The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 2 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

The Confederate war furnished two conspicuous manifestations of supreme heroism on the part of large bodies of men—one upon one side, the other upon the other. Pickett's charge at Gettysburg was one of these. This series of six charges up Marye's Heights was the other.

When the sixth assault ended as its predecessors had done, the time had manifestly come to end the battle. A wiser commander would have ended it much earlier, indeed. Having lost 12,353 men in an ill-directed contest Burnside withdrew to the river bank, baffled and beaten beyond recovery.

The Army of the Potomac had won all the glory for itself that heroic conduct can give in the absence of victory, but it had need now of rest, recruitment and a new commander.

Burnside was clearly not equal to the task of commanding such an army in a contest with such an adversary as Robert E. Lee. He had himself passed precisely that judgment upon his own capacities when on three former occasions the command of the Army of the Potomac was offered to him. But now that he had accepted that command and had led to disastrous defeat what somebody at the time characterized as "the finest army on the planet," disappointment and chagrin seem for the moment to have unseated his reason. He refused to recognize the extent of the disaster he had suffered or the conspicuousness and completeness of his defeat. His army was torn and broken as no other great army on either side had been before. It was weary with futile battling, discouraged by a failure that had involved terrible losses, and the fact that it was not demoralized was due only to the splendid courage and devotion of the soldiers themselves. Worse than all it had lost confidence in the capacity of its leader.

Nevertheless Burnside, reckless of any consequences that might follow, was determined that night to renew the battle on the following morning, himself leading his own former corps, the Ninth, in still another desperate attempt to carry Marye's Heights. Earnest protests and persuasions succeeded at last in inducing him to abandon this purpose, and after remaining inactive for a day on the bank of the river, he withdrew his army, under cover of night, to the other side of the river and the fearfully disastrous Fredericksburg campaign was at an end.

Military critics have wondered much that Lee, whose loss in the battle had been only 5,309 men, and whose troops were almost wild with the enthusiasm of victory, permitted his badly beaten adversary to remain unmolested on the southern bank of the stream for twenty-four hours and then quietly to retire. Burnside's position and the condition of his army strongly invited attack. He had a wide and deep river behind him, with only a frail pontoon bridge spanning it. Had he been defeated there by assault on the part of the victors there would have been no way of escape open to him. Destruction or surrender must have followed.

On the other hand, his force still heavily outnumbered Lee's and it was in no way demoralized. Defeated and discouraged as it was its spirit was unbroken, and had Lee left his works and assailed it in the open, the issue of the conflict might have been very uncertain. It is alleged that Lee's lieutenants urged a tempestuous assault, and that Lee's chief reason for rejecting the advice was born of his hope that Burnside would himself on the next day renew the attempt to dislodge the Confederates from their well-nigh impregnable position.

However that may be, Lee did not in fact assume the offensive; Burnside retired during darkness to the farther side of the river and the two armies settled themselves in winter quarters, Lee presently sending large bodies of men to the southwest to reinforce the armies there, where active warfare was in progress, and still more active warfare threatened.

The military operations of the season that thus closed had been in every way remarkable. Four distinct campaigns had been fought, all of them severe, and all marked by brilliant strategy and heroic conduct on the part of the troops on either side. McClellan's siege of Richmond, which had filled the South with gloomy apprehension, had been broken in a series of bloody and impressive battles, and the Army of the Potomac had been forced to withdraw for the defense of Washington.

Pope's campaign with his Army of Virginia had been conspicuously brought to naught by brilliant strategy and desperate fighting.