The News & TeleGraff

Standing in front of a group of twenty people assembled on folding chairs in a large green-and-white striped tent, Robert E. Lee today reminded me, "It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it." His speech came midway through a muddy Saturday of living history that celebrated the sights and sounds of one of the worst days of fighting ever on American soil-the 142nd anniversary of the battle of Fredericksburg. I joined my friend Andrew, and his former college roommate Ben, for the latest stop on his Civil War battlefield tour. (Proving that I not only have dorky friends but indeed work with more dorks, one of my co-workers was at the reenactment today as well.)

Fredericksburg was the site of a terrible battle in 1862 where General Ambrose Burnside had attempted to cross the Rappahannock River, and—after days of delays—finally succeeded only to battle through the town and then be repulsed in FOURTEEN charges against a Confederate-held stone wall near the sunken road at the base of Marye's Heights. Using the wall as a guard, and well-placed artillery above them on the hill, the Confederate troops slaughtered the Union troops despite being outnumbered 3 to 1. The repeated assaults were so ineffective that, even with the size differential, the Confederates never used half their available troops. Robert E. Lee's army suffered 5,300 casualties, but Burnside's men fell in twice the numbers. By the end of the fighting, 12,600 Union troops were killed, wounded, or missing—two-thirds of them fell in front of the stone wall.

Our day began, as have most days this dreary week, with lots of rain. Thankfully, it ended shortly after we arrived at the site of the reenactment, which was held on the site of George Washington's boyhood home. There was a full day of events and lots of mud. We watched infantry and artillery drills, and then watched a reenactment of the Marye's Heights engagement where the Union troops, as represented by the 28th Massachusetts Regiment, charged across a field towards the heights held by the Confederate's 47th Virginia Regiment. Both sides fired volley after volley, and predetermined casualties "fell" to mark the proportional losses on both sides (normally the troops would collapse to the ground, but today they merely kneeled to avoid the mud).

While the "battle" was supremely executed, unfortunately modern development made it appear as if the Confederates were defending a 7-Eleven and a McDonalds. I could just imagine the commanding officer at the time: "Gentlemen, our line cannot break. We must defend the McNuggets and the Slurpees to the last man."

All-in-all, the reenactors did a great job bringing the battle to life. I had expected to enjoy the event at least on a curiosity level, as I do most things historical, but it ended up being a genuinely interesting event. Watching the soldiers march, hearing the muskets fire, and feeling the boom of the powerful cannons, and listening to the songs around the campfire all made for a captivating time. As Lee warned, I could grow fond of war. We learned about marching and drills, and—in watching the troops practice drills over and over—the need for good training. We learned about which members of an artillery battery needed to be able to read and write (answer, only one), and why troops in the infantry were required to have two front teeth (to tear open powder cartridges)—if you didn't have two front teeth you had to join the artillery or the Navy. The living historians who played the generals put on a great show and provided very interesting commentary on the battle. And the soldiers themselves, many of whom brought wives and children in period costume, played their parts to the nth degree.

The one close call around all the day's weaponry came when Andrew, Ben, and I all narrowly averted a terrible death while observing the skirmish along the Rappahannock. The Confederate troops, for whatever reason, decided to attempt firing a wooden arrow across the river to the Union side, where we were watching. The reenactors on our side diligently moved spectators out of the way, but when they fired the arrow it went terrible awry and crashed down in the heart of the gathering, missing ten different people by no more than ten feet.

After some living history presentations, and some time spent wandering the encampment, we departed the farm for Chatham Manor, which overlooks the city and from which Union artillery rained fire down about the residents of Fredericksburg. There, a very excited Park Ranger (we were, as far as we could tell, the only visitors of the day) explained that interestingly—since Lincoln visited Chatham and the house had previously been owned by friends of George Washington—it is one of only three buildings that both Lincoln and Washington had occupied (the other two are Mount Vernon and Berkeley Plantation, home of Benjamin Harrison and the birthplace of the president with the shortest tenure to date). The manor had been used as a hospital during the war, and both Clara Barton and Walt Whitman had tended to patients there.

Our trio spent the afternoon in downtown Fredericksburg, where we dined at a fabulous restaurant specializing in vegetarian cuisine (I had a bean and grain burger with bleu cheese), and explored the quaint shops until the afternoon street-fight began. The skirmish, which progressed up two blocks towards the battlefield, occurred in the middle of the town's candlelight tour of homes lavishly decorated for the holidays. Thus, all of these people standing in line to enter elegant homes suddenly found themselves engulfed in a 19th Century battle. Notice the girl covering her ears in the foreground of this shot:

After thoroughly enjoying the destruction of the tranquility of the posh Fredericksburg neighborhood, we looked at some of the beautiful 19th and 20th century buildings in town, and headed for home a little more educated and a little more appreciative of our bloody shared history.

(My full photos from the day are here. As an experiment, I also made a video (4.2 MB AVI) of some of the fighting on my digital camera.)