previous next

[344] Porter and McDowell courts have prevented my getting away. Should it be decided the army is to go into winter quarters, I may yet have a chance, though I hardly have much hope.


To Mrs. George G. Meade:
camp opposite Fredericksburg, January 2, 1863.
I think I wrote you we were on the eve of a movement, but day before yesterday Burnside got a telegram from the President directing him to suspend preparations and come to Washington. Burnside proceeded there post-haste, and was much astonished by the President telling him that a deputation of his (Burnside's) generals had called on him to protest against any further attempt to cross the river, and asking him to stop Burnside. Burnside asked the names of these officers, which the President declined giving. He then resigned his command, which the President refused to accept. He then made a written protest against Stanton and Halleck, which he read to the President in their presence, stating that neither had the confidence of the people nor the army, and calling on him to remove them and himself. To this they made no reply, and the President would not receive his paper, though he took no offense at its contents. Finding he could get nothing out of any of them, he came back, and thus matters stand. Burnside told me all this himself this morning, and read me his paper, which was right up and down. All this is confidential. God only knows what is to become of us and what will be done. No one in Washington has the courage to say or do anything beyond hampering and obstructing us. Burnside is in favor of advancing, but he is opposed by his principal generals —Sumner, Franklin and Hooker. I had a long talk with Franklin yesterday, who is very positive in his opinion that we cannot go to Richmond on this line, and hence there is no object in our attempting to move on it. I agreed with him on the impracticability of this line, but I did not think for that reason we ought to stand still, because we must move some time or other in some direction, and we are every day growing weaker, without any hope of reinforcements in future. In April, thirty-eight two-year regiments, from New York, and all the nine-month men go out of service. This is a serious consideration. Now, while I am not in favor of reattempting to cross here, yet I was in favor of crossing, if a suitable place could be found above or below, where we could rapidly cross and attack them before


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Fredericksburg, Va. (Virginia, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Ambrose E. Burnside (7)
William B. Franklin (2)
Edwin M. Stanton (1)
George Gordon Meade (1)
Joe Hooker (1)
Henry W. Halleck (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
January 2nd, 1863 AD (1)
April (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: