I
. Onto Fredericksburg
Dad & I flew into Dulles outside D.C. on
the afternoon of April 28th and made our way south
through eastern Virginia on state and rural routes.
This region is saturated in Civil War heritage like
no other. Historical markers appear every few miles,
the past never far away. Case-in-point was our final
stretch into Fredericksburg along state route 17,
the modern-era rendition of a road that would bring
disaster to Ambrose Burnside’s final act as
commander of the Union’s Army of the Potomac:
a ignominious winter maneuver left to history as
“the Mud March” . . . Dad & I are
both members of the Civil War Trust and know
the threat bottom-line commercial & residential
development poses to the battlefields of mid-Virginia.
We expected the region to be built up; but nothing
like what we encountered. Williams Street runs west
from Fredericksburg into central Virginia as route
3. In the 1860s this was the “Plank Road,”
one of the few “improved” roads in the
area. These roads always figured prominently in
the mass shuttling of troops to, from, and during
campaigns. From late November 1862 to May 1863,
the Plank Road was the arterial route for Robert
E. Lee’s C.S. Army of Northern Virginia.
Along this route his Confederates marched into their
impregnable positions on the hills west of Fredericksburg,
and would double-back the following spring to repel
a daring Union thrust pushing east from the “Chancellor
House.” Along this route today stands many
solid miles of commercial indigestion. The stretch
to the immediate west of Fredericksburg is built
over in big chain-store ways. Miles on miles of
service-roads and rampways and parking lots and
drives run helter-skelter. All of them are dominated
by sprawling complexes that stretch out of sight.
Coming from Atlanta, where this carpet-bomb approach
to suburban development is sadly the norm, I was
still overpowered. It seemed to dwarf the historic
downtown that hugs a bend of the Rappahannock River,
almost cowering before the commercial juggernaut
gobbling up all rural scenes to the west. From our
hotel – dead-centre of this mess – all
references to the landmark battles fought here have
been overrun by the dislocation of mass-consumerism
along the old Plank Road. A rural route only a generation
ago, it is now a six-lane serpent of asphalt that
slices into Virginia . . . Needless to say, we were
mighty relieved to discover “old” Fredericksburg’s
unique character intact.
Fredericksburg can rightfully claim itself one of
the most historic towns in America. With roots in
the early 18th century, it boasts of colonial and
Revolution-era heritage in the names of Hugh Mercer,
James Monroe, the general himself: George Washington,
and his mother Mary. But we were here to explore
the town’s more infamous role in our heritage:
the Battle of Fredericksburg, December, 1862
– one of the tragic disasters and most complete
victories of the Civil War.
* * *
On the night of November 7, 1862, the precise, plodding
and irrefutably vain, George McClellan, was relieved
as commander of the U.S. Army of the Potomac.
Command of the flagship army fell to a reluctant
Ambrose Burnside, who felt himself unfit for the
role; but accepted on the fact that his rival, Joe
Hooker, would be awarded the post if he refused
. . . This change in command came at a critical
point. The Army of the Potomac had won a
tactical victory at the gruesome Battle of Antietam
that September, having repelled the Confederate
“invasion” of Maryland (the South always
claimed Maryland as its own). The “victory”
had provided political leverage enough for Abraham
Lincoln to issue his preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation. This act alone raised the cause
of Union to a moral plateau above the sectional
political and economic fractures on which the war
had been declared and prosecuted, in turn making
it a diplomatic quagmire for foreign powers, such
as England and France, to intervene on behalf of
the South – an often rumored hope of C.S.
leaders throughout the war . . . Yet the momentum
following Antietam had melted away. McClellan allowed
Lee to retreat to relative safety in the Shenandoah
Valley and had been slow to pursue. Coupled with
past instances of the “slows,” a term
used by Lincoln, McClellan’s tenure as chief
was terminated. Burnside was immediately pressed
by the leaders in Washington for his “intentions.”
In less than a week, he had drafted, submitted,
revised, then re-submitted a plan that was approved.
He would race his six corps – 118,000 men
having been reorganized into three “Grand
Divisions” of two corps each – around
the flank of Lee’s then scattered forces,
throw pontoons across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg
and, keeping close on the Richmond Fredericksburg
& Potomac railroad for use as a supply line,
light out for Richmond. He would induce Lee to attack
him on advantageous terms. With speed, it was a
solid plan.
Through the waning hours of sunlight – April
28, 2003 – Dad & I readied our plans for
the next day. We had a single day to tour Fredericksburg
before moving on and couldn’t be hampered
by the “slows.” We would have to be
decisive and flexible in our planning. Our main
source – well-highlighted, notes scribbled
in margins – was the volume of Time-Life’s,
the Civil War, entitled “Rebels Resurgent.”
A birthday present when I was a 15, its volumes
have become our requisite “pre-Ramble”
research and workhorse in the field. This, along
with a detailed driving-tour map purchased at the
park’s Visitor’s Center – accompanied
by narration on cd – and the standard NMP
literature, would be all we need. Over dinner we
mapped out a strategy, coordinating our movements
with the flow of the battle. We would start our
tour across the river at Park HQ: the colonial-era
mansion known as “Chatham,” which served
as HQ for the “Right Grand Division”
commander, Edwin Sumner . . . After dinner, we drove
back to our hotel along LaFayette Road on the south
side of town. This road, flanked by the old RF&P
(still an active CSX/Amtrak rail line) businesses,
apartments and residences, marks the far-left of
the seven separate division-strength assaults that
would be launched from this sector on the afternoon
of December 13, 1862. Yet as we drove up from town
the thousands of casualties who suffered and died
desperately on this ground seemed a hard thing to
reconcile amongst a historic, but nonetheless modern
city just doing its thing. It was any other evening,
in another corner of America – even if
it did sit on top of a 19th century killing field.
* * *
By late 1862, Robert E. Lee had already cemented
a reputation for being decisive, even daring. With
the odds always long, he often had little choice.
But on the morning of November 15, 1862, both decisiveness
and the odds were with his newly installed counterpart,
Ambrose Burnside . . . Following the retreat from
Maryland, Lee had positioned his I Corps under James
Longstreet at Culpeper in north-central Virginia,
allowing “Stonewall” Jackson’s
II Corps to remain masked by the mountain ranges
of the Shenandoah – ideally, to strike the
initially languid pursuit of the Union army into
Virginia. But this scenario went unrealized. Burnside
staged a “feint” against Longstreet
on the morning of the 15th and under its deception
set his massive army on the road for Fredericksburg.
The three U.S. “Grand Divisions” –
the “Right” under Edwin Sumner, the
“Center” under Joseph Hooker, the “Left”
under William Franklin – marched out in that
order over the next two days. Sumner’s men
covered the forty miles in two grueling days. Hooker’s
and Franklin’s men closed up soon after. Burnside
had reached his objective, but would gain nothing
if he could not put his army across the river into
town and secure the RF&P. He’d far outpaced
the pontoon trains that’d been ordered to
meet the army. This was a serious problem. The pontoons
were necessity. All other bridges, including the
railroad trestle, had been destroyed earlier in
the war. And as the Union army waited for the engineers
to arrive, a driving three-day rain began to pour
down, swelling the Rappahannock and scotching the
alternative of fording upriver. Burnside was at
the mercy of a U.S. Quartermaster Dept. who’d
been afflicted with the “slows” . .
. Half of the pontoon bridging material the army
would need had been sent overland via wagon train.
The other half was ferried down the Potomac. Yet
both deliveries did not even leave Washington D.C.
– fifty miles north – until the 19th,
the day Sumner’s men pulled up into Falmouth
directly across the river from Fredericksburg. The
rainstorm mired the overland train in mud over its
axles. It made no progress and was ordered back
to D.C. to be ferried down the Potomac, as well.
The delay unraveled Burnside’s entire plan.
The pontoons did not arrive at Aquia – a Potomac
river town about ten miles to the north of Fredericksburg
– until the 25th. This alone provided Lee
with more than enough time to pull together his
lean army and intercept the Union’s aborted
drive on Richmond. Burnside had lost the race. A
follow-up plan of improvising a new crossing miles
south at a riverbend called “Skinker’s
Neck” was thwarted by the timely arrival of
Jackson’s hard-marching corps from the Shenandoah.
The Army of the Potomac, from general to
private, could only brood over the opportunity missed,
as they watched and listened to the Army of Northern
Virginia confidently perfect one of the strongest
defensive positions of the entire war. Colonel Samuel
Zook, a U.S. II Corps brigade commander whose men
would absorb the horrific price of storming those
defenses, penned an acrid letter prior to battle,
predicting, “I expect we will be licked, for
we have allowed the rebs nearly four weeks to erect
batteries &c. to slaughter us by thousands in
consequence of the infernal inefficiency of the
Quarter Master Genl & his subordinates”
(1). . .
The core of both these armies were veterans by late
1862. Given the unforeseen sacrifice and bloodshed
that the war – still four months from its
halfway point – had already produced, prophetic
fatalism was certainly their right. As the mountains
of letters and reminiscences that these men left
behind can attest, they called it as they saw it.
And who could blame them? It was quite possible
to be dead the following day.
Click for Part II . The
Crossings and Prelude to Battle
