The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (9 page)

Sumner had done his best, or worst but the carnage was by no means over. Hooker’s men had crossed the river, under orders to continue the assault, and the commander of one of his divisions, Brigadier General Andrew Humphreys, believed he knew a way to get his troops up to and over the wall, so they could come to grips with the jeering scarecrows in the sunken road. While they were deploying in the dusk he rode among them, telling them not to fire while they were charging. It was obvious by now, he said, that firing did the rebels little damage behind their ready-made breastwork; it only served to slow the attack and expose the attackers to more of the rapid-fire volleys from beyond the wall. The object was to get there fast—much as a man might hurry across an open space in a shower of rain, intending to be as dry as possible when he reached the other side—then rely on the bayonet to do the work that would remain to be done when they got there.

They went forward in the twilight, stumbling over the human wreckage left by five previous charges. Prone men, wounded and unwounded, called out to them not to try it; some even caught at their legs as they passed, attempting to hold them back; but they ignored them and went on, beckoned by voices that mocked them from ahead, calling them blue-bellies and urging them to bring their boots and blankets within reach. Humphreys sat his horse amid the bullets, a slim veteran of aristocratic mien. He had left West Point in ’31, two years behind R. E. Lee, and his record in the peacetime army had been a good one; yet his advancement since then, it was said, had been delayed because of suspicions aroused by his prewar friendship with Jefferson Davis. Now he was out to prove those suspicions false. As he watched he saw the stone wall become “a sheet of flame that enveloped the head and flanks of the column.” Its formations unraveled by sudden attrition, the charge was brought to a stumbling halt about forty yards from the wall. For a moment the Federals hung there, beginning to return the galling fire; but it was useless, and they knew it. Despite the shouts and pleas of their officers—including Humphreys, who remained mounted yet incredibly went unhit—the men turned and stumbled back through the gathering darkness. Or anyhow the survivors did, having added a thousand casualties to the wreckage that cluttered the open slope, ghastly under the pinkish yellow flicker of muzzle-flashes still rippling back and forth along the crest of the stone wall.

“The fighting is about over,” a Union signal officer reported at 6 o’clock from the heights across the way; “only an occasional gun is heard.”

It was over, as he said, but not as the result of instructions from Burnside. Hooker was the one who finally called a halt to the carnage.
“Finding that I had lost as many men as my orders required me to lose,” he later declared in his official report, “I suspended the attack.”

Burnside himself took a much less gloomy view of the state of affairs when he crossed the river late that night for an inspection of the front. Unquestionably a great deal of blood had been shed—far more, in fact, than he would know until he received the final casualty returns—but he had little doubt that a continuation of today’s work would break Lee’s line tomorrow. At any rate he was determined to try it, and he sent out orders to that effect, alerting his front-line commanders. Recrossing the Rappahannock at 4 o’clock in the morning, he got off a wire to Washington: “I have just returned from the field. Our troops are all over the river. We hold the first ridge outside the town, and 3 miles below. We hope to carry the crest today.”

Once more Lee had divined his opponent’s purpose. “I expect the battle to be renewed at daylight,” he wired Richmond, three hours after the final assault had failed, and this opinion was reinforced within another three hours by the capture, shortly before midnight, of a courier bearing orders to Burnside’s front-line commanders for tomorrow’s continuation of the attack. But Sunday’s dawn, December 14, brought only the soup-thick fog of yesterday, without the familiar hum of preparation from down on the curtained plain. Indeed, even after the rising sun had burned away the mist, the only change apparent to the eye was in the lines along the western ridge. Expecting a turning movement, Lee had instructed his men to improve their fortifications in order to free all but a comparative handful for action on the flanks. So well had they plied their tools, these soldiers who six months ago had sneered at digging as cowardly work “unfit for a white man” and in derision had dubbed their new commander “the King of Spades,” that Lee remarked with pleasure at the sight: “My army is as much stronger for these new intrenchments as if I had received reinforcements of 20,000 men.”

No longer in need of prodding, or even suggestion, they kept digging. As the sun rose higher, so did the parapets. But the observers on Lee’s Hill discerned no corresponding activity among the Federals on the plain, portions of whose forward edge were carpeted solid blue with the thick-fallen dead and wounded. The only sign of preparation was that the near ends of the east-west streets of Fredericksburg had been barricaded, as if in expectation of receiving, not delivering, an attack. The morning wore on. Noon came and went: then afternoon: and still no sign that the bluecoats were about to launch the assault that had been ordered in the dispatch captured the night before. As the shadows lengthened, Lee turned at last to Longstreet, who had been acquainted
with the northern commander in the peacetime army. “General,” he said, “I am losing faith in your friend General Burnside.”

He was by no means alone in this, although the principal loss of faith in Old Peter’s friend had occurred within the luckless commander’s own ranks. Refreshed by a short sleep, and still convinced that he would break Lee’s line by continuing yesterday’s headlong tactics, Burnside had risen early that morning, only to be confronted by Sumner, who had been five years in the army before his present chief was born. He was known to be no quitter; in fact, so pronounced was his fondness for personal combat, Burnside had ordered the old man to remain at his left-bank headquarters yesterday, lest he get himself killed leading charges. Today, though, he was quite unlike himself in this respect.

“General,” he said, obviously unstrung by all he had seen the day before, if only from a distance, “I hope you will desist from this attack. I do not know of any general officer who approves of it, and I think it will prove disastrous to the army.”

Burnside was taken aback, having expected to encounter a different spirit. However, as he later wrote, “Advice of that kind from General Sumner, who had always been in favor of an advance whenever it was possible, caused me to hesitate.” To his further dismay, he found his other Grand Division commanders of the same opinion. Franklin did not surprise him greatly in this regard—ironically, that general had served him on the left at Fredericksburg in much the same fashion as he himself had served McClellan on the left at Antietam—but when Hooker, the redoubtable Fighting Joe, was even more emphatic than Sumner in advising no renewal of the attack, he knew the thing was off. His first reaction was one of frantic despair. He had a wild impulse to place himself at the head of his old corps and lead an all-out, all-or-nothing charge against the sunken road, intending to break Lee’s line or else be broken by it. Dissuaded from this, he retired to his tent, bitter with the knowledge that all yesterday’s blood had been shed to no advantage: except to the rebels, who would be facing that many fewer men next time the two armies came to grips. A corps commander, Major General W. F. Smith, followed him into the tent and found him pacing back and forth, distracted. “Oh, those men! Oh, those men!” he was saying. What men? Smith asked, and Burnside replied: “Those men over there,” pointing across the river, where portions of the plain were carpeted blue: “I am thinking of them all the time!”

Sunset closed a day that had witnessed nothing more than a bit of long-range firing on one side and a great deal of digging on the other. Such spectacle as there was, and it was much, came after nightfall. A mysterious refulgence, shot with fanwise shafts of varicolored light, predominantly reds and blues—first a glimmer, then a spreading glow, as if all the countryside between Fredericksburg and Washington
were afire—filled a wide arc of the horizon beyond the Federal right. It was the aurora borealis, seldom visible this far south and never before seen by most of the Confederates, who watched it with amazement. The Northerners might make of it what they chose by way of a portent (after all, these were the
Northern
Lights) but to one Southerner it seemed “that the heavens were hanging out banners and streamers and setting off fireworks in honor of our great victory.”

As if to rival this gaudy nighttime aerial display, morning brought a terrestrial phenomenon, equally amazing in its way. The ground in front of the sunken road, formerly carpeted solid blue, had taken on a mottled hue, with patches of startling white. Binoculars disclosed the cause. Many of the Federal dead had been stripped stark naked by shivering Confederates, who had crept out in the darkness to scavenge the warm clothes from the bodies of men who needed them no longer.

That afternoon, as a result of a request by Burnside for a truce during which he could bury his dead and relieve such of his wounded as had survived two days and nights of exposure without medicine for their hurts or water for their fever-parched throats, the men of both armies had a nearer view of the carnage. No one assigned to one of the burial details ever forgot the horror of what he saw; for here, close-up and life-size, was an effective antidote to the long-range, miniature pageantry of Saturday’s battle as it had been viewed from the opposing heights. Up close, you heard the groans and smelled the blood. You saw the dead. According to one who moved among them, they were “swollen to twice their natural size, black as Negroes in most cases.” They sprawled “in every conceivable position, some on their backs with gaping jaws, some with eyes as large as walnuts, protruding with glassy stare, some doubled up like a contortionist.” Here, he wrote—approaching incoherency as the memory grew stronger—lay “one without a head, there one without legs, yonder a head and legs without a trunk; everywhere horrible expressions, fear, rage, agony, madness, torture; lying in pools of blood, lying with heads half buried in mud, with fragments of shell sticking in oozing brain, with bullet holes all over the puffed limbs.”

Not even amid such scenes as this, however, did the irrepressible rebel soldier’s wry sense of humor—or anyhow what passed for such; mainly it was a biting sense of the ridiculous—desert him. One, about to remove a shoe from what he thought was a Federal corpse, was surprised to see the “corpse” lift its head and look at him reproachfully. “Beg pardon, sir,” the would-be scavenger said, carefully lowering the leg; “I thought you had gone above.” Another butternut scarecrow, reprimanded by a Union officer for violating the terms of the truce by picking up a fine Belgian rifle that had been dropped between the lines, looked his critic up and down, pausing for a long stare at the polished
boots the officer was wearing. “Never mind,” he said dryly. “I’ll shoot you tomorrow and git them boots.”

So he said. But as the thing turned out, neither he nor anyone else was going to be doing any shooting on that field tomorrow: not unless the Confederates started shooting at each other. Night brought a storm of sleet and driving rain, with a hard wind blowing eastward off the ridge and toward the river. When the fog of December 16 rolled away, the plain was empty. A hurried and red-faced investigation disclosed the fact that not a single live, unwounded Federal remained on the west bank of the Rappahannock. Covered by darkness, the sound of their movements drowned by the howling wind, the bluecoats had made a successful withdrawal in the night, taking up their pontoons after such a good job of salvaging equipment that one signal officer proudly reported that he had not left a yard of wire behind.

Burnside was distressed that a campaign which had opened so auspiciously should have so ignominious a close. What was more, reports of the battle were appearing by now in the northern papers, and the correspondents, ignoring the general’s plea that they not treat “the affair at Fredericksburg” as a disaster, pulled out all the descriptive stops and figuratively threw up their hands in horror at the bungling and the bloodshed. An account in the New York
Times
so infuriated Burnside that he summoned the reporter to his tent and threatened to run him through with his sword. By ordinary a mild-natured man, he was souring under the goads of criticism, such as those made by two of his own colonels: one that he and his men had been committed piecemeal—“handed in on toasting forks,” he phrased it—and the other that the defeat had been “owing to the heavy fire in front and an excess of enthusiasm in the rear.” Nor was his temper soothed when he read such comments as the following, from an Ohio journal: “It can hardly be in human nature for men to show more valor, or generals to manifest less judgment, than were perceptible on our side that day.”

In truth, the casualties were staggering: especially by contrast. The Federals had lost 12,653 men, the Confederates well under half as many: 5309. The latter figure was subsequently adjusted to 4201, just under one third of the former, when it was found that more than a thousand of those reported missing or wounded had taken advantage of the chance at a Christmas holiday immediately after the battle.