ABSTRACT
After the bloody failure to storm Confederate positions at Fredericksburg on 13 December 1862, the Union Army of the Potomac returned to its old camps on the north side of the Rappahannock. It had lost nearly 13,000 men, most of them in vain assaults against enemy defenses at Marye’s Heights, and with shattered morale and fading confidence in its commander, the army was ‘all played out’. Six weeks later Major General Ambrose E. Burnside tried to retrieve the situation, but the entire country was an ‘ocean of mud’ and he was soon forced to abandon what became known officially – and derisively – as the ‘Mud March’. On 25 January Burnside was relieved.
