Fredericksburg Confederate Cemetery

The Fredericksburg Confederate Cemetery stands on its own ground, separate from the Federal cemetery Congress established in 1865 on Marye's Heights. Geographic coordinates place them near each other, but the brief offers no verified account of when the Confederate burial ground was established, who dug the graves, or how many men lie beneath the grass. What the record confirms is this: the National Military Park created in 1927 now preserves both sites, and the park was transferred to the National Park Service in 1933.

The Federal cemetery holds 15,243 Civil War interments; only 2,473 carried names. Rounded headstones mark the identified. Numbered markers stand over mass graves holding the unknown—the first number identifies the plot, the second counts the men buried there. The cemetery was placed on Marye's Heights, Confederate high ground during the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. The name Marye's Heights, applied to the whole ridge by the national press in 1863, originally belonged only to the section near the Marye family home, Brompton. The Willis home, which stood on the other part of the ridge, burned before the war began.

Four battles churned through this ground between December 1862 and May 1864: Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, The Wilderness, and Spotsylvania. The destination context reports that Fredericksburg witnessed significant destruction during the Battle of Fredericksburg. The Federal cemetery allowed new burials until 1945; approximately 100 twentieth-century soldiers rest here, some alongside their spouses. Willis Cemetery, enclosed by a brick wall and predating the Civil War, served local needs.

Verses from Theodore O'Hara's "The Bivouac of the Dead" appear on plaques throughout the Federal cemetery. O'Hara wrote the poem for American casualties at Buena Vista in 1847, during the Mexican-American War. The text was not written for these wars, but it has become their inscription: "No rumor of the foe's advance / Now swells upon the wind."