Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 3.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[790] Rodes withdraws to a better position a few miles to the rear. He forms his right toward the Stevensburg road, and his left on the river, near Wheatley's Ford, and awaits with confidence the attack of the Unionists, for he knows that Johnson's division is marching to join him. In fact, as soon as he is aware of the arrival of the Federals in force before Kelly's Ford, Ewell has ordered this division to the menaced point, and has hastily gone to place himself near his lieutenant. Shortly after sunset the two forces are strongly established on a line which entirely closes the angle between the Rappahannock and Mountain Run. Meade has not taken advantage of the last hours of the day to pursue his success. The bridge on which the whole left column is to pass has been built rather late, the soldiers are fatigued by the long march; in short, the Union general is waiting to hear from his right.

The news he is expecting will render useless Ewell's dispositions to resist him. Sedgwick, as we have said, has arrived since noon, with the Fifth and Sixth corps, at a short distance from Rappahannock Bridge. But he is preparing for the fight with his usual circumspection, this time justified by the nature of the ground and the position of the enemy. The hill occupied by the latter is divided into two parts by a deep depression, through which the railroad, after having followed a direction oblique to that of the stream, passes to reach the bridge destroyed a few weeks before. Two small works rise on both sides of the road on the opposite hills and at two hundred and fifty yards from each other. That on the right, on the south-east, is an old Federal redoubt without its moat, and placed on the declivity in such a manner that the assailants have a sight of the interior. The other has already sustained two transformations: it is a lunette built by the Southerners and afterward reshaped by their adversaries, who had raised a parapet with a moat through its gorge; the Confederates have transformed it a second time, while availing themselves of the two flanks to give it the form of a horn-work: it is badly disposed for receiving artillery. An intrenchment starting from the bank of the river joins the redoubt, cuts the railroad to touch on the work, and prolongs itself to the crest