Glory road, p.5
Glory Road, page 5
For one thing, they had not been paid for months. For another, in this movement down from Warrenton a great many units had somehow been marched away from their equipment and were now enduring the sleet and snow without tents or blankets. For still another, the quality and quantity of the rations were visibly deteriorating. Fights broke out as regiments which the commissaries had missed tried to raid the supplies of better-nourished outfits. A diarist in the 9th Massachusetts recalled later: "Never were we any worse off for supplies." A veteran in the 22nd Massachusetts wrote feelingly of their bivouac, from which 588 men of the regiment were absent because of sickness: "This plain became a wallow-hole; the clay surface freezing at night and thawing by day, trampled by thousands of men, made a vast sea of mud. ... It had to be scraped and washed off to prevent our tents from becoming hog pens." The rookie
146th New York, which had just joined up, learned that army life was not quite as it had been imagined, and its historian recalled: "Many of the older regiments around us were tired of the service and anxious to return home, and the infection spread among the new regiments."16
Often enough, spirits went up or down with the quality of the food. For six mortal weeks the 79th New York had had nothing to eat but hardtack and salt meat. One day, by great good luck, a captain in this regiment got some potatoes. He sliced them and fried a huge panful and sat down with his tent mate, the regimental chaplain, to eat them. In blissful silence the two men ate fried potatoes, emptying the pan to the last crinkly slice, carefully dividing and eating that, and then leaning back to light their pipes, feeling that life might be joyous after all. The chaplain had said grace over their meal, and after that the two had spoken not a word; but at last the captain took his pipe from his mouth and said gravely: "Chaplain, Jiose potatoes needed salt." The chaplain thought it over, then nodded judicially, and the two men resumed their contented silent smoking.17
However, it is quite clear that, taking the army as a whole, something more was wrong than a mere shortage of rations. What was going on was not just the normal grousing of soldiers who have begun to see that war is not quite as much fun as they had expected it to be. This army was beginning to understand its own handicaps, and it was beginning to lose confidence. Most of the rank and file knew no more about what the high command had in mind than the rank and file usually knows, but the rank and file was not in the least stupid and it could read the omens as well as anybody. What lay back of these myriad complaints about mud, bad food, and poor leadership comes out in a letter written just at this time by one soldier who happened to be completely articulate—Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., of the 20th Massachusetts, a twice-wounded man of proven valor from a stout, battle-tried regiment. On November 19 Holmes wrote:
"I've pretty much made up my mind that the South have achieved their independence & I am almost ready to hope spring will see an end. . . . The army is tired with its hard and its tenible experience & still more with its mismanagement & I think before long the majority will say that we are vainly working to effect what never happens-the subjugation (for that is it) of a great civilized nation. We shan't do it-at least the army can't."18
What Holmes could put into words in a letter to his own kin, other soldiers could only think-or, more likely, feel, leaving the thought unformulated and being conscious only of a deep depression. Yet the depression and what lay back of it were hidden if possible. Like the two officers who found uplift in a pan of fried potatoes, the soldiers kept their spirits up with such devices as were available, which included, for the men on picket duty along the river, the exchange of not wholly ill-natured insults with the Confederate pickets across the river. As, for instance:
"Oh, Yank! How did you like Bull Run?"
"Better bury your dead on South Mountain."
"What do you think of the New York election?" (Democrats had just made Horatio Seymour, suspected of strong Copperhead tendencies, governor of New York, roundly defeating the Unionist candidate, General James Wadsworth, and the Confederates were inclined to make much of it.)
"What do you think of Ben Butler?"
"Oh, the Louisiana Tigers will bring him to Richmond."
"The Louisiana Tigers? There's none of them left—the last died running."18
And so on, very like the catcalling of schoolboy gangs on the playground, except that these gangs unaccountably carried rifles and might at any moment quit yelling and start shooting at each other. The exchange had a sharp edge now and then. The whole army chuckled over the answer one brash Federal got when, observing that the Confederate on the opposite bank was exceedingly ragged, he called across to know if Rebels did not have any decent clothes. The Reb looked him over for a minute, then called back: "We-uns don't put on our good clothes to butcher hogs."
But whether it approached the event with grousing, with despairing letters home, or with jeers at the enemy's pickets, the army knew that it was drifting steadily toward a battle. It drifted with fatalism. In fact, so contradictory is the spirit of man that the soldiers even displayed a febrile enthusiasm, for although all the signs were bad, yet action was action, the battle might possibly be won, and a great battle won would bring the war near an end. A newspaper correspondent in early December wrote that "the Army of the Potomac never felt better" than it did when the long blue columns at last began to draw out of the scattered camps and head toward the banks of the deep unbridged river.20
For Burnside, after sitting there bemused for three weeks, had finally come to a decision. It seemed to him now that the enemy would be more surprised by a crossing right at Fredericksburg than by a crossing at any other place, and in a way he was right. Probably nothing in all the war surprised Lee quite as much as the discovery that his enemy would move up for a frontal assault at Fredericksburg, although this was not a surprise that gave the Federals any military advantage. In any case, on December 9 Burnside called the Grand Division commanders to headquarters and instructed them to have their commands ready to move at daylight of December 11, each man carrying three days' rations and sixty rounds of ammunition, battery and ammunition wagons to carry three days' forage for their horses. To Major Spaulding, Burnside sent word to stand by: the army was at last ready to use those pontoons.
There is record of a party given by officers of a New England regiment in a riverside hut the night the orders came out. Some twenty men who had no illusions about the kind of reception they were going to get when they crossed the river met to sing songs and to drink whisky punch. At the end, just before the party broke up, someone lifted his glass and cried: "To the health of Little Mac!"
The hut rocked with cheers and the glasses v/ent bottoms up, and a man who was present wrote that the soldiers were sustained that night by a positive faith that McClellan would yet return and lead the army to victory.21
With that faith, or such other faith as they could muster, the men marched up to the river. As the 16th Maine marched through deserted camps the men could hear the high soft voice of a contraband camp servant lifted in the song, "Jordan Water, Rise over Me."22
3. Big Stars Are Busting
It was three o'clock on a cold December morning, and there was a heavy wet fog along the river and many strange noises in the night: a creaking and a thumping and a scrabbling, the sound of wagons and horses and men getting great hollow weights down a steep bumpy road where no one could see three feet beyond the end of his nose. There was this river, and beyond it there was a silent lifeless town, and beyond the town there was an open plain bordered by low hills, and in this bleak three-in-the-morning chill all of these lay invisible, and the shadow of death rested upon them and could be felt there in the dark by the riverside. The 50th New York Engineers were going to throw pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock to Fredericksburg.
Major Spaulding had his orders, and he was building three bridges: one of them opposite the dock at the lower end of town, where steamboats used to receive passengers and freight in the days when Fredericksburg had a normal life to live, and the other two a bit farther upstream, opposite the center of town. He had chosen his spots by daylight, and now the men were extending the bridges into a void, building for a farther shore which they had to take on faith, anchoring their scows in the chuckling black water and binding them together with long timbers and fastening planking on top of the timbers, trying to do it silently, but knowing perfectly well that whatever faith might say about the farther shore there were alert enemies over there somewhere, hearing these sounds and cannily interpreting them and preparing to act as soon as the light should come. For a few hours the darkness was a protecting cloak.
The darkness did not last nearly long enough. By six o'clock it had thinned, and although the fog remained there was a dim gray light along the river. From the Confederate side there came a measured boom-boom of two fieldpieces, the signal by which the Rebel commander on the water front notified his army that the Yankees were coming across. Presently the engineers could see the water-front buildings of Fredericksburg in the mist not far off. There were many Confederates hidden in and about those buildings, and as the slow light grew these looked at the bridgebuilders over the sights of their rifles. There was a crackling snap-snap of infantry fire all along the water front, and the engineers ran back off their half-finished bridges to take cover, leaving dead and wounded men along the wet planking.
The Yankee water front along here belonged to General Couch, who commanded the II Corps, and as soon as the firing began he spread a line of infantry along the bank to return the fire. This did no good. It was so dark and misty that the Federals could not see any targets across the river, and although they did a good deal of shooting they killed no Rebels. The firing died down after a while and the engineers ran out on the bridges again, thus getting close enough to the Fredericksburg shore to be perfectly visible to the waiting Confederates, who zestfully reopened fire and again drove the men to cover.
When it got lighter things were not much better. The Confederates in the town were Mississippians, and they hid in basements and behind low barricades and in rifle pits dug in the lee of brick buildings, and the Federals across the river had very little chance to hit any of them. The men who tried to complete the bridges had to do their work less than a hundred feet from the Confederate shore, and they were sitting ducks to be shot. Time and again the engineers ran out to finish the job; each time, with very little delay, the waiting Confederates drove them back; each time the supporting Federal infantry fired completely ineffective volleys.1
General Burnside had certain plans, and they called for the building of two sets of bridges: this group of three, opposite the town itself, where he proposed to cross the right wing of his army, find another set a mile or more downstream, where the left wing was to cross. The downstream-bridge gang had it easy. The Confederate shore there was open and could quickly be swept clear, and by mid-morning the downstream bridges were finished and ready for use. But upstream it was obvious that no bridges could be completed until the Rebels had been driven out of Fredericksburg, and they were never going to be dislodged by any long-range infantry fire.
The Federal army that morning contained 120,000 men, and most of them were lined up on the high ground overlooking Fredericksburg, waiting for a chance to get across, and here they were, stopped cold by a solitary Confederate brigade, 1,500 men at the most—an unwelcome modern version of Horatius at the bridge. It was intolerable, and Burnside at last called in his chief artillerist, Brigadier General Henry J. Hunt, and told him to blast Fredericksburg off the face of the earth if he had to—anything, just so he pulverized that Mississippi brigade and made it possible for the New York engineers to finish their job.
This Hunt was a notable gunner, one of the most useful officers the Union Army possessed, a good organizer and solid fighting man, keen student of the new science of gunnery, a man who believed in great massed sheaves of gunfire but who also insisted that each individual gun crew must take the time to get on the target before it fired. He had lately taken the Federal gunners over the coals about this latter point, decreeing that except when they were firing canister at close range they must not, even in red-hot action, fire at a rate faster than one round per gun in two minutes. To fire faster, he remarked, was to fire wildly, which did no good. Furthermore, an officer who shot up all his battery's ammunition in a hurry was probably an officer who wanted a good excuse to take his guns back out of action. He would be treated as such henceforth, in any case, and no battery hereafter would be allowed to withdraw from action just because it was out of ammunition. It would send for more ammunition, and while it waited it would remain under fire, officers and men at their posts, unless higher authority ordered it to withdraw.2 Hunt had been spending a week or more getting his batteries posted on Stafford Heights, as the high ground above the river was called. He had more than 140 guns in line—Rodman three-inch rifles, ten-and twenty-pounder Parrotts, and a handful of four-and-one-half-inch siege guns, long monsters too cumbersome for field maneuver but useful in a spot like this. Rather more than one hundred of these guns would bear on the water front opposite the frustrated bridge-builders, and he gave the gunners their orders—fifty rounds per gun, pick your targets, and remember what the regulations say about firing deliberately.
So the guns opened, and a tremendous cloud of smoke came rolling down from Stafford Heights to cover the river and the open plain and the tormented town, and presently tall columns of blacker smoke from burning buildings went up to the blue sky, and the waiting Federals saw walls and roofs collapse and bricks and timbers fly through the air, while men who had lived through Malvern Hill and Antietam said this was the most thunderous cannonade they had ever heard. Most of the inhabitants of Fredericksburg had left town, so that to an extent Hunt was shelling a deserted town; even so, soldiers recorded that it was not pleasant to see the whole might of their artillery turned upon human habitations.3
The bombardment ended at last, and there were many wrecked buildings along the water front. The engineers trotted out on the bridges again, but the ominous pin points of flame sputtered around basement windows and low barricades, and more engineers were shot down, and once again it was too hot to build bridges. General Hunt had wrecked Fredericksburg, but he had not driven out the Mississippians. Huddling under cover, they had had a hard time oil it, but they had not had more than they could take, and as soon as the gunfire ceased they were ready to fight again. They were teaching Hunt the lesson which artillerists have to learn anew in each generation—that a bombardment which will destroy buildings will not necessarily keep brave defenders from fighting on amid the wreckage.
The solution to the problem was at last accomplished by the infantry under Colonel Norman J. Hall, who had one of General Oliver Otis Howard's brigades in the II Corps and to whom General Hunt suggested that the way to get the Rebels out of Fredericksburg was to go over and push them out personally. Colonel Hall look his 7th Michigan down to the water front, borrowed some of Major Spaulding's pontoons to use as assault boats, got some of the engineers detailed as oarsmen, and sent landing parties across the river despite losses. The Michigan men got a foothold along the far bank, the 19th and 20th Massachusetts were sent over as support waves, and the three regiments finally combed the last Confederates out of the waterside gun pits and went driving on to secure the town.4
This fight was rough while it lasted. There was a swirl of door-to-door fighting, and the 20th Massachusetts lost ninety-seven officers and men in a street-fighting advance of fifty yards. Colonel Hall, a regular-army officer who admired nonchalance in action, recalled later how very Bostonian and unemotional the New England soldiers were during this fight. There was the 20th's colonel quietly telling a company commander: "Mr. Abbott, you will take your first platoon forward." Platoon advances and is almost instantly knocked out by rifle fire. "You'll have to put in the second," says the colonel; and the captain, acting slightly bored by the whole affair, goes forward with the second platoon in the best old-world style. In his official report Colonel Hall said he could not presume to say all that ought to be said about "the unflinching bravery and splendid discipline" of these Yankees. Privately, in conversation with one of the regimental officers, he remarked that the 20th, like the regulars, did its fighting without bothering to strike heroic attitudes. Groping for the expression he wanted, he hit upon an odd one: "The 20th has no poetry in a fight."5
In the end, the soldiers got the town secured and went on to skirmish with Rebels on the outskirts. The bridges were finished, the rest of Colonel Hall's brigade came across, and from Stafford Heights the Federal gunners looked for targets beyond the town, firing furiously whenever they found one.
So the long day ended, and men remembered afterward that a strange golden dusk lay upon the plain and the surrounding hills, as if a belated Indian-summer evening had come bewildered out of peacetime autumn into wintry wartime. There was a haze on the horizon, and the western sky was scarlet and purple as the sun went down, and most of Fredericksburg seemed to be burning. A chaplain in the 33rd New York wrote that the smoke "rolled gently upward in dark columns, or, whirling aloft, chased itself in graceful rings like a thing of beauty." As it grew darker, these smoke clouds glowed red when the shell exploded, and the gun pits on Stafford Heights were picked out by stabbing flames as the guns were fired. A newspaper correspondent wrote: "Towering between us and the western sky, which was still showing its faded scarlet lining, was the huge somber pillar of grimy smoke that marked the burning of Fredericksburg. Ascending to a vast height, it bore away northward, shaped like a plume bowed in the wind."6
Attended by whatever beauties of nature and burning homes, the Federals now had a foothold on the southern bank of the Rappahannock—which at Fredericksburg is actually the western bank, the river running nearly north to south just there—and Burnside could put his troops across as he pleased. There may have been some reason for haste. Lee was still unable to believe that Burnside planned to make his main assault here, for the hills behind Fredericksburg, where Lee's army had been entrenching for weeks, made an ideal defensive line, and to the last moment the Confederates thought this crossing at Fredericksburg must be a ponderous feint. As a result, Jackson's corps was still watching possible crossings a dozen miles downstream. When Colonel Hall's men secured the town Lee had only half of his army on hand. But Burnside frittered away the next day with a deal of marching and countermarching, and Lee had plenty of time to call in Jackson and assemble the seventy-eight thousand men of the Army of Northern Virginia on the high ground west of the Fredericksburg plain.
