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1 Burnside When He Was Brilliant: Ambrose Burnside and Union Combined Operations in Pamlico Sound David E. Long F ew names from the Civil War era inspire more loathing and contempt than that of Ambrose Everett Burnside. It is a curious legacy for a man whose prewar contemporaries found him a likeable and collegial fellow officer. Of course, their perceptions of Burnside were not yet clouded by the knowledge that on one unfortunate day at Fredericksburg in December 1862, Burnside would order what was undoubtedly the most futile charge in the history of the U.S. Army, and who a day later sought to fall on his sword by renewing the attack and personally leading it in another lethal and equally hopeless advance. And yet in 1861 when the war began, Burnside was one of the most forward-looking and innovative officers in the Union army, especially in terms of his willingness to think about, and plan for, combined operations. It was Burnside, himself a Rhode Islander, who first proposed to George B. McClellan in October 1861 the wisdom of recruiting a few brigades from the maritime regions of New England to fight on the Southern coast and in the estuaries of Virginia and the Carolinas. In Burnside’s vision, this force would be composed of men who would not only fight, but also maneuver along the coast in their own boats, giving them a mobility unavailable to shore-bound soldiers. McClellan was Burnside’s close prewar friend, and though he casually dismissed Burnside’s explanations regarding the disaster at Bull Run, he liked the idea of the coastal division, and Burnside soon found himself promoted to brigadier general and charged with raising and training a division whose special mission it would be to perform maritime operations. At this point, Burnside’s vision did not include the navy, so it was not a truly combined operation, but it was nevertheless innovative in its concept and opened up the possibility of combined operations in the future.1 Burnside called on the New England governors for troops to make up his specialized division; he exercised the authority McClellan gave him to purchase or charter vessels for those troops; and he established a temporary camp for his division at Hempstead, Long Island. By late 1861, Ambrose Burnside was arguably the foremost Union officer involved with amphibious operations. At this point in the war, Burnside was on top of his game, and that game was to train David E. Long 11 troops for special operations work and to accumulate the necessary transportation conveyances to move a force approaching fifteen thousand troops and sailors through coastal waters to whatever their ultimate destination might be. Because Burnside envisioned his marine division as operating independently of the navy, inter-service rivalry was not yet a limiting problem, but he did encounter some intra-service rivalry. In both raising the troops and purchasing or leasing the ships and boats, Burnside had to compete with General Thomas W. Sherman, who was raising a force for an army–navy attack on Port Royal, South Carolina. Both expeditions planned to use Annapolis, Maryland, as the staging area, and Burnside could not move his force there until Sherman’s force departed on October 21. Burnside also had to purchase several score surf boats, which could be loaded quickly and could carry his soldiers to a hostile beach. Throughout this process, Burnside demonstrated his attention to detail, inspecting the small craft closely for seaworthiness and materials that would survive inclement weather. He was not about to invest in boats that would capsize in a heavy surf or come apart the first time it rained.2 In her pioneering study Combined Operations in the Civil War, Rowena Reed argues that McClellan had a clear vision of how Burnside’s amphibious division was to be employed as part of a comprehensive plan ‘‘to paralyze the South’s internal lines of communication.’’ She asserts that his goal was to ‘‘gain a large and secure base for operations against the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad.’’ If so, apparently Little Mac did not let Burnside in on these plans, for Burnside himself was unsure where his specialized division would be deployed. At one point he asked for a detailed report on affairs in Texas from a man familiar with that state; Burnside may have been sizing up the sparsely populated Gulf Coast as a tempting target. In the end, however, McClellan ordered Burnside’s division to...

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