Sunken Road and Stone Wall

Fredericksburg sits halfway between Washington and Richmond — at the fall line of the Rappahannock, where the Piedmont drops to the coastal plain and where, in December 1862, geography became fate. The city had already changed hands. It would change hands again. But what happened on December 13 was different. That day, the war stopped pretending it could be won cleanly.

Confederate troops under General James Longstreet held a stone wall along the Sunken Road at the base of Marye's Heights. The road sat below grade. Behind the wall, Confederate infantry took position with clear sightlines across 900 yards of open ground. No cover. No defilade. Winter grass and killing distance.

General Ambrose Burnside ordered his men across it anyway. Fourteen separate assaults were launched. Not one Federal soldier touched the wall. Not one entered the Sunken Road. The closest any Union attacker came was fifty yards — near enough to see the men firing, far enough that there was nothing to be done about it. Confederate troops held without yielding an inch. By the time Burnside called it off, approximately 18,500 men were casualties: 12,500 Union, 6,000 Confederate. Nearly one in three Federal soldiers in this sector was killed or wounded attempting to take a position that could not be taken.

The Sunken Road is part of Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park now. An 0.8-mile loop trail runs from the Battlefield Visitor Center on Lafayette Boulevard. The stone wall is still there. You walk the ground they couldn't cross.