Glory Road by Bruce Catton Read Free Book Online Page A

way across the river here. He just wanted to get across and then do his fighting somewhere farther to the south, and this had seemed like a good place to do the crossing. Yet now, when a crossing right here was looking more and more inadvisable, Burnside and his army waited stolidly on the riverbanks, and the charming little colonial town began, in spite of logic, to take on more and more military importance, as if something in its atmosphere had from the beginning been fated to draw the charge of lightning from the gathering storm clouds.
    The railroad from Aquia Creek to Richmond crossed the river at Fredericksburg—or at least it had done so in the old days, before war smashed the bridge—and it was much on Burnside's mind. He was suggesting now to Colonel Haupt that a supply of railroad iron had better be floated up the Rappahannock under navy convoy for use in relaying the track south once Lee had been driven away. Haupt was objecting to this, pointing out that they could not rebuild the line south until they had first rebuilt the bridge, and that once the bridge had been rebuilt they could bring the new rails in by train and save a laborious transshipment at the riverside. Still, Burnside was boss, and "it shall be done if you desire it." 11
    Haupt had found Burnside a good man to deal with. To a subordinate about this time he wrote that "General Burnside is one of the most reasonable and practical men I have ever met." Haupt was a man of many expedients, and he had invented a species of car ferry which was saving much time and labor in the supply of this army. At Alexandria, Haupt had assembled a number of Schuylkill River coal barges. These had been lined up in pairs, side by side, each pair bound firmly together with long timbers bolted transversely, railroad tracks laid lengthwise on top. Each pair of barges thus treated made one serviceable car float capable of carrying the sixteen loaded freight cars which made up a military supply train. The trains, then, as they came down from the north to Alexandria, were simply run on the floats there and were towed down to the railroad docks at Aquia Creek. It took about an hour to transfer a train to the float, six hours for towage, and another hour to get the train back on the tracks again. Without breaking carloadings, a freight train of supplies for the army could get from Washington to Falmouth between dawn and dusk. 12
    A capable operator, this Haupt. The Northland may have had trouble finding competent generals just then, but when it sent up an industrial technician it invariably sent up a good one. Just now Haupt rather doubted that there would be much new track to lay once the army got possession of Fredericksburg. The line south from Fredericksburg was still intact, and if a battle were fought and the Rebels were driven off, it seemed improbable that in their retreat they would have time to destroy much track. However, to play safe he agreed that he would order an extra ten miles of rails, just in case.
    Haupt's letter was significant on a couple of points. The casual reference to the purchase of ten miles of railroad rails as a form of insurance demonstrated that the United States was an industrialized nation waging industrial warfare, even though that fact was not yet, understood. A great deal of industrial muscle was available if ten miles of railroad iron were the small change of the latest military offensive. (In the South the progressive deterioration of the railroads was already a serious problem, and there were not ten miles of spare rails in all the Confederacy.) 13 More immediately, Haupt's unemotional calculation that Lee would probably be driven out of Fredericksburg too abruptly to leave time for railroad destruction was an indication that the high command was already accepting as inevitable what it had not even dreamed of a fortnight earlier: a bloody battle for mere possession of the opposite bank of the Rappahannock.
    The high command, of course,