The engineers had had a bridge across the Potomac at Berlin, Maryland, ever since early October, and when McClellan moved his army down from western Maryland to the Warrenton area this had been the principal crossing. There was another pontoon bridge six miles upstream at Harper's Ferry, with a subsidiary bridge there over the Shenandoah as well. At Berlin, in addition to the bridge, there were fifty-six additional boats in the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, plus a land train of twenty boats stacked up, ready to go, on ponderous wagons, together with other wagons full of supplementary equipment. The army had gone on south and the engineers sat idly and happily by their unused bridges and spare boats and waited for orders.
When orders finally came they were six days late: first in the series of blunders which the army was eventually to pay for at Fredericksburg. GHQ had decided on November 6 to move the pontoon train down to Washington so that it could quickly be brought down into Virginia in case of need, but some functionary at GHQ forgot that there was such a thing as a military telegraph line and simply put the orders in the mail. As a result, it was November 12 before the orders got to Berlin and were opened by Major Ira Spaulding, commander of the 50th New York Engineers. Six days behind schedule, then, Major Spaulding learned what he was supposed to do.
GHQ wanted to keep the bridges at Harper's Ferry, so Spaulding was to detail a company to take charge up there, sending with that company certain additional boats and planking for maintenance. The Berlin bridge was to be dismantled and its component parts were to be taken to Washington, along with all of the spare boats, wagons, and odds and ends of surplus equipment which were at Berlin. When Major Spaulding had got his regiment and all of this equipment to the Volunteer Engineer Brigade depot in Washington, his instructions said that he was to make up a pontoon train on wheels as rapidly as possible and stand by ready to move on a moment's notice.
The major went to work promptly. By evening he had his bridge disassembled and a train of thirty-six boats was in the canal moving down toward Washington. Next morning another train of forty boats and materiel got off and the wagons were made ready to begin the journey overland. The company which had been detailed to stay at
Harper's Ferry was made responsible for getting the last odds and ends rounded up and shipped; the rest of the regiment was on the way, either floating down the canal with the water-borne scows or slogging along overland with the great wagons. After making a final checkup Spaulding himself went to Washington by railroad, and late that night he reported to his boss, Brigadier General Daniel P. Woodbury. Woodbury looked at Spaulding's orders, and thus himself learned for the first time that a pontoon train was to be prepared for possible service with the army. The hour being late, he told Spaulding to come back next morning and they would see what new orders there might be.
Next morning was November 14: the same day President Lincoln was telling Burnside that his plan of action was approved but that if he moved he had better move fast. While Spaulding waited at Woodbury's headquarters, Woodbury went off to see Halleck, who by now knew that Burnside had permission to move via Fredericksburg and who had previously been warned that if this move were made Burnside would have to have the pontoons immediately. Just what Halleck had on his mind that morning nobody ever quite made out, but in any case, Woodbury finally returned to his own office and told Spaulding to put his boats and wagons in depot as fast as they reached town and to put his men into camp. This, of course, countermanded the original orders to make up a new train and stand by.
The first lot of boats came in that evening and more arrived next morning, November 15, as did a telegram from an engineer officer on Burnside's staff asking how about those pontoons. By night all of the men and materiel which had been at Berlin were in Washington. The mat6riel was stowed away in the engineer depot on the Anacostia River just above the navy yard, and the 50th Engineers were in camp nearby. That evening General Woodbury gave Spaulding a new set of orders: make up two pontoon trains of twenty-four boats each to go down to Belle Plain by water, the boats being made up in rafts, each boat to be loaded with its own allotment of planking, timbers, ropes, and other gear. As far as General Woodbury knew, the boats were wanted at Belle Plain, not elsewhere. Consequently, no wagons were sent with them, which meant that when they did reach Belle Plain there would be no way to carry them over to the Rappahannock.
Getting these boat-rafts together was a chore, but the engineers kept at it smartly and next morning the steamer
Hero
showed up, took the rafts in tow, and went off downstream. This done, Spaulding was ordered to make up a train of twenty more boats, with transportation for forty, to go down to the Fredericksburg area by land. It took much longer to get this ready. First the major had to go to the quartermaster depot and draw two hundred horses. Then he had to indent for two hundred sets of harness, which were delivered at the engineer depot in their original boxes and so had to be unboxed and fitted together before they could be put on the horses—many of which, it then developed, had never been in any kind of harness before and had strong objections to being harnessed now. While this was going on, the major had to get teamsters detailed from the casuals' camp at Alexandria, had to draw rations and forage, and had to keep his own men busy loading the cumbersome boats and their equipment on wagons. All in all, it was the afternoon of November 19 before the train finally went creaking down from the engineer depot, rumbled across Long Bridge, crept on through Alexandria, and at last camped for the night in a pelting rain half a dozen miles from its starting point.
Now Major Spaulding and his men had been working very hard, and they had even harder work ahead of them, but they were men who toiled in a gray nightmare and all that they did was vanity and a mockery. For while they were making up their train, and while the paddle-boat
Hero
with its ungainly rafts was chugging down the Potomac—to go hard aground, at last, and wait some hours for release—while all of this was happening, General Burnside and General Sumner were waiting by the Rappahannock fords with forty thousand good soldiers who could either cross the river free now or cross it at a dreadful price a little later on, and 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 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.