The Battle of Fredericksburg

The December 13, 1862, Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, marked the defeat of Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Army of the Potomac by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, an important setback for the Union cause and military effort to seize the Confederate capital city of Richmond, Virginia. The battle and military campaign preceding it, which occurred primarily along the Rappahannock River at the city of Fredericksburg and in adjacent Stafford and Spotsylvania counties, was the most lopsided victory the Army of Northern Virginia achieved during the American Civil War, with the Union Army sustaining combat casualties equivalent to more than double those suffered by Confederates. The campaign also saw the use of urban combat, military occupation, and the direct role of civilians at the center of the November and December military maneuvers around the city, which was positioned approximately equidistant between Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Principal battle locations included the Confederate position of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s corps on Marye’s Heights behind the city, the Union artillery position on Stafford Heights, the position of Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Confederate corps at Prospect Hill south of the city of Fredericksburg, and the Rappahannock River itself, which was crossed only after Union engineers built a pontoon bridge under fire. The campaign is noted for Union Army shelling of the city itself as a military position, the failed, multiwave Union infantry assaults against fortified positions, and the destruction of property on December 12 as the town itself was sacked.

Second Bull Run/Manassas

The summer of 1862 witnessed the struggle between Northern Republican and Democratic ideologies embodied in the Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac even as Union and Confederate armies faced off in the Second Manassas Campaign. Formed to protect Washington while Maj. Gen. George McClellan advanced on Richmond, the Army of Virginia and its leader, Maj. Gen. John Pope, implemented a Republican or “hard war” policy of military occupation by confiscating civilian property and imposing loyalty oaths. Northern and Southern Democrats (characterized by McClellan and Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, respectively) recognized the threat that Pope’s ideology posed and sought to crush it, either by delaying reinforcement or decisive battlefield defeat. The defeat of Pope and his army by Confederate forces at Second Manassas delayed but did not destroy the twin Republican agendas of emancipation and destruction of the Confederacy. Pope and his political generals prefigured the total-war policies of the war’s last year.

The Chancellorsville Campaign

The Chancellorsville Campaign of early May 1863 was one of the most strategic military operations in any theater of the American Civil War. Union Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker and his powerful Army of the Potomac were miraculously defeated by the outnumbered Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under the leadership of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. In a daring flank march and attack, the Rebels crushed the federal Eleventh Corps on May 2 and over the next several days hammered the rest of Hooker’s army back across the Rappahannock River. Northern morale sank, Copperheads gained momentum, and German Americans, feeling the sting of nativism, began to question their role in the Union. The initiative in the East once again passed to the South, creating conditions for what became the Pennsylvania Campaign. But Jackson, wounded accidentally by his own men, died, destroying the fragile command team Lee had carefully built over the previous year. His loss was a turning point in the war.

We Can No Longer Keep Silent

This chapter details the army's collective proclamation of political sentiment in early 1863. Following the disaster at Fredericksburg and general frustration during the "emancipation winter," a growing number of anti-war Copperheads on the home front convinced junior officers to mobilize the army for political action. In a series of several dozen political resolutions adopted by regiments throughout the Army of the Potomac, the officers and men in the ranks proclaimed themselves in the nation's press to be the arbiters of loyalty and guardians of civic virtue. In the process, they endorsed the Lincoln administration and broadly supported its efforts to weaken the Confederacy through conscription, emancipation, and "hard war." This campaign elicited a backlash from Democratic men at home and in the ranks, but the publication of such a vehement political stance from the army throughout Northern newspapers drowned them out.

What the Sentiment of the Army Really Is

This chapter begins with an analysis of how General Ulysses Grant's Overland Campaign drained the Army of the Potomac of much of its veteran core of officers and enlisted men. The survivors, hunkered in the trenches of Petersburg, watched as recruits and conscripts refilled the army's ranks. The chapter then focuses on the spirited contest over the 1864 presidential election between Lincoln and McClellan. Veterans who had not reenlisted organized paramilitary campaign clubs at home and communicated with those still at the front. When it came time to vote, the army's reenlisted soldiers, many of whom had fought under McClellan, largely spurned him. Those who had served longest viewed the election through the lens of loyalty, and McClellan had consorted with treason by aligning with the opposition party.

A Republic in the Ranks

The Union Army of the Potomac was a hotbed of political activity during the Civil War. It proved a source of constant frustration for Abraham Lincoln, and its commander, George B. McClellan, even secured the Democratic nomination for president in 1864. This book uses untapped sources to recast our understanding of soldier ideology and presents the most comprehensive view yet of the army’s political story. It recounts the struggle between Republicans and Democrats for political allegiance among the army’s rank and file, in the process showing that the army’s captains, majors, and colonels spurred a pro-Republican political awakening among the enlisted men that burst onto the public stage through newspaper editorials, unit resolutions, and letters to home front politicians. The book traces the heated campaigning and voting activity on the front lines during critical elections such as the 1864 presidential contest, highlighting how an army that had once revered McClellan renounced him for consorting with the forces of peace activism and treason. Union soldiers asserted themselves as the guardians of civic virtue and used the power of political organization to set the terms in a heated debate over wartime loyalty.