In December 1862, at the Civil War battle of Fredericksburg, a young Union officer wrote: "I do like to see a brave man, but when a man goes out for the express purpose of getting shot at he seems to me in the way of a maniac." The officer was writing about Brigadier General Andrew Atkinson Humphreys. The battle was Humphreys' first real military engagement.
Fredericksburg was a blood bath. It has gone down in history books as one of the Union's most ill-conceived and poorly conducted battles. Confederate troops under General Robert E. Lee were positioned on high ground behind a stone wall. The Union troops under General Ambrose Burnside were ordered to charge at them. Column after column of men were mowed down under Confederate fire or driven back. When it came to Humphreys' turn, he ordered the youngest, most inexperienced men in his command to keep pace with the rest of his troops and then he charged up the hill in front. He loved the bloody mayhem. In a letter to his wife he described the thrill of battle: "as the storm of bullets whistled around me, and as the shells and shrapnel burst close to me in every direction with hissing sound, the excitement grew more glorious still. Oh, it was sublime!" In a letter to a friend he said, "I felt like a young girl of sixteen at her first ball … I felt more like a god than a man."
Within ten or fifteen minutes, by his own reckoning, Humphreys had lost 1,000 men, a fifth of his command. But that didn't seem to disturb him. Nor did the deaths of thousands more of his troops in subsequent battles. In his letters home, Humphreys never mentioned those losses. What concerned him was establishing his reputation as a military leader. "It is acknowledged throughout this army," he explained to his wife, "that no officer ever did as much with troops of short term of service as I did. …"
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eads/peopleevents/p_humphreys.html
Fredericksburg was a blood bath. It has gone down in history books as one of the Union's most ill-conceived and poorly conducted battles. Confederate troops under General Robert E. Lee were positioned on high ground behind a stone wall. The Union troops under General Ambrose Burnside were ordered to charge at them. Column after column of men were mowed down under Confederate fire or driven back. When it came to Humphreys' turn, he ordered the youngest, most inexperienced men in his command to keep pace with the rest of his troops and then he charged up the hill in front. He loved the bloody mayhem. In a letter to his wife he described the thrill of battle: "as the storm of bullets whistled around me, and as the shells and shrapnel burst close to me in every direction with hissing sound, the excitement grew more glorious still. Oh, it was sublime!" In a letter to a friend he said, "I felt like a young girl of sixteen at her first ball … I felt more like a god than a man."
Within ten or fifteen minutes, by his own reckoning, Humphreys had lost 1,000 men, a fifth of his command. But that didn't seem to disturb him. Nor did the deaths of thousands more of his troops in subsequent battles. In his letters home, Humphreys never mentioned those losses. What concerned him was establishing his reputation as a military leader. "It is acknowledged throughout this army," he explained to his wife, "that no officer ever did as much with troops of short term of service as I did. …"
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eads/peopleevents/p_humphreys.html
