Louisa May Alcott by Susan Cheever

Author:Susan Cheever
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

Further up the Atlantic Coast, Louisa May Alcott was taking her first trip beyond New England. She hadn’t left Baltimore yet, but her journal is already more Dickensian than Richardsonian. Gone were the pacing beauties and mustachioed villains of her A. M. Barnard stories. Gone were the convoluted metaphysics of her more serious work. Instead, she wrote in a wry, direct voice. Just south of Baltimore, Alcott’s train had an accident when a coupling iron broke, creating a small crash between two cars. “Hats flew off, bonnets were flattened, the stove skipped, the lamps fell down, the water jar turned a somersault,” she wrote. “Of course it became necessary for all the men to get out and stand about in everybody’s way, while repairs were made; and for the women to wrestle their heads out of the windows, asking nine foolish questions for one sensible one.”16

Finally on the morning of December 13, Burnside gave the command to attack. The Union Army, two months late, started across the pontoon bridges with all possible pomp and fanfare. The blue columns crossed the river on the swaying bridges in vast, organized waves, flooding through the town and fanning out onto the open plain below the Army of Northern Virginia. “It moved with flags and with bands and with a great rumbling of moving cannon, making a display of might that impressed the waiting Confederates, impressed even Lee himself.”17 Looking down at the approaching army from Marye’s Heights, Lee had an acute consciousness of history—he had been educated at West Point like Ambrose Burnside—and of the future. A brilliant strategist, he knew that the attack was hopeless and that the superior strength of the Union Army was unimportant because of the position and preparation of his own army. “It is well that we know how terrible war really is,” he commented to an aide as the glorious but doomed Union Army approached, “else we would grow too fond of it.”18 Burnside’s men swept across the river and through the remains of the town into the entrenched Confederate lines, where they were mowed down immediately.

As the dead of the Union Army began to pile up below the Confederate position at Marye’s Heights, Burnside’s men led another attack. The day wore on, and Burnside, sequestered in headquarters on the other side of the river, watched the battle from the second floor of a beautifully furnished Greek Revival house. The Union Army made sixteen attacks against a position that had been shown to be unbreachable earlier that day.

The waves of Union soldiers marching forward under a rain of fire and sometimes crawling over their fallen comrades to move ahead sickened even the Confederate troops who were mowing them down. The Battle of Fredericksburg was one of the worst defeats in the history of the United States Army; 12,700 men were killed that day as Burnside ordered his men over and over again into death and they obediently followed his orders. Fredericksburg quickly became a symbol of stubbornness in the face of unbeatable odds and of the resulting, almost incomprehensible, horror.

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