The word may appear strange, applied to the Army of Northern Virginia, which had certainly vindicated its claim, under many arduous trials, to the virtues of toughness and endurance.  But Lee’s meaning was plain, and his view seems to have been founded on good sense.  The enemy had in all, probably, two hundred pieces of artillery, a large portion of which were posted on the high ground north of the river.  Had Lee descended from his ridge and advanced into the plain to attack, this large number of guns would have greeted him with a rapid and destructive fire, which must have inflicted upon him a loss as nearly heavy as he had inflicted upon General Burnside at Marye’s Hill.  From such a result he naturally shrunk.  It has been seen that the Federal troops, brave as they were, had been demoralized by such a fire; and Lee was unwilling to expose his own troops to similar slaughter.

There is little question, it seems, that an advance of the description mentioned would have resulted in a conclusive victory, and the probable surrender of the whole or a large portion of the Federal army.  Whether the probability of such a result was sufficient to compensate for the certain slaughter, the reader will decide for himself.  General Lee did not think so, and did not order the advance.  He preferred awaiting, in his strong position, the second assault which General Burnside would probably make; and, while he thus waited, the enemy secretly recrossed the river, rendering an attack upon them by Lee impossible.

General Burnside made a second movement to cross the Rappahannock—­this time at Banks’s Ford, above Fredericksburg—­in the inclement month of January; but, as he might have anticipated, the condition of the roads was such that it was impossible to advance.  His artillery, with the horses dragging the pieces, sank into the almost bottomless mud, where they stuck fast—­even the foot-soldiers found it difficult to march through the quagmire—­and the whole movement was speedily abandoned.

When General Burnside issued the order for this injudicious advance, two of his general officers met, and one asked: 

“What do you think of it?”

“It don’t seem to have the ring” was the reply.

“No—­the bell is broken,” the other added.

This incident, which is given on the authority of a Northern writer, probably conveys a correct idea of the feeling of both the officers and men of General Burnside’s army.  The disastrous day of Fredericksburg had seriously injured the troops.

“The Army of the Potomac,” the writer adds, “was sadly fractured, and its tones had no longer the clear, inspiring ring of victory.”

XII.

THE YEAR OF BATTLES.

The stormy year 1862 had terminated, thus, in a great Confederate success.  In its arduous campaigns, following each other in rapid succession, General Lee had directed the movements of the main great army, and the result of the year’s fighting was to gain him that high military reputation which his subsequent movements only consolidated and increased.