A Northern Tomb at Fredericksburg

Prussian Major Heros von Borcke accompanied Gen. JEB Stuart as the latter observed Northern soldiers burying their dead after Burnside’s disaster at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Von Borcke expressed shock at the rough manner in which Northern soldiers handled their dead, watching corpses being tossed into a nearby abandoned ice house pit “until the solid mass of human flesh had reached near the surface, when a covering of logs, chalk and mud closed the mouth of this vast and awful tomb.” To the Prussian officer, it seemed as if the Federal were more interested in doing the job quickly than doing it well. Had he been appalled at the carnage in late 1862 as Americans slaughtered each other, Lincoln might have called for an armistice and peaceful settlement of the conflict.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

A Northern Tomb at Fredericksburg

“On December 15, 1862, two days after Fredericksburg, [Gen. Ambrose] Burnside, his units having crossed back across the Rappahannock, asked Lee’s permission to remove his dead from the battlefield. The manner in which they performed their duties caused many of Lee’s soldiers to believe that what they were seeing before their eyes revealed another seamy side of the Yankee character, by their treating their fallen comrades, “these brave soldiers,” as one Gray observer termed them, like so many lumps of inert matter, dumping them into common graves “without even a blanket or words of prayer.”

Different in appearance but representing the same lack of feeling was an abandoned ice house, which the grave diggers converted into a “vast and awful tomb.” (Opened months later it revealed within a ghastly “hecatomb of skeletons.”)

These acts of desecration completed, the bulk of the Northerners disappeared, their pickets on the north side of the river about the only evidence of their presence nearby.”