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leisurely trip to Washington—this line with its bridges, culverts, and docks had been destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, and rebuilt anew. All of the timber had been cut down to make trestles and crossties, to corduroy the unpaved roads, to build wharves and piers and stockades and sheds and huts, to provide fuel for locomotives and steamboats and firewood for the stoves and camp-fires of the soldiers. Colonel Herman Haupt, superintendent of military railroads, complained that the locomotives of his construction trains now had to haul all their own fuel up from the landing, to which place it came down-river in barges. Along the road from the landing up to Fredericksburg there remained now not so much as a stick.
    Most of the houses had fared as the wood lots had fared. Some had been torn down for building material, some had been burned by accident, and some had simply been destroyed. A newspaper correspondent saw "tall chimneys standing, monuments of departed peace, in the midst of wastes that had been farms." Nothing else remained. The livestock was all gone, the fences had vanished, every bit of household furniture or farm equipment that could be carried away had disappeared. The desolation was complete. 1
    Much of this was just the inevitable wastage of war. The Army of the Potomac sprawled over a wide strip of land to the north and east of Fredericksburg, close to the Rappahannock River, and its main lines of supply ran back to the Potomac River landings, Aquia Creek and Belle Plain. Over the fifteen or twenty miles of atrocious roads which crossed this country, all of the food, clothing, ammunition, and other supplies for 130,000 men had to be carried—of grain and hay alone the quartermasters had to move 800 tons a day—and the endless wagon trains that lumbered back and forth over the cramped roadways, drivers shouting and swearing and fighting one another for the right of way, were a destroying force that rolled over the landscape and mashed it flat. If a culvert collapsed on a road near somebody's house, the house was torn down to provide timber for a new culvert, and that was that. Moving or standing still, the army could not help creating its own wasteland.
    But there was beginning to be more to it than that. The army had grown lawless, although it had not been lawless earlier. It had marched the length of the Virginia peninsula the preceding spring, it had spent many weeks in front of Richmond, it had maneuvered for a time near this same Fredericksburg, and there had been a long hike up to western Maryland. In all of it the foraging, pillaging, and wrecking which took place had been of minor consequence. But during the last few weeks the soldiers seemed to be turning into unabashed thieves. What had been done before had been furtive, a matter of individual soldiers sneaking away from their commands, grabbing what they wanted, and then running for cover. Now it was being done quite openly, with soldiers sweeping up chickens, hogs, cattle, sheep, and everything else that they could carry off. Some of the men, it is recorded, had learned how to steal beehives without being hurt. Houses were invaded and ransacked, fruit cellars and corncribs were despoiled, and the disorderly skein of stragglers that raveled out around the army knew very few restraints when desirable rebel property was encountered.
    Indeed, the job could not be blamed entirely on stragglers. If much foraging was done in defiance of officers, much or! it also was done with their hearty encouragement. Some men of the 6th Wisconsin complained to their colonel that they were short of rations. The colonel pointed to a clump of farmhouses on a hill and said: "I'm going to take a short nap. Don't let me see or hear of your foraging on this march. I think I see a smokehouse near that white residence." The 5th New Hampshire raided a well-stocked hen house and its Colonel Cross scolded the men sharply—because they let one hen escape. Later, after a