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It was an unforgettable display of valor amid the worst of
war. During the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862,
Northern troops from the Army of the Potomac under General Ambrose
E. Burnside repeatedly assaulted impregnable Southern positions
on Marye’s Heights. Battle-seasoned troops from General
Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia were defending
a heavily-fortified line behind a stone wall. Wave after wave
of Federal troops charged up the hill - and were slaughtered.
Casualties were horrific. Watching so many brave men in blue
hurl themselves into what was almost certain death, General Lee
was moved to comment: “It is well that war is so terrible,
lest we grow too fond of it.”
Near dusk, after numerous unsuccessful attempts to break the
Confederate line, another assault was ordered. Among the front-line
troops chosen for the attack was the 20th Maine Infantry, whose
officers included Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.
A former college professor from Maine, Chamberlain would become
one of the Civil War’s most famous figures for his heroic
defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg - which may have saved
the battle and the war for the North. He would later rise in
rank to general and would be chosen to receive the surrender
of Lee’s troops at Appomattox.
At Fredericksburg, however, what Chamberlain and the 20th
Maine experienced was not victory - but sacrifice and defeat.
The men from Maine pushed their way over the bodies of their
fallen comrades to within a stone’s throw from the Southern
line before they were forced to find cover on the littered slopes
of Marye’s Heights. There they stayed in the bitter cold
all night and all day, lying amid the bodies of the dead. Finally,
on the afternoon of the next day, they were recalled for the
retreat of the Federal army. It was a harrowing and heart-rending
exposure to the worst of war for Chamberlain and his men. Yet,
they had proven their mettle. The valor they and other troops
from the Army of the Potomac displayed at Fredericksburg would
become one of the war’s most memorable and heroic sagas.
The measure of their courage would be recorded after the war
by one of their former foes, General James Longstreet, who watched
their valiant assaults from atop Marye’s Heights. “A
series of braver, more desperate charges than those hurled against
our troops…was never known,” Longstreet observed. Victory
and acclaim awaited Chamberlain and his 20th Maine at Gettysburg
- forged on the field of fire at Fredericksburg. |