The angles are flawless, the grounds impeccably manicured, the weather too warm, the grass too green. There are no open fields left — like so many of the small villages near Washington, D.C., suburban sprawl has crawled past the town limits, and it laps around the base of the hills that are now home to condos and administration buildings for the nearby University of Mary Washington.
The casual visitor would be hard pressed to believe that anything of any importance has ever happened here, or that this sleepy little town along the Rappahannock River has ever been anything different than…well, a sleepy little town.
But then there are the cemeteries. Many of them. Willis Hill and Fredericksburg National, Shiloh and Fredericksburg City. It seems that one pops up on every corner, and the natural question is why such an impossibly small town has so many dead people in it.
Here, the focus sharpens on the real story of Fredericksburg, and what took place 150 years ago in front of this short, 3-and-a-half foot wall that now serves to separate the blocks of the buried from the blocks of homes on Littlepage Street and Kenmore Avenue, where regular Virginians go about their regular lives in 2013.
It’s here that so long ago, two great armies met on the ground that’s now home to Jake & Mike’s restaurant and the James Monroe High School football field and Pulliam’s Auto Center, and fought to decide the future of a fledgling nation that, with its back on the ropes, had turned on itself.
And for a 35-year-old schoolteacher from Pequannock, his life would change in front of that wall, which became the scene of one of the unimaginable slaughters in the history of war.
Moses Nelson Wisewell
According to Pequannock Township Historian Ed Engelbart, Moses Nelson Wisewell was born in Brandon, Vt., on May 15, 1827. Records from the town’s Historic District Commission note that he came to the bustling little town along the Pompton just prior to 1850 after having left a position as the schoolmaster of a military academy in Yonkers.
In those days, Pequannock was several times larger in land area but, with just 4,126 residents, had one-third of its present population. Wisewell had come to teach the area’s youth, and as was tradition at the time, boarded with the residents — in this case, Thomas and Hester Mandeville.
However, he found more than just eager students, and in what might have been a charming story, fell in love with Mandeville’s 18-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. The two were married in 1850 at the First Reformed Church of Pompton Plains, which still stands on the Newark-Pompton Turnpike across from Town Hall.
Over the course of the next 10 years, the couple had two daughters as Wisewell pursued what Engelbart said was a "successful career" as the principal of the Pequannock Township School and "the academy," which was a tuition-based private school.
A year-and-a-half after the first guns had fired on Fort Sumter, Wisewell decided to enlist, and it’s likely that his education and apparent military background earned him a commission as the colonel of the 28th New Jersey, which, in the summer and fall of 1862, was being recruited from throughout Middlesex, Monmouth, Ocean, Camden, and Gloucester counties.
The 28th, a nine-month regiment, was officially mustered in on Sept. 22, 1862, with Pequannock’s adopted son in command.
There are not many descriptions of Wisewell’s character to be found in literature on the war — he was just another colonel among the hundreds. But according to John Young Foster’s 1868 book "New Jersey and the Rebellion," the New Jerseyan was a man of "fine intellectual capacity" who soon acquired "a marked hold on the confidence" of his soldiers.
That enthusiasm appears to have waned, however, when during a public address he made "certain offensive avowals" about the war and the ongoing governor’s race in his home state and "became obnoxious to a large portion of the regiment." Regardless, he retained his command, and his conduct in the future would show why.
The 28th was 940 strong when it left Freehold for Washington on the night of Oct. 4, 1862. It was attached to General Nathan Kimball’s brigade in General French’s division of the Second Corps of the northern Army of the Potomac, which by December was camped along the eastern side of the Rappahannock River, waiting for orders from commander General Ambrose Burnside.
It was Burnside’s first campaign at the helm of the hard-luck army, which had met with little but defeat since the war’s start. Abraham Lincoln had appointed him to replace the pompous, ineffectual George B. McClellan after the latter failed to purse Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the wake of the northern victory at Antietam. How Burnside would perform was unknown, but he met Lincoln’s major qualification of not being McClellan, and for the time being, that was enough.
The Union commander, like several before and after, sought to march directly on the Confederate capital of Richmond, which sits just 134 miles from Washington. Taking the lightly-defended hub of Fredericksburg, which is nearly equidistant from the two, was a necessary part of that plan.
Burnside moved fast, stealing the march on Lee and arriving at the town in mid-November. The Rappahannock, however, was too high to ford, and his army sat for three weeks while pontoon bridges were built and brought to the front.
This gave the southern army plenty of time to respond, and by the time Burnside crossed the river on Dec. 12, the Army of Northern Virginia had occupied a line of ridges southwest of the town — squarely between the Army of the Potomac and the Confederate capital.
The 28th crossed the Rappahannock on Burnside’s pontoon boats at sunrise on Dec. 12, and passed a bitterly cold night camped near the town before being called to arms on the fateful morning of Dec. 13.
History can only assume that Burnside, a poor commander who was a perennial loser in the war, did not understand what he was looking at when he gazed through his binoculars at the sloping heights and wooded ground that housed the rebel army. All his subordinates, however, did, and men on the northern end of the line saw all too well that Marye’s Heights, what with its sunken road framed by a stone wall on the near side, formed a nearly impregnable natural fortification.
This did not deter him. It should have.
At the gates of hell
On the morning of the 13th, southern General James Longstreet later wrote, the armies were veiled from each other by an "impenetrable mist" that hid guns and flags but allowed voices to carry eerily across the field with "almost startling" clarity.
The attack on the southern portion of the Confederate line began shortly after dawn, and met with some success before falling apart a few hours later. As that advance faltered, Kimball’s brigade — and with it, Wisewell’s 28th — received the order to fall in line and act as the tip of the spear for the assault on Marye’s Heights.
The 600 yards they had to cover before reaching the fortified wall was difficult ground, interspersed with houses, fences, and a canal that forced all the troops to funnel themselves onto three small wooden bridges to cross.
The rest was open, and every inch of it was covered by batteries of artillery. Confederate artillery commander Lt. Col. Edward Porter Alexander quipped that "a chicken could not live on that field when we open on it."
Longstreet, who commanded the defending troops, described the advance in his typically dry prose.
"French’s division came on in gallant style, but somewhat hurried. He gathered his ranks behind the swell of ground near the canal, and moved to the assault," he said.
And what an assault it was. According to Francis Augustin O’Reilly’s book "The Fredericksburg Campaign," the 8th Ohio was in front, with the 28th and 24th New Jersey behind them.
One Confederate, watching from a freshly dug artillery pit, noted that he’d "never witnessed such a battle array before," while another recalled "how beautifully" the Federals came on.
"Their bright bayonets glistening in the sunlight made the line look like a huge serpent of blue and steel," he wrote.
As soon as the northerners cleared the town, however, they received a rude welcome as the heavy guns roared to life. Cannonballs tore the ranks apart, and sent "arms, hands, legs, and clothing into the air." O’Reilly wrote that a shell decapitated the 8th Ohio’s flag-bearer, "leaving his blood and brains upon comrades and the flag."
Still the brigade moved forward, but when the quadruple ranks of Confederate infantry behind the wall finally stood and leveled their rifles at the lead regiment, the barrels of their guns became the last thing many a northerner would ever see. Men in the rear loaded for those in the front ranks, and rifles were passed back and forth simulating what would eventually be known as "machine gun fire." The results were ghastly.
"Hell erupted," O’Reilly wrote. "Cobb’s Georgians (behind the wall) stood up from behind their stone wall and unleashed a devastating volley that paralyzed the Yankees."
General Kimball rode down the lines, and stopped on occasion to address the men before reigning up in front of the New Jerseyans.
"Boys, we are the attacking brigade. I shall expect you to go ahead and open the first. Keep steady, aim low, and let every man do his duty….Remember, you are Jerseymen!" Kimball said. Later, O’Reilly wrote, the general would tell them that "they can’t kill all of you, but they may hurt some of you."
"I thought that was pretty poor satisfaction or comfort to us," one soldier wrote.
The closer the 28th got to the heights, the worse the situation got, and the regiment’s Lieutenant Colonel, Edward A.L. Roberts, later said that it suffered "a most galling and deadly fire of shot and shell," all the while bogging down in the mud that slowed their movement to a crawl.
As the bee’s nest of the bullets grew worse, the northern line curled and fell like "dry grass before the fire," one soldier said. Foster, however, wrote that the 28th moved on "in the face of a murderous fire…(and) pressed steadily forward until the plain was crossed and the foot of the first ridge was reached."
By then, their ranks were "terribly thinned," with one fifth of the regiment having been killed or wounded within minutes of starting the advance.
O’Reilly was harder on the Jersey boys, and wrote the "inchoate 24th and 28th New Jersey regiments quailed before the fire" before laying down along an exposed fold in the ground that left them pinned down and unable to retreat or advance.
"Bullets flew among their prostrate ranks, and their effectiveness diminished," he wrote.
It was here, O’Reilly reports, that a single Confederate bullet, made up of one-ounce of soft lead, finally found its mark, and struck Wisewell directly in the jaw. He would have to be carried from the field, his fate uncertain, and the regiment left without a commander.
His soldiers, badly shaken, "did not exactly run, yet they were very nervous all the time," and O’Reilly said that when three straight artillery shells landed amongst them with fearful effect, the virgin regiment finally broke and ran for the rear. Their leadership was also lacking, as Roberts, who assumed the command after Wisewell’s wounding, was later cashiered for evidently tendering his resignation "in the face of the enemy."
Foster paints a more positive picture of the 28th’s conduct, though, and wrote that "the command stood firm, deliberately opening fire upon the enemy from the shelter of a ravine, and holding the position tenaciously until night put an end to the conflict."
"Only the very highest courage could have held the 28th in the perilous position it occupied, exposed to all the fury of the enemy’s attack," he said. "From first to last, the men fought with the same heroism, the same cool determination, as the veteran troops around them.
It is unclear which account is more correct.
Several more Union assaults followed, and the slaughter continued until darkness enveloped the field. Finally the 28th withdrew, leaving 200 of its original 600 dead, but with its "standards lustrous with the halo of brave achievements." Many other northerners passed the night still pinned down, cradled between stacked corpses meant to block the bullets.
Burnside had wished to renew the attack in the morning and physically lead the corps he’d once commanded against the position, but his subordinates convinced him not to. It would be the last time he commanded the Army of the Potomac.
By the end of the day, the Army of the Potomac had lost 12,500 men. Somewhere between 6,000 to 8,000 lay in front of the stone wall on Marye’s Heights. No soldier had gotten closer than 50 yards before being gunned down.
Cheating death
After being carried from the field, Wisewell, by some miracle, survived his wounds even with the lack of antibiotics and general ignorance of medical procedures that abounded in 1860s America. Like any good New Jerseyan, however, he could not keep quiet when it came to his opinion of his commander.
"After Fredericksburg, he excoriated Burnside for his incompetence," said Engelbart, "and Burnside was ready to bring him up on charges. It didn’t happen, but he was more or less told to shut up."
However, he was promoted to brevet Brigadier General for his "gallant and meritorious service" at the battle, and was mustered out in July 1863. In just one fight, the schoolteacher-turned-soldier assured his place in history, small though it may be.
"His courage…was undoubted," Foster wrote. "And at the Battle of Fredericksburg, he led his regiment with great gallantry."
He was later made the military governor of Washington, D.C., and after the war, became a civil engineer and merchant. His obituary in The New York Times noted that he "built many railroads and was involved in many public works," and also obtained the first patent for Oleo margarine.
He became involved with trying to build a military academy in Pequannock that would be New Jersey’s answer to West Point, but due to a lack of funding, it was never built.
After his wife died in 1886, Wisewell spent an increasing amount of time in New York City, where he died two years later. He was brought back to Pequannock, and now lies in the graveyard of the church he was married in.
And even though his old regiment was full of those who only signed up for a nine-month fight, it would distinguish itself at the Federal disaster at Chancellorsville before being mustered out in NJ later that summer.
Foster, once again, wrote a fitting description.
"During the whole time that the 28th was connected with the Army of the Potomac, it held a position on the immediate front…and was, consequently, at all times exposed to attack by ‘raiding’ parties of the enemy. It is simple truth to say of the regiment that wherever placed, it did its duty courageously and efficiently, and that though serving the dark hours of the war, it never lost its faith in the Republic."
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
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