War So Terrible

In reverie, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee commented on the bloodletting at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862. As he watched thousands of Union soldiers fall in battle, the Confederate leader said, "It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."
Far from being a romantic clash of gallant souls, war is a way to extend the political agendas of the governments. Sometimes, though, political agendas and timetables can lead to military disaster.

Such was the case during the Fredericksburg campaign. Fredericksburg was preceded by the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland, which splashed the war's blood across Northern territory in the fall of 1862. Northerners now faced for the first time the chilling prospect of war on their farms and in their cities. After the war's most intense day of fighting on September 17, Lee's Confederates withdrew into Virginia. The northern victory in the rolling fields of Maryland allowed President Abraham Lincoln to announce that the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order freeing slaves in areas of rebellion, would go into effect on January 1, 1863. Military victory gave the Union government the political power to begin the process of slave emancipation.

As memories of Antietam's blood frightened Northern minds, Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside mounted a campaign to take the war south again. The goal was to help ease civilian fears and strengthen Northern political resolve, but also to enforce emancipation as an important new political objective of the war. A military victory could validate the newly issued Emancipation Proclamation. Since the proclamation freed slaves only in areas in rebellion, Union military victory in Confederate territory would bring emancipation to an important area of Southern slavery.

By late November, Burnside's Army of the Potomac, 120,000 strong, arrived on the banks of the Rappahannock River opposite Fredericksburg. Burnside faced the 75,000 man Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee. The Union general moved quickly, hoping to steal a march on Lee and drive toward the Southern capital of Richmond without strong opposition. The Confederate force, having returned to Virginia from Maryland through the Shenandoah Valley, held positions west of the area when the Union march began.
Burnside's troops marched overland quickly at first, continuing to screen the approaches to Washington from Confederate threats. But they could not cross the 400-foot-wide Rappahannock until the Union's transportable, floating bridges, called pontoons, arrived. Delayed by poor communication and poorer roads, the pontoon wagon train kept Union forces waiting for two weeks. The Confederate army soon massed along a seven-mile front on high ground west of Fredericksburg, blocking the main road further south.

With the Confederate army now in his way, Burnside's plan for an easy march to the Southern capital became a momentous struggle along the Rappahannock. Burnside's aim to achieve political goals with military means would be even more difficult to achieve. Driven by his political mandate, Burnside launched an almost suicidal assault on December 13, 1862 against the strongest part of the Confederate defense.
The Battle of Fredericksburg was a horrific Union defeat. Burnside's army lost 12,800 men in little more than four hours of fighting on that sunny Saturday. By the 15th, the Union army had recrossed its bridges in utter defeat. Burnside wept for his army's failure. Thousands of his Union troops wept with their commander. Burnside soon resigned his post, just the latest in an lengthening line of failed Union army commanders in Virginia. The South was jubilant, and the North stung with pain, numbed by disappointment, and deeply demoralized. The disastrous showdown on the Rappahannock led many northerners to fear that the war could not be won.

A contemporary Irish ballad, Faded Coat of Blue, captured the melancholy mood of the North in that winter of discontent:

My brave lad sleeps in his faded coat of blue,
In a lonely grave unknown, lies the heart that beat so true.
He sank faint and hungry among the famished brave,
And they laid him sad and lonely within his nameless grave.