Diary of Corporal John W. Dennett, December 15, 1862

On picket at Fredericksburg all day. Started at half-past six P.M., marched to the upper part of the city, and went into battery, and threw up earthworks for our guns. Finished two of them, and got one of the guns into them, when orders came to evacuate the city with as little noise as possible.

We re-crossed the river on the morning of the 16th, and were about the last to leave the city. Nearly every house was broken open, and the contents destroyed.

SOURCE: John Lord Parker, Henry Wilson's Regiment: History of the Twenty-second Massachusetts Infantry, the Second Company Sharpshooters and the Third Light Battery, in the War of the Rebellion, p. 270