Terrible Swift Sword (16 page)

For the first time in its history, the Union Cavalry Corps was setting out to pick a fight with the Rebel cavalry.

MAY–JULY 1864

AT FIRST LIGHT ON MAY 9, the Cavalry Corps began riding down the Telegraph Road connecting Fredericksburg and Richmond. Assembled in its entirety as it was on this day, the Cavalry Corps was impressive: 9,800 troopers rode four abreast, followed by thirty-two guns, forage for the horses and mules, and wagons loaded with food and ammunition. The column stretched thirteen miles.

In freeing Philip Sheridan to ride around the Rebel army's right flank—to draw out and defeat Jeb Stuart, ravage Robert E. Lee's supply line, and threaten Richmond—Ulysses Grant was throwing the dice. The cavalry's departure would leave the Army of the Potomac practically bereft of mounted reconnaissance troops, a potentially disastrous situation with the two armies locked in a bloody battle at Spotsylvania Court House. Yet, if Sheridan's corps did whip Stuart's vaunted cavalry, destroy Lee's supply depots, and sow panic in Richmond, the expedition would have been well worth the risk. Moreover, it would give Grant a terrible new weapon to wield in his total war against the Confederacy.

The Cavalry Corps traveled at a regal, four-mile-an-hour pace that projected power and not deception. Colonel James Kidd of the 6th Michigan Cavalry, who
had participated in General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick's raid on Richmond two months earlier, was struck by the difference between Kilpatrick's galloping ride and the Cavalry Corps's measured gait. “Sheridan went out with the utmost deliberation, looking for trouble—seeking it—and desiring before every other thing to fight Stuart and fight him on his native heath.”

At this point in the war, Jeb Stuart's invincibility was all but accepted fact within the Army of the Potomac. But Sheridan was confident that his powerful Cavalry Corps would reveal Stuart's vulnerabilities. “We will give him a fair, square fight; we are strong, and I know we can beat him, and in view of my recent representations to General Meade I shall expect nothing but success,” he told his three division commanders, David Gregg, James Wilson, and Wesley Merritt, as he laid out his plan.

Its boldness surprised them. Previous cavalry raids had been little more than “a hurried ride through the enemy's country,” Sheridan observed, “without purpose of fighting more than enough to escape in case of molestation, and here and there to destroy a bridge.” This raid would be radically different—no less than “a cavalry duel behind Lee's lines, in his own country.”
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It was a mild day, and the weather was calm. The long column stirred up clouds of dust that soon coated men and horses with a gray patina. Kidd observed that the march's leisurely pace was not taxing and had a calming effect that buoyed everyone's confidence.
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Leaving the Telegraph Road at the Ta River to follow a road that angled to the southwest, the Union cavalrymen neared Chilesbur and the North Anna River. A Rebel cavalry brigade attacked the rear of the column. The Cavalry Corps's stately raid had at last aroused the interest of the Rebel cavalry—as Sheridan had expected. Sheridan dispatched Brigadier General Henry Davies's brigade to fight a rearguard action, while the rest of the corps proceeded toward Richmond.

Jeb Stuart had sent the brigade to slow the column's progress so that he could interpose the rest of his cavalry between Sheridan and the Confederate capital. Sheridan had every intention of letting Stuart do just that; the more enemy cavalrymen that attempted to block his path, the more there would be to destroy.

STURDILY BUILT AND ABOVE average height, James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart was given the tongue-in-cheek nickname of “Beauty” by his West Point classmates because of his high forehead and blunt features. Before the war, he chased Plains Indians with the 1st US Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and once was shot by
a Cheyenne warrior in the chest; his sternum deflected the pistol ball, and he recovered.

At Fort Leavenworth, he met Flora Cooke, the riding, shooting, guitar-playing daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Phillip St. George Cooke, and they married in 1855. Four years later, at Harper's Ferry, Stuart signaled his former West Point instructor, Colonel Robert E. Lee, to launch the attack on John Brown's insurgents when they refused to surrender. Stuart kept Brown's Bowie knife as a souvenir.
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When the war began, Stuart, a loyal Virginian descended from generations of Virginians, resigned his US Army commission and joined the Confederacy. Lee assigned him to General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson's division with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he led a cavalry charge at First Manassas. In September 1861, Stuart was promoted to brigadier general. Soon after that, he was commanding the Army of Northern Virginia's cavalry.

Full-bearded and ruddy-faced, Stuart was robust, energetic, and ebullient to the point of refusing to acknowledge defeats or personal shortcomings. He was famously vain, dressing like a knight-errant from medieval times—tall cavalry boots, golden spurs, gauntlet gloves, gray coat buttoned to the chin, French saber, red-lined cape, yellow sash, and a feather in his hat. He surrounded himself with musicians and loved to sing.
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Stuart burst upon the consciousness of ordinary Southerners in 1862 when, during Major General George McClellan's Peninsula Campaign, he led a Rebel brigade in a ride completely around McClellan's army—figuratively counting coup on the Yankee invaders. As daring raid followed daring raid, Stuart's reputation grew to nearly mythic proportions, and even his enemies grudgingly acknowledged his aura of seeming invincibility.

But there were failures, too, notably at Gettysburg. While Lee's army fought arguably the war's pivotal battle, Stuart was off raiding. His absence had left Lee virtually blind, and his single contribution to the battle, on its third day, was his failed cavalry attack during Major General George Pickett's disastrous charge up Cemetery Ridge.

While the Union cavalry stumbled, failed, learned, improved, and eventually flourished during 1863 and 1864, Stuart continued to operate much as he always had.

SHERIDAN'S TROOPERS REACHED THE North Anna River just before dusk on May 9. In the sky to the west, they saw a large smoke plume. It was coming from
Beaver Dam Station on the Virginia Central Railroad, which connected the mountains and northern Virginia. Lee had established an advance supply depot at the station in case he was forced to fall back to the North Anna. When news reached them that Yankee cavalry were nearby, the Rebel guards had set fire to the depot's enormous stockpile: 1 million rations of meat and more than 500,000 bread rations.

Brigadier General George Custer's Wolverine Brigade rode toward the smoke. Custer had risen fast and traveled far since graduating last in West Point's Class of 1861, having barely avoided expulsion for demerits. Custer's daredevil feats during the Peninsula Campaign won him a place on George McClellan's staff and, with McClellan's removal, he had moved to Alfred Pleasonton's staff.

After distinguishing himself at Brandy Station and Aldie, twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Custer was promoted directly to brigadier general. On the third day of fighting at Gettysburg, Custer's cavalry brigade had driven Jeb Stuart from the field. With his reddish-blond ringlets, handlebar moustache, bright red necktie, black velvet jacket, gold braid and stars, and broad-brimmed hat, Custer was in many ways a mirror image of Stuart.

On the way to Beaver Dam Station, Custer's brigade drove off enemy guards escorting four hundred Union prisoners and liberated the captives, who were on their way to prisons in Richmond from the fighting in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania Court House.

Arriving at the station, the troopers seized two locomotives and three trains with one hundred cars laden with supplies for Lee's army. After the Yankee cavalrymen helped themselves to all the bacon, flour, meal, sugar, molasses, liquor, and medical supplies they could carry, they burned the rest—several million dollars' worth, Custer reported—as well as the station.

The cavalrymen fired artillery shells through the locomotives' boilers, while lightning sizzled, thunder boomed, and rain poured down. The orgy of destruction surpassed that of any Union cavalry raid in three years of war. The next morning, Custer's men added to it by tearing up ten miles of railroad track and telegraph lines, disrupting communications between Richmond and Lee's army.
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Jeb Stuart had left half of his 9,000-man corps behind at Spotsylvania Court House; he was unsure whether Sheridan meant to proceed from Beaver Dam Station to Richmond or to turn back and hit Lee's rear at Spotsylvania and Stuart was hedging his bets. Reaching the smoking ruins of Beaver Dam Station, he redoubled his efforts to thrust his cavalrymen between Sheridan and Richmond. Breaking off his harassment of Sheridan's rearguard, Stuart and his three brigades began tracing a long eastward loop around Sheridan, whose corps rode unmolested during the day of May 10. That night, while Sheridan's cavalrymen camped peacefully on the
south bank of the South Anna River at Ground Squirrel Bridge, Stuart's men rode on, straining to get ahead of the Yankee troopers.
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MAY 11, 1864–YELLOW TAVERN—Stuart's cavaliers rode all night. Learning that Union cavalrymen had burned a locomotive and its train and torn up railroad tracks at Ashland, he was still unsure of Sheridan's intentions. Once more, as he had on the first day of the pursuit, Stuart divided his force, sending a detachment to hang on the Cavalry Corps's rear.

With his 3,000 remaining men, Stuart arrived ahead of Sheridan at a derelict hostelry known as Yellow Tavern. He sent an aide to Richmond with a message for Lieutenant General Braxton Bragg, who now commanded the city's defenses, informing him of his disposition. “My men and horses are tired, hungry, and jaded, but
all right
,” he wrote.
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Armed with single-shot muzzleloaders, Stuart and his troopers stood between Sheridan's 10,000 men and the Rebel capital, just six miles down the Brook Turnpike. It had taken hard riding to interject his force between the Yankees and the Confederacy's greatest prize, but the South's “Beau Sabreur” was used to hard riding—and accustomed to overcoming long odds such as those he now faced.
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The day before, near Beaver Dam Station, Stuart had visited his wife, Flora, who, with their children, was staying at the home of Edmund Fontaine. They spoke quietly in the yard, Stuart never dismounting, and then they kissed and said their good-byes. Stuart was uncharacteristically silent for a time as he rode on. Then, he turned to one of his staff officers, Major Reid Venable, and told him that he had never expected to survive the war.
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