foot of the hill, worn down below the level of the ground on either side by years of carts, with a stone wall along its outer edge. A man standing in that road was covered to the chest. A man standing behind him could load and pass his rifle forward. Above and behind them, on the crest, were the guns.

A Confederate artillerist told Longstreet that when they opened on that field, a chicken could not live on it. He was being professional rather than boastful, and he was right.

Between the town and the wall lay about four hundred yards of open ground, rising, with a millrace cut across it that had to be crossed on stringers because the planking was gone. Every Union brigade that came out of Fredericksburg that day came out into that. They came out one brigade at a time, because the streets they were forming in would not let them come out any other way, and so the whole afternoon was not one attack but fourteen.

They knew. That is the part I want stated plainly. The men in the later waves had spent hours watching what happened to the earlier ones, from a distance close enough to see it, and they dressed their lines and went anyway.

None of them reached the wall. Not one, all day, in fourteen tries. The closest any of them got, the ground itself was already covered with what was left of the ones before. In the evening the survivors on that field could not get back, so they lay down among the dead and used them for cover, and stayed there through a December night cold enough that the wounded who could not crawl froze where they were.

That night the aurora came out over Virginia, which almost never happens that far south. Men on both sides stood and looked at it. The ones who could still look up.

Eight thousand had fallen in front of that wall. The whole battle cost the Union twelve and a half thousand and the Confederates five and a half, and the army withdrew back across the river two days later, and nothing whatever had changed except the arithmetic.

Burnside wanted to lead the next assault in person, at the head of his old corps, and his officers refused to let him. He wept. Lee, watching from the hill while the lines came apart in front of him for the sixth or seventh time, said that it was well war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. It is the most quoted sentence of that day, and he said it while winning.

I stood in the sunken road for part of it and out on the field for the rest, and I want to be clear that those were not two different jobs. The men behind the wall who did not die that day mostly died in the next two years, and I have them too. The wall did not save anyone. It only sorted them.