The Battle of Fredericksburg
December
11-15, 1862
The Battle of
Fredericksburg, fought December 11-15, 1862, was one of the largest and
deadliest of the Civil War. It featured the first major opposed river
crossing in American military history. Union and Confederate troops fought in
the streets of Fredericksburg, the Civil War’s first urban combat. And
with nearly 200,000 combatants, no other Civil War battle featured a larger
concentration of soldiers.
Burnside’s
plan at Fredericksburg was to use the nearly 60,000 men in Maj. Gen. William B.
Franklin’s Left Grand Division to crush Lee’s southern flank on Prospect Hill
while the rest of his army held Longstreet and the Confederate First Corps in
position at Marye’s Heights.
The Union
army’s main assault against Stonewall Jackson produced initial success and held
the promise of destroying the Confederate right, but lack of reinforcements and
Jackson’s powerful counterattack stymied the effort. Both sides suffered heavy
losses (totaling 9,000 in killed, wounded and missing) with no real change in
the strategic situation.
In the
meantime, Burnside’s “diversion” against veteran Confederate soldiers behind a
stone wall produced a similar number of casualties but most of these were
suffered by the Union troops. Wave after wave of Federal soldiers marched
forth to take the heights, but each was met with devastating rifle and artillery
fire from the nearly impregnable Confederate positions. Confederate artillerist
Edward Porter Alexander’s earlier claim that “a chicken could not live on that
field” proved to be entirely prophetic this bloody day.
As darkness
fell on a battlefield strewn with dead and wounded, it was abundantly clear that
a signal Confederate victory was at hand. The Army of the Potomac had
suffered nearly 12,600 casualties, nearly two-thirds of them in front of Mayre’s
Heights. By comparison, Lee’s army had suffered some 5,300 losses.
Robert E. Lee, watching the great Confederate victory unfolding from his hilltop
command post exclaimed, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow
too fond of it.”
Roughly six
weeks after the Battle of Fredericksburg, President Lincoln removed Burnside
from command of the Army of the Potomac.