CHAPTER 32
What will the civilized world say when they read these words sent forth by the President of the United States . . . they will say justly that a crime so fearful as that proposed was never before contemplated by any nation, civilized or barborous.
—FRANKLIN PIERCE
Lincoln
On December 11, 1862, at 3:00 a.m., Union engineers went quickly to work building bridges across the icy Rappahannock near Fredericksburg. When daylight came, they found themselves under fire and fled, their work incomplete. The response by General Burnside, now in charge of the Army of the Potomac, came in eight thousand pieces, courtesy of 150 cannon, which Longstreet observed was “a perfect storm of shot and shell, crushing the houses with a cyclone of fiery metal.” The city burst into flames in several places, and “solid shot rained like hail.” When the engineers resumed their work, the sniper fire was renewed, and Burnside sent soldiers across in pontoon boats to clear the area. He and his men marched into Fredericksburg the next day.
The Confederates, now sixty-five thousand strong, were expecting him, and for more than twenty days had been preparing their welcome. Watching one hundred thousand men under Burnside prepare for combat, Jackson “grimly awaited the onslaught.”
To the Confederate left was Marye’s Heights, and at its base a sunken road, at the end of which was a shoulder-high wall. Behind this wall Longstreet placed twenty-five hundred men. The night before, at least some of Burnside’s commanders believed he was making a terrible mistake. “If you make the attack as contemplated,” General Hawkins told him, “it will be the greatest slaughter of the war; there isn’t infantry enough in our whole army to carry those heights if they are well defended.” A colonel advised, “The carrying out of your plan will be murder, not warfare.” Burnside bristled at their eagerness to throw cold water on his plans, citing another general who had predicted victory in forty-eight hours. The next morning the attack on the raised and heavily fortified position began.
As the Union forces approached, “a storm of lead was poured into their advancing ranks and they were swept from the field like chaff before the wind. A cloud of smoke” concealed the scene for a moment when it was finished. Those who survived sought refuge in a railroad cut, only to be bombarded by artillery. Moments later came another attempt with the same results, as men would “melt like snow coming down on warm ground,” according to a Union general. By the second charge, Longstreet noted, “the field in front . . . was thickly strewn with the dead and dying Federals, but again they formed with desperate courage and renewed the attack and were driven off. At each attack the slaughter was so great that by the time the third attack was repulsed, the ground was so thickly strewn with dead that the bodies seriously impeded the approach of the Federals.” The fourth wave finally saw a single man make it within one hundred feet of the Confederate position before being killed. They came a fifth time and a sixth time with the same results, “leaving the battlefield literally heaped with the bodies of their dead . . . fallen like the steady dripping of rain from the eaves of a house,” piled as high as three bodies deep in some places. The temperature dropped to zero overnight, with many wounded on the field dying of cold, freezing the bodies to the ground. For thirty minutes that evening the aurora borealis appeared in the sky above Fredericksburg, one of the southernmost instances in history of the northern lights. The battle was not renewed the following day, and finally on the 15th Burnside withdrew from Fredericksburg and back across the Rappahannock. It was such a tragic irony; Burnside’s aggression might well have resulted in the taking of Richmond the previous year, or the destruction of Lee at Antietam, but McClellan’s caution at Fredericksburg would have saved countless lives from a pointless and sudden end. The cover of Harper’s Weekly featured a cartoon of Columbia, the personification of America, commanding Lincoln and Stanton to explain to her, “Where are my 15,000 sons—murdered at Fredericksburg?” Lincoln was devastated by the news of yet another Union defeat. “Oh, if there is a man out of hell that suffers more than I do, I pity him!”