I used to have a list of days I considered High Holy Days: days when no work could be done and when pilgrimages were required in accordance with my own personal laws of behaviour. Some of those days were holidays: St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Day. Some were personal days, like my birthday. Some were the anniversaries of battles: September 17 – the Battle of Antietam and December 13 – the Battle of Fredericksburg.
Fredericksburg was a unique battle in the Civil War, and not only because Shelby Foote actually praised the valor of Union troops in describing the fight:
More credit is given to Confederate soldiers: they’re supposed to have had more elan and dash. Actually I know of no braver men in either army than the Union troops at Fredericksburg, which was a serious Union defeat. But to keep charging that wall at the foot of Marye’s Heights after all the failures there’d been is a singular instance of valor. It was different from southern elan. It was a steadiness under fire, a continuing to press the point.
Both armies were at the peak of their strength: 114,000 for the Union, 72,500 for the Confederacy. Both armies had winnowed the ranks of shirkers and the officer’s corps of the incompentent. Both armies had fought all year: from the Gates of Richmond, through the Valley, to the banks of Manassas Creek and the fields along the Antietam. By December, the men of both armies knew how to fight, how to kill, and how to survive.
Fredericksburg had moments of notable rarity – an amphibious landing under fire, street to street and house to house fighting, large scale sack of an American town – and moments of horrifying frequency – unexploited breakthroughs, bad generalship, indescribable heroism, forlorn assaults.
Nearly 200,000 men fought at Fredericksburg – from the men of the Pennsylvania Reserves against North Carolinians in the swamps south of town to the men of the Irish Brigade against Georgians on the hills to the west – the largest land battle in the Western Hemisphere was hammered out.
I don’t go anymore, too many other things have come up to take the day’s place in the list of sacrosanct moments. Although I’m not there today I can remember the small granite marker at the river’s edge and watching as a mixed group of Irish and American politicians and military men dedicated it on a long-ago December 13. I can remember stopping into an antique shop downtown and being shown a small brown bottle with a yellowing label: “This boxwood was taken from the cap of an Irish soldier wounded in front of Marye’s Heights – December 13, 1862.”