Fredericksburg 1862: Late Pontoon Bridges and the Wall at Marye's Heights

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In November 1862 Lincoln replaced George McClellan with Ambrose Burnside, who openly said he felt unqualified and accepted partly to keep the command from Joseph Hooker. Burnside feinted near Warrenton, then marched his army from November 15 to Falmouth, across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg, with the road to Richmond open. The pontoon bridges he needed were still on the Upper Potomac, held up by paperwork and a lack of horses. By the time they arrived, Lee had James Longstreet on Marye's Heights and Stonewall Jackson to the south. On December 11 William Barksdale's Mississippians shot down the bridge builders, Union guns fired more than 5,000 shells into the town, and infantry rowed across to clear it house by house before looting it.

On December 13 John Pelham held up the southern advance with a single gun for nearly an hour, and George Meade's division found a 600-yard gap in Jackson's line, but William Franklin read an order to "seize" the high ground as a limited probe and kept his reserves idle. Burnside then sent his men against the sunken Telegraph Road behind a four-foot stone wall, across a canal crossed by three small bridges. Seven divisions made 14 charges and none reached the wall. Union casualties topped 12,600 against about 5,300 Confederate. Burnside had to be talked out of leading his old Ninth Corps in person, the army withdrew on December 15, and Lincoln said that if there was a worse place than hell, he was in it.

• Longstreet's artillery commander told him a chicken could not live on that field once the guns opened.
• The Irish Brigade lost 545 of its 1,200 men, and Winfield Hancock's division lost over 2,000.
• Confederate Sergeant Richard Kirkland carried water to wounded Union soldiers, though the earliest records of the story date to 1880.
• On the night of December 14, soldiers on both sides recorded a rare display of the aurora borealis over the battlefield.
• The Slaughter Pen Farm, where Meade broke through, was saved from development by a $12 million American Battlefield Trust effort.