The Mud March: When the Army Sank

In January of eighteen sixty-three, the Army of the Potomac tried to move. It ended in one of the most complete humiliations in American military history, not from enemy fire, but from mud.

Major General Ambrose Burnside had just survived the catastrophic Battle of Fredericksburg in December, where his assaults on Marye's Heights cost the Union nearly thirteen thousand casualties and accomplished nothing. He needed to act, and he needed to act fast, before Lincoln lost patience entirely. His plan was to swing his one hundred twenty thousand men around General Robert E. Lee's left flank, cross the Rappahannock River upstream, and cut off the Confederate army from Richmond.

On January twentieth, the army began to move. The weather had been unseasonably mild. That changed within hours. A drizzle turned into a downpour that would not let up. Virginia's clay-rich soil absorbed the water and became something closer to glue than to ground. Soldiers described sinking past their knees with every step. Regiments were forced to rest again and again simply from the effort of walking. Wagons sank to their axles. Field guns disappeared into the mire up to their wheel hubs. Even teams of a dozen horses could not drag the artillery forward. The whole enormous army, with all its wagons and cannon and supplies, came to a stop in the middle of a field.

On January twenty-second, after two days of going essentially nowhere, Burnside called off the operation. It took his men several more days to claw their way back to their winter camps.

The army's morale, already shattered by Fredericksburg, collapsed further. The Mud March became shorthand for the Army of the Potomac's nadir. Within days, Lincoln relieved Burnside and replaced him with Joseph Hooker. The army that would eventually win the war had to be rebuilt from this lowest point, stuck in the Virginia clay.