The “Mud March” Nor’easter,
January 20-23, 1863
During late January of 1863, General Burnside’s Union Army
was in camp across the Rappahannock River from General Lee’s Confederate troops, who were camped around
Fredericksburg, Virginia. Burnside had been feeling increasing pressure to move
against the Confederate Army after his defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg,
a month earlier, on December 13, 1862. Burnside’s plan was to march his army several miles to
the northwest of the Confederates and cross the Rappahannock,
circling around the left flank of Lee’s army. He would then attack the
Confederate Army near Fredericksburg. The weather had been fairly dry and mild for most of
January and the prospects for a winter campaign seemed good.
On the morning of January 20, 1863, the Army of the Potomac
formed columns and began the march up the Rappahannock River. Unknown to the soldiers, a massive storm was developing
near the southeast coast and had started to move northward. Rain began falling
during the evening of January 20 and continued to fall heavily on January 21. Burnside’s
army quickly got bogged down in the mud. Temperatures hovered in the upper
30’s, adding a chill to the drenched soldiers. Wagons sank to their wheel hubs
in mud and artillery became hopelessly stuck. A team of 12 horses and 150 men
could not pull one cannon out of the mud. Also, the soldiers slipped and fell
repeatedly, while others lost their shoes in the thick mud.
General George Sykes of the Fifth
Army Corps wrote a succinct summary of the storm:
On the night of the 20th, a
violent storm of rain set in, making the roads impassable on account of the
mud, rendering military movements impracticable. The entire command was turned
out to repair and corduroy the roads.
By January 22, the rain had ended but
the entire Army of the Potomac was still mired in the mud. The weather remained cloudy
and damp, with temperatures hovering in the upper 30’s
to near 40°F. The damp conditions and above-freezing temperatures kept the
roads soft and muddy. Ammunition and supply wagons remained stuck fast, and
horses and mules died of exhaustion in the mud. The challenge was no longer to
cross the river and attack Lee, but instead to get unstuck from the mud and
return to camp. Log roads were built over the mud with great effort, and the
Union Army arrived back in camp on January 23. The campaign had been a dismal
failure and General Burnside was even heckled by his own men as they marched back
to camp in the mud.
A soldier’s account gives vivid
detail of the misery involved during the march:
For the clouds gathered all day
thicker and darker, and night ushered in a storm of wind and pouring rain,
harder for that moving army to encounter than a hundred thousand enemies; a
driving rain that drenched and chilled the poor shelter less men and horses,
and that poached the ground into mud deeper than the New England mind can
conceive of, and stickier than – well, I am at a loss for a similitude. Pitch,
for cohesion attraction, is but as sand compared with it.
Another account
describes the muddy roads:
The rain lasted thirty hours without
cessation. To understand the effect, one must have lived in Virginia through a winter. The roads are nothing but dirt roads.
The mud is not simply on the surface, but penetrates the ground to a great
depth. It appears as though the water, after passing through a first bed of
clay, soaked into some kind of earth without any consistency. As soon as the
hardened crust on the surface is softened, everything is buried in a sticky
paste mixed with liquid mud, in which, with my own eyes, I have seen teams of
mules buried.
When the soldiers returned to their camps, many found
their huts flooded. The exhausted army coped as best they could in their soggy
environment. Two days later, on January 25, President Lincoln relieved Burnside
and named Joseph Hooker to the command. Never again would a major military
maneuver or campaign occur during the winter months in Virginia.
The storm that stopped the Union army
was a strong, winter coastal storm. The storm generated heavy rain along the
coast and piedmont while heavy snow fell far inland. The total rainfall in Washington was 3.20 inches and the lowest barometric pressure was
29.75 inches. Gale-force winds from the northeast accompanied the storm on
January 22 and 23. In Tennessee and Ohio, heavy snow fell and slowed military movements in those
states. East of the Blue Ridge
Mountains, temperatures remained fairly constant
in the upper 30’s and the precipitation fell as rain.
Light rain and fog continued for
three days following the storm. The rain turned to wet snow on January 28 and
continued through January 29. The total snowfall accumulation was
insignificant, but the liquid total for the two days was an additional 0.88
inches, concluding a very soggy period in American military history.