Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

By the time the first elements of Burnside’s pontoon train finally arrived from Washington on November 24, Lee had frantically assembled the scattered parts of the Army of Northern Virginia and dug them in along a ridge known as Marye’s Heights, just below Fredericksburg, covering the approaches south toward Richmond. Burnside had lost the advantage of surprise.9

In any other circumstances, a commander of the Army of the Potomac would have been well advised to give up the campaign as lost and gone into winter quarters until spring brought fairer weather. Burnside was under too much pressure from Washington to stop now, though, and as if to prove that he really was the aggressive general everyone thought he was, Burnside ordered the river crossing forced and the pontoon bridges built under fire. Remarkably, his soldiers and engineers pulled it off, and by December 12, 1862, a shaky trio of bridges was thrown over the Rappahannock through a curtain of harassing rebel fire, and the town of Fredericksburg was secured. But the Confederates remained on the heights beyond the town. Burnside planned to tackle them on December 13 by staging a large-scale demonstration in front of Marye’s Heights, while swinging a third of his army around Lee’s right flank.10

Planning an operation of this scale, however, proved beyond Burnside’s grasp. The flanking maneuver was checked by “Stonewall” Jackson, and, as if to annihilate all memory of any hesitancy at Antietam, Burnside ended up making not one or two but six perfectly formed but ghastly frontal assaults on Marye’s Heights. From behind a stone wall at the foot of the heights, the Confederates mowed down the thick, slow-moving Federal formations all day, until more than 12,000 Union soldiers were dead or wounded, 6,000 of them piled in front of Marye’s Heights alone. “We had to advance over a level plane, and their batteries being on high ground and they being behind breastworks, we had no chance at them, while they could take as deliberate aim as a fellow would at a chicken,” wrote George Washington Whitman to his brother three weeks after the battle, “The range was so short, that they threw percussion shells into our ranks that would drop at our feet and explode, killing and wounding Three or four every pop.” The next day Burnside wanted to make one more attack, which he would lead personally, but his disgusted corps commanders talked him out of it.11

Burnside withdrew to the north bank of the Rappahannock, hoping for a second chance to get at Lee. However, when he started a new campaign on January 20, 1863, to get across the Rappahannock several miles further west, winter rains turned the roads into bottomless morasses, and Burnside’s infamous “Mud March” slopped to a halt. It “was the meanest… the most ‘ornery’ time the Army of the Potomac ever had,” remembered one Maine captain. “For mud, rain, cold, whiskey drowned-out men, horses, mules, and abandoned wagons and batteries, for pure unadulterated demoralization… this took the cake.” With soldiers demoralized and deserting in record numbers, with most of Burnside’s corps commanders publicly criticizing his ineptitude, Lincoln had no choice but to relieve Burnside.12

Lincoln’s second choice for a general for the Army of the Potomac was yet another soldier with a reputation for aggressiveness, Major General Joseph Hooker, a handsome, happy-go-lucky brawler with an alcoholic’s red nose and an awesome command of old army profanity. By appointing Hooker Lincoln showed that he had lost patience with the army’s McClellan loyalists, since Hooker was one of the few anti-McClellan officers in the upper echelons of the Army of the Potomac and one of the even fewer to have endorsed the Emancipation Proclamation. He was also a surprisingly good administrator, and he spent the first three months of 1863 restoring the shattered morale and organization of the Army of the Potomac until, by April 1863, Hooker was able to invite Lincoln down to the army’s camps on the Rappahannock for a grand review. While Hooker was an uncommon organizer and a popular division and corps commander, there was some question in the mind of Darius Couch, the senior corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, about whether he possessed “the weight of character” needed to “take charge of that army.” Hooker was, in fact, a braggart and a show-off. Henry Slocum, who commanded the 12th Corps in the Army of the Potomac, had “no faith whatever in Hooker’s ability as a military man, in his integrity or honor.” Instead, “whiskey, boasting, and vilification have been his stock in trade.” Nevertheless, Hooker deliberately played up to the press to swell his image as a stern, remorseless campaigner, and he reveled in the nickname the newspapers happily bestowed upon him, “Fighting Joe.”13

Despite the image, Hooker grew unsteady and unsure under pressure. “He could play the best game of poker I ever saw,” commented Hooker’s chief of cavalry, George Stoneman, “until it came to the point where he should go a thousand better, and then he would flunk.” Far worse than this, Hooker was also grasping and loyal only to his own ambitions. “Gen. Hooker,” wrote Colonel Theodore Gates of the 20th New York, “is reputed a very ambitious & some what unscrupulous man.” Hooker had privately damned McClellan behind the general’s back to members of the Cabinet, and undercut Burnside’s authority so often by criticism and innuendo that the normally placid Burnside beseeched Lincoln to have Hooker court-martialed for insubordination. He liked to hear himself talk, whether it was about how he intended to thrash Lee—“May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none”—or how the country needed to get serious about winning the war and, like the old Roman republic, create a temporary dictatorship to finish things up.14

Lincoln struggled to bring Hooker to heel by reminding him that it was only with serious reservations that he had been appointed to command the Army of the Potomac. “I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your