Fredericksburg

Today was a travel day, but we travelled just a short drive down I-95 to Fredericksburg. After unhitching we drove to the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center in downtown Fredericksburg.  Within a radius of 17 miles, four horrendous battles were fought - Fredericksburg (December 11-13, 1862); Chancellorsville (April 27 - May 6, 1863); The Wilderness (May 5-6, 1864); and, Spotsylvania Court House (May 8-21, 1864). These sites make this the most contested ground in America and the bloodiest landscape on the continent. Located midway between the Confederate capital of Richmond and the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C., the Rapidan and Rappahannock rivers offered the Confederates opportunities for defense and posed a major obstacle to advancing Union armies. 

On December 11, 1862, Union troops bombarded Fredericksburg from the east, then crossed the river on pontoon bridges to confront Robert E. Lee's Confederates holding fortified high ground to the west of the city. On December 13, Ambrose E. Burnside's (Rhode Island connection) Union troops launched a two-pronged attack. On the south end of the line they achieved a brief-but-bloody breakthrough against Stonewall Jackson's corps at Prospect Hill. To the north, behind town, waves of Union attackers struggled against the powerful Confederate defenses on Marye's (pronounced Marie's)Heights and in the Sunken Road. The result was a resounding Confederate victory that left the fields around Fredericksburg blanketed with Union dead and wounded.

The battle dealt a painful blow to the Union war effort, discouraging Union soldiers and intensifying public debate about the war and the wisdom of emancipation. For the Confederates, the triumph helped establish both Lee and his army as the Confederacy's greatest hope for ultimate victory.  

Smiling, gentle Mike, a volunteer, who explained the four battle for us.

There is a walking tour of the area of heavy combat on the Sunken Road that culminated in the Fredericksburg National Cemetery.  

A view up Marye's Hill.

Ranger Becky was at the start of the walking tour.  She talked to us about Burnside's actions, deplorable, and Lee's generalship. She is a big fan of Stonewall Jackson and feels that he was the great military tactician, not Lee. She said that Lee suffered from heart problems that he hid from his troops and family. I'll have to read the new book about Lee.

Statue erected in memory of the heroism and humanity of Richard Kirkland , a Confederate soldier who crossed the Confederate lines to bring water to wounded Union soldiers on the field in front of the Sunken Road.

The Sunken Road at the base of Marye's Hill that provided natural fortifications for the Confederate troops.

A huge holly tree along the walk.

When the Civil War ended, the people of Fredericksburg set about the task of restoring shell -damaged buildings and war-torn lives. But the evidence of the war lingered on, in the trench-scarred hillsides and crude cemetery plots scattered haphazardly across the nearby battlefields. Thousands of soldiers who had died in battle lay under stark mounds of earth with little, if anything, to identify them. In April 1866, nine months after the war's end, Congress directed the Secretary of War to establish a system of national cemeteries for the burial of soldiers who had died in defense of the Union. At Fredericksburg, the Government constructed a cemetery on Marye's Heights, the formidable ridge that had defied repeated Union assaults during the Battle of Fredericksburg. 

Panoramic picture of a portion of the Fredericksburg National Cemetery. 

Among the last and nearly successful of the many charges made against Marye's Heights was that made by General Andrew A. Humphreys' Pennsylvania Division. Surging forward at dusk, Humphreys' men got within 100 yards of this ridge before being driven back by the fire of Confederate riflemen located in the Sunken Road below. In 1908 the State of Pennsylvania erected this monument to honor the more than one thousand soldiers of Humphreys' division who were casualties in that attack.

Tomorrow we plan on visiting the other three sites - Chancellorsville, The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House.