Glory Road (7 page)

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.
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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 cro
ss the right wing of his army, f
ind 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-m
orning
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 d
riven out the Mississip
pians. 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 fron
t, borrowed some of Major Spaul
ding'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."
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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.

That ground actually is not so very high, the hills for the most part rising only forty or fifty feet above the plain. For Lee's purposes, however, the ground was exactly right—high enough to offer an impregnable defensive line, but not high enough to scare lie Federals and keep them from attacking at all. Directly west of the town, and a little less than half a
mile away, rose the modest ridg
e known as Marye's Heights, with a white-pillared Virginia mansion picturesquely sited on the crest. To the north, slightly higher hills slanted off to the river, offering Lee's left flank a position that could not be taken. (It could be turned, to be sure, if the Yankees cared to march eight or ten miles upstream, but the field of Burnside's vision had narrowed so that he could see nothing but what was immediately in front of him.) To the south, the high ground pulled farther and farther away from the river, ending, nearly four air-line miles from Ma
r
ye's Heights, in a wooded knoll that overlooked a weedy grade crossing on the Richmond railroad, a spot known locally as Hamilton's Crossing. From the protected left-flank position to the hill by Hamilton's Crossing, the Confederates were well dug in, all set to kill as many Yankees as might come at them.

Burnside was a trained soldier who presumably knew the folly of smashing head-on into a perfect defensive position, and he had evolved a plan which might just possibly have worked if everything had gone exactly right. The left wing of his army, styled the Left Grand Division, was commanded by Major General William B. Franklin, who had demonstrated in the Antietam campaign that he would not drive ahead any faster than his commander forced him to do, but who, that limitation aside, was a solid and capable soldier. Franklin had under him two excellent army corps, the I Corps under John F. Reynolds and the VI Corps of William F. Smith— "Baldy" Smith, that staunch friend of the departed McClellan who seems to have had
the stamina once to tell McClella
n to his face that his dealings with Copperhead leaders looked like treason.

Franklin was to take his men across by the downstream bridges, and Sumner was to cross his Grand Division by the upper bridges. Hooker, with the remaining third of the army, was to stand by ready to support either or both. Burnside's general idea appears to have been for Franklin to drive through past Hamilton's Crossing, outflanking Lee's right and rolling his line up to the northward. Once this had begun, Sumner was to break through at Marye's Heights, Lee would then have to retreat in great haste, the jubilant Federals could despoil and slay in his wake, and the war wo aid come to a close.

That, at any rate, is what Burnside later said that he had planned and directed before the battle began. His written orders appear to have called for something rather different: a simple reconnaissance in force by Franklin, an advance by Sumner to a providentially unoccupied hill, the intervention of a fortunate army between two separated retreating bodies of Confederate troops. One of Burnside's notions, apparently, was that the Rebels would withdraw as soon as they were pushed a little, and he was careful to warn Franklin and Sumner not to let their men fire into each other when they got up on top of the line of hills.

Burnside's planning, in brief, was very foggy; and as a crowning misfortune it developed that one of the worst of his failings was a simple inability to use the English language clearly. None of his subordinates understood just what he wanted them to do, and under the circumstances the battle could become nothing but a simple exercise in the killing of Union soldiers. Some of the soldiers appear to have been aware of this. A newspaper correspondent going about the camps that day asked various officers what the Confederate Army was up to. There it was, with scores of guns on commanding hills and with more and more of the Union Army parading into town under the very muzzles of those silent guns; why didn't the Rebels open fire? He got a variety of explanations: the Rebels were low on ammunition, Lee did not wish to bombard a Virginia town, the Southern army was in retreat, and so on. Finally the reporter tagged an enlisted man, who looked over toward the silent, ominous hills and remarked: "They want us to get in. Getting out won't be quite so smart and easy. You'll see."
⁷