Shepherd's Song

On Sang the Requiem of the Army of the Potomac Mid December, 1862 Major General Ambrose Burnside, commander of the Army of the Potomac, huddled deep within layers of Union blue wool. Even with all the fireplaces in the Phillips’ mansion roaring to a hell-high pitch, his bones ached, and he could not sleep for the shakes. Ague, he wanted to believe, but ague came and went with some relief in between. Bare-bone cold went down to his fingertips and paralyzed his mind with grief and disquiet. On the expanse of mahogany table in front of him lay a tray with a decanter half filled with very good brandy, and beside it, the field maps of Fredericksburg and Falmouth. These still bore his notes and orders on the bloody campaign just past. Generals Hancock and Reynolds had been right—they had not won. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia still held the high ground, and on this side of the Rappahannock his own army clung to Stafford Heights, just as it had before the death of twenty thousand men. Taking a page from Lee’s strategy book, Burnside had tried to do what the Virginian had done so often and so brilliantly: hit the enemy simultaneously from two flanks, get behind him, and crush him in a vise. At Groveton and on the Peninsula, Lee had played the plan to perfection. But the plan had not worked out that way when Burnside had adopted it. He had never gotten behind Lee’s lines. Lee had guarded his flanks with impassable barriers, Massaponax Creek on Jackson’s right and the canal and the Rappahannock on Longstreet’s left. Confederate cavalry insulated them beyond approach. Burnside had been in the job less than a month when he sent his army against the Confederates strung out along Marye’s Heights and Prospect Hill. Blue tides of humanity rose and ebbed; and in the end, they had been annihilated by converging fire. A squirrel could not have survived in the open that day. The exhaust from the cannon and rifles had eclipsed the sun and plunged the afternoon into premature night, hiding the casualties under rolling pillows of smoke. From the first charge, field reports were all of death and disaster. By the hour they came in, adding to the “horrible arithmetic” as Lincoln called it. Whole towns in New England would have no men coming home that Christmas or any thereafter. At dusk his generals persuaded Burnside to break the battle off, and he relented. Finally, he had asked the enemy for mercy, but Lee would not agree to a ceasefire to bury the dead and relieve the wounded still on the field. So, Union men lay all night in the December frost under a shroud of sulfur haze. After dark the Confederates, threadbare themselves, stole out from their lines to strip, then leave the Union casualties to freeze and die slowly by minutes and by hours. When there was nothing more to steal, Johnny, maddened with euphoria over his day’s victory, leveled his musket into the darkness. He set his sights and fired on the cries of the enemy's desperately wounded abandoned in the darkness. If the sobs did not abate with the first shot, the Rebel adjusted his aim and fired again. Sooner or later he got the silence he wanted. Then he reloaded and cocked his ear for another target. Burnside had lost his reason over it, and ordered another charge for the next day—one that he would lead personally. But merciful reason prevailed, and his officers talked him out of it. For all his fire against the enterprise before the battle, Hancock was calm now. Unbidden, he had helped himself to Burnside’s brandy but left the glass untouched—he would do his drinking and his grieving in private. General Darius Couch, Burnside’s second-in-command, was not so temperate. He slammed his resignation onto his commander’s desk and stormed out. Reynolds, ever the gentleman, just stared Burnside down. He too would not serve under a man who could not distinguish strategy from suicide. Couch had been right. Hancock had been right. And in the beginning, he himself had been right. Burnside had tried to tell Lincoln that he was not the man to lead an army. This command took a soothsayer with a bit of the poker player. And he had no talent for either. If ordered, he could hold a line until the angels blew, but coordination and tactics that worked so well on paper and in his mind reversed themselves in bloody practice.