Free Glory Road by Bruce Catton Page A

hills, with Abner Doubleday's division acting as flank guard on the left. As the men took their places the Iron Brigade, by chance, found itself quartered on the Bernard plantation, some three miles below Fredericksburg, and Company C of the 6th Wisconsin had a contraband cook who until comparatively recently had been held in servitude on this very estate. This one was highly pleased to be back, a free man protected by Lincoln's soldiers, on the plantation where he was born and bred. Yet when he saw some of his soldiers chopping down a fine shade tree to get firewood he ran up to them, pointing toward the manor house and pleading earnestly: "You break dat ol' man's heart if you cut down dat tree! His grandfather planted dat tree!" 10
    Night came at last and army movements ceased, and this great host of Federal soldiers, put down here so deliberately and so ostentatiously, waited for the action which the morning was sure to bring. The generals at the downstream end of the line were nervous. Franklin and his two corps commanders, Reynolds and Smith, interpreted Burnside's orders as calling simply for an armed observation of enemy strength. In a chat with Smith, Burnside had agreed that a good deal more than that was needed, and he had promised to send over supplementary orders. The generals sat up until three in the morning waiting for them, but they never came, either then or thereafter. Franklin, who was prepared to go by the script though the heavens fell, told Reynolds his original instructions stood: send out one division when day came, to seize the hill at Hamilton's Crossing, hold another division ready to support it, and if all goes well, which is not likely, someone will doubtless order something additional.
    Dawn came in cold and foggy, with a slow wind in the leafless trees. As the brigades moved out to take their places they could hear the innumerable army noises, but they could see neither their own ranks nor the enemy's, and George Meade spread out his Pennsylvania division in a gray watery light facing west along the edge of a muddy road that led south. Doubleday took his men in on Meade's left, and Gibbon, going into action as a division commander for the first time, lined his men up on the other side. Everybody lounged in the ranks and waited for the fog to lift.
    It lifted at about eleven o'clock, and when it went up it went up dramatically, like the curtain of a theater. The Federals were spread out all across the plain south of Fredericksburg, rank upon long rank, with national and regimental banners bright in the morning breeze, guns drawn up at intervals between the brigades, everything looking very martial and splendid, as if war were some sort of pageant. The Rebels were hardly visible. The hills which sheltered them were heavily wooded, and a low railway embankment that ran across the plain in front of the hills was fringed with a stubbly second growth where some advanced lines were concealed. They had a mass of guns planted on the knoll by Hamilton's Crossing, and a mile farther north they had another big bank of guns half hidden in a rising grove. Stonewall Jackson was an old artillerist himself, and he always made good use of his guns. As the last wisps of fog blew away, the Southern gunners stared at the limitless target that lay in front of them, trotted up to their pieces, pulled at trail handspikes and spun elevating screws, and opened fire. Gibbon's and Meade's men, drawn up along the highway, had to stay there and take it, while the Federal batteries rolled forward to make reply and a great turbulence of boiling smoke and heavy sound went tumbling up the sky.
    Holding still to be shelled is about as unpleasant a job as infantry gets, and the Yankees in the open plain found it especially hard because they could very easily see the cannoneers who were firing at them. Naturally, they hated them; one soldier wrote that the Rebel gunners, visibly busy around their pieces, looked "like fiends who