Glory Road (8 page)

Yet the Federal strength was great, and this unending muster of the troops was so impressive that even stolid, impassive Longstreet began to worry at last, and he asked his chief of artillery if he had not better get some more guns to defend Marye's Heights. The gunner laughed at him; once he opened fire, he said, not even a chicken could live on the plain between the hills and the town. Longstreet looked again and was reassured. Later, when Lee asked him if the overpowering weight of Federals might not be too heavy for him, Longstreet promised to kill every man in the Union Army, provided his ammunition held out.
⁹
The Yankees were with power, but in all the war the Southerners never had to worry as little about a battle as about this one.

Sumner sent his entire command into Fredericksburg, but he did not go with it. Burnside kept him on the home side of the river, feeling that if the old man once got over the bridges he would be unable to keep from getting up into the front line of attack, which was no place for a Grand Division commander. There was a day-long sputter of rifle fire on the skirmish lines outside of town as Federals and Confederates bickered over the approaches; and inside :he town there was a prodigious amount of looting of the empty houses, so that Couch finally put a provost guard at the bridges to keep the looters from getting their plunder across the river. By nightfall, he wrote, the guards had collected "an enormous pile of booty."

Franklin put in the day getting his divisions across by the lower bridges, and by evening he had them posted on a north-and-south fine facing the Confederate hills, with Abner Doubleday's division acting as flank guard on the left. As the men took their places the Iron Brigade, by chance, found itself quartered on the Bernard plantation, some three miles below Fredericksburg, and Company C of the 6th Wisconsin had a contraband cook who until comparatively recently had been held in servitude on this very estate. This one was highly pleased to be back, a free man protected by Lincoln's soldiers, on the plantation where he was born and bred. Yet when he saw some of his soldiers chopping down a fine shade tree to get firewood he ran up to them, pointing toward the manor house and pleading earnestly: "You break dat ol' man's heart if you cut down dat tree! His grandfather planted dat tree!"
¹⁰

Night came at last and army movements ceased, and this great host of Federal soldiers, put down here so deliberately and so ostentatiously, waited for the action which the morning was sure to bring. The generals at the downstream end of the line were nervous. Franklin and his two corps commanders, Reynolds and Smith, interpreted Burnside's orders as calling simply for an armed observation of enemy strength. In a chat with Smith, Burnside had agreed that a good deal more than that was needed, and he had promised to send over supplementary orders. The generals sat up until three in the morning waiting for them, but they never came, either then or thereafter. Franklin, who was prepared to go by the script though the heavens fell, told Reynolds his original instructions stood: send out one division when day came, to seize the hill at Hamilton's Crossing, hold another division ready to support it, and if all goes well, which is not likely, someone will doubtless order something additional.

Dawn came in cold and foggy, with a slow wind in the leafless trees. As the brigades moved out to take their places they could hear the innumerable army noises, but they could see neither their own ranks nor the enemy's, and George Meade spread out his Pennsylvania division in a gray watery light facing west along the edge of a muddy road that led south. Doubleday took his men in on Meade's left, and Gibbon, going into action as a division commander for the first time, lined his men up on the other side. Everybody lounged in the ranks and waited for the fog to lift.

It lifted at about eleven o'clock, and when it went up it went up dramatically, like the curtain of a theater. The Federals were spread out all across the plain south of Fredericksburg, rank upon long rank, with national and regimental banners bright in the morning breeze, guns drawn up at intervals between the brigades, everything looking very martial and splendid, as if war were some sort of pageant. The Rebels were hardly visible. The hills which sheltered them were heavily wooded, and a low railway embankment that ran across the plain in front of the hills was fringed with a stubbly second growth where some advanced lines were concealed. They had a mass of guns planted on the knoll by Hamilton's Crossing, and a mile farther north they had another big bank of guns half hidden in a rising grove. Stonewall Jackson was an old artillerist himself, and he always made good use of his guns. As the last wisps of fog blew away, the Southern gunners stared at the limitless target that lay in front of them, trotted up to their pieces, pulled at trail handspikes and spun elevating screws, and opened fire. Gibbon's and Meade's men, drawn up along the highway, had to stay there and take it, while the Federal batteries rolled forward to make reply and a great turbulence of boiling smoke and heavy sound went tumbling up the sky.

Holding still to be shelled is about as unpleasant a job as infantry gets, and the Yankees in the open plain found it especially hard because they could very easily see the cannoneers who were firing at them. Naturally, they hated them; one soldier wrote that the Rebel gunners, visibly busy around their pieces, looked "like fiends who stirred infernal fires." An indignant general routed one straggler out of a ditch and ordered him to rejoin his command. The straggler saluted and said: "General, I will, jest as soon as them fellers quit throwin' railroad iron at us." And back on the far side of the Rappahannock the chaplain of a Pennsylvania regiment, returning to camp with some wounded men, told the contraband cook of the regimental officers' mess to take some hot coffee over to the embattled regiment. The contraband, looking wide-eyed at the flashing shells that were exploding all over the plain, shook his head emphatically. "I'se not gwine up dar whar so many big stars are busting!"
¹¹

It was at times like this that the Civil War officer was supposed to display a dramatic disregard of danger. To keep his troops steady he had to expose his own person; he had to do it with an air, as if to show that he simply was not aware that there was any danger. The boys of the 16th Maine, growing restive under the cannonade, presently found themselves gaping at Captain James Hall, who had his 2nd Maine battery drawn up in action beside them and who was blithely sitting his horse, carrying on a conversation with the 16th's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles W. Tilden, and the brigadier, Colonel Adrian Root, who were on their horses a dozen yards away from him. Since the air was full of truly deafening noise, the three officers had to shout at the top of their lungs to make themselves heard, but aside from that they might have been three civilian horsemen who had met on a bridle path in a park on a pleasant May morning and were stopping to pass the time of day.

While the soldiers hugged the ground and watched admiringly, a Rebel shell came whistling in between Captain Hall and the two colonels, narrowly missing the colonels and going on to crash into a caisson in the rear, exploding it with an earth-rocking crash. Captain Hall looked faintly annoyed. Very deliberately he dismounted, walked over to one of his guns, and painstakingly sighted it at the Rebel battery which had fired the shot. Satisfied, he stepped back and waved his hand to the gun crew. The gun was fired and landed a direct hit, dismounting a Rebel gun amid a cloud of torn earth and flying splinters. The battery commander walked back to his horse, mounted, and resumed the interrupted conversation as if nothing had happened.
¹²

Such dramatics might help to make shell fire endurable, but in the end the battle would be decided by what the infantry did. By noon or thereabouts the Federal gunners had beaten the Confederate gunfire down just enough so that the infantry could go forward. Meade took his division into a ragged patch of woodland along the edge of the railroad track, Gibbon went into the fringe of the same woodland a little later and a little farther north, and the artillerists let their guns cool while the foot soldiers fought in the swampy underbrush. Meade's division by good fortune stumbled into a gap in Jackson's lines and for a short time made great headway, crumpling up a couple of A. P. Hill's brigades, killing one of his brigadiers, taking prisoners, and just for a moment making it look as if Burnside's battle plan might make sense after all. But although there were more than sixty thousand armed Federals on this plain south of Fredericksburg (one of Hooker's two corps had been sent down here as insurance), these two divisions seemed to be all that Franklin could get into action. The Army of the Potomac was up against its old, old difficulty: visibly outnumbering its enemy, it nevertheless was put into action in such a way that where the actual fighting was going on there were more Rebels present than Yankees. Stonewall Jackson sent in fresh troops, and the Federal assault columns were smashed and came running back into the open, hotly pursued. Across the open plain, shaken by the blast of many guns, there rose the high unearthly keen of the Rebel yell.

That yell
-
"that hellish yell," a Michigan soldier called it—appears to have been an actual power in battle, worth many regiments to the
Confederacy. A Federal surgeon wrote after the war:
"I have never, since I was born
, heard so fearful a noise as a Rebel yell. It is nothing like a hurrah, but rather a regular wildcat screech." And lest that be thought the nervous reaction of a timid non
-
combatant, here is the verdict of a front-line veteran from the 6th Wisconsin:

"There is nothing like it this side of the infernal region, and the peculiar corkscrew sensation that it sends down your backbone under these circumstances can never be told. You have to feel it, and if you say you did not feel it, and heard the yell, you have
never
been there."
¹⁸

A spine-chilling thing, the Rebel yell. Not for nothing did old Stonewall himself, grimmest of all America's soldiers, call it "the sweetest music I ever heard."

Yelling like fiends, then, and inspired equally by hatred of the Yankee invader and the desire to plunder the invader's camp and person of good boots, blankets, and coffee, the Rebels came storming across the railroad and down into the plain as if they would shove the last Federals into the river. But Franklin's supply of support troops was practically limitless, and the Federal artillery was ready and waiting. The battery commanders held their men in until the Confederates were within point-blank range, and then they hit them hard with canister and slammed in additional salvos as fast as they could load their pieces, this being one occasion when General Hunt's one-round-in-two-minutes rule did not apply. The Confederate fighting lines were cut and broken and the men withdrew to their trenches on the wooded hillsides, and all of the important fighting on this part of the battlefield was over.

It remained, however, for the Iron Brigade to carry out a little assignment which had no effect on the battle itself but which at least restored internal harmony to the brigade.

This brigade was down at the extreme left of the army, and while the serious fighting was going on elsewhere, Jeb Stuart's horse artillery and dismounted cavalry had been making pests of themselves in some broken country near the river. The Iron Brigade was ordered to go out and put a stop to it. So Solomon Meredith, wearing his general's stars in action for the first time, sent the rookie 24th Michigan into a tangled bit of woodland where Rebel snipers lurked, with the 7th Wisconsin in immediate support and the rest of the brigade following after.

Despite all the fine things the generals and the war correspondents wrote about troops being eager to get into battle, Civil War soldiers were as sensible as any others and went into action usually because they had to and not because they liked it. But this was one of the times when some men really wanted to fight. This 24th Michigan had been ostracized for two solid months and it had had all it could take. If it did not soon redeem itself under fire its life simply was not going to be worth living any longer, and nothing the Rebels could do to it was half as bad as the cold contempt it was getting from the rest of the brigade. So when orders came through the men went forward with a grim determination that might have taken them straight through the middle of Jackson's main line if anyone had thought to point them that way. The brigade rolled forward, the four veteran regiments happy enough to let someone else go in the front line, watching the straw-feet with the half-amused, critical eyes of old-timers.