Club Trip to Fredericksburg Battlefields

Some 30 NPC members and their guests enjoyed a fascinating tour Saturday, Sept. 12, of the Civil War battleground in and around Fredericksburg, Va., as part of the Club's decades-long partnership with the Civil War Trust and National Park Service (NPS).

NPS historian Frank O'Reilly brought to life the bloody three-day struggle in December, 1862, that destroyed the small railroad town on the Rappahannock River 50 miles south of Washington, a battle that broke new ground in military tactics, cost the Union army staggering loses, prevented a quick northern victory and gave the Confederacy an unwarranted sense of military invincibility.

Under an overcast sky, the visitors walking ground once trod by Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, President Abraham Lincoln, Union Generals Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker and George Meade and more than 100,000 soldiers, some 9,000 of whom lost limbs and lives along a vast floodplain dominated by rebel-held highlands. O'Reilly quoted Lee, who had a panoramic view of the carnage, as telling an aide that "It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it." Battlefield firsts at Fredericksburg included establishing a beachhead for assault bridges across the Rappahannock and house-to-house urban warfare involving American soldiers.

The bus outing to Fredericksburg was the tenth such trip arranged by NPC member Jim Noone in cooperation with the Civil War Trust, a non-profit organization dedicated to saving U.S. battlefields, including Fredericksburg's Slaughter Pen Farm where 65,000 Union troops narrowly failed to break through 37,000 Confederates. The Trust spent $12.3 million to keep the land where thousands of soldiers died from becoming a housing development.