Ambrose Burnside

Ambrose Burnside (1824-1881) was a Union general in the American Civil War (1861-1865). He served at the Battles of First Bull Run (Manassas), Antietam and New Bern before being named commanding officer of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862. Following the Union’s disastrous defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Burnside was transferred to the Western Theater, where he battled Confederate cavalry officer and raider John Hunt Morgan. Burnside later led his corps in the 1864 Overland Campaign before being relieved of command following the disastrous Battle of the Crater at Petersburg, Virginia. After the war, Burnside worked in the railroad industry and was elected to two terms as a U.S. senator from Rhode Island. Burnside’s distinctive facial hair, originally known as “burnsides,” inspired the term “sideburns.”

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The Union suffered nearly 3,800 casualties during the disastrous Battle of the Crater, and Ulysses S. Grant considered the event “the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war.”

Burnside, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. (1847), resigned his commission in 1853 and for the next five years manufactured firearms at Bristol, R.I. Soon after the Civil War broke out, Burnside took command of a Rhode Island militia regiment. He was later commissioned a brigadier general in the Union Army and fought in the North Carolina coast campaign. Promoted to major general (1862), he was transferred to the Virginia theatre of war. In command of General George McClellan's left wing at the Battle of Antietam, Md. (September), he was criticized for his ineffectiveness.

When McClellan was removed from the command of the Army of the Potomac (Nov. 7, 1862), Burnside (over his own protests) was chosen to replace him. After a crushing defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg (December), Burnside was replaced by General Joseph Hooker (Jan. 26, 1863). Transferred to Ohio, Burnside helped to crush General John Morgan's Ohio raid in July. He then marched into Tennessee, taking Knoxville and holding it against a siege by Confederate troops under General James Longstreet. Returning to the Eastern theatre in 1864, Burnside led his old corps under General Ulysses S. Grant in the Wilderness campaign. In Virginia the fiasco of the “Burnside mine” at Petersburg—a mine was exploded under part of the Confederate line, but the assaulting troops were repulsed with heavy losses because of mismanagement—brought about Burnside's resignation. After the war he served as governor of Rhode Island (1866–69) and as U.S. senator from 1875 until his death.

Copyright © 1994-2009 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. For more information visit Britannica.com.

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