Arizona!

Hey everyone, welcome to the 235th episode of our Civil War podcast. My name is

Rich. And I'm Tracy. Hello y'all. Thanks for tuning into the show. In his

excellent book on the Battle of Fredericksburg, Franco Riley writes,

When Canon Fire resonated upriver from Franklin's front, marking the

beginning of Pellum's stool, Union troops began to stir in the streets of

Fredericksburg. Fog clung to the city, obscuring the fields and heights to the

west. Federal pickets peered into the mist until they were relieved at 8 a.m. Some

of the soldiers resumed their excesses where they had left off the night

before. Thomas F. Galway of the 8th Ohio noted that on the morning of

December 13th, many of the men are already drunk again. Others rooted around

through violated houses scavenging for overlooked trinkets or food. Anyone

telling the story of the fighting at Fredericksburg on Saturday December 13th, 1862,

is helped tremendously by the fact the story can be so neatly divided between the

action on the southern and the northern portions of the battlefield. It's almost

as if two separate battles were fought that day only a short distance apart.

Of course, for the soldiers involved in the bloody combat that day, there was

nothing neat and tidy about it, but from a storyteller's point of view, it's

perfect. And so with this episode, we'll shift our focus from the southern

sector of the battlefield where the Federals of Franklin's left Grand Division

took on Stonewall Jackson's Confederates to the northern part of the field,

where the Yankees of Sumner's right Grand Division and Fredericksburg faced

...