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Behind the Confederate lines, Francis Dawson reported to General James “Old Pete” Longstreet’s headquarters on December 6, and realized after his brief and unceremonious meeting with the general that his history as an English volunteer held no interest for him. Longstreet maintained a professional relationship with his staff members, which, for a junior officer such as Dawson, meant almost no personal contact at all. Adding insult to his lowly status was the discovery that he was expected to do the work of three men: “Colonel Manning had no taste for anything but marching and fighting, and Lieutenant Duxberry was too fond of pleasure and show to be of much practical use,” wrote Dawson. “The whole responsibility in the Ordnance Department of Longstreet’s Corps devolved upon me.”18

Lee was incredulous that Burnside was still seriously contemplating Fredericksburg as a crossing place. He ordered Longstreet’s First Corps into position along a seven-mile range of wooded hills that overlooked Fredericksburg and the Rappahannock River. The batteries were clustered thickly, ready to fire on the plain below. When Longstreet asked his artillery commander whether any more guns were needed, the officer replied, “A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.”19 The Confederate army was so well entrenched above the town that a Federal advance seemed completely implausible. Yet “the Yankees were in plain view on the other side” of the area and “evidently very active,” wrote Heros von Borcke, Jeb Stuart’s Prussian volunteer aide, after his reconnaissance. Union general Edwin Sumner sent orders to the mayor to evacuate all civilians. The majority of the inhabitants of the eighteenth-century town were women and children. “I never saw a more pitiful procession than they made trudging through the deep snow,” wrote a Southern artilleryman.

There were women carrying a baby in one arm, and its bottle, its clothes, and its covering in the other.… Most of them had to cross a creek swollen with winter rains, and deadly cold with winter ice and snow. We took the battery horses down and ferried them over, taking one child in front and two behind, and sometimes a woman or a girl on either side with her feet in the stirrups, holding on by our shoulders. Where they were going we could not tell, and I doubt if they could.20

Sheet ice coated the roads, making the horses fearful and skittish. Reconnaissance “was anything but pleasant,” wrote von Borcke.21 But the atmosphere at General Stuart’s camp remained almost festive. The Maryland journalist William W. Glenn had sent across two more English visitors to the Confederacy. Captains Lewis Phillips and Edward Wynne had succumbed to the temptation that was affecting so many British officers in Canada, to slip through Northern lines for a peek at the Confederate army.22 Wynne fell ill when they reached Richmond, leaving Phillips to continue by himself. Phillips found the Confederate officers touchingly keen to demonstrate to him the quality of their men. Borcke recalled the Englishman watching a shabbily dressed South Carolina brigade parade before him in a marching style that would have earned swift punishment if performed on British soil, and pronouncing with perfect sincerity that he was impressed.23

The picket lines of the two armies had come so close to each other that rebel and Federal soldiers could jokingly trade insults across the river. Sam Hill’s regiment, the 6th Louisiana, enjoyed a brief bartering system with unknown Union pickets, exchanging letters and tobacco for coffee and old editions of Harper’s Magazine. One letter actually reached its destination in New Orleans.24

On the night of December 10, word spread through the Confederate camp that ammunition was being doled out among the Yankees, indicating that a battle was imminent.25 The officers at Stuart’s headquarters nonetheless decided that there was time to take Captain Phillips to a country ball that was being held nearby. The ten-mile wagon ride to the plantation