There are lots of places to look for casualties and horrors inflicted on the civilian side of things, mainly toward southern civilians. Robert K. Krick has a good article from MILITARY HISTORY QUARTERLY (MHQ) Under War's Savage Heel about Fredericksburg. Here are some excerpts...
.
In 1861, Fredericksburg had been a town of just more than five thousand souls, one-third of them black and one-third of the black population free. The community treasured its history and tradition of gentility. A visitor wrote in 1860 of Fredericksburg's prosperity "Houses to rent can scarce be had… People go there to...educate their families, and to enjoy intellectual, moral, and religious social intercourse...beautiful and healthful...polished and attractive... thoroughly Virginian."
Federal authorities across the Rappahannock warned in late November ('62) that they intended to shell the city because Southern forces were sheltered in its buildings and occupying its streets. Civilians streamed out of town to avoid the impending destruction, clutching what few pitiful possessions they could carry. A Confederate officer recalled the "sad spectacle" "The weather was inclement, the ground was frozen, women and children, the aged, infirm, sick and destitute, without food and thinly clad, without homes or shelter, formed in the mournful procession that went out from Fredericksburg; to seek food they knew not where, to find shelter nowhere save under heaven's canopy."
After the frightened evacuation, however, no shelling ensued. ... Civilians returned warily to their homes in town, some of them just in time to be caught when, on December 11, 1862, Northern soldiers began to lay bridges across the river. A storm of enemy shells soon followed.
Burnside ordered his artillery, more than 150 guns, to clear out the whole town. That too proved impossible. The bombardment harmed very few Confederates, but it did the old city a great deal of damage. In not much more than an hour, perhaps eight thousand shells landed in Fredericksburg. The fifty tons of iron and explosives smashed walls and chimneys and set houses on fire. A Mississippian who had been shooting Yankees on the bridges all morning claimed "that there was not a square yard in the city which was not struck by a missile of some kind." A British citizen ran up the Union Jack over his home, but Federal gunners mistook it for some kind of Confederate device and methodically riddled the house. Fortunately for the townspeople, Civil War ordnance did not wreak the kind of havoc that high explosives of later eras could produce. Most civilians, who cowered in their basements as iron and black powder crashed overhead survived the ordeal. Northern shells tore the leg off an "old bedridden man," and killed only two civilians of record, one Jacob Grotz and a black woman named Mary Price.
Wanton Destruction:
The modern tendency to reject Southern testimony, unless it fits current prescriptions, as outright lies would disregard horrified accounts by Confederate witnesses. The following medley of contemporary descriptions comes exclusively from Northern pens.
A Union surgeon "The scenes of wanton destruction and ruin...beggars all description The floor was a foot deep in broken bottles."
A New York officer "Boys came into our place loaded with silver pitchers, silver spoons, silver lamps Splendid alabaster vases and pieces of statuary were thrown at...700 dollar mirrors Finest cut glass ware goblets were hurled at nice plate glass windows Rosewood pianos piled in the streets & burned or soldiers would get on top of them & kick the keyboard & internal machinery all to pieces. Libraries...were overhauled & thrown on the floor & in the streets. I can't begin to describe the scenes of destruction."
Another New York officer "Now begins the sacking Soldiers were wearing wreaths of false flowers...and silk dresses from the private houses."
An Illinois cavalryman "I saw the greatest destruction of property that was ever known I got a number of valuable books to send home."
An ardent abolitionist with local roots interviewed black townspeople about how the ordeal affected them. Washington Wright, a freedman and sexton of St. George's Church, accosted a soldier carrying off a silver chalice from the sanctuary and shamed him into abandoning it. The rest of the church plate disappeared into looters' haversacks, and soldiers mutilated the organ and destroyed the Bibles and prayer books. Wright had less success with his personal property than with the Episcopal chalice. "The soldiers when they came in got a hearse and loaded it with pillage," he reported. "They cut down our curtains and cut up our carpets and carried off all of our bacon. A man couldn't walk the streets with a watch on."
A girl described the ruins of her home after Yankees had swept through, pouring jam on everything they could not break "The house looked as if a lot of crazy people had been turned loose there."
A soldier from Richmond told his mother that Fredericksburg would "make you weep to see it."
A Confederate staff officer quoted General Lee as saying quietly "These people like to make war on the defenseless. It just suits them."
Many Northerners, ashamed of the troops' wanton behavior, expressed their disgust in letters home. Men admitted to imagining the horror and outrage that such behavior would engender if it were turned toward their own homes and families. A general from New York anguished over the "deplorable state of things" wrought by "the brutal Soldiery."
A lieutenant in the Thirteenth New York wrote, "Fredericksburg would make your heart ache."
Krick writes "People sure that they are right, with power over those they know are wrong, generally collaborate in brutal horrors."
It's a very interesting article.
9thvacav
 | 
CivilWarTalk.com -
A free and friendly Civil War community. 
Linear Mode
