December 13 · This Day in America
Below Marye's Heights, a sunken road runs behind a stone wall, and behind that wall the Confederate army stands four ranks deep. The Union plan is to cross four hundred yards of open ground and take it. They try, and try, and try again. Nearly three thousand men fall in the first hour. Not a single Union soldier reaches the wall. By dark, more than twelve thousand are dead, wounded, or missing, most of them in front of that one stone wall. It is one of the worst days the United States Army has ever had. Watching the slaughter from a hill, Robert E. Lee says quietly, "It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it." The men who survived it did not need to be told. They went forward anyway, and the country they were fighting over still exists because, on days like this one, they did.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1636
The General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony orders its scattered militia organized into three standing regiments — North, South, and East — so the colony can defend itself. Units that trace their lineage to that 1636 order still serve today. This is the birthday of the National Guard, the oldest component of the United States military: citizen-soldiers, older than the nation they would one day swear to defend.
Source: www.ausa.org
“It is well that war is so terrible — we should grow too fond of it.”Robert E. Lee, at Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862