Glory Road by Bruce Catton Read Free Book Online

who were barred from doing it now because Major Spaulding, his engineers, and the pontoons were still many miles away.
    The nightmare was to get worse. The next day was November 20, and Sumner still waited at Falmouth with his forty thousand men, while Joe Hooker moved in close behind him with forty thousand more. Across the river the leading elements of Longstreet's corps were beginning to dig themselves in on the range of low hills that runs north and south behind the town of Fredericksburg. The time left to the Army of the Potomac was beginning to be very short indeed. And on the Telegraph Road south from Alexandria the rain was continuous and the road was turning to clinging, bottomless mud. The wagons mired down—there were few heavier, unhandier things on wheels in those days than an army wagon carrying a pontoon boat—and in places the soldiers had to lift them along by sheer muscle. The steamer Hero docked her pontoons at Belle Plain, but there was no good way to get them to Falmouth; the men in charge of them did not know that anyone over at Falmouth wanted them, and anyway, no one seems to have notified Burnside that they had reached Belle Plain.
    The rain continued to fall. Major Spaulding wrote plaintively that "the roads are in such a shocking condition that I find I cannot make over five miles a day with my bridge train, and to do even this much I am obliged to haul many of my wagons for miles by hand and work my men half the night." 8 The engineers were struggling knee-deep in mud in a perpetual cold rain, and the worst part of the whole route—the notoriously boggy bottom lands along Chopawamsic Creek—lay ahead of them. Major Spaulding decided that something would have to be done.
    It must be remembered that, as far as the major knew, time was no particular object. General Woodbury wrote later that "no one ever informed me that the success of any important movement depended in the slightest degree upon a pontoon train to leave Washington by land." Both he and Major Spaulding supposed that this was simply a routine movement involving no especial reason for hurry. 9 Even so, a conscientious engineer officer was apt to balk at a routine movement which took all winter, which was what this trip down the Telegraph Road was beginning to look like. So Spaulding at last gave in and sent an officer back to Washington to get a steamboat and bring it down to the mouth of Occoquan Creek. At that point they would make their boats up into rafts, load the dismantled wagons and the rest of the materiel aboard, have the steamboat tow them down to Belle Plain, and send the horses along by land.
    They did it that way in the end, having a prodigious amount of trouble rafting their boats through the shallows at the mouth of the Occoquan. By November 24 they had everything afloat and were on their way, and late that night they reached the sprawling wharves at Belle Plain. The horses had not arrived yet—even without any wagons to pull, it was weary plugging down that muddy highway—but Spaulding was able to draw other horses from the base quartermaster, and he kept his men working most of the night. The following afternoon he was able to report at Burnside's headquarters with the long-lost pontoons close behind him. 10
    Apparently he got meager thanks for his effort. He had obeyed orders and he and his men had worked very hard to do it, but by now the situation had developed in such a way that everybody concerned would have been much better off if the engineers and their boats had remained stuck in the mud all winter. All of Longstreet's corps was in position across the river now, and Lee was there with it. Jackson had begun to pull his troops out of the Shenandoah Valley, where he had been hoping against hope that the misguided Yankees would try to attack him, and was en route to Fredericksburg.
    So Burnside's plan, which had been good enough a week ago, was no good at all any more. He had never had any idea of fighting his