By the end of December the Thirteenth Corps, except Sheldon's brigade which was at Plaquemine, had been gradually transferred to the Texas coast. Thus Franklin was left to hold the line of the Teche with little more than 5,000 men of the Nineteenth Corps and about 3,500 of Lee's cavalry. This, with the winter nights and the winter roads, was too small a force to hold a position so advanced and so exposed as New Iberia, even if there had been any longer an object in doing so. Accordingly, on the evening of the 5th of January, marching orders were issued for the following morning; but in the night a drizzling rain came on and, freezing as it fell, coated the deep, dense mud with a glaze of ice. The march was therefore put off a day, and on the morning of the 7th, through a frozen bog, a biting norther blowing, and the weather unusually cold for this region, the Nineteenth Corps floundered back to Franklin. The best of the roads were bad enough, but those across the bends, used in ordinary seasons as cut-offs, were now impassable sloughs, so the troops had to march nearly the full length of the bayou. Here a novel form of straggling was introduced through the ever industrious ingenuity of the lazy, many of whom contrived to leave the ranks, and, crossing the levee, seized canoes or made rafts, and tranquilly floated down the bayou ahead of their plodding comrades. On the morning of the 9th of January the corps went into winter quarters at Franklin. Tents were not issued until a month later, but meanwhile the men built shelters and huts for themselves of such materials as they could find on the plantations or in the wooded swamps; and with branches of live oak and boughs of laurel and the long gray Spanish moss, they constructed for their camps a lavish ornamentation of arbors and arches, mimic forts and sham monitors.