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the commander took out his pencil and drew a diagram of what the Confederates would likely do to a second attack. This brought them to their senses. But although they were now unanimous about a withdrawal, no one wanted to go to Burnside’s headquarters with the request. Hawkins took it upon himself, riding in pitch-blackness through mud and debris to Burnside’s camp. He arrived before the general himself and waited. “As [Burnside] came through the door he said: ‘Well, it’s all arranged; we attack at early dawn, the Ninth Corps in the centre, which I shall lead in person’; and then seeing me he said: ‘Hawkins, your brigade shall lead with the 9th New York on the right of the line, and we’ll make up for the bad work of to-day.’ ” Undaunted, Hawkins launched into a calm but emphatic explanation as to why there could be no second attack. The unanimous agreement of the generals forced Burnside to concur. Strangely, there were still regiments who had yet to fire a shot; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had spent all day in the woods reading the poems of Robert Browning while he waited for orders.

“A ride along the whole length of the lines told a sad tale of slaughter,” wrote Lawley. “It is doubtful whether any living pen could do justice to the horrors.” But “when the eye had once rested upon the fatal slope of Marye’s Heights the memory became fixed upon the spot.” Fourteen Federal brigades had been thrown at the wretched stone wall. “There, in every attitude of death, lying so close to each other that you might step from body to body, lay acres of the Federal dead.”37 Vizetelly stopped counting the bodies when he neared seven hundred. Intermingled with the dead were the wounded and dying. With no truce agreed, they could not be rescued from the field. Their screams and moans filled the cold night air. The survivors huddled together in ravines, behind walls, and at the bases of trees for warmth, forbidden to light fires lest they provide a target for the enemy. As the dead stiffened in the freezing temperatures, they were propped up to look like sentries.38

All day on the fourteenth, Lee waited for Burnside to resume the offensive. But instead of fighting, Union soldiers turned what had been casual looting of Fredericksburg into a full-scale rampage. The historian of Ebenezer Wells’s regiment claims that the three terrified women discovered by the 79th in a filthy coal cellar were treated with kind respect. If so, they were among the few who were not taunted or molested. Soldiers went from house to house stripping the valuables and methodically smashing the rest. The streets became blocked with broken detritus; everything from pianos to petticoats lay in mangled heaps across the roads. The anarchy horrified and disgusted many Federal soldiers, but the destruction continued throughout the day. Even Martha Washington’s tomb was ransacked and used for target practice. At night, the madness below seemed to be reflected in the sky—the Northern Lights had never been seen so far south, and bright-red tongues of light flickered and crackled over the soldiers’ heads. When dawn came, the rising sun revealed a remarkable change on the battle plain. Hardly a shred of blue remained. The dead had been stripped naked by Confederates seeking to exchange their tattered uniforms for good Northern cloth.

Lee was still waiting on the fifteenth when Burnside requested a flag of truce for burial and retrieval. Lee acquiesced, which, according to Wolseley, was a tactical mistake of the gravest kind. In his history of the battle, written in 1889, he would describe the general’s actions as “inexplicable.” “Burnside’s army was at Lee’s mercy,” wedged tight between the Confederates and an unfordable river. Lee should have launched an all-out attack and obliterated the mighty Army of the Potomac while it remained vulnerable. Such a decisive victory, Wolseley believed, would have convinced the European Powers that neutrality was no longer an option. The Lincoln administration might well have fallen, and with it the national will to prosecute the war.39 But