Ambrose Burnside

• 1. Introduction

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  Ambrose Burnside is best remembered for two catastrophic failures, but the word his name spawned is used every day by people who have never heard of him. Born on the 23rd of May, 1824, in Liberty, Indiana, Burnside rose from a tailor's apprentice to command the most powerful army on the continent. He turned down that command twice. The third time, a courier told him that if he refused again, the job would go to Joseph Hooker, a man Burnside despised. So he accepted. What followed would mark him as one of the most tragic figures the American Civil War produced: a general who knew his own limits, ignored by the machinery of war that needed him to be more than he was. The facial hair he wore, with strips of hair joining his ears to his mustache while the chin stayed clean-shaved, became so distinctive that it gave the English language a new word. The story of how he got there, and how it all fell apart, is more complicated than the nickname suggests.

• 2. The Man Before the War

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  Ambrose Burnside's father had been a slave owner in South Carolina who freed his enslaved people when the family relocated to Indiana. That background shaped the world Burnside inherited without fully defining the man he became. His mother died in 1841, cutting short his education at Liberty Seminary, and he was apprenticed to a local tailor. An appointment to the United States Military Academy in 1843, arranged through his father's political connections, changed the course of his life entirely.

  He graduated in 1847, ranking 18th in a class of 47, and was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant. He arrived in Veracruz for the Mexican-American War only after hostilities had ended, and spent his time on garrison duty near Mexico City. His first real test in combat came in August 1849, when he was wounded by an arrow in his neck during a skirmish against Apaches in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

  One episode from his early years captures something essential about his fortune. He had been engaged to Charlotte "Lottie" Moon. When the minister asked if she took him as her husband, Moon reportedly shouted "No siree Bob!" and ran out of the church. She went on to become a Confederate spy during the Civil War. Burnside later arrested her, her younger sister Virginia "Ginnie" Moon, and their mother, keeping all three under house arrest for months but never formally charging any of them with espionage.

  In 1852, stationed at Fort Adams in Newport, Rhode Island, he married Mary Richmond Bishop of Providence. The marriage lasted until Mary's death in 1876, and the couple had no children.

• 3. The Burnside Carbine

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  After leaving the Regular Army in October 1853, Burnside threw himself into a commercial venture that should have made him wealthy. He developed the Burnside carbine, a cavalry firearm that bore his name, and President Buchanan's Secretary of War John B. Floyd contracted the Burnside Arms Company to equip a large portion of the Army with it. The contract was worth $100,000. Burnside established extensive factories for production at the Bristol Rifle Works.

  Then another gunmaker allegedly bribed Floyd to break the contract. The factories had barely been completed. The burdens of a failed congressional campaign in 1858, which he ran as a Democrat and lost in a landslide, combined with a fire that destroyed his factory, wiped him out financially. He was forced to assign his firearm patents to others, surrendering the rights to his own invention.

  He went west in search of employment and became treasurer of the Illinois Central Railroad. There he worked alongside George B. McClellan, who would later become one of his commanding officers. He also became acquainted with the railroad's corporate attorney, a man named Abraham Lincoln. The carbine he invented and lost would go on to see significant use in the Civil War, carried by the very cavalry he had hoped to supply.

• 4. Early Victories in the East

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  When the Civil War broke out, Burnside raised the 1st Rhode Island Volunteer Infantry Regiment and was appointed its colonel on the 2nd of May, 1861. Two companies of that regiment were armed with Burnside carbines. His performance at the First Battle of Bull Run in July was unremarkable, but what came next established his reputation.

  Burnside commanded three brigades assembled in Annapolis, Maryland, conducting an amphibious campaign along the North Carolina coast that closed more than 80% of the state's sea coast to Confederate shipping for the rest of the war. The Battle of Elizabeth City, fought on the 10th of February, 1862, on the Pasquotank River, ended with the Confederate fleet captured, sunk, or dispersed. The battle pitted vessels of the Union's North Atlantic Blockading Squadron against the Confederate Navy's Mosquito Fleet, which was supported by a shore battery of four guns at Cobb's Point.

  His victories at Roanoke Island and New Bern earned him promotion to major general of volunteers on the 18th of March, 1862, and they stood as the first significant Union victories in the Eastern Theater. When the Army of the Potomac's commander George McClellan stumbled in the Peninsula Campaign, Burnside was offered command of the entire army. He turned it down, citing loyalty to McClellan and an honest assessment of his own military experience. He turned it down a second time after John Pope's disaster at Second Bull Run.

• 5. Antietam's Bridge

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  At the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Burnside was given command of the Right Wing of the Army of the Potomac, but McClellan then split his two corps and placed them on opposite ends of the Union battle line, reducing Burnside again to command of just the IX Corps. Burnside never quite accepted this demotion. He funneled orders through subordinates as though he were still commanding the larger wing, a cumbersome arrangement that slowed the attack on the southern flank of the line.

  The crossing that bears his name became a symbol of his limitations. Rather than scouting the easy fording sites that existed out of range of Confederate fire, Burnside's troops were sent into repeated charges across a narrow bridge dominated by Confederate sharpshooters on high ground. McClellan, losing patience by noon, sent courier after courier. He told one aide, "Tell him if it costs 10,000 men he must go now." When McClellan's inspector general arrived to deliver the same message in person, Burnside reacted with indignation: "McClellan appears to think I am not trying my best to carry this bridge; you are the third or fourth one who has been to me this morning with similar orders."

  The IX Corps eventually broke through, but the delay allowed Major General A. P. Hill's Confederate division to march up from Harpers Ferry and repulse the Union advance. McClellan refused Burnside's requests for reinforcements, and the day ended without a decisive Union victory.

• 6. Fredericksburg and the Mud March

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  Lincoln removed McClellan on the 5th of November, 1862, and selected Burnside to replace him two days later. It was the third time command had been offered, and Burnside reluctantly obeyed only because the courier made clear the alternative was Hooker. The formal change of command took place on the 9th of November at the farm of Julia Claggett in New Baltimore, Virginia. Columbia Claggett, Julia's daughter-in-law, later testified that a parade and transfer of the army occurred in front of their house that day.

  Lincoln approved Burnside's plan to capture Richmond on the 14th of November. His advance toward Fredericksburg was rapid, but the engineers were slow to bring up pontoon bridges to cross the Rappahannock River. Burnside also hesitated to deploy troops across available fording points. The delay gave General Lee time to concentrate along Marye's Heights just west of Fredericksburg.

  On the 13th of December, the Union attacks went forward and were slaughtered. Assaults south of town, meant to be the main effort, went unsupported when they made initial breakthroughs. Burnside, devastated, announced he would personally lead the IX Corps in a final assault. His corps commanders talked him out of it. He accepted full blame and offered to resign. His detractors gave him the name "Butcher of Fredericksburg".

  In January 1863, he launched another offensive that dissolved in winter rains before it achieved anything, earning the lasting nickname the Mud March. When he asked for insubordinate officers to be court-martialed and again offered his own resignation, Lincoln accepted the resignation on the 26th of January, replacing him with Hooker, one of the officers who had conspired against him.

• 7. Ohio, Knoxville, and the Crater

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  Lincoln declined Burnside's offer to resign his commission entirely and sent him to command the Department of the Ohio, covering Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois. The assignment was intended to keep him out of trouble. Instead, Burnside collided with antiwar politics. He issued orders forbidding public expression of sentiment against the war or the administration, culminating in General Order No. 38, which threatened anyone found guilty of treason with imprisonment or banishment to enemy lines.

  On the 1st of May, 1863, Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham held a rally in Mount Vernon, Ohio, denouncing Lincoln as a "tyrant" seeking to abolish the Constitution. Burnside had agents at the rally. He arrested Vallandigham for treason, had him tried by a military court, and saw him sentenced to imprisonment for the duration of the war. He then sent troops to shut down the Chicago Times newspaper, which had been printing antiwar editorials for months. Lincoln, who had been consulted on neither action, freed Vallandigham and sent him to Confederate lines, then ordered the Chicago Times reopened and announced that Burnside had exceeded his authority.

  Burnside redeemed himself somewhat in the Knoxville Campaign, skillfully outmaneuvering Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet at the Battle of Campbell's Station and holding Knoxville through a siege until Confederate forces withdrew. His holding action tied down Longstreet's corps during the period when Ulysses S. Grant defeated Braxton Bragg at Chattanooga.

  The final chapter of his military career came at Petersburg in July 1864. A regiment of former coal miners in the 48th Pennsylvania proposed digging a mine under Confederate fortifications at a position called Elliot's Salient. Burnside agreed. The fort was destroyed on the 30th of July, but the assault that followed collapsed. Meade had ordered Burnside, only hours before the attack, not to use his specially trained division of Black troops. Burnside let his three remaining division commanders draw lots for the assignment. The lot fell to Brigadier General James H. Ledlie, who had failed to brief his men and was later observed drinking in a bombproof shelter well behind the lines during the battle. Ledlie's men entered the crater instead of going around it, became trapped, and were cut down. Burnside's forces suffered 3,800 casualties. He was relieved of command on the 14th of August and sent on extended leave. He wrote of a December meeting with Lincoln and Grant: "I was not informed of any duty upon which I am to be placed." He resigned his commission on the 15th of April, 1865, after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. The United States Congress Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War later placed the blame for the Crater defeat on General Meade, not Burnside, for ordering the withdrawal of the trained Black troops.

• 8. Governor, Senator, and Legacy

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  After the war, Burnside turned his attention to railroads and politics. He held presidencies in the Cincinnati and Martinsville Railroad, the Indianapolis and Vincennes Railroad, the Cairo and Vincennes Railroad, and the Rhode Island Locomotive Works. He was nominated by the Republican Party to run for governor of Rhode Island in March 1866, having been a Democrat before the war, and was elected in a landslide on the 4th of April, 1866. He served three one-year terms, from the 29th of May, 1866, to the 25th of May, 1869.

  In 1870, during a visit to Europe, he attempted to mediate between France and Germany during the Franco-Prussian War, and was registered at the offices of Drexel, Harjes and Co. in Geneva in the week ending the 5th of November, 1870. At its founding in 1871, the National Rifle Association of America chose him as its first president. He served as commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic veterans' association from 1871 to 1872.

  In 1874 the Rhode Island Senate elected him to the United States Senate. He was re-elected in 1880 and served as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 1881.

  He died suddenly of what was then called "neuralgia of the heart," now recognized as angina pectoris, on the morning of the 13th of September, 1881, at his home in Bristol, Rhode Island. Thousands of mourners from across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut crowded the streets of Providence for his funeral procession on the 16th of September.

  Bruce Catton's assessment has endured: that Burnside had repeatedly shown it was a military tragedy to give him a rank above colonel, yet he was also, unlike many generals of that war, a man without angles to play, never scheming or backbiting, never mistaking himself for Napoleon. An equestrian statue designed by the sculptor Launt Thompson was dedicated in 1887 at Exchange Place in Providence, and in 1906 was moved to City Hall Park, which was re-dedicated as Burnside Park.