Ambrose Burnside

Ambrose E. Burnside Major General, United States Army
Born	May 23, 1824
Died	September 13, 1881

Ambrose Everette Burnside (1824 - 1881) was a Major General in the United States Army during the American Civil War, and best known for his loss of the Battle of Fredricksburg in December, 1862, and the disaster of the Crater during the seige of Petersburg in July, 1864.

Early life

Burnside was born in Liberty, Indiana, from where he was appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1847. His involvement in the Mexican War the following year consisted of garrison duty as he arrived too late to take part in hostilities.

Between 1847 and 1852, Burnside served in various garrisons along the western frontier of the United States, and during this time he drew up designs for a new rifle, a breech-loading carbine that could load faster, was more accurate, and had less misfire than the smoothbore musket then standard issue among the infantry. Resigning his commission in 1853, he moved to Bristol, Rhode Island, where he set up shop to manufacture his rifle. Sales were slow, however, and facing financial ruin when he was unable to sell enough of them to sustain his business, he was forced to give the patents to his creditors in 1860. When the Civil War broke out some nine months later, the company holding his patents were able to make 2000 rifles a month to satisfy Army demand, and thus made a comfortable profit; Burnside didn’t see a penny from his idea. (TL 13, pg. 24).

Civil War

When war broke out in 1861, Burnside was accepted as head of a Rhode Island militia regiment. His regiment was sent to Virginia to take part in the First Battle of Bull Run, and his subsequent actions there caused him to be reinstated in the regular army as a brigadier general, to lead a command in the successful North Carolina coastal campaign against coastal fortifications and ships, taking many prisoners as a result. His reputation high among his fellow officers, he was promoted to major general and asked by President Abraham Lincoln to command the Army of the Potomac. In this he politely refused, stating he was not experienced to command anything larger than a brigade.

Antietam

He served in the Army of the Potomac regardless, under Major General George B. McClellan, and during the Battle of Antietam he was in command IX Corps, of McClellan’s left wing. The arrangement was cumbersome; two junior officers, Major General Jesse Reno and later, Brigadier General Jacob Cox (after Reno was killed), were both treated as corps commander, and Burnside sent orders to the corps through them, resulting in the slowness of the corps to attack the Confederate forces on the Union’s southern flank near what came to be called “Burnside’s Bridge”.

Burnside funneled his forces across the bridge during the battle; because of the narrowness of the bridge itself the attacking soldiers were easily picked off and driven from the bridge. He sent wave after wave across the bridge, and each was beaten back with heavy losses. Expecting the bridge and the ground beyond to be taken, McClellan sent a succession of messengers to inquire as to why the bridge wasn’t taken, and the delay in taking it allowed Confederate reinforcements under Major General A. P. Hill to repulse the only Union breakthrough. Had Burnside made a reconnaissance of the area, he would have discovered the creek was less than three feet deep in places within a half mile of the bridge.

Fredericksburg

Abraham Lincoln removed McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac due to his general’s ineffectiveness at following and destroying the Confederate forces which left Antietam, and over his protests, ordered Burnside to take over on November 7, 1862. Disagreement over plans to take Richmond between Burnside, Army Chief Major General Henry Halleck, and Lincoln, caused a delay in Burnside’s crossing of the Rappahannock River, so that Confederate General Robert E. Lee was allowed considerable time to arrange his forces on the heights of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Burnside’s attack on December 13, mismanaged nearly everywhere, resulted in a disasterous retreat, and a second attempt to go after Lee in January resulted in the derisive “Mud March”. In a letter to Lincoln, Burnside demanded the resignation of several officers who were openly insubordinate during the march, or he himself would resign; Lincoln rejected the former and accepted the latter, and Burnside was relieved of command, and transferred to Ohio.

Minor successes

Here he found some level of success. He assisted in the crushing of an attempted raid into Ohio by Confederate General John Hunt Morgan in July, 1863. He arrested agitators against the war and locked them in jails, suspending habeas corpus for the duration of the war, the most famous of which was a Democratic Congressman named Clement Valandigham, whose arrest set off a firestorm in Washington (Lincoln would issue a famous reply in response: "must I shoot some simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, and not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?"). He also marched into Knoxville, Tennessee in September, 1863, and held it against Confederate forces under general James Longstreet, thus aiding Major General Ulysses S. Grant’s success in Chattanooga.

The Crater

Rejoining his old corps in the Army of the Potomac during the Wilderness Campaign, Burnside served under Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, the overall commander of the Union forces, and Major General George G. Mead, still the commander of the Army of the Potomac. Burnisde offered service during the Wilderness Campaign by his attacks on Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and subsequently continued his service during the long and tedious siege of Petersburg. Besieging an enemy force was never the most enjoyable or interesting part of a war, as it usually involved trapping them in a city and then starving them into submissiuon or cracking their lines. Every soldier in the Army of the Potomac, from General grant to the newest private soldier was trying their utmost to find a way to break General Robert E. Lee's lines.

It was Colonel Henry Pleasants, a man in Burnside's IX Corps, who came up with a plan to end the siege: the men in his regiment, who happened to have been Pennsylvania miners in their lives before the war, would dig a tunnel under the Confederate defenses, pack it with explosives, and set the charge off. Theoretically, the resulting explosion would open a breach in the Confederate lines which the Union would be able to exploit to their benefit. Burnside, having received approval from Grant, had the men begin to dig the tunnel, and trained a unit of black soldiers to go around the blasted area and charge throught the (hopefully) battered and shattered and weakened Confederate line, which would, in turn, allow other Federal forces to follow through.

Several hours before the blast took place, Generals Grant and Mead, who felt uneasy about using black soldiers, ordered Burnside to replace his trained black soldiers with a white unit which was not trained for the task. Although this decision seems to have been made with a racist frame of mind, the generals were really concerned with two matters: the first was that these black troops did not have as much combat time as other troops. The second problem was this: if the confederates were not damaged by the blast, they could potentially slaughter the black troops, which would open the commanding genreals to harsh allegations about the "massacre" of troops. When the explosion took place on July 30, the white soldiers jumped into the crater instead of going around it, and stared at it awestruck.

The Confederates thus were given time to regroup and open fire from the rim, and the short Battle of the Crater ended in a humiliating defeat with heavy casualties. Burnside, charged with the fiasco, was sent on leave. He was not placed in a command again, and President Andrew Johnson accepted his resignation from the Army on April 15, 1865, the day Lincoln died from an assassin’s bullet.

After the war

After the war, Burnside was employed by numerous industrial and railroad firms, as well as serving as governor of Rhode Island (1866-1869). He also served as commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (a veterans association); was elected first president of the National Rifle Association; and was elected to the United States Senate in 1874, but he died before the first year was over into his second term in 1881.

Apart from his Civil War service, Burnside is known for the flamboyant facial whiskers which he wore for most of his life, and a play on his name caused them to be called “sideburns”.

References

• Time-Life Books The Civil War (vol. 13, Rebels Resurgent), Time, Inc. New York (1985)