Who won the Battle of Fredericksburg?
The Confederacy won decisively. Between 11 and 15 December 1862, Union general Ambrose Burnside forced a crossing of the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and on 13 December attacked Robert E. Lee's army on the hills behind the town. A brief breakthrough on the southern end of the line was thrown back, and wave after wave of attacks against a stone wall below Marye's Heights was shot down before reaching it. The Union lost about 12,600 men, more than twice the Confederate total, and gained nothing.3
At Fredericksburg, Union soldiers were ordered to leave the shelter of a ruined town, cross a quarter mile of open ground and climb toward a stone wall lined with rifles. They came on all afternoon, brigade after brigade, and not one man reached the wall. Watching from the hill above, Lee turned to James Longstreet and said: "It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it."4
Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Battle of Perryville · Next: The Battle of Chancellorsville
A reluctant commander
In November 1862 Abraham Lincoln ran out of patience with George McClellan, who had failed to follow up the costly Union victory at Antietam in September, and removed him from command of the Army of the Potomac. His choice of successor, Ambrose Burnside, did not want the job. Burnside had already turned down two earlier offers of promotion from Lincoln, believing he was not fit for so large a command, and he accepted only because this time it came as an order. 5› Battle of Antietam, 1862
Under heavy pressure from Washington to move before winter, Burnside drew up a bold plan. Instead of following Lee southwest, he would dash southeast to Fredericksburg, a river town halfway between Washington and Richmond, cross the Rappahannock there and put his army between Lee and the Confederate capital. The plan had real promise, but only if it was carried out fast.6
The race to the Rappahannock
At first everything went right. Leaving Warrenton on 15 November, Burnside marched his army some 35 miles to Falmouth, on the north bank opposite Fredericksburg, in two days. The town was held by only a few hundred Confederates. But the bridges over the river had been destroyed, and the pontoon boats Burnside needed to cross were tangled in bureaucratic delays in Washington. The first pontoons arrived about a week late, and Burnside waited roughly two weeks more before he tried to cross.7
Lee used every day of the delay. James Longstreet's corps reached Fredericksburg on 19 November and took up the line of hills behind the town, and Stonewall Jackson's men hurried east from the Shenandoah Valley to join them. By the time the Union bridges were ready, Lee's whole army was waiting on the south bank.8
The armies and Lee's line
The Army of the Potomac numbered about 120,000 men, organized by Burnside into three "grand divisions" under Edwin Sumner on the right, Joseph Hooker in the center and William Franklin on the left. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had more than 70,000. The American Battlefield Trust counts some 172,000 men available on the two sides, more than fought at Gettysburg, which makes Fredericksburg one of the largest battles of the war.9
Lee's position was a natural fortress. His line ran about seven miles along a range of hills that formed an amphitheater around the plain behind the town. Longstreet held the northern half, with guns on Marye's Heights and Telegraph Hill, Lee's command post. Jackson held the southern end around Prospect Hill and Hamilton's Crossing on the railroad to Richmond, and he stacked his divisions one behind another nearly a mile deep. Any Union attack would have to cross open fields under artillery fire before it even reached the Confederate infantry.10
11 December: bridges under fire
In the foggy darkness before dawn on 11 December, Union engineers crept to the river and began laying their pontoons. Opposite the town, the work soon stopped. William Barksdale's Mississippi brigade, firing from houses, cellars and yards along the riverfront, shot down the engineers again and again. Burnside answered by turning about 150 guns on Stafford Heights against the town. The National Park Service counts some 8,000 projectiles fired into Fredericksburg; most houses were damaged and many civilians who had stayed cowered in their cellars.11
When the guns fell silent, the Mississippians opened fire again. In the end volunteers from Michigan, Massachusetts and New York rowed across in the pontoon boats under fire, landed and cleared the riverbank, and fought the Confederates block by block until dusk. The American Battlefield Trust calls it the first opposed river crossing in American military history and the first real urban combat of the Civil War.12
On 12 December the rest of the army crossed. Burnside made no attack that day. Instead, many of his soldiers looted the abandoned town, smashing mirrors, furniture and even a piano. According to the American Battlefield Trust, many historians consider the sack of Fredericksburg the worst looting of the war up to that point.13
13 December: the breakthrough at Prospect Hill
Burnside meant his main effort to fall on Jackson in the south, where Franklin had about 60,000 men. But his orders were vague, telling Franklin to attack with "a division at least", and Franklin, a cautious soldier, took them literally. He sent forward only George Meade's division of Pennsylvanians, some 4,500 men, at about 8:30 in the morning.14
Before they got far, two Confederate guns under the 24-year-old Major John Pelham opened fire on their flank and held up the whole advance for nearly an hour, a feat that Lee praised in his report. When Meade's men finally pushed on, they found by luck a 600-yard stretch of swampy woods in Jackson's line that the Confederates had left undefended. They poured through, mortally wounded Brigadier General Maxcy Gregg, whose South Carolinians at first took them for retreating Confederates, and reached the crest deep inside Jackson's position, while John Gibbon's division broke through alongside them.15
No support came. Jackson calmly fed in his deep reserves, and with the Rebel Yell they drove the exhausted Pennsylvanians out of the woods, back across the railroad and into the fields. The ground where so many fell was nicknamed the Slaughter Pen. By the American Battlefield Trust's count some 9,000 men, about 5,000 Union and 4,000 Confederate, were killed or wounded on this end of the field, and with them went the Union's best chance of victory.16
The stone wall at Marye's Heights
By late morning Burnside gave up waiting for Franklin and sent Sumner's men out of the town against Marye's Heights. It looked like the most promising target: it was closest to the town and its slope was gentler than the hills around it. But at its foot ran the Telegraph Road, worn down by years of wagon traffic and lined with stone walls, a ready-made trench. Thomas Cobb's Georgia brigade filled it, later reinforced by Joseph Kershaw's South Carolinians and North Carolina troops, several ranks deep, with artillery on the heights above firing over their heads. "A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it," boasted the Confederate gunner Edward Porter Alexander.17
The first assault went in at noon and set the pattern for the rest of the day. The attackers left the town under shellfire, bunched up to cross a water-filled canal ditch on three damaged bridges, re-formed behind a low bluff and then advanced up an open slope of about 400 yards. When they were halfway there, sheets of rifle fire burst from the sunken road. The National Park Service estimates that in the first hour alone the Union lost nearly 3,000 men. Cobb was mortally wounded, but the line held.18
The attacks went on until dark. Late in the day Andrew Humphreys led a fresh division through the wreckage of the earlier waves, and part of one brigade got within about 25 yards of the wall before it melted away. The fifteenth Union brigade went in after sunset and failed like the rest. Not a single Union soldier reached the stone wall. Nearly two-thirds of all Union losses in the battle fell in front of it.19
Night on the field and the retreat
That night thousands of wounded men lay freezing on the slope below Marye's Heights, and their cries carried through the darkness. Burnside, distraught, wanted to lead his old IX Corps against the wall himself the next morning, and his generals had to talk him out of it. On 14 December a Confederate sergeant, Richard Kirkland of the 2nd South Carolina, climbed over the wall to give water to wounded Union soldiers, and he became known as the "Angel of Marye's Heights".20
On the night of 15 December Burnside skillfully withdrew his army back across the Rappahannock to Stafford Heights and took up his bridges behind him. The Fredericksburg campaign was over.21
Aftermath
The defeat shook the North. In Washington the blame fell first on the government: a majority of Republican senators voted to remove Secretary of State William Seward, and Lincoln had to defuse a crisis in his own cabinet. In January 1863 Burnside tried to restore his reputation with another march around Lee's flank, which bogged down in winter rain and became known as the "Mud March". Lincoln then removed him and gave the army to Joseph Hooker.22
For the South the victory restored morale after the near disaster at Antietam. Yet, as the National Park Service historian points out, it was a hollow triumph. The North quickly replaced Burnside's lost men and equipment, while Lee struggled to replace either; the battle made no decisive difference to the war and only postponed the next Union drive on Richmond until spring. 23› Battle of Chancellorsville, 1863
The same ground was fought over again within five months. On 3 May 1863, during the Chancellorsville campaign, Union troops under John Sedgwick attacked Marye's Heights again and this time drove the Confederates off it. 24› Second Battle of Fredericksburg, 1863
The town and its people
Fredericksburg itself paid a heavy price. Most of its residents fled before the battle, many by train to Richmond, others to friends' farms or makeshift camps in the December cold. Those who stayed lived through the bombardment, the street fighting and the looting. "For long hours the only sounds that greeted our ears were the whizzing and moaning of shells and the crash of falling bricks and timber," remembered ten-year-old Fanny White. According to the American Battlefield Trust, Southerners raised some $170,000 to help the town rebuild, and Fredericksburg changed hands at least seven times during the war.25
The wounded carried the battle north with them. In Washington a volunteer nurse named Louisa May Alcott, later the author of Little Women, received her first patients from Fredericksburg and described them in her book Hospital Sketches: ragged, gaunt and pale, and wearing the look of defeat.26
Visiting the battlefield today
Much of the battlefield is preserved in Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. The Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center stands beside the Sunken Road, where a walking trail follows the stone wall past the Innis House and the Kirkland Monument and climbs Marye's Heights to the Fredericksburg National Cemetery. A driving tour continues to Chatham, the plantation house across the river that served as a Union headquarters and field hospital, Lee's Hill, where Lee watched the battle, and the site of the Union breakthrough and Prospect Hill.27
The Slaughter Pen Farm, the open ground of Meade's and Gibbon's attack, was threatened by development until 2006, when the Civil War Trust (now the American Battlefield Trust) and its partners bought its 208 acres for $12 million, which the Trust describes as the most expensive private battlefield preservation effort in American history.28
