Battle of Fredericksburg

Battle context

The Battle of Fredericksburg resulted in Union casualties more than twice those of the Confederates — 12,653 against 5,377 — making it one of the most lopsided engagements of the American Civil War. Burnside's Army of the Potomac, numbering over 122,000, failed to dislodge Lee's 78,513-strong Army of Northern Virginia from its entrenched positions on the heights above the city. The scale of the Union loss was striking enough that a visitor to the battlefield described it to President Abraham Lincoln as a 'butchery,' a characterization that captured the battle's place in the war's memory as a costly and unproductive offensive effort in the Eastern Theater.