Lincoln's Dreams

I went and got the car. Take Lafayette Boulevard to Sunken Road. You can’t miss it. The pharmacist had been right about that. There were signs everywhere: highway signs for US 3, small brown National Park Service signs every block or so on Lafayette Boulevard, a big brown sign at the entrance, a “Closed After Dark” sign next to the iron gates, Fredericksburg Historic Tour marker Number 24, a white “National Cemetery” sign. Sunken Road was marked with a regular green-and-white street sign. I pulled into Sunken Road and parked across from the Visitors’ Center. It was after nine, which meant the Visitors’ Center and, presumably, the library were open, but I didn’t go in. I went up the hill to see the graves.

It wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. The hill was terraced into grassy shelves just wide enough for a row of graves, and at the top the carved headstones sloped down and away in neat rows toward a flag anchored with pyramids of decorative solid shot, but the hill wasn’t even half as high as the hill at Arlington, hardly high enough to be called a ridge.

The plain below, where all the bodies had lain, was covered with grass and trees and criss-crossed with brick paths. Azaleas and ivy had been planted around the Visitors’ Center. It looked like somebody’s backyard.

Well, that was the kind of war the Civil War had been, wasn’t it? A backyard war, fought in cornfields and on front porches and across rutted country lanes, a homey little war that had killed two hundred and four thousand boys and men outright and four hundred thousand more with dysentery and amputated arms and bilious fever. But in spite of the neat rows of graves stretching away like points on a radius, it didn’t look like anybody had ever been killed here. And it didn’t look like Arlington.

At the top of the hill I took the brick path that led along its edge to a large sign that turned out to be a painting of Lee looking through binoculars out over the battlefield. Next to it was a brick pillar with a speaker in it. I pushed the button for the know-nothing tourist’s guided tour.

“At this spot on Marye’s Heights,” the deep, authoritative voice said, “General Robert E. Lee stood, commanding the battle of Fredericksburg.” It sounded like Richard on the answering machine. I let the voice ramble on while I looked at the graves on the edge.

They were marked with granite squares maybe six inches across. There were two numbers on each square. The one nearest me read 243, and then a line, and below that the number 4. I scribbled the numbers down on a piece of paper so I could ask what they meant.

“Good morning,” a brown-hatted ranger said. He came up beside me, carrying a plastic trash sack. “Did you need in to the Visitors’ Center? I was out checking the grounds, so I locked it up, but I can go open it. We’ve been having problems with kids geting in at night.” He pulled a beer can out of the back to show me and then dropped it back in. “The first tour’s at eleven. Are you looking for a particular grave?”

“No,” I said. “I just wanted to see the battlefield from up here.”

“It’s hard to imagine there was ever a battle here, isn’t it? The artillery were all along this ridge, and there were sharpshooters down behind that stone wall, where the road is. It’s not the original wall, by the way. General Robert E. Lee commanded the battle from up here,” he said with the enthusiasm of someone who’s never been in a war. “He watched the Union army coming up from the river there,” he pointed across the trees and roofs of Fredericksburg toward the Rappahannock, “and he said, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.’”

“What do the numbers on the unmarked graves mean?”

“Those are the graves’ registration numbers. After the war there were bodies buried all over this area from the battles of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania and the Wilderness. When the battlefield was made into a national cemetery, quartermaster teams were sent around to disinter the bodies and rebury them here. The numbers tell where the bodies were found.”

I took out the piece of paper I’d written the numbers on and unfolded it. “Can you tell me about this one?” I said. “Two hundred forty-three, and under that there’s a line and the number four.”

“Two hundred forty-three is the registration number. The four is the number of bodies.”

“The number of bodies?”

“That were found in the original grave. Or parts of bodies. It was hard to tell, sometimes, how many soldiers there really were. Some of the bodies had been buried for three years.”

Like Willie Lincoln, I thought irrelevantly. Maybe he had been buried in a field somewhere, and then a quartermaster’s team had dug him up and sent him home with his father’s body to Springfield.

“At Chancellorsville they found a grave full of arms and legs. They figured it must have been near a field hospital where they were doing amputations. And lots or times they’d buried horses along with the bodies.”

“How did they arrive at these numbers, then?”