Ambrose Burnside
Channel: the aleatoric learning channel
Date: 2021-08-18

Early life Burnside was born in Liberty, Indiana, and was the fourth of nine children of Edghill and Pamela Brown Burnside, a family of Scottish origin. After leaving the Regular Army, Burnside devoted his time and energy to the manufacture of a firearm that bears his name: the Burnside carbine. Burnside reluctantly obeyed this order, the third such in his brief career, in part because the courier told him that, if he refused it, the command would go instead to Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, whom Burnside disliked. Burnside assumed charge of the Army of the Potomac in a change of command ceremony at New Baltimore, Virginia on November 9, 1862.President Abraham Lincoln pressured Burnside to take aggressive action and approved his plan on November 14 to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. Burnside's detractors labeled him the "Butcher of Fredericksburg". In January 1863, Burnside launched a second offensive against Lee, but it bogged down in winter rains before anything was accomplished, and has derisively been called the Mud March. The IX Corps fought in the Overland Campaign of May 1864 as an independent command, reporting initially to Grant; his corps was not assigned to the Army of the Potomac because Burnside outranked its commander Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, who had been a division commander under Burnside at Fredericksburg. Bruce Catton summarized Burnside: ... Burnside had repeatedly demonstrated that it had been a military tragedy to give him a rank higher than colonel. Burnside, Kentucky, in south-central Kentucky, is a small town south of Somerset named for the former site of Camp Burnside, near the former Cumberland River town of Point Isabelle.