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beginning to warm up to him. For the most part they were taking their cue from the IX Corps, which had invaded the Carolina islands with him earlier that year and which felt that "Old Burny" was as good as the best. The DC Corps recalled that under Burnside in Carolina the rations had always been good. The general had forever been poking his nose into the mess shacks, sampling the food, checking on the supplies issued by the commissary. A veteran in the 48th Pennsylvania, applauding him for that remembered care, wrote sententiously that "the nearest way to a soldier's heart lays right through his haversack," and a V Corps private agreed that the men were always willing to cheer when they saw Burnside's "manly countenance, bald head, and unmistakable whiskers." 5
    With his new duties as army commander, Burnside was spending no time looking into company kitchens or harassing the commissaries. This was a little oversight for which he was to pay a high price a bit later, and in its small way it illustrated his whole problem. He needed to be a good strategist and an able tactician, to be sure-after all, he had to lead his troops into action against Robert E. Lee —and yet in some ways it was almost more important for the commander of the Army of the Potomac at that time to be a good housekeeper. This army lived and moved under the weight of a peculiar curse. So many incompetents wore shoulder straps, and there was so much lost motion between orders and their execution, that unless the commanding general did spend part of his time looking into the matter of his soldiers' rations, those rations were going to deteriorate very swiftly. 6
    As with rations, so with weightier things. As a sample, there was the relationship between pontoon boats and high strategy.
    The high strategy by which Burnside was moving in mid-November of 1862 was not too bad. Burnside had inherited the army in the general vicinity of Warrenton, with an advance in progress down the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railway. To continue that advance as McClellan had begun it struck Burnside as unwise. The farther the army got, the more it would expose its communications. To General John Pope, some three months earlier, Lee and Stonewall Jackson had demonstrated the evil things that could befall Yankee supply lines that were rashly exposed in that part of the country, and the lesson had not been forgotten.
    So Burnside had decided to swing the whole army ove r to tide water. There would be wide rivers to cross that way, but the lines of supply would be short and pestilent Rebel raiders could not easily get at them. He would have his advance guard wade the Rappahannock at the fords a little way upstream from Fredericksburg to drive off the Confederate outposts. Then he would lay pontoon bridges at Fredericksburg and cross the rest of the army and the supply trains before Lee's army could reach the vicinity to contest the crossing. He must have, he calculated, twelve days' rations in the wagons, together with a big drove of beef cattle, and Colonel Haupt was assembling workers and material to rebuild the railroad bridge once the town had been secured. All of this done, the army would move southward, and somewhere below the Rappahannock it would meet and fight the Army of Northern Virginia.
    On November 12, a few days after he had taken command, Burnside submitted this plan to higher authority. General Halleck was not in favor of it. He was rarely in favor of any plan devised by a subordinate, and he knew perfectly how to qualify any approval he did express so that if disaster came his own record would contain no stain. President Lincoln, who was beginning to catch onto this trait of the general-in-chief, examined Burnside's proposal for himself and on November 14 he telegraphed his approval, remarking that the plan would succeed if Burnside moved fast—otherwise not. On the next day Burnside put the army in motion.
    By the morning of November 17 Burnside's advance