Never Call Retreat (4 page)

In front of Fredericksburg the Rappahannock River flows nearly north to south. West of the town there is a low ridge known as Marye's Heights. At the time of the battle there was a sunken road flanked by a stone wall running along the base of this ridge, and on the crest there was a fine pillared mansion with lawns and open grounds around it. The ridge runs north to the river (which curves westward, upstream from Fredericksburg) and opposite what was in 1862 the southern end of the town the ridge ends in the shallow valley of a stream known as Hazel Run. South of Hazel Run there is an irregular chain of little wooded hills, going south for about three miles and ending in an insignificant knoll that looks down on a looping curve in the railroad that goes on to Richmond. Beyond the knoll a country road ran across the tracks—Hamilton's Crossing, they called it; the name was remembered because it marked the southern end of the battlefield.

None of this elevated ground, from Marye's Heights to Hamilton's Crossing, is really very high, but Lee's army occupied all of it and for purely defensive purposes the position was extremely strong. To be sure, it was not good for anything more than defense. Burnside had artillery planted all along the Yankee side of the river, and Lee had no scope for a counteroffensive. But as a place on which the Army of the Potomac might easily break its back the Confederate position here was ideal.

Burnside's battle plan called for two offensive blows, one of which was supposed to puncture the Confederate left center while the other overpowered the Confederate right. It was hoped that the two columns of assault, carrying out their assignments, would eventually join hands in the Confederate rear; and of course if they did this Burnside would win his battle and the road to Richmond would be wide open. To do it, however, Burnside's men must carry Marye's Heights by direct frontal assault, and this was little less than a military impossibility; what with the guns on top of the ridge and the infantry packed into the sunken road behind that stone wall, this position simply could not be taken by storm. Furthermore, the assault on Lee's right would encounter the seasoned army corps of the fabulous Stonewall Jackson, who had boasted with fair accuracy that no one ever drove his troops out of a place they had been ordered to hold. Still, this was Burnside's plan, and on the morning of December 13 the army undertook to put it into effect.

There was a heavy fog that morning, and the Confederates on their hills looked east over a filmy white sea that hid everything except the church spires of Fredericksburg. They could see no Yankees, but they could hear them; there were bugle calls, going from corps to division to brigade to regiment, and there was the muffled, shuffling tramp of great masses of marching men, and the clank and clatter of gun carriages jolting along frozen roads. Then, around eleven o'clock in the morning, a wind shredded the fog and drew it away, and under the clear sunlight the waiting Southerners could see their enemies.

They could see all of them at once, as if the footlights had suddenly lit up some unimaginable stage, and in no other battle did they see anything quite as breath-taking. Here was the Army of the Potomac, on the move and coming out to fight; it seemed to be made visible all in one instant, the wind rippled in its flags and the sunlight sparkled from musket barrels and bayonets and the brass fieldpieces. Out of Fredericksburg came long columns-of-four, marching west toward Marye's Heights. Other columns moved down the country roads to the south, and by the river still more columns were coming across on the pontoon bridges. Below the town, battle line upon battle line began to swing forward through the brown fields toward Stonewall Jackson's position, and under Marye's Heights the endless columns fanned out to make more battle lines. Far beyond, across the river, quick flashes of light flickered up and down the length of Stafford Heights as the powerful Federal siege guns began to feel for their targets.

Southeast of Hamilton's Crossing, Jeb Stuart's horse artillery was taking position to open fire on the Yankee left, and on Marye's Heights the massed guns began to lay crisscross lines of fire on the plain where the Federal assault was taking shape. A little earlier, posting his guns, tough James

Longstreet, lieutenant general commanding the left of Lee's army, asked his chief of artillery if there were guns enough to cover the approaches, and the artillerist laughed at him. Once he opened fire, he said, not even a chicken could live on the open ground between Fredericksburg and the sunken road.
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It was only a moderate overstatement.

Burnside had divided his army into three masses which he called Grand Divisions, each commanded by a major general in whom he had confidence and with whom the battle plan had been discussed earlier. The hardest assignment, the assault on Marye's Heights, had been given to the Right Grand Division, led by Edwin Vose Sumner. Sumner was a rigid Old-Army type, a man of boundless courage and fidelity and the simplest mental processes; admirable, and yet a little out of date. He had been an army officer since 1819, which was long before most of the men in his command had been born, and he had a roaring parade-ground voice and a dogged heads-down quality that led his juniors to refer to him as the Bull of the Woods. Burnside had ordered him to stay on the Yankee side of the river, fearing that if Sumner were anywhere near the scene of action he would insist on getting all the way up in the front line. Burnside's order probably saved Sumner's life, because the front line of his Grand Division this day was a deadly place and the old man would unquestionably have been in it if his orders had permitted it.

Sumner was brave and so were his men, but bravery was not enough. He sent his two army corps into action unimaginatively, after the Antietam system, one division at a time, so that the attack on the heights became a long series of battles and the defense never had to bear the weight of one massive blow. Each division had to cross the wide plain where the dead grass was blistered by Longstreet's artillery, and the men who were not killed by the gunfire had to march up toward the stone wall that concealed the sunken road. The wall was a quarter of a mile long, there were six ranks of infantry behind it enjoying almost perfect protection, and the blue brigades coming up elbow to elbow offered a target that could not be missed.

The mustering of Burnside's hosts was impressive to see. Watching from the hilltop where he had his headquarters flag, Lee knew a moment of doubt and cautioned Longstreet that this pressure might break his line. Longstreet refused to worry, asserting that if every man in the Federal army came up to assault Marye's Heights, "I will kill them all."
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From the start of the battle to the end of it, not one Federal soldier got within 100 feet of the stone wall.

The failure was not for want of trying: nearly half of the Yankee army set out to get there. After Sumner's people wore themselves out Burnside sent in his Center Grand Division. This was under Joseph Hooker, whom the newspapers called "Fighting Joe" and who was everything Sumner was not. He was smart, adaptable, his mental agility unhampered by the slightest trace of loyalty toward any superior: there was no reason to doubt his fidelity to the Union cause, but he did see the war mostly in terms of opportunity for Joe Hooker, and there was no opportunity in front of Marye's Heights. He sent back word that the assault could not succeed, and when his orders were repeated he rode back to headquarters to protest in person, doing it so vigorously that Burnside's military secretary considered him "ungentlemanly and impatient." It did no good; orders were orders, and Hooker's division began to advance over ground littered with dead and wounded from Sumner's command.

Hooker was right. The case was hopeless, and the new divisions got no farther than those that had gone in earlier. Toward the end of the day a curious additional handicap developed. Bridadier General Andrew A. Humphreys, leading a division through the smoky twilight toward the blazing wall, believed that his men might actually have stormed the position if the prostrate survivors of former attacks had not kept trying to stop them. Humphreys' soldiers waded through a sea of clutching hands; wounded and unwounded men wanted to see no more men killed in an attempt to do the impossible, and they reached up to grab feet and pants legs, throwing the advance into such disorder that it gave way under fire as all the others had done. And at last, "finding that I had lost as many men as my orders required me to lose," Hooker suspended the attack.
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Different participants said different things, all of them meaning much the same. Old Sumner spoke of the fearful musketry that swept the plain and said that "no troops could stand such a fire as that." Hooker remarked that the soldiers "were put to do a work that no men could do," and one of the infantrymen involved said that he and his comrades "might as well have tried to take Hell." The next day a general officer visited Burnside and found him pacing restlessly back and forth in his tent, repeating "Oh, those men! Those men!" The visitor asked what he meant, and Burnside gestured toward the field where so many had fallen, saying: "I am thinking of them all the time."
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Haunted thus by ghosts, Burnside also was plagued by a tragic might-have-been. This half of the battle never could have been a success, but the other half was different. His blow at Stonewall Jackson could have been a victory. It did not actually come very close to it but the possibility was there, and Burnside did not need to shoulder all of the blame for the failure.

In his assault on Lee's right Burnside used his Left Grand Division, under William B. Franklin. A favorite of the departed McClellan, Franklin was careful, competent, and uninspired; the sort of general who is unlikely to make a serious blunder and equally unlikely to capitalize on a blunder made by his opponent. On this day at Fredericksburg, Franklin followed the strict letter of his orders and came to failure. It seems likely that even after the battle was over he did not quite see the success that might have been won if his orders had been more intelligently drafted by General Burnside or more intelligently interpreted by himself.

Burnside wanted Franklin to use his entire force to fight his way into Lee's right rear, but the written orders he sent down did not say it that way. They told Franklin to get ready for a rapid move down the Old Richmond road, which ran past Jackson's front and gave access to roads that led directly to the Confederate rear. They also told him to send, at once, "a division at least" to seize the rising ground north of Hamilton's Crossing. Two of Hooker's infantry divisions and two divisions of cavalry were put at his disposal, so that he commanded nearly half of the Federal army. He was instructed, finally, to be prepared "to move at once, as soon as the fog lifts."
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This opaque writing led to trouble. Franklin thought he had simply been told to strike a moderate blow and stand by for further orders. Dutifully enough, he sent out a single division to attack Jackson's line, with another division in support. He also moved a division south to keep Stuart's pestiferous horse artillery at a distance; using two fieldpieces, Stuart's brilliant young gunner, Major John Pelham, managed to delay Franklin's deployment for most of the morning. But by noon Franklin was ready to take additional action as soon as headquarters told him to do so.

He got no further orders, but unexpected opportunity did present itself.

The division that attacked Jackson was a good one; three brigades of Pennsylvanians under crabbed, reliable Major General George Gordon Meade. It crossed the railroad tracks, crashed through stubby thickets and small timber, and—incredibly—broke the Confederate line. If the breakthrough had been exploited, Burnside could have won his battle in spite of the odds.

Jackson's army corps, approximately 35,000 strong, had been posted farther down the Rappahannock, and Lee had been a little tardy in ordering it up to the line it held on December 13. Placing his men in haste, Jackson apparently had been careless. At any rate there was a gap in his line just where Meade's men hit him, and the Pennsylvanians went straight through it, crumpling the brigades on either side, driving off the support troops, and actually reaching the higher ground Burnside wanted occupied. There they were, 4,500 of them, right in the middle of Jackson's 35,000, touching the chance of victory. Afterward Meade cried bitterly: "The slightest straw almost would have kept the tide in our favor."
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Meade's men needed help they did not get. The division that had been assigned to support them got started late, floundered up ineffectively, never came in contact with them, and was broken and driven away without giving them the slightest help. Jackson was quick to organize a counterattack, and when it struck it struck with power; the Pennsylvanians were assailed in front and on both flanks, nobody in all the Federal army showed any sign of coming to the rescue, and at last the division broke and ran for it, more than a third of its men out of action. The triumphant Confederates swept out into the open as if they would drive the whole Federal left into the river, but Franklin's artillery halted them and when the day ended nothing whatever had been accomplished. Burnside's failure had been complete. He had lost more than 12,000 men, his opponent had lost fewer than half that many, and the battle had done nothing except demonstrate that the strength of the Army of the Potomac lay in its rank and file rather than in its generals.

It demonstrated too the prankish fate that governs battles. The command failure had been abysmal; and yet if Sumner and Franklin had changed places, each man taking his own limitations to the other man's assignment, and each working under Burnside's hazy directives, the battle might have been very different. Franklin, sticking to the letter of his orders, would have tapped at Marye's Heights with one division, bringing one more up in support, and letting it go at that; and an infinity of useless death and suffering would have been avoided. Sumner, fighting heads down, would have hit the break in Jackson's line with as many of his 60,000 as he could get to the scene, and something important might have come of it; and you can imagine the whole battle turned inside-out if you imagine one change in the assignments of two men. There is not much logic in war.
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Burnside wanted to renew the attack next day but was talked out of it, and for two days the armies stayed in skirmish-line contact, neither daring to strike at the other; then Burnside moved his men back across the river to their old camps, took up his bridges, and tacitly confessed that the whole adventure had been a failure. Lee was left in full possession of the town and the battlefield.