eleven miles by the plank road.

Two things only were unsatisfactory:--

1. The absence of information.

2. The fact that the whole movement had been observed by the
Confederate cavalry.

Pleasonton's brigade of horse had proved too weak for the duty
assigned to it. It had been able to protect the front, but it was too
small to cover the flanks; and at the flanks Stuart had persistently
struck. Hooker appears to have believed that Stoneman's advance
against the Central Railroad would draw off the whole of the
Confederate horse. Stuart, however, was not to be beguiled from his
proper functions. Never were his squadrons more skilfully handled
than in this campaign. With fine tactical insight, as soon as the
great movement on Chancellorsville became pronounced, he had attacked
the right flank of the Federal columns with Fitzhugh Lee's brigade,
leaving only the two regiments under W.H.F. Lee to watch Stoneman's
10,000 sabres. Then, having obtained the information he required, he
moved across the Federal front, and routing one of Pleasonton's
regiments in a night affair near Spotsylvania Court House, he had
regained touch with his own army. The results of his manoeuvres were
of the utmost importance. Lee was fully informed as to his
adversary's strength; the Confederate cavalry was in superior
strength at the critical point, that is, along the front of the two
armies; and Hooker had no knowledge whatever of what was going on in
the space between Sedgwick and himself. He was only aware, on the
night of April 30, that the Confederate position before
Fredericksburg was still strongly occupied.

The want, however, of accurate information gave him no uneasiness.
The most careful arrangements had been made to note and report every
movement of the enemy the next day.

No less than three captive balloons, in charge of skilled observers,
looked down upon the Confederate earthworks.* (* Balloons, which had
been first used in the Peninsular campaign, were not much dreaded by
the Confederates. "The experience of twenty months' warfare has
taught them how little formidable such engines of war are." Special
Correspondent of the Times at Fredericksburg, January 1, 1863.)
Signal stations and observatories had been established on each
commanding height; a line of field telegraph had been laid from
Falmouth to United States Ford, and the chief of the staff, General
Butterfield, remained at the former village in communication with
Gen