And frontal assault was exactly what Burnside planned.5 On a chilly Saturday, December 13, just as the morning fog gave way to startling sunlight, Confederate defenders, heavily fortified with artillery of their own, watched the oncoming Army of the Potomac with awed anticipation. Thousands of Yankees with battle flags streaming marched rank upon rank up the hill in a desperate bid to dislodge Confederate defenders from their nearly perfect defenses.
The assault was hopeless. Despite heroic charges by Burnside’s divisions, Longstreet’s line held and repulsed the Federals. None even made it to the stone wall. With inestimable bravery, if not wisdom, Federals continued to charge until nightfall, leaving behind a field stacked three deep in casualties. Finally, after fourteen separate brigade-size attacks, the Federals retreated, leaving piles of their dead in front of the stone wall.
Still unable to accept the full horror of his failed assaults, Burnside contemplated renewed assaults the next day. His officers persuaded him to revoke the orders. On the other side, Lee wisely resisted the temptation to carry a counteroffensive into well-entrenched Federal artillery aching for a payback, and held his soldiers back. The ratio of losses between North and South ranked Fredericksburg among the most one-sided battles in the war: in all, Burnside lost 12,600 men to Lee’s 5,300.
Bombardment and capture of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Despite the fact that General Ambrose Burnside (seated on his noble steed) and his Federals lost miserably at Fredericksburg, Currier & Ives chose to portray a heroic victory for Northerners on the home front.
Only in the gruesome aftermath would common soldiers recognize the slaughter they had wreaked upon each other. Fredericksburg itself was destroyed, though most of the civilians had escaped before the battle. The night after the battle, screams punctuated the dark as wounded men pleaded for assistance.
The dead received no respect. For Confederate forces, undersupplied and bitterly cold, the temptation to ransack Federal dead for clothing, shoes, and food proved irresistible. Starlight brought with it the haunting landscape of pale naked Yankee corpses lying in frozen suspended animation before the stone wall. They looked, one soldier later recalled, “like hogs that had been cleaned.”6 A disbelieving Robert E. Lee looked at the carnage and muttered the famous words, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”7
Private John E. Anderson arrived at Fredericksburg from Belle Isle Prison the day after the battle to rejoin his unit, only to find them decimated: “Thomas Plunkett has lost both arms. Hugh Gallagher has lost a finger. The rest are dead or on detached duty at the hospital.... I see many new faces, and look in vain for any of the old ones.”8
After initial reports of a stunning Federal triumph, Lincoln and the War Department in Washington soon learned otherwise and were aghast at the enormity of the defeat. Besides the military setback, the political ramifications were devastating. Northern morale would plummet, and political support for the war and the party that fought it would drop still further.
To minimize the damage, Burnside imposed an immediate gag on the press, blocking all access to the telegraph wires and forbidding anyone—especially reporters—from leaving the scene of the battle. For several days, the North stood in ignorance both as to the scope of the defeat and the names of the casualties.
The same was not true in the South, where commentators mocked the stupidity of Union commanders. One writer expressed the general opinion that:The Yankees had essayed a task which no army could have accomplished. To have driven our men from their position and to have taken it, was a work compared with which the storming of Gibraltar would be as child’s play.... No other man than Burnside would have attempted so difficult or so foolhardy an adventure.9
When word of the extent of defeat finally reached the Northern public, fury was unleashed both on Union commanders and on the press for supposedly suppressing the tragic news. The press immediately exonerated themselves, leaving the commanders to absorb the full rage of public sentiment. According to Murat Halstead, editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, who had earlier accused Sherman of being “gone in the head,” Burnside was even worse: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.... We did not take a battery or silence a gun. We did not reach the crest of the hights [sic] held by the enemy in a single place.... The occupation of Fredericksburg was a blunder.10
While pro-Republican papers like the New York Tribune or Chicago Tribune tried to minimize the disaster, opposition papers—most notably the New York Herald—had a field day criticizing the War Department and General Burnside. Burnside was so incensed by the blistering account registered by William Swinton in the New York Times that he summoned him into his tent and threatened to shoot him.
id Deming, chief correspondent of the Associated Press, was arrested for breaking the gag and removed to Washington for his printed account of plummeting morale in the army. It did not help Deming that he was a champion of McClellan and an enemy of Halleck. To blunt criticisms of Lincoln for adopting a suicidal total-war strategy, Burnside issued a public apology to the Associated Press, taking sole responsibility for the debacle.11
While quick to criticize Northern leadership for the defeat at Fredericksburg, no public commentators remarked on the level of slaughter. In fact, Lee’s lament came too late. The two nations had already grown far too fond of war to give up on it anytime soon. The infantry of patriotism, reinforced with the artillery of mounting hatred, rendered both sides mindless killing machines bent on destruction.
One Confederate chaplain wrote in the Central Presbyterian: “We should add to the prayer for peace, let this war continue, if we are not yet so humbled and disciplined by its trials, as to be prepared for those glorious moral and spiritual gifts, which Thou designest it should confer upon us as a people, and upon the Church of Christ in the Confederacy, and upon mankind.”12
Meanwhile, in the days following Fredericksburg, Burnside’s public acceptance of blame reaped a whirlwind of public rage in the press and in the War Department. Again, Lincoln faced the prospects of incompetent command and mounting criticism at home. A scathing cartoon in the New York Illustrated News depicted Secretary of War Stanton and Lincoln garbed in country dresses with the caption: “This is old mother Lincoln explaining to old mother Stanton how the slaughter of our troops at Fredericksburg reminds him of an anecdote he heard out west.”13
From the trenches, James Gassner wrote to his mother:What do the people up North think about Burnside now? Do they think he can do just as he pleases with the Rebs? Perhaps they will want little Mac. To save the Capitol again and their played out President [Lincoln] and the rest of his gang. I’ll tell you what it is; little McClellan knows more in one day than all the rest of our Generals in three weeks. I think if McClellan had had command of us we never would have had to retreat.14
Left out of this ordinary soldier’s perception from ground level was the tactical truism that McClellan would never have had to retreat because he would have never advanced.
Not all fatalities were on the battlefield. For Henry Joslin, a baker with the Union army, death came slowly by disease. In letters to his mother in January 1863, he described problems with scurvy that placed him on light duty. By February he asked for a furlough to heal but was denied. In March he wrote his mother, “I have taken out a bunk in the hospital tent where I can have better care and rations then in the Co. quarters where I have been.” But it would not help. His final letter, written near Potomac Creek, Virginia, was a last-ditch plea for his mother’s help:Dear Mother, Captain Eager said that he was going to have you send for me or come and get me and the quicker you come the better. I think I can start right off with you as the surgeon told me to write for where to come for me. My appetite is good and I feel first rate only weak yet. You will find me at 2nd Div. 2nd Corps Hospital Potomac Creek Bridge. Come and God speed you to your soldier boy, Henry Joslin.15
By the t
ime his mother arrived, Henry Joslin, “soldier boy,” had died.
On December 22 Lincoln conferred in Washington with Burnside and congratulated the army for its bravery at Fredericksburg, publicly labeling the defeat an “accident.” Despite the good face, Lincoln was desperate for leadership that could expend lives but at the same time win victories.
CHAPTER 21
“GOD HAS GRANTED US A HAPPY NEW YEAR”
While the Army of the Potomac licked its wounds in the East, Lincoln’s eventual redeemers Grant and Sherman continued to tarnish their reputations in the West, both on and off the battlefield. In Grant’s case, criticism surrounded his infamous General Orders No. 11. Concerned over exploitative peddlers and speculators preying on Union camps, Grant pointed the finger at all Jews with the following order: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of the order.”1
Though never put into effect and eventually rescinded by Lincoln, the order did its damage. Grant added to the stigma of alcoholism the opprobrium of anti-Semitism. But neither of these dark marks dislodged Lincoln’s confidence in Grant’s military abilities. Given the way the war was going, a world of sins could be forgiven by one victory.
In Richmond, the Daily Dispatch exploited Grant’s attempted expulsion of Jews from his department as “all in keeping with the professed religious toleration of the puritans.” In contrast, they held up Judah Benjamin, their Jewish secretary of state, as an example of superior toleration. The paper went on to defend religious toleration as a sacred principle and blasted “Yankee historians” who traced intolerance back to the South.2 The editors seemed to make a point of welcoming Jews and Catholics into the Southern tent as they published commentaries by rabbis and bishops who supported the Confederate cause.3 They also explained how Irish Catholics were being duped into fighting for the North, and later defended the Jews when they were singled out in the war as extortionists.4
At the same time, tolerance had its limits. Virtually all Confederates agreed that Northern-only movements such as Mormonism and Spiritualism did not deserve the term “religion.” Instead, these movements must be viewed as evil outgrowths of a deeply rooted, Puritan-derived fanaticism that had taken a religious form.5 The Richmond Daily Dispatch printed a letter on “Thoughts for Soldiers” that contrasted the piety of the Christian South to the heresies of the North: “Hence the materialism of Practical Phrenology, the irresponsibility from Mesmeric Influences, the ridiculous revelation of Mormonism to Joe Smith, the ascension robes of Millerism, the seven spheres of Spiritualism, etc.” Only secession could save the continent for Christ, “as the consequence of the foregoing God cut us off from the North, not only to save us from this contamination, but to save to the cause of Christ one branch of the church as yet unshaken. Mark! not for our merit, or because we were without fault, but as the Jews were often saved because ‘to them were committed the oracles of god.’ ”6
On the battlefield, General Sherman suffered another ill-advised Federal defeat when he took an expedition down the Mississippi from Memphis to Chickasaw Bluffs north of Vicksburg. On December 29, in a movement reminiscent of Fredericksburg, he advanced on General John Clifford Pemberton’s well-entrenched forces and was soundly beaten back. Out of 31,000 effectives, Sherman lost 1,776 compared to only 207 Confederates.7
Meanwhile, Confederate civilians continued to feel the brunt of battle in their home lives. Letters to the Confederate Treasury Department continued to overwhelm Secretary Christopher Gustavus Memminger. One particularly poignant appeal to President Davis came from Julia Williams of Petersburg, Virginia. Williams’s husband had been killed at Malvern Hill even as Yankee forces were destroying her home. Davis forwarded her appeal to Secretary Memminger with the note “widow of Lt. Williams killed at Malvern Hill.” Her story speaks for itself:Servants and everything else we possess have long since been in their possession. All this I cheerfully resigned, while I had the aid and comfort of my patriotic and devoted husband, But alas! The time had come that he too had fallen as a noble martyr upon the altar of his country.... Consequently I am deprived by the chances of war of his aid and forced to surrender the resources on which I have hitherto relied for support. I am left entirely dependent therefore and present myself as an humble supplicant.... I do sincerely hope I shall not be compelled to return to my desolate home unprotected and unprovided for. I am indeed in a lamentable situation.8
Behind the suffering lay a mounting fury that generated blood appetites that could not be satisfied. These sentiments found their most strident voice in the clergy and their calls for blood revenge. In a funeral sermon “for Lieutenant Abram Carrington of the CSA,” reprinted in the Central Presbyterian of Richmond, the firebrand Robert Dabney preached an incendiary sermon condemning the North for an “aggressive war,” which, in moral terms, “is wholesale murder.”
Lieutenant Carrington, a close friend of Dabney’s, had become the most recent victim of the conflict. After extolling Carrington’s courage at the battle of Frayser’s Farm on June 30, 1862, Dabney took aim at the hearts of his congregation’s young men:Surely [his] very blood should cry out again from the ground, if we permitted the soil which drank the precious libation, to be polluted with the despot’s foot! Before God, I take you to witness this day, that its blood seals upon you the obligation to fill their places in your country’s host, and “play the men for your people and the cities of your God,” to complete vindication of their rights.9
The language of blood as a “precious libation” could not go unnoticed by Dabney’s young hearers as they prepared themselves for sacrifice.
The effect of joining emancipation and total war assumed an eerie confirmation when New Year’s Day newspapers presented coverage of both the Emancipation Proclamation and a frightful new battle with horrific casualties. This time the center of attention shifted to the western theater. There Confederate forces in retreat from Perryville, Kentucky, under the command of General Braxton Bragg, met advancing Federal forces under General William Rosecrans near the town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Both commanders were hot-tempered and eventually lost their commands, but not before clashing in a full-fledged bloodbath.
On December 31, forty-four thousand Yankees faced off against thirty-eight thousand rebels just west of Stones River. That night, with battle looming, the contending bands played their rival national tunes. Then in another poignant moment of American fellow feeling, both bands and armies joined together in singing “Home Sweet Home.” Two armies, one home. The next day they met in battle.
Ironically, both generals planned to attack the other’s right flank and get into his rear, cutting his army from its base.10 General Rosecrans ordered his attack to start at daybreak after breakfast. But as at Shiloh, the Confederates caught the coffee-sipping Yankees by surprise. With a burst of bloodcurdling rebel yells, the Confederates advanced and drove the Federal right flank back three miles before they were finally stopped. A fierce holding action and counterattack by the young and extremely gifted General Philip Sheridan bought sufficient time for the Federals to regroup. In the course of a furious four-hour firefight, Sheridan lost one-third of his men and all of his brigade commanders. But the imperiled flank held, and with it Sheridan’s reputation.
1862
By noon, the Union line had regrouped in a precarious position likened by military historians to a “jackknife with its blade nearly closed.” If the Confederates could break the Federal line anywhere along the Nashville turnpike, the blade would snap shut and the Union army would be destroyed.11 The crucial angle where the blade joined the handle lay in a four-acre oak grove named Round Forest, but which the soldiers would rename “Hell’s Half Acre.” Confederate corps commander and former Episcopal bishop Leonidas Polk ordered his Mississippi rebels to charge across an open field to attack the Round Forest.
On the other side
, General George Thomas—who enjoyed the distinction of never leaving the battlefield through four years of war—had placed lines of heavy artillery in the paths of the charging Confederates. In a single salvo of shattering noise, the artillery opened up and tore the advancing Confederates to shreds. The noise was so intense that it reportedly drove the rabbits mad, and they tried to crawl under prostrate soldiers for protection. A second charge penetrated the Union line west of Round Forest and succeeded in capturing one thousand prisoners and eleven guns. But still the midwesterners held Round Forest as a cigar-chomping General Rosecrans, in rumpled hat and bloodstained overcoat, rallied his forces up and down the line.
Bragg was so certain Rosecrans would retreat, weighed down as he was with many Union casualties and Confederate prisoners in tow, that he sent a victory message to President Davis: “God has granted us a happy New Year.” But Bragg’s God proved to be a New Year’s angel of darkness. Instead of retiring, Rosecrans decided to remain in the field overnight, moving his army from the Round Forest to higher ground perfectly situated for a strategic defensive position. There the Federals launched a fierce counterattack that claimed seventeen hundred casualties in little over an hour.
With a third of his troops dead, wounded, or missing, Bragg could neither follow up his tactical victory with an attack on Rosecrans’s larger army nor drive it back. Instead, badly intimidated, he called off the attack and retreated to a new position south of Murfreesboro, leaving a bloodbath behind. Clearly Lincoln was not the only president dealing with incompetent generals. Federal losses totaled 12,906 of 41,400 engaged. In proportional terms, this would prove to be the deadliest battle the North would fight. The Confederates lost 11,739 out of 34,739 engaged.
Upon the Altar of the Nation Page 26
