Burnside turned to one of the oldest generals in the Union army, Edwin Sumner, to launch the second attack at 11:00 a.m., west out of Fredericksburg toward Marye’s Heights. Sumner had served in the army since 1819 and commanded 30,000 men against 4,000 Confederates who had dug in behind a stone wall halfway up Marye’s Heights. They were reinforced by artillery along the ridgeline.
Lee’s men confidently looked down on the ground that Sumner’s troops would have to cross. The Union attackers faced a plain 900 yards wide. Two bridges across a canal west of town forced them to concentrate their forces before advancing on the exposed ground. One Confederate wrote he could see “the bright lights of their bayonets glistening in the sunlight (which) made their lines look like a huge serpent of blue and steel.”26
Waves of Union brigades, marching two hundred yards apart, became ideal targets for Confederate artillery. As they advanced, hundreds fell wounded under merciless hilltop Confederate artillery fire pointed almost straight down on their advance. Those who survived then faced a storm of small arms fire from hundreds of Confederates concealed behind the stone wall along a below-grade road halfway up the ridge. When a Confederate stood to fire, his level shot was almost directly into the belly of an advancing Union soldier, often less than one hundred yards away.
In three hours of battle, Letterman’s medical officers confronted five thousand dead or wounded Union soldiers below Marye’s Heights. Stretcher bearers who followed one regiment after another onto the battlefield carried wounded men to aid stations and hospitals in Fredericksburg. By the time the sun set, six assaults on Marye’s Heights had failed. South of town, a second attack by General Franklin at mid-afternoon also had ended in a deadly defeat. Two distinct battlefields, now dark and bone-chilling cold, were covered with dead and wounded.
Hospitals in town and in Union-held territory across the river had already filled. Chatham House, a local landmark high atop the sloping eastern riverbank was typical. Letterman had established a hospital in the manor that also served as Sumner’s headquarters. Rows of windows across the towering two-story building facing the river, 180 feet wide and 27 feet deep, could be seen from Fredericksburg.
Surgeons converted one room into an operating room and transformed nearby barns, a laundry shed, slave cabins, and a stable into patient wards. The operating room featured windows on three sides, providing excellent ventilation against the throat-grabbing stench of open belly wounds. After each amputation, an assistant tossed the severed limb out a northern window onto a sickening pile of severed body parts under a tree. Not far away, wounded men lay outside, waiting their turn for attention. There were so many that “orderlies (placed) patients outside on the cold, damp ground. . . . Think of it, wounded and unable to help yourself, and lying on the ground in the month of December with only a rubber blanket between you and the cold earth; but it could not be helped,” wrote Josiah Murphey, who had been brought to Chatham after being shot in the face.27
The fighting had been so intense and so close to Fredericksburg that Letterman’s ambulance crews were of limited use. His organized battlefield force of stretcher bearers stumbled through the night across lumpy ground freshly plowed by the day’s artillery explosions. “The night was very dark, and the difficulty great in finding the objects of their search,” wrote Letterman. “The lanterns could not be used, as the glimmering of a candle invariably drew the fire of the enemy. . . . [B]efore dawn, all the wounded who were inside our lines had been taken to hospitals. . . . Here, throughout the night, the medical officers . . . engaged in attendance upon them, as they were brought in, blankets were fastened over the windows and every aperture to conceal the lights, as every appearance of which drew a shot from the enemy’s guns planted on Marye’s Heights.”28
Letterman’s surgeons faced a variety of wounds. “As wounded soldiers arrived from the battle field, they are usually begrimed with powder, smoke and dust, and often covered with mud. . . . Their wounds, being mostly from gunshot or shell, seldom or never bleed at first, unless some important artery is cut, and in these cases they usually perish in the field. Their greatest danger from hemorrhage comes with the sloughing process incident to healing, some 15 or 20 days after. They usually utter no cries, and a wounded hospital is, in the main, as still by night as the house of death, save from the subdued tones of conversations of the wakeful or the movements of the attendants,” wrote surgeon Franklin Hough.29
On many occasions, Letterman’s surgeons could only provide comfort in the final moments of a man’s life. “On the litter lies a man who has his leg nearly torn from his body, by a shell; he looks up into your face with a wishful expression and mildly asks ‘Doctor as soon as can (be) convenient will you examine my leg?’ He asks, ‘Will it kill me?’Then comes the time to try the courage of the Surgeon: you have no time to beat around the bush; the answer must be plain. If ‘Oh no,’ he says ‘Thank God!’ If, as often is the case, ‘I fear your wound is fatal,’ he closes his eyes; you see his lips moving in prayer; you catch his accents as his eyes grow filmy, and hear him feebly imploring protection and care for his poor wife and children, ‘Tell them I have done my duty faithfully as a good soldier and my last wish was for their welfare.’”30
The following day, as Letterman’s casualty list grew to more than 9,000, the two shattered armies rested in place while Burnside’s officers talked him out of a second attack. The Confederates remained in control of the high ground west of Fredericksburg, and the Union army huddled among the smoldering ruins of a town now littered with collapsed walls, household belongings, shredded trees, and abandoned equipment. That night they shivered as the temperature dropped into the thirties and an aurora borealis danced across the sky, turning from pale yellow to blood red. Surgeries had continued nonstop in the town’s field hospitals but were interrupted when messengers arrived, telling the staff to evacuate all wounded east out of Fredericksburg and back across the pontoon bridges to the Army of the Potomac’s original staging ground.
Sawdust, dirt, and pine branches were spread on the bridges to muffle the sound of Letterman’s ambulances carrying the wounded across the river. Ambulances on the far side of the river entered town in unison and exited as a unit across a different bridge to the north. The one-way traffic made it clear to Confederate lookouts that an evacuation was under way. While surgeons in town prepared their wounded for transport, hundreds of ambulances rolled across the bridges through the night. Some of the most seriously wounded men were carried on stretchers by soldiers and orderlies to hospitals on the other side The daring retreat and entirely successful medical evacuation produced thousands of unexpected patients on the other bank that Letterman had expected would remain in the hospitals established in Fredericksburg.
The opposing armies were now back in their original positions after suffering nearly 2,000 dead, more than 13,000 wounded, and nearly 2,500 missing or taken prisoner. A temporary truce enabled Letterman’s burial details to cross the river one last time to collect the dead and bury them. Some were “on their back with gaping jaws, some with eyes as large as walnuts, protruding with a glassy stare, some doubled up like a contortionist, here one without a head, there one without legs, yonder a head and legs without a trunk, everywhere horrible expressions, fear, rage, agony, madness, torture, lying in pools of blood, lying with heads half buried in mud, with fragments of shell sticking in oozing brain, with bullet holes all over the puffed limbs,”31 wrote one man on burial detail.
When it became clear Burnside would not renew the attack, Letterman decided to keep as many wounded near Fredericksburg as possible to speed their recovery and return to duty. But Burnside overruled him ordering a mass evacuation by rail to Aquia Landing and then by steamers north to general hospitals in major cities. On December 18, 2,500 wounded men were evacuated, followed by 900 the next day. Within two weeks nearly all of the wounded who could travel were evacuated. Hundreds of unscathed soldiers deserted the battlefield by hitching rides on the rail cars, raising Lette
rman’s ire.
“These are cowardly stragglers who abandon their colors on the field of battle for the slightest injury (often self-inflicted) and raise a clamor which unhappily too many are fond to echo. How different those, whether slightly or seriously wounded, who have born the burden and the heat of the day!—rarely do they complain of want or care; on the contrary, expressions of thankfulness often escape their lips for the attention bestowed upon them,” he wrote.32
In one of the few documented disagreements between him and his senior medical officers, Letterman edited surgeon John Brinton’s critique of the first stage of evacuation by railroad. Brinton felt the conditions in the railroad cars were substandard for the wounded, but amended Brinton’s report to say there was adequate bedding in the railcars for the wounded during the thirty-minute ride to Aquia Landing.33 In his postwar writing, Letterman never explained why he edited Brinton’s report.
Despite some criticism that Letterman wasn’t adequately prepared for Burnside’s order to evacuate the wounded, Fredericksburg represented as large a victory for the medical department as it became a strategic loss for the Army of the Potomac. Burnside was devastated by the losses he had suffered in his first battle as commanding officer of the army. The pontoon bridges’ delay had cost him the element of surprise, but on the other hand it had given Letterman invaluable time to prepare for a battle whose location was certain for several weeks in advance.
As a result, Letterman had plenty of supplies, except for coldweather clothing necessitated by an early December snowstorm. For that event, the Sanitary Commission had come to his rescue, with 1,800 blankets, 900 quilts, more than 5,600 woolen shirts, nearly 4,500 pair of woolen underwear, and more than 4,000 woolen socks.34 Despite this assistance, the Sanitary Commission acknowledged that Letterman had prepared well for the battle, reporting “A minute inspection of these supplies was at once made, and it was found they (Letterman’s hospitals) had nearly all been amply supplied by the Medical Purveyor with those means of succor first needed by wounded men.”35
Fredericksburg became the first true test of Jonathan Letterman’s reorganization and systematization of battlefield care. His ambulance crews were in place and trained. His surgeons had been reorganized according to a restructured hospital system that provided mobile field hospitals, the previously missing link between regimental hospitals that primarily served as aid stations and general hospitals. Medical supplies and transport had become the province and responsibility of medical officers, not the quartermaster corps. His entire system had been tested by approximately 100,000 soldiers in the Army of the Potomac. A new era in battlefield medicine had begun.
“The medical department has become so thoroughly systematized, that wounded and sick men were cared for better than they had ever been in any army before . . . (this) was perfected . . . by the efficient and earnest medical director of the army, Dr. Letterman; to whom belongs the honor of bringing about this most desirable change. By the new system, the surgeons were enabled to accomplish a far greater amount of work, and in much better order than under the old; and the wounded were better and more quickly cared for,” wrote surgeon George Stevens of the Sixth Corps. Stevens appreciated Letterman’s designation of operating surgeons, hospital organization personnel, and record keeping surgeons, and he noted that about one in fifteen medical officers performed surgeries.36
Stevens’s commanding officer, Sixth Corps medical director Charles O’Leary, was equally impressed with Letterman’s system: “During the engagements on the 13th, the ambulances being guided and governed with perfect control and with a precision rare even in military organizations, the wounded were brought without delay or confusion to the hospitals of their respective divisions. Not a single item provided for the organization of the Field Hospitals suffered the slightest derangement, and the celerity with which the wounded were treated, and the system pervading the whole Medical Department, from the stations in the field selected by the assistant-surgeons with the regiments, to the wards where the wounded were transferred from the hands of the surgeons to be attended by nurses, afforded the most pleasing contrast to what we had hitherto seen during the war.”37
Despite glowing praise by military medical professionals, Letterman was roundly criticized by a single medical inspector, Thomas Perley. His was a lone voice almost a month following Fredericksburg when he wrote Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, saying “I do not believe I have ever seen greater misery from sickness than exists now in our Army of the Potomac. . . . In view of the condition of the Army of the Potomac, I am forced to the conclusion that the principal medical officer is not equal to his responsible station, and has failed in his duty, either from having too much to do or from neglect.”38
At the time, Stanton was bitterly feuding with Surgeon General William Hammond. Whether Perley served as a lackey for Stanton, looking to find fault within Hammond’s organization, is unclear. Perley wrote his report after his sole tour in the field, and there is no evidence that it merited serious consideration or action. He also wrote it after the Army of the Potomac had settled into its winter quarters near Aquia Landing.
By then, Letterman’s anger may have subsided. He had made it clear that he disagreed with General Burnside’s decision to evacuate so many wounded out of the region. His disgust at perhaps thousands more who deserted by commandeering rides of medical evacuation transports knew no bounds. And his sensitivity to the condition of those transports had led him to openly edit a surgeon’s critical assessment of the supplies available during medical transportation. After his second major battle as medical director of the Army of the Potomac, Letterman was keenly aware that the effectiveness and perception of his department were vulnerable to differing combat philosophies as well as post-battle second guessing.
Cold, mud, and a lack of firewood defined the winter camp of the Army of the Potomac, a base of operations it had first established when it marched on Fredericksburg more than a month earlier. Following Letterman’s battlefield success, he now faced increasing rates of typhoid, erysipelas, scurvy, and other maladies in a massive army camp whose sanitary conditions in thousands of unheated tents was substandard at best. An exhausted, demoralized army faced a long, cold winter at the start of 1863.
Meanwhile General Burnside sought redemption. On January 20, the Army of the Potomac marched in search of General Lee. Cold rain changed into snow as it blanketed Burnside’s soldiers the first night of the march. It turned the Virginia countryside into fields of sticking, sucking mud that stripped men of shoes and stubbornly gripped wagon wheels. Cold, drained, and discouraged, the army lacked the strength to fight Lee and winter. Burnside turned the army around, retreating once against to the Aquia Landing region. The area had already been stripped of most of its natural resources by the massive army.
The Army of the Potomac now faced a long Virginia winter a few miles from its devastating defeat at Fredericksburg, where many soldiers had come to believe their comrades had died in vain. Battlefield deaths included J. H. Woodbury of Massachusetts, George Simons of New Hampshire, and Henry Dyke of New York. They were killed at Fredericksburg and had been buried side by side, less than one hundred yards from the Confederate artillery emplacements on Marye’s Heights.
Although Jonathan Letterman had overhauled the military’s battlefield care system in the latter half of 1862, in the first few weeks of 1863 the military camp health issues that he faced were the same ones that had plagued the army for years. He also soon would have to build a working relationship with his third commanding officer of the Army of the Potomac in less than four months.
Letterman had reported to one general who considered himself the Union’s savior, and another who candidly acknowledged his lack of qualifications for command of an army. Tens of thousands of soldiers had been ordered to follow the commands of these men, engage the enemy in sometimes suicidal assaults, and place their health and potentially their survival in the hands of Jonathan Letterman.
Despite the
instability of Army of the Potomac’s command, Letterman had proven worthy of Surgeon General Hammond’s confidence when Hammond appointed him medical director of the Army of the Potomac six months earlier. Hammond had made his respect for Letterman clear in his letter of appointment on June 19, 1862. “In making this assignment, I have been governed by what I conceive to be the best interests of the service. Your energy, determination, and faithful discharge of duty in all the different situations in which you have been placed during your service of thirteen years determined me to place you in the most arduous, responsible, and trying position you have yet occupied.”39
Now, after six months of war experience, Letterman would stand between the army’s wounded and sick and a new commanding officer, whose army’s headquarters would become better known for bachelor pursuits than battle plans.
7
CHANCELLORSVILLE
“What will the country say?”
General Ambrose Burnside commanded a beaten and increasingly sick Army of the Potomac in the final few weeks of 1862. Some of his generals believed Ambrose wasn’t the man for the job and planned a coup. It began on December 30, when two of Burnside’s brigadier generals, John Newton and John Cochrane, took the extraordinary step of going over his head to meet directly with President Lincoln. They told the president Burnside already had lost the confidence of his generals, the army had fallen into disarray, and that Burnside planned to attack Lee at Fredericksburg again.
Surgeon In Blue Page 16