Larry Purtell
Little Meadows
PA USA
|
Posts: 1577
Joined: 2004
|
|
|
|
December 19, 1862
|
From the richmond Enquirer. Richmond VA december 19, 1862.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer. Philadelphia PA. December 19, 1862.
Fro0m the Peoples Press. Winston-Salem N.C. December 19, 1862.
----------------------------------
"My goal is to live forever. So far, so good.
|
|
|
|
|
Phil Andrade
London
UK
|
Posts: 6060
Joined: 2004
|
|
|
|
December 19, 1862
|
Goodness, Larry : you don’t disappoint, do you ?
These vignettes are great !
Fredericksburg is remembered for lop sided slaughter of the yankees : certainly, at the base of Marye’s Heights, this depiction is all too justifiable .
And yet, there is little in the Confederate accounts that you’ve cited that suggests an easy triumph. On the contrary, the southern articles show a painful awareness of heavy loss. Lee himself described his loss as heavy.
Looking at the comments on the confederate casualties, I noticed an anecdote about the Mississippians of Featherstone’s command suffering 28 casualties from a single shell : remarkably, this was not in the great battle of the 13th December, but a couple of days earlier when the yankee gunners were plastering the rebels with artillery fire in an attempt to suppress the sharpshooters who were picking off the engineers trying to build pontoons across the river.
Lee himself was cast down after Fredericksburg. He was, perhaps, taken back at the persistence of the yankees in their desperate and bloody attacks : maybe he realised that foes such as these were going to keep hammering, whatever the cost, and that their numerical superiority, matched by that resolve, was going to ruin his army unless he could seek conclusions quickly. That question of ciphering that he later predicted would make the conflict a mere matter of time, might well have been to the fore of his mind.
Politicians in Richmond were jubilant and predicted that the North would give up : the money markets certainly endorsed that perception.
But Lee himself , and , I daresay, his soldiers who had slaughtered the advancing yankees, did not share that complacency.
Regards, Phil
----------------------------------
"Egad, sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox!"
"That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
Earl of Sandwich and John Wilkes
|
|
|
|
|
