Free Glory Road by Bruce Catton

brief, was very foggy; and as a crowning misfortune it developed that one of the worst of his failings was a simple inability to use the English language clearly. None of his subordinates understood just what he wanted them to do, and under the circumstances the battle could become nothing but a simple exercise in the killing of Union soldiers. Some of the soldiers appear to have been aware of this. A newspaper correspondent going about the camps that day asked various officers what the Confederate Army was up to. There it was, with scores of guns on commanding hills and with more and more of the Union Army parading into town under the very muzzles of those silent guns; why didn't the Rebels open fire? He got a variety of explanations: the Rebels were low on ammunition, Lee did not wish to bombard a Virginia town, the Southern army was in retreat, and so on. Finally the reporter tagged an enlisted man, who looked over toward the silent, ominous hills and remarked: "They want us to get in. Getting out won't be quite so smart and easy. You'll see." 7
    Whatever the Rebels may have wanted, the twelfth of December was a mild sunny day, and during the whole of it the Army of the Potomac assembled its hosts on the heights east of the river and sent them slanting down to the water in endless blue columns bright with flags and polished muskets, their crossing announced by the unceasing route-step tramp of tens of thousands of men on the hollow swaying bridges. Some of the Rebel guns on the western hills might have reached these bridges and the approaches. Mostly they did not try, except for one of Jackson's batteries which possessed an English-made Whitworth rifle, a breechloader with a range longer than the artillerists of that day quite knew how to use. These gunners fired a few rounds at Franklin's downstream crossing, putting one bolt through a paymaster's tent on the Yankee side of the river just as the paymaster had spread his greenbacks out on a barrel-and-plank table. The bills went whirling and dancing up about the wrecked tent like a green blizzard, and the ensuing scramble by stragglers and orderlies was something the army long remembered. 8 Otherwise the crossing was peaceful enough. If the deluded Yankees were indeed going to make their fight here, no Confederate commander wanted to keep them from trying it.

Yet the Federal strength was great, and this unending muster of the troops was so impressive that even stolid, impassive Longstreet began to worry at last, and he asked his chief of artillery if he had not better get some more guns to defend Marye's Heights. The gunner laughed at him; once he opened fire, he said, not even a chicken could live on the plain between the hills and the town. Longstreet looked again and was reassured. Later, when Lee asked him if the overpowering weight of Federals might not be too heavy for him, Longstreet promised to kill every man in the Union Army, provided his ammunition held out. 9 The Yankees were with power, but in all the war the Southerners never had to worry as little about a battle as about this one.
    Sumner sent his entire command into Fredericksburg, but he did not go with it. Burnside kept him on the home side of the river, feeling that if the old man once got over the bridges he would be unable to keep from getting up into the front line of attack, which was no place for a Grand Division commander. There was a day-long sputter of rifle fire on the skirmish lines outside of town as Federals and Confederates bickered over the approaches; and inside :he town there was a prodigious amount of looting of the empty houses, so that Couch finally put a provost guard at the bridges to keep the looters from getting their plunder across the river. By nightfall, he wrote, the guards had collected "an enormous pile of booty."
    Franklin put in the day getting his divisions across by the lower bridges, and by evening he had them posted on a north-and-south fine facing the Confederate