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reached the
    Rappahannock River fords, and Yankee patrols went prowling down to the bank to exchange gibes with the Confederate sentries across the river. The advance was styled the Right Grand Division and constituted a third of the army, the II Corps under Darius N. Couch and the IX Corps under Orlando Willcox. Commander of the whole was Major General Edwin V. Sumner—Bull Sumner of the white whiskers and the tremendous parade-ground voice, the ramrod-backed old regular who had been commissioned a second lieutenant away back in 1819 and who, in more than forty years of service, had become the very embodiment of the code by which the old-time professional soldier lived. The code wa s simple. One automatically gave complete loyalty to all persons in superior authority, one obeyed all lawful orders without question, and one never, under any circumstances, was afraid of anything. Made incarnate in the person of an aging major general, the code had its limitations. It did not necessarily produce a man fitted to command a third of an invading army. It did, however, produce a man you could count on, and if the old man's virtues were limited, they were solid. Worse men have worn a major general's stars.
    Sumner got his two corps up to the river, and the rest of the army went into bivouac not far behind him, within easy marching distance of the Fredericksburg crossing where the pontoon bridges were to be made. So far the movement had been remarkably deft and speedy— a point that is often overlooked when the dreary mistakes of the Fredericksburg campaign are recounted. Across the river Lee had hardly more than a corporal's guard—a couple of batteries of field artillery, a skimpy regiment of cavalry, and a few hundred infantrymen. Far upstream Jeb Stuart was scouting to learn whether the Yankees had in fact left Warrenton. A division from James Longstreet's corps, plus the army artillery reserve, was under orders to march from Culpeper to Fredericksburg, but it would not show up for several days. Jackson and his half of the army had not yet left the Shenandoah Valley. The way was open. Sumner's men could wade the river, the rest of the army could cross the river on the pontoon bridges at Fredericksburg, ample supplies could be carried across in the wagons, and Lee's army would find itself neatly outflanked.
    Thus it was not at all a bad program which Burnside had mapped out. Its execution, however, depended on the immediate appearance, on the Yankee side of the river opposite Fredericksburg, of several dozens of the clumsy wooden scows with which the army built its pontoon bridges. And these scows were not there, nor did it appear that they were anywhere else where a harassed army commander could quickly get hold of them. In the entire military hierarchy, from general-in-chief down to humblest private, nobody seemed to know exactly where these scows were, except for a weary regiment of volunteer engineer troops, and these lads—wrestling personally with the ungainly things scores of miles from the spot where Burnside's army was waiting—had no idea that anybody in particular wanted them or that there was any especial hurry about anything.
    No pontoons, no bridges; no bridges, no crossing of the river. The equation, to Burnside, seemed complete. A gambler might have felt otherwise, might have sent Sumner and his advance guard across at once, trusting that the old man could hold his position and feed his men until the missing pontoons did show up. But it would have taken a gambler to order it. It was beginning to rain. A late November rain is apt to be a long one, and the Rappahannock is quite capable of rising six feet in twenty-four hours when the rain comes down. If Sumner's forty thousand crossed and the Rappahannock did rise, the fords would cease to be fords, Sumner could neither be supplied, reinforced, nor withdrawn, and Lee might well find himself in position to destroy a solid third of the Union Army. It seemed to