This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [122]
They were missing because — to put it at its simplest — this was an army in which some arrangement or other was always going wrong. Men could be recruited, fed, drilled, and disciplined in large numbers; they could even be led into a battle, after a fashion, with their own bravery making up for many failures in leadership; but to take care of the daily routine of housekeeping and maintenance was for some reason beyond the capacity of this army’s authorities. Burnside had ordered pontoons sent to Fredericksburg to be ready for him when he needed them, but in some way his orders had gone astray; the pontoons were not where everybody supposed they were, and anyway, when the orders finally reached them, nobody remembered to explain to the men in charge that there was a great hurry about things. So the Army of the Potomac sat in idleness by the Rappahannock while these mistakes were set right; and because it took a long time to set them right, Lee brought his army to Fredericksburg, arrayed it carefully on high ground back from the river, and calmly waited to see what Burnside would do next.1
Burnside would do just what he had set out to do, for there was a great stubbornness in him — a great stubbornness, and nothing more. He had said he would cross at Fredericksburg, and at Fredericksburg he would cross, even if destruction awaited him. By December 11 everything was ready, pontoons and all, and on the next morning the engineers came down to the water to build the bridges.
The Confederates were waiting, and from houses and riverside shacks they laid fire on the river, killing many of the engineers. Bridges half built, the engineers had to stop, while more than one hundred Federal guns hammered the town, pulverizing houses, knocking bricks and timbers into the empty streets, and sending a great cloud of smoke billowing up toward the autumn sky. Silence again, and a new rush by the engineers; then Rebel sharpshooters, little harmed by the fire that had wrecked the town, opened fire again, more of the engineers were killed, and once more the bridge-building failed.
In the end Burnside’s men took some of the ponderous pontoons, filled them with infantry, paddled them across the river in spite of the musketry, and drove combat patrols through the town, gouging the sharpshooters out of their holes. This ended the resistance. By midafternoon the bridges were finished, and at last the great, sinewy Army of the Potomac began its crossing. It moved glacially, hour after hour, the enormous blue columns coming down the banks to the river and swaying endlessly over the bridges, flooding the town and fanning out into an open plain just downstream; it moved with flags and with bands and with a great rumbling of moving cannon, making a display of might that impressed the waiting Confederates, impressed even Lee himself. Yet this Union army which seemed to move so irresistibly was in fact plodding blindly into a trap.
Fredericksburg was deceptive. The Rappahannock, coming down the distant Blue Ridge on a general easterly course, turns south just above the town, and for a time it flows very nearly on a north-to-south line, with Fredericksburg lying on the west bank. An army crossing the stream and entering Fredericksburg finds a shallow open plain west of the town, extending for several miles downstream; and just beyond the plain, perhaps three quarters of a mile from the river, there is a long chain of wooded hills running roughly parallel to the river. To get out of the town and make any progress whatever, the army must start by passing that chain of hills.
It looks innocent enough because the hills are not very high, and toward the south they trail off into gentle rolling country where the railroad to Richmond curves past them. But the hills are just high enough to make an ideal defensive