Against this impregnable place, Burnside launched charge after charge, and never did men go more bravely and certainly to death. This was simultaneous with the fighting at Hamilton’s Crossing.
Meagher’s Irish Brigade went first across the plain. Detouring from Hanover street and George street, they formed line of battle on the lowest ground, and with cedar branches waving in their hats, bravely green in memory of “the ould sod” they swept forward until the rifles behind the wall and the cannon on the hill decimated their ranks; and yet again they formed and charged, until over the whole plain lay the dead, with green cedar boughs waving idly in their hats. The Irish Brigade was practically exterminated, and three more charges by larger bodies failed, although one Northern officer fell within twenty-five yards of the wall. The day ended in the utter defeat of the Union Army, which withdrew into Fredericksburg at night.
In front of the wall 8,217 Union soldiers were killed or wounded, and in the “Sunken Road” the Confederates lost 1,962.
The total Union loss in the whole battle of Fredericksburg was 12,664 and the Confederates’ loss 5,377.
General J. R. Cook, of the Confederate Army, was killed almost at the spot where Cobb fell. General C. F. Jackson and General Bayard, of the Union Army, were killed, the latter dying in the Bernard House, “Mansfield,” where Franklin had his headquarters.
The Death of General Cobb
General T. R. R. Cobb, the gallant commander of the Georgians, fell mortally wounded at the stone wall, and tradition has said that he was killed by a shell fired from the lawn of his mother’s home, a dramatic story that is refuted by evidence that he was killed by a sharpshooter in a house at the left and in front of the “Sunken Road.”
But the brilliant Georgian, who aided in formulating the Confederate Constitution, was killed within sight of the house, where, more than forty years before, the elder Cobb met, and in which he married, she who was to be the General’s mother. Journeying late in 1819 North to attend Congress, Senator John Forsythe, who was born in Fredericksburg, and Senator Cobb, Sr., were guests of Thomas R. Rootes, Esq., at Federal Hill, a great house that sits at the edge of the town, overlooking the little valley and Marye’s Heights, and there began a romance that led to marriage of Miss Rootes and Senator Cobb, in the mansion, in 1820. From the spot where he stood when he died, had not the smoke of a terrific battle screened it, their son, the Georgian General, could have clearly seen the windows of the room in which his parents were married.
General Cobb died in the yard of a small house, just at the edge of the “Sunken Road,” ministered to in his last moments, as was many another man who drank the last bitter cup that day, by an angel of mercy and a woman of dauntless courage, Mrs. Martha Stevens.
Her house was in the center of the fire, yet she refused to leave it, and there between the lines, with the charges rolling up to her yard fence and tons of lead shrieking about her, Mrs. Stevens stayed all day, giving the wounded drink, and bandaging their wounds until every sheet and piece of clothing in the house had been used to bind a soldier’s hurts. At times the fire of Northern troops was concentrated on her house so that General Lee, frowning, turned to those about him and said: “I wish those people would let Mrs. Stevens alone.”