Legends

“It was a bitter disappointment to him, not finding a legitimate publisher.”

“What was it about Fredericksburg that was so special?”

Martin’s hand, clammy with perspiration, came up to massage his brow. The involuntary gesture wasn’t lost on Dr. Treffler. “It was early in December of 1862,” he began, staring vacantly out of the window at the horizon, watching for the flashes of the great battle being fought beyond it. “There was a new Federal general in charge of the Army of the Potomac, his name was Burnside. Ambrose Burnside. He thought he saw a way to end the war with one swift assault across Virginia to capture the Confederate capitol, Richmond. It was a brilliant plan. President Lincoln signed off on it and Burnside force-marched his troops down the Potomac to a point across the river from Fredericksburg. If he could surprise the rebels and take the city, the road to Richmond would be open and the war would end almost before it got going. Burnside had put in an urgent order for pontoon bridges, but when he reached Fredericksburg he discovered that the War Department hadn’t dispatched them. The Union army wound up bivouacking for ten days on its side of the river waiting for the Goddamn bridges, giving Robert Lee time to bring up his army and mass it on the heights above the city. When the bridges finally arrived and Burnside crossed the river, he found Bobby Lee and seventy-five thousand Confederates blocking the road to Richmond. The weather was wintry, the autumnal mud in the rutted roads had turned hard. The Federals, advancing across sloping open ground, came on all day, wave after wave of them in their spanking bright factory-made uniforms. The Rebels in homespun dyed with plant pigments, fighting from behind a low stone wall at the edge of a sunken road at the foot of Marye’s Hill, beat back every attack. The sharpshooters, armed with Whitworths, picked off the Federal officers so easily that many of them began tearing off their insignias as they went into the line. Groups of Federals tried to take cover behind some brick houses on the plain but the Yankee cavalry, using the flats of sabres, forced them back to the battle. Burnside kept track of the progress of the fighting from the roof of the Chatham Mansion across the river. From a knob up on the heights, the Mansion was within eyeshot and Bobby Lee pointed it out to Stonewall Jackson—he told him that thirty years before he’d courted the lady he wound up marrying at that very house. On the ridge line, a Confederate band belted out waltzes for the southern gentlemen and ladies who had come down from Richmond to see the battle. Old Pete Longstreet, with a woman’s woolen shawl draped over his shoulders, watched the fighting unfolding below him through a long glass fixed to a wooden tripod in front of the Confederate command post. It took a time to convince him that the Federal attack on the sunken road wasn’t a feint—he couldn’t swallow the idea that Burnside was squandering his life’s blood in a frontal attack that had no chance of succeeding. At one point an Irish Brigade made it to within fifteen paces of the sunken road and even the Rebels watching from the heights cheered their courage. But the 24th Georgians behind the low stone wall, firing and loading and firing so steadily their teeth ached from biting off the paper cartridges, turned back that attack, too. Burnside launched fourteen assaults on the heights before darkness blotted out the killing fields. When the Federals finally retreated across the river the next day and counted noses, they discovered that nine thousand Union men had fallen at Fredericksburg.”

Martin sat humped over in the chair now, his lids squeezed shut, the flat of a hand pressed to his forehead damming the migraine building up behind his eyes. “When Lincoln Dittmann went to Washington to research the book, he discovered Burnside’s original order for the pontoon bridges in the army archives. The word ‘Urgent’ had been inked out, probably by a Confederate sympathizer working at the War Department. You asked what was so special about Fredericksburg—Dittmann concluded that if the pontoon bridges had been delivered on time, the war might have ended there in 1862 instead of dragging on until 1865.”