Photo of the Day: Ambrose Burnside Statue, Providence RI

I must say that I was rather surprised to see not just a statue but an entire park honoring Ambrose Burnside in downtown Providence when I visited the Rhode Island capital this past fall. I always understood that he made less of a mark through his achievements in public life than his tonsorial style. In fact, he didn’t even really get proper credit for the latter, when you think of it. (“Sideburn,” of course, reverses the syllables of his surname.)

The Union commander at the Battle of Fredericksburg has become synonymous with all manner of misfortune from bad luck (he was left at the altar by his fiancée at his first wedding) to incompetence (during the Civil War, he pleaded with Abraham Lincoln not to appoint him commander of the Army of the Potomac because he was unfit for the job—a proposition he commenced to prove by ordering one useless attack after another at Fredericksburg, then leading his troops on a dismal, pointless midwinter “Mud March”).

Ever since taking this photo, I’ve wanted an excuse to write this patriotic but appropriately unheralded soldier—and now I have it. On this date in 1856, Burnside received a patent for a breech-loading carbine, the culmination of work on the project that began three years before, when he had still been a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.

In a way, Burnside’s experience was of a piece of the rest of his career and life: initial success followed by deeply frustrating failure. Despite beating out 17 other carbines in an 1857 competition conducted at West Point, Burnside couldn’t make a go of his business and was forced to declare bankruptcy two years later. He had already assigned patent rights to others when the outbreak of the Civil War fanned interest in the weapon. By the end of the conflict, the gun was the third most used carbine utilized by the Union cavalry, exceeded only by the Sharps and Spencer brands.

Back to the general’s statue. Burnside might have failed as soldier and businessman, but he found rather more success in politics, as he was elected to three one-year terms as governor of Rhode Island and another term as U.S. Senator. The equestrian bronze statue in this photo was unveiled in 1887, a half-dozen years after his death. It stood for nearly 20 years in Exchange (renamed Kennedy) Place, facing City Hall, until the opening of a railroad station necessitated its move to its current location.

The elements have been about as kind to Burnside’s statue as posterity was to his memory. Acid rain and pollutants ate into the metal, leaving a blue-green coat of copper sulfate. Nor were human beings much better: they gave it a “psychedelic” look during the city’s arts festival in 1969, and during the Occupy Providence protests of a few years ago was festooned with signs, banners, and a mask over the statue’s face. At last, this past August, the city hired a company that halted and, one hopes, even helped return the statue to something like its original condition.

This Day in Civil War History (Irish Brigade’s Hopeless Valor at Fredericksburg)

December 13, 1862—It was the Union Army’s version of the Charge of the Light Brigade, a valorous but hopeless assault upon an enemy in an impregnable position. But despite a display of courage so conspicuous that it won the respect of Confederate commanders, the “Irish Brigade” was cut to pieces at the Battle of Fredericksburg, as the North closed out its year with its worst showing yet against Robert E. Lee.

Union commander Ambrose Burnside is now known to posterity largely for a flamboyant tonsorial style that led to a linguistic coinage: “sideburn.” Even here, however, he gets no respect, because the usage turns his name inside out.

As it happened, he was as luckless in the art of war as he was in other aspects of life, and his ill fortune spelled doom for the Army of the Potomac in general and its recruits of Irish descent in particular. As a young soldier just out of West Point, he was a poor player at card games. A few years later, it is said, his prospective bride refused to go through with the ceremony right at the altar.

A rifle promoted by Burnside would be used extensively by the North during the Civil War. It had not come early enough for the soldier-turned-civilian however, who had been forced to find a new line of work when the War Department in the 1850s canceled a contract for the weaponry. Two years after Fredericksburg, another potential Burnside brainstorm—digging a tunnel toward the Confederates at the Siege of Petersburg, dynamiting it, then overwhelming the enemy in the resulting confusion—boomeranged on the Union at the Battle of the Crater, bringing his military career to an end.

In November 1862, however, when Lincoln had resolved to replace slow-moving George McClellan as head of the Army of the Potomac, Burnside was the only Union corps commander who had had any success at any level operating independently, when he secured a foothold on the North Carolina coast early in the war. He had pleaded with Lincoln—twice—that he was unworthy to lead an entire army when the President asked him to take over the reins from McClellan. At Fredericksburg, he now demonstrated what he was talking about.

In contrast to McClellan, Burnside moved with dispatch in getting his troops toward Richmond. But bad luck came to the fore for him again. With the success of his plan depending on crossing the Rappahannock River unopposed, he now found that the civilian bridges had been wrecked earlier in the war. He could not get pontoon bridges built fast enough before Lee's Army of Northern Virginia got there first.

On the morning of the 13^th, Burnside gave the order to attack, despite serious reservations on the part of his other generals over any offensive against what Lee had turned into a well-fortified position. The battle commenced around noon. A few hours in, a couple of charges at Marye’s Heights, a commanding position with plenty of artillery under James Longstreet, had ended in disaster. Now it was the turn of the Irish Brigade.

The unit, composed largely of Irish emigrants fleeing famine and political repression in their homeland over the past two decades, had nitially contained three regiments--the 63rd, 69th, and 88th New York--but the 28th Massachusetts and 116th Pennsylvania were added later in the year.

Thomas Meagher, an Irish revolutionary who had escaped from a British prison in Tasmania to come to the United States, had been designated by Abraham Lincoln to lead the brigade. He had led his unit through two stiff fights already, in McClellan’s Seven Days campaign and again at the Battle of Antietam. The brigade’s banner from the latter fight was still not back from being mended when they found themselves in battle again. As they received another summons to arms at Fredericksburg, Meagher showed concern for his men’s esprit de corps by urging them to wear green sprigs in their caps as substitutes for the giant banner--and as reminders of their Irish heritage.

Even as they emerged from town, the lines of the brigade were riddled with fire, with 18 falling dead. Then they had to break ranks, splash through a canal ditch, reform and move toward the heights. Meagher, with a painful knee injury incurred at Antietam, could only get the men across the canal before he was led away.

The men’s mission was, for all intents and purposes, suicidal: cross 600 yards of open field to get at the Confederates on Marye’s Heights. They already knew that other troops had failed. Waiting on the Confederate side, ironically enough, were a number of their Irish countrymen (many of Brigadier General Thomas Cobb’s troops, especially in the 24^th Georgia Infantry unit, were Irish-born).  

The strafing of the Irish Brigade’s ranks continued, but so did their courage. Amazingly, amid the murderous fire they had already endured, they made it to within 100 yards of the top when they were greeted by a barrage that, as a survivor recalled, left them “like corn before the sickle.” The soldiers had a triple motivation: not just to attain their military objective, nor even to prove their individual courage, but to demonstrate, to friend and foe alike, that their ancestry did not make them second-class citizens of the United States. Their attitude resembled that in the celebrated couplet by Alfred Lord Tennyson on the men who perished in the slaughter at the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War: “Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to die and die.”

Fredericksburg resembled the Charge of the Light Brigade in other respects. Though it demonstrated the courage of men placed in harm’s way in what Tennyson called “the valley of death,” it just as vividly confirmed the incompetence of their high command. A half dozen frontal assaults were made at Marye’s Heights by Union troops, to no avail. Not an inch of ground was gained in the attempts. Longstreet’s men, entrenched behind a stone wall, with artillery ranged behind them, cut everything that came their way, until Union dead were piled three deep in some places.

Even the Confederate command was moved to pity by the plight of his opponents: “I thought, as I saw the Federals come again and again to their death, that they deserved success if courage and daring could entitle soldiers to victory,” Longstreet remembered more than two decades later. Lee’s view, expressed to Longstreet at the height of battle, became one of the most quoted remarks of the entire conflict: "It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it."

Casualties were perhaps more lopsided in favor of Lee than at any other time in the conflict: 12,700 men killed or wounded for the Federals versus only 5,300 for the rebels.

The futility of the whole affair drove the North mad. With great difficulty, Burnside had to be persuaded the next day not to personally lead another frontal assault. When he heard about the extent of the losses, Lincoln responded, “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.”

Hell defined what the Irish Brigade endured at Fredericksburg: 545 men lost, nearly half of what they took into the battle, including 14 of its 15 field officers. One survivor predicted, “It will be a sad, sad Christmas by many an Irish hearthstone.” As a result of its three main battles fought over the past six months, the brigade had suffered at least 1,200 casualties.

And yet, something more survived. even aside from the enduring legend of the courage "Fighting 69th" (derived, it is said, from another remark by Lee, who, when told the name of the group that had made the gallant dash against his lines, and recalling their similar display in the Seven Days, said, "Ah, yes. That fighting 69th.") Irish soldiers here, as in elsewhere in the war, encountered countrymen in the units of other states, forming a new, common bond in their adopted country, opening vistas far beyond the rural villages of their homeland or the crowded cities of their new nation. If anything, the Irish community formed stronger bonds with the Roman Catholic Church than before, as chaplains became indispensable conduits between soldiers and their loved ones.

Approximately 150,000 Irish-born males enlisted in the Union Army, proving, at often hideous cost, that neither their ancestry nor the Roman Catholic faith so many professed posed any threat to the values of the second American republic coming into being as a result of the war. The postwar Fourteenth Amendment, while constructed principally with freedmen in mind, also contained, in its sweeping opening statement, a guarantee of the rights of the immigrants, such as the Irish and the Germans, who had lately fought to preserve the Union: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

 

(The accompanying image, “Battle of Fredericksburg, Laying the Pontoon Bridge,” a chromolithograph by Thure de Thulstrup, is in the Print Department of the Boston Public Library.)

This Day in Civil War History (Union Fiasco at Battle of the Crater)

July 30, 1864—Having tried readily repulsed head-on and flanking maneuvers against Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant hoped for greater success with one of the most daring operations of the Civil War: a mine that would be exploded under Confederate entrenchments east of Petersburg, Va., panicking the defenders so much that the position could be easily taken.

It seemed like the kind of audacious scheme that could end the drawn-out war—sort of like British General James Wolfe’s scaling of the seemingly impregnable Plains of Abraham that resulted in the French loss of North America in the Battle of Quebec in 1759.

But in war, as in so much else, execution is everything. Unfortunately, the Battle of the Crater, as it came to be called, produced a fearsome loss of life for the Army of the Potomac, in a campaign that was already piling up so many casualties that Northern anti-war sentiment was running at a fever pitch more than three years after Fort Sumter.

All might be fair in love and war, but you couldn’t tell that to the man responsible for pitching the idea of the mine to Grant: IX Corps Commander Ambrose Burnside, whose principal contribution to history turned out to be the flamboyant mutton chops that wayward linguists, in a truly backhanded tribute to its progenitor, called “sideburns.”

Before the war, Burnside was supposedly jilted at the altar by a Southern belle named Lotte Moon. Afterwards, he began to sport the tonsorial style that made him famous—in my humble opinion, to hide the deep shade of crimson the Virginia teenager had left him with.

Burnside was no luckier in war, believe it or not. In contrast to some of the vainglorious louts who preceded Grant in leading the Union effort in the eastern theater of operations, Burnside begged off—twice--when Lincoln asked him to lead the Army of the Potomac, saying he wasn’t worthy of command. At the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, where he ordered one fruitless charge after another upon Marye’s Heights, he demonstrated how right he was to be modest.

Now, in the coming engagement, as the Federals attempted to end what was looking more and more like a remorseless siege, Burnside showed once against the decency and vision that made others momentarily think him fit for command, along with the lack of nerve that left his troops slaughtered.

What I like about General Grant is that, when stymied, he always sought another way, even if unconventional, to advance his goal, most memorably in his Vicksburg campaign the year before. That situation occurred again here, when Burnside came bearing an idea from the 48th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. Several soldiers in the regiment, hailing from the Schuykill Valley coal-mining region, looked out at the Confederate position ahead of them and said they could blow it “out of existence if we could run a mineshaft under it.”

In his legendary three-volume history of the Civil War, Shelby Foote noted that the commander of the Army of the Potomac, General George Gordon Meade, assented to Burnside’s scheme at least partly because it would keep his men busy, and there seemed no better ideas at hand besides another assault upon the rebels that might end in a bloodbath.

Maybe so, but that’s not why Grant agreed. His Personal Memoirs outline his rationale for going along with the idea:

* He didn’t want Lee to transfer troops west, where they were desperately needed against William Tecumseh Sherman, who was advancing at twice the speed into enemy territory as the Army of the Potomac.

* He knew that Rebel “intelligence” had already sensed the building of the mine—and had completely exaggerated its scope, believing it would not only encompass the Confederate entrenchments but the entire city of Petersburg itself. An ill-defined threat, Grant believed, would work as much to the advantage of the operation as no knowledge of the mine at all.

* He saw the mine explosion as part of a larger campaign in which a diversion would be created—Lee would be drawn away from the south side of the James River, leaving only 18,000 men to defend the Petersburg rail hub that Richmond, the Confederate capital, relied on as its transportation lifeline.

Burnside, delighted that someone was taking his ideas seriously again after the Battle of Fredericksburg, had his men working on the tunnel for a month before the date set for the assault. He’d even picked out the division that would lead the way: an African-American unit that he had admirably prepared for what he hoped would be their desired hour of glory, one that would make Northern politicians and generals think of newly freed slaves as heroes rather than ditch-diggers.

From this point on, Burnside made one mistake after another. It all started when Meade countermanded his assignment of the well-drilled African-American regiments to lead the assault at the Crater.

Meade sensed—correctly—that reporters were denying him credit for his army’s advances and lumping its reverses at his feet. (The media were punishing him for discipline he’d meted out to a Philadelphia reporter for an unfavorable article.) No way did Meade want to be blamed for ordering untried African-American troops on a risky mission that could unleash a bloodbath. Use the white divisions instead, he told Burnside.

Burnside was doubly dismayed—he’d been told this only the day before the battle, and the fresh black regiments he’d trained would now take a backseat to white divisions.

Now began four major mistakes made by Burnside that doomed a plan that had promised so much:

* He was so dispirited by the change of plans that, rather than pick the leader of the charge himself, he left it to his division commanders to pick lots for the honor. The “winner” was Gen. James Ledlie, the least experienced of the three.

* Burnside had not acted to clear away the debris and entanglements that inevitably got in the way of his troops after the fuse was finally lit—after a delay of an hour and a half. The troops were left to make their way through the opening in painfully slow single file.

* Burnside had allowed to be chosen, in Ledlie, someone not only inefficient but nowhere to be found when his raw troops needed him to guide them through the confusion of the explosion. The reason why? Ledlie was swigging on a bottle of rum far away from the lines, as he was wont to do when the stress got to him—or, as Grant bitingly put it, he had “found some safe retreat to get into before they started.”

* Burnside failed to implement quickly orders that could have spared thousands of Union casualties. As Union troops flooded into the Crater, they stalled and became sitting ducks for Confederate reinforcements. Around 9:30 am, nearly five hours after the “immense mushroom” rose from where the explosion occurred, Meade gave the order to cease a follow-up attack and withdraw. Burnside, however, did not transmit this for nearly three hours, leading to a horrific loss of life. (Much of this was perpetrated by Rebels incensed not only by the prospect of losing a battle to former slaves, but also by being blown to Kingdom Come while sleeping. )

What transpired next between the hapless Burnside and Meade—whom someone memorably described as “a damned old goggle-eyed snapping turtle”—was something to behold. Meade began to dress Mr. Mutton Chops down, demonstrating, in a staffer’s description that I love, insults that “went far toward confirming one’s belief in the wealth and flexibility of the English language as a medium of personal dispute.”

(It kind of reminds me of George Washington at the Battle of Monmouth, where, rounding upon insubordinate general Charles Lee, he is said to have turned the air blue with his language for miles around.)

After that exchange of views, Meade wanted Burnside cashiered immediately, court-martialed for incompetence and God only knows what else. Grant—who described the battle as “the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war”—inclined toward the subtler approach: sending Burnside home on leave. That’s what happened in the end.

Burnside finally found an arena he enjoyed: politics, serving as governor and then U.S. Senator from Rhode Island. But in the years after his death in 1881, historians tended to remember that 4,000 Union troops, against only 1,000 Confederates, became casualties because of his botched operation at the Crater.