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nation required more than enthusiasmβ€”it required time to resolve the numerous contradictions in Southern society between slaveholders and nonslaveholders, between the Romantic image of the South as a society of plantation aristocrats and the grubby rationality of cotton capitalism, between states’ rights and the urgency of centralizing every Southern resource in order to win the war. Unfortunately, time was in short supply in the Confederacy. Southern armies were losing territory, Southern men were quietly avoiding war service, and Southern families were going hungry. If Southerners were ever to have the time they needed to understand why they were fighting this war, then the Confederate armies must strike and strike quickly to secure Confederate independence, or else the stress of performing this experiment in nation building under the sword would push the Southern nation into collapse.

The day after the Richmond bread riot, the lead editorial in the Richmond Dispatch was resolutely headlined, β€œSufferings in the North.”5

SOMEONE MORE FIT TO COMMAND

On November 7, 1862, President Lincoln finally dismissed George Brinton McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. The immediate reason for McClellan’s dismissal was his slowness in pursuit of Lee’s battered Army of Northern Virginia after its hammering at Antietam the previous September. Looming behind that was the larger conflict between Lincoln and McClellan over slavery and emancipation. But getting rid of McClellan only solved half the problem; it now became necessary for Lincoln to find a more politically reliable replacement who would be aggressive enough to pursue and defeat the Army of Northern Virginia.

At first Lincoln thought he had found such a man in another of McClellan’s corps commanders, Major General Ambrose Burnside. A floridly bewhiskered, six-foot-tall midwesterner, Burnside was admired by one reporter as β€œthe very beau ideal of a soldier.” A West Point graduate of 1847, Burnside had served briefly in the Mexican War (he arrived the day Mexico City fell, so he saw no action) and then resigned from the army in 1853 to go into the arms business, where he patented a breech-loading rifle known as the Burnside carbine. When the war broke out, he was appointed to command the 1st Rhode Island Volunteers and led the expedition that captured Roanoke Island in February 1862. The Roanoke Island expedition made Burnside’s reputation as an aggressive leader, and when McClellan’s Peninsula campaign collapsed that July, Lincoln offered Burnside command of the Army of the Potomac on the spot. But Burnside had known McClellan since West Point, counted him as a friend, and felt too much personal gratitude to McClellan for past favors to take advantage of McClellan’s failure. By November, however, there was no question that McClellan had to leave the army, and Burnside reluctantly obeyed Lincoln’s summons to replace him.6

That reluctance should have warned Lincoln that all was not what it seemed with Burnside. Despite the reputation he had won as a fighter in the Roanoke expedition, Burnside was actually hesitant and unsure of himself as a general, and the higher he ascended the ladder of command responsibilities, the more hesitant and unsure he grew. At Antietam, McClellan had ordered Burnside to send the four divisions of Burnside’s 9th Corps across a bridge on the Antietam Creek and attack Lee’s right flank. Burnside found getting across the creek and across the bridge far more difficult than anyone had imagined, and not until after noon did the Federals finally storm across and drive off the thin curtain of Confederate skirmishers who had been defending it. He then paused for two hours to straighten out the alignment of his divisions, allowing just enough time for a full Confederate division under A. P. Hill to arrive pell-mell from Harpers Ferry and knock the 9th Corps back to the creek. Caution and uncertainty caused Burnside to throw away a golden opportunity to crush Lee’s army, and he escaped criticism only because so much of Lincoln’s disappointed wrath after Antietam was poured out on McClellan’s head instead. Replacing McClellan with Burnside, Lincoln imagined, would give the Army of the Potomac an aggressive commander, but it would also placate any unrest among McClellan’s stalwarts in the senior officer ranks by selecting someone who was supposed to be one of McClellan’s friends.7

Burnside was aware that despite the lateness of the year, Lincoln and the War Department would expect him to mount a campaign as soon as possible to make up for the time McClellan had wasted in the fall. He also understood that there would be no patience with any plans for another flanking campaign down to the James River peninsula, with a careful and bloodless siege of Richmond. Lincoln wanted confrontation and he wanted it now, and anything less than a head-on overland drive would be interpreted politically as weakness of will. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, not Richmond, must be the real object of attack. So within a week of taking over the Army of the Potomac, Burnside called the army’s major generals together and unveiled his plan. Abandoning McClellan’s James River route, he would march overland, cross the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg, and draw Lee into a knock-down, drag-out fight in the flat country somewhere between Fredericksburg and Richmond. Since the bridges across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg had been destroyed as the city changed hands through 1862, Burnside would surprise Lee by building bridges of pontoon boats there, and be on the south side of the Rappahannock before Lee knew what was happening.8

The critical point in this plan was getting across the Rappahannock quickly, for if Lee got wind of what was going on and moved the Army of Northern Virginia to Fredericksburg first, the Army of the Potomac would have to fight its way across the Rappahannock and out of Fredericksburg at a decided disadvantage. Unhappily for Burnside, this was precisely what happened. Although Burnside took only three days, from November 14 to November 17, to march the Army of the Potomac down to the Rappahannock opposite Fredericksburg, his pontoons were nowhere to be found.

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