Excerpted from A Brief History of the Thirty-fourth Regiment by Lieutenant Louis N. Chapin (1903):
We come to the morning of December 11. At midnight before orders had arrived to be ready for a move at daybreak, and we were ready. While we are eating a hasty breakfast, we hear the sound of cannon from the direction of the river. We know the battle is on, though only the artillery is joined as yet, and none of our men are on the other side of the river. Soon we are moved down the valley and up back of the hills and Lacy House. The artillery is thundering from all the heights. But not a move until nightfall. One man wrote home at this time, “None of us can ever forget that artillery fight. It lasted for six hours. Fredericksburg was riddled. A pontoon bridge is in course of construction in front of the city on which our troops may cross, but the rebs don’t relish the idea of seeing that bridge built right under their noses, and the pontoon builders are having a red-hot time. As the dusk of the night gathers down, we are advanced toward the river, but the enemy on the heights across espy the move, and scour the plain, over which we are moving, with shot and shell. But, as has been remarked many times before, it takes a pile of lead and iron to kill a man. And so, thought rained on those heights as it once rained on cities on the plain, there are few casualties, notwithstanding there are thousands of our troops in plain view of the rebel batteries on the opposite side of the river. Finally, the Seventh Michigan, in boats, crosses to the other side, and cleans the rebs out of the houses and cellars along the river front, and straightway the bridge is finished; and in about the same time it takes to tell it, over pour the troops, horse and foot, into Fredericksburg town. The rebs are still hanging on, in some parts of the town, but they are soon cleaned out.It was a weird sight which met our gaze in the streets of the city. By the light of the burning buildings, thousands of men, many no doubt, with evil intent, made their way about. The heavy bombardment had made a riddle of the place. Many houses were shattered to pieces, and their contents scattered about in the streets. The inhabitants had fled. In one of the houses we entered, we noticed that a shell had come down through the roof into the parlor and exploded in the piano. The instrument looked as if it needed tuning. Again. We wrote to the Mohawk Courier immediately after the battle:
The city was on fire in numerous places, and every building was completely riddled with our shells. Piles of dead were lying on the corners, and every doorstep was a tombstone for some poor soldier who slumbered at its base. The gutters were red, and groans of wounded men stifled the very air. It was a scene which no man desires to behold but once.
We are all inclined, after forty-years’ interval, to take a somewhat rosy view of those far-off events; but that was what we wrote at the very time, and it isn’t very rosy but it’s true. Of course, there was a good deal of looting. The term has an ugly sound, and no American soldier likes to use it. But we are talking of a city whose inhabitants had fled, whose property was strewn through all the streets, the wanton waste and desolation and spoil of war. Many of the houses, some of the most pretentious in the city, had escaped without a scratch, but of course, they did not escape spoliation by the victorious soldiers.
All day Friday, the 12th, our army was gathering in and about the city. We were near neighbors to a watchful enemy, and we felt the advance shadow of what was impending. Down the length of every street frowned a dozen rebel guns. It is a queer sensation, living in a city with such dangerous neighbors, and so many of them. There was a second night, and it was a hit night in the old town. On Saturday morning, the ball opened for sure. The story of that dreadful slaughter, having been written in many purple testaments, need not be repeated here. For this is only the chronicle of one little regiment, and nobody will look to it for a comprehensive description of what has passed into lurid history as the Battle of Fredericksburg. The plan-less battle began just in the edge of the city, and near where we were lying. About nine o’clock the Thirty-fourth advanced to a position where the engagement was in plain sight, and there it stayed until some time in the afternoon, when the whole brigade advanced up to one of the streets running at right angles to the river, and filed into a field close under the bluff occupied by the rebels.
Here, again, we cannot do better than to quote what we wrote to the journal above referred to immediately after the retreat:
We suppose there were seven or eight thousand men massed under that bluff. Perhaps an inscrutable Providence could study out what this move was for, but your correspondent has never yet heard a decent theory stated. Scarcely two hundred feet away, on this bluff, was a rebel redoubt with a cannon behind it. An officer on a white horse was riding around giving orders. You may be perfectly certain he had from seven to ten thousand deeply interested spectators. Not a moment elapsed before there was a puff of smoke from behind the redoubt, and a shell from a six-pounder when screaming over our heads. It never hit a man. Another and another followed, with the same result. It was evident that the piece could no be depressed sufficiently to rake us without the muzzle hitting the front of the redoubt. Then this pale horse and his rider came out from behind the redoubt, and surveyed our position, and went back. Then four men took hold of the piece and rolled it out from behind the earthwork. It is said the judgement-day comes but once, and we all felt that it had come for us right then and there. It was a moment to be remembered forever. Now they have us for sure. The very next shot is sure to fetch us. Of all the thousands of men huddled there, every eye was fixed on that gun. The cannoneers take their positions, the process of loading and priming is gone through with, and then every head is bowed in silence, waiting for the awful messenger. It comes like the shriek of an incarnate demon, it plowed its way into our ranks, burying us all in the dirt. Another and another followed in rapid succession, each one bringing death and destruction into our ranks. The air is filled with groans and cries of mangled men. Every man of those thousands is clutching the earth and trying to make himself thinner. It is a good thing, at times, to be a spare man. No one, then, wanted to be fatter. The first shot fired, after the gun was moved out, passed directly over our company (K). The next, coming in exactly the same line, fell a little short, striking just ahead of us, and doing terrible execution. Then the orderly sergeant, Jim Talcott, lying by my side, and trying to make himself thinner, said, “Now, boys, it’s our turn.” And sure enough, with an ugly scream, that might have been heard up in Herkimer County, the next shot landed squarely in our company. Eery inch of the ground was covered with blue men, but this ugly auger bored a hole right through. Deep into the earth it went, and then exploded. Scarcely a man in the company but received some souvenir. And all this time we were compelled to remain inactive, not firing a shot in return. There was not a man on all that blue field but would have volunteered in an instant to dash up that height, and had there been someone in high authority to authorize it the movement, that one gun would have been silenced or captured in a moment. But, anyway, the slaughter was destined not to continue for long. All this time, from the north side of the river, far away, our own cannon were booming, and the moment this one piece was rolled out from behind the breastwork, it became the target for all our artillery. There was one gun on our side, miles up the river, that we had heard booming at intervals all day. It must have been a sixty-two pounder, and a moment after the third shot of which I spoke had be fired, there came the boom of this great gun. The great shot sped on its awful mission, over miles of river and valley, and hill and meadow, and came down fair and square on the top of this mischievous little six-pounder, and that instant exploded. The gun and carriage were destroyed, and all the men near it knocked out, including the white horse and his rider. Then all those ten thousand men rose and shouted with a great shout.
As soon as we could pull ourselves together, we began to look about, and take an account of our assets. They were a sorry lot. Poor Adam Moyer. He had just arrived from the north, a new recruit. This was his first touch of fire. Both legs were torn off, hanging only by the shreds. How short he looked as we laid him on a blanket with the stumps by his side. And little Andrew A. Smith, a sweet-faced boy, slender, but every inch a man; a leg and arm both gone. Both these died in a little while. As Andrew was being carried from the field he said, “Tell my mother that I died like a man.” It is strange how these boys always thing of their mothers at such a time. Lite the boy that was wounded back at Fair Oaks, and was taken prisoner, and to Richmond. All the long days he pined and wasted to a shadow, and died at last, though he had but a little wound, crying and calling “Mother, mother.” Poor Andrew Smith. At the battle of White Oak Swamp, when he had fallen with the heat and exhaustion of the march, still he would not give up, and rose, and went with the men into the fight. But now his time had come, for the bone was driven up into his body. And Corporal John Hurley, of Company I, dreadfully killed. And what a lot of maimed men, all about us. Lieutenant Ransom, with a badly shattered leg; he died a week later. And Lieutenant Finnegan is sow badly hurt, he has seen the last of his service with the regiment. Orlando Fosket, with a leg shot off; and William DeForest, and Alexander Comins, both, badly in the legs.
Other regiments around us suffered as much, if not more, than the Thirty-fourth, though none were more exposed. The battle continued all about us until fairly dark, and about midnight we were relieved by the Fourth Regulars of Syke’s brigade. The following day, Sunday, matters were comparatively quiet, likewise Monday the 5th. Monday night, near eleven o’clock, we were suddenly called into line, and to our surprise, we were marched back across the river, and two hours later we were in our old camp. Thus, ended the battle of Fredericksburg. Was it filly, or a blunder? Anyway, it was a butchery. And not one good thing was ever known to come of it.
Thirty-nine years after these events, the writer of this chronicle went back, and stood on that same spot, on that same field. The distance to the little redoubt seemed just the same, not more than two hundred feet away, scarcely that. Climbing up the little bluff and poking away the briers and brushes with had overgrown the place, was the same earthwork. The rains of all the years had not seemed to lower it a foot.
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