Fredericksburg VA Area II

TUE July 27

TIME WARP back to the late 1700s and early 1800s and I went to James Madison’s Montpelier. Our fourth President is presented as the drafter of the Virginia plan that provided the convention with the starting place for the Constitution. Montpelier was sold to the DuPont family who extensively remodeled it and later turn the house over to the National Trust and in 2003 the Trust started demolition of the non-historic remodeling and restoring the home to how it was when James and Dolley lived there, very interesting.

After Montpelier it was back to 1864 and another, but longer visit to The Wilderness where I took a Ranger led tour to hear about the battle and how each side fared. The Ranger said this was where tactics against fixed positions in the Civil War started to change and where Grant introduced war against support elements of plantation and farm products supporting the southern effort and metal forges, etc.

WED July 28

Today was first the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House followed by the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Spotsylvania is the battle after Chancellorsville and was another bloody battle that was not a win for either side and after fighting to exhaustion the armies left and moved south after suffering 30,000 causalities. A monument I saw to the 15th Regiment of the New Jersey Volunteers stated they entered the fight with 429 men of whom 116 were KIA, 159 WIA and 38 were missing. Spotsylvania is marked as the longest hand-to-hand battle of the war.

Fredericksburg is the last battle where Union forces were not unified under a single commander, Grant took overall command as general-in-chief three months later, and Burnside was the Union commander of over 118,000 at Fredericksburg against Lee’s 60,000. And Lincoln very much wanted a victory because he planned to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in two weeks on January 1, 1863 and Lincoln very much needed to PR benefit of a war-time victory, now, and he didn’t get it. Burnside issued vague orders and did not control his troops and even with a 2 to 1 advantage he didn’t press and after two days withdrew from the fight.

More than 15,000 men were killed and 85,000 wounded in these four battles.
Did You Know? [I know that Marla knows, she told me.] During the war, the North generally named a battle after the closest river, stream or creek and the South tended to name battles after towns or railroad junctions. Hence the Confederate name Manassas after Manassas Junction and the Union name Bull Run for the stream Bull Run are the same battle.