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Chatham Manor was Union headquarters at Fredericksburg.
“Burnside ordered what?”
We were in Fredericksburg, VA, on a weeklong trip, researching and shooting for a GPP Timeline Guide book on the Battle of Fredericksburg, and I had just begun to grasp why this battle has not risen to the top of the list of most revered and talked-about confrontations in the Civil War.
Here’s a quick recap, so we’re all on the same page:
After losing his advantage by waiting three weeks on the banks of the Rappahannock River before attempting to cross—and watching as the Confederate forces amass by the tens of thousands in Fredericksburg on the other side—Major General Ambrose Burnside (yes, the general with the bizarre facial hair that gave us the term “sideburns” … let’s move on) finally gave the order to begin building pontoon bridges across the river. He planned that the night’s darkness and the heavy, chilling fog of the morning of December 11, 1862, would mask his men’s attempts to construct the cumbersome bridges, but instead, his men fell to Confederate musket fire at the first glimmer of light.
It took all day to fight their way across the river, but the Union troops finally managed it, taking the battle to the streets of Fredericksburg for hand-to-hand combat with Barksdale’s Mississippi Brigade. When night fell and Barksdale obeyed orders to retreat, the Union soldiers bedded down in town to await their general’s orders for attack.
Another day would pass before Burnside sized up the tenuous situation and determined what to do. The Confederate troops had secured both flanks of their seven-mile line, making a conventional flank assault a losing proposition at best. Burnside found himself in exactly the situation he had foreseen weeks before, when he had reluctantly accepted command of the Army of the Potomac: He had to make a stand against the Rebel army before winter set in—not because it was a good idea strategically, but because he had been ordered to do so by President Lincoln. Winter would close the roads into Virginia’s major towns, putting off the war’s advancement for months. Lincoln wanted to gain an advantage now, but as Burnside gazed up at the Confederate line along the high ground above Fredericksburg, he knew that advantage had passed.
With no more viable strategy, Burnside ordered an attack … a full-frontal assault up the middle of the Confederate line. To pull this off, the Union troops would have to cross a canal, followed by 300 yards of wide-open land with no cover, while their opponents knelt behind earthworks and a stone wall and shot directly at them.
What happened? Honestly, what do you think happened? Burnside lost six thousand men in the space of a few hours, in no less than 14 frontal assaults on the Southern-held high ground. By day’s end, with his troops either depleted or demoralized, Burnside began planning for another day of frontal assaults … but his grand division generals, Sumner and Franklin, skillfully talked him out of this. The Union retreated quietly a day later.
There’s a lesson here: Human error compounded by hubris creates a deadly combination, especially in war. Human error and misunderstanding on the part of Generals Longstreet and Ewell would lead General Robert E. Lee to employ the same losing tactic—the full-frontal assault—at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, even though he had observed with horror the carnage that took place at Fredericksburg. The result: Five thousand Confederate men fell in just two hours. Nearly a year later, General Ulysses S. Grant would attempt the same tactic at Cold Harbor, resulting in the most embarrassing failure of his military career. Before his campaign ended, he’d lost thirteen thousand men to death, wounding or capture.
In all three cases, the general-in-chief put winning over common sense, seeing the attempt—however misguided—as the highest priority in his strategy. In all three cases, the loss of life was staggering.
While the days of the frontal assault strategy have long since ended, the combination of hubris and human error continue to lead us into battle: The bad intelligence that lured us into war in Iraq leaves us with the same sense that confrontation could have been avoided, were it not for the hubris of the commanders in chief.
History can do much about the present, if we can take the time to learn from the mistakes of generals and presidents of the past.
Photo by Nic Minetor
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