On Dec. 13, 1862, Union troops under the command of General Ambrose Burnside, repeatedly assaulted a stone wall that shielded a sunken road at the base of Marye’s Heights in the center of the Fredericksburg battlefield, suffering devastating casualties in the most one-sided Union defeat in the American Civil War. Two-thirds of the 12,600 Union casualties at Fredericksburg (dead, wounded, missing) fell in front of that stone wall. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s forces suffered less than 5,000 casualties in the battle. The courageous Union troops on that day were “lions led by donkeys.”
The phrase “lions led by donkeys” was popularized by British writer Alan Clark in his 1961 book The Donkeys, a scathing examination of the ineptitude of British generals during the First World War. Clark claimed that German Gen. Erich Ludendorff used the phrase in a conversation with another German officer after the war. That claim has been challenged, but British Captain Peter Thompson used the phrase as the title of his 1927 book about the war. The phrase apparently has even earlier origins during the Crimean War at the Siege of Sevastopol.
Whatever the true provenance of the phrase, it applies to Union troops and their generals at Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg 160 years ago. During the initial assaults on Confederate forces at the stone wall, the men of 32 Union brigades charged straight into the fierce rifle fire at the wall and the devastating artillery fire from Marye’s Heights, as Lee and his subordinates watched with awe the sacrifice of Union soldiers. Lee that day supposedly remarked, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”
Enemy fire 'screcching like demons'
As the fog lifted that morning and Union soldiers crossed the pontoon bridges resting on the Rappahannock River, in what one soldier described as “an ominous silence akin to a funeral procession,” Confederate shells and solid shot exploded around them. Another Union soldier recalled seeing expressions of “seriousness and dread” on the faces of others in his regiment as they approached the open field leading up to the stone wall. Union troops faced fire “screeching like demons in the air, solid shot, shrapnel and shells from the batteries on the hills.” Men dropped dead and wounded by the dozens. Some fell to the ground in an effort to escape the withering fire. Charge after charge failed to dislodge Confederate troops on the sunken road behind the stone wall. During some of the latter charges, wounded Union soldiers pleaded with their comrades to turn back, some even grabbed hold of soldiers’ legs to dissuade them from their awful fate. But the men kept going forward, many to their doom. Union Gen. Andrew Humphreys described one of the last charges:
The stone wall was a sheet of flame that enveloped the head and flank of the column. Officers and men were falling rapidly,
and the head of the column was at length brought to a stand when close up to the wall.
Soon the Union troops became a “retiring mass” as men in their brigade fell all around them. It was Gen. Joseph Hooker, who in the following year would suffer a similar calamity at Chancellorsville, that finally called off the assault, as Burnside seemed oblivious to the extent of the carnage he had initiated.
Union soldiers brave, but doomed
At the beginning of the battle as he overlooked the field of fire in front of the stone wall, Confederate Gen. James Longstreet remarked to Lee: “General, we cover that ground now so well that we comb it as with a fine-tooth comb. A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.” During the successive charges, Longstreet told Lee: “General, if you put every man now on the other side of the Potomac in that field to approach me over that same line, and give me plenty of ammunition, I will kill them all before they reach my line.”
Longstreet, who watched the action from one of the hills overlooking the battlefield, later wrote: “A series of braver, more desperate charges than those hurled against the troops in the sunken road was never known, and the piles and cross-piles of dead marked a field such as I never saw before or since.” And Longstreet was later at Gettysburg and witnessed his own men get cut down in Pickett’s Charge.
Northern newspapers, including the New York Times, characterized the Union loss at Fredericksburg as a disaster, while an Ohio paper commented: “It can hardly be in human nature for men to show more valor, or generals to manifest less judgment, than were perceptible on our side that day.” President Abraham Lincoln eventually relieved Burnside of command, replacing him with Hooker. Lincoln would not find a general equal to Lee until Grant came east after winning victory after victory in the western theater of the war.
As would be the case after so many battles of the First World War, after the Battle of Fredericksburg the “lions” lay dead and wounded in the field while the “donkeys” prepared for the next slaughter.
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