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By sheer determination, they slogged forward toward the enemy.
They were the soldiers of the Union’s Army of the Potomac,
and they did not give up. Just weeks earlier, they had been dispatched
in wave after wave in an assault on General Robert E. Lee’s
fortified line at the battle of Fredericksburg. Their attack
had failed, but only due to the misguided leadership by the army’s
latest commander, General Ambrose E. Burnside, and not because
of any lack of courage by the men in blue.
Now, on January 21, 1863, they were advancing again –
as Burnside attempted to flank Lee’s army. The march was
conducted in the midst of a brutally fierce winter storm. The
weather caused the road to be churned into an ocean of mud. It
was “an indescribable chaos of pontoons, vehicles, and artillery,”
a Federal officer would later recall – “wagons upset
by the roadside, guns stalled in the mud – horses and mules
buried in the liquid mud.” Even so, the battle-hardened
soldiers of the Army of the Potomac did not give up. |