Veterans Week, Part I: The Sunken Road and The Angel of Marye's Heights

Headstone, Civil War Veteran, Fredericksburg, VA

Veterans Day falls in this week. My head is full of America's conflicts, present and past. We are a warrior nation, a fact some of us only regret in the aftermaths of our actions. I have two bits of American history to share that I believe are instructive right now to remind us that America has known harder times than these. There are responses to national stress that are to be avoided at all costs, recourses that were suffered pitifully and should not be forgotten. Reasons to find solutions rather than escalate rhetoric.

One story comes from Fredericksburg, VA, which we visited last week, and the other from near Franklin, TN. (I'll be visiting Franklin this week and will tell that story in a second post).

Fredericksburg, VA: A perfect little college town, walkable and so packed with Revolutionary and Civil War history and livable charm that I was pricing housing...again. We made some beautiful shots of the charm, but Fredericksburg is a town with a job and that's what I want to convey: it works to preserve America's stories so that we may be informed by them, so that we may not repeat them. The story of The Battle of The Sunken Road haunts me.

The Sunken Road And The Stone Wall

The Army of The Potomac (114,000 engaged) met the Army of Northern Virginia (72,500 engaged)  at Fredericksburg in December, 1862. Union troops under Generals Burnside, Sumner, Hooker, and Franklin and Confederate troops under Lee, Longstreet,  Jackson, and Stuart, combined in Fredericksburg to comprise the largest armed engagement of the Civil War.

From the movie "Gods and Generals"

On the northern end of the battlefield, Union troops under General Sumner charged a low ridge called Marye's Heights. They moved up a long plain that rose very gradually to about 45 ft. at its crest. Near the crest of Marye's Heights, a narrow lane, known as Telegraph Road and later called The Sunken Road, crossed the plain, set in a declination behind a 4-ft. stone wall. Behind the lane, the ground rose sharply to the crest. Under cover of fog, the Confederate troops, under Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws, were dug in behind the stone wall. 7000 Confederate reserves were hidden behind the ridge. Massed Confederate artillery guns were placed on the rise behind the wall, aimed low to rake the enemy, skimming just over the heads of their own men. The Union Right Grand Division attacked across that long sloping plain directly toward the wall, the sunken lane, and the guns massed on Marye's Heights.

It was Pickett's Charge, in reverse. Lt. Col. Edward Porter Alexander promised General Longstreet, "General, we cover that ground now so well that we will comb it as with a fine-tooth comb. A chicken could not live on that field when we open [fire] on it."  And so it was.

Restored home next to the Sunken Road, nearly cut to timber by
bullets. Some inner walls are original and bear the damage today.

Seven Union divisions were thrown at the the Sunken Road, one brigade at a time for a total of fourteen charges. All of them failed. Between 6,000 and 8,000 Union soldiers and 1,200 Confederate soldiers died that day. Longstreet later wrote that, "The charges had been desperate and bloody, but utterly hopeless." Through that long December night and all the next day, Confederate fire prevented the Union troops from attending to their wounded.

The Angel of Marye's Heights
 by Felix de Weldon

Sergeant Richard Rowland Kirkland, with Confederate Company G, 2nd S. Carolina Volunteer Infantry, could no longer bear the cries for help from the Union wounded. He asked and was granted permission from his commander to provide aid. Kirkland gathered canteens and, in daylight, with neither a cease fire nor a truce flag to protect him, brought comfort to the enemy lying on the open plain. Known as The Angel of Marye's Heights, Kirkland was memorialized in a statue.

I found Fredericksburg so dear and, at the same time, so sad. It's residents live in an idyllic American town and they tend their stories as tenderly as Kirkland tended the Union wounded and dying. We love our history in this country. We honor and cherish it. But we thereby live in danger of romanticizing its battles and its armies--an error that contributes to the ease with which those who call themselves patriots tossed off threats of "second amendment solutions" to our troubles during the recent mid-term campaigns.

I am nervous to hear hawkish rhetoric from the newly elected congressmen like Rand Paul and from old hawks whose numbers are reinforced. On the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, Paul stated, "I think we need to have more discussion on it, but it doesn't sound like I'm probably going to be in favor of that." And Lindsay Graham of SC, who needs to read up on Kirkland's story, told Time Magazine,“the likelihood of a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq has gone down.” Mr. Graham will be hearing from me. 


Some of my friends are so distressed, so disgusted by the changes in The House of Representatives and the rhetoric of some voices on the right, they are moving to emigrate. Some are so angry, they sound like the tea party gone progressive. Certainly, I can imagine conditions under which I would consider leaving my country, but I do not think those conditions prevail today. I believe there are no answers for America in those responses. The harder thing is to stay, to remain calm, and to work, heeding the lessons of history.

Civil War Cemetery, Fredericksburg, Maryland