It was Thursday, Christmas day of 1862, and the guns at Fredericksburg had fallen silent just ten days before with over ten thousand Union soldiers of the Army of the Potomac and half that number of Confederates from the Army of Northern Virginia lying dead or wounded beyond the city. That night, a twenty-one year old cannoneer from Richmond, Lieutenant William Gordon McCabe, sat in his bivouac penning some lines of verse . . . a poem in which he took a bit of literary license, as the weather that December in Virginia was unseasonably warm and would become even warmer the following month when the retreating Union Army virtually sank in a sea of melting mire during its humiliating “mud march” northward. The following poem was soon published in a number of Southern newspapers, such as Richmond’s “Southern Literary Messenger.”
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