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Authors: Joseph Wheelan

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Sheridan described the battle as being “of the severest character.” When it ended indecisively more than five hours later, the two hundred men of the 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry had fired 18,000 rounds from their Spencer rifles.
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BOTH COMBATANTS WITHDREW, AND Sheridan pushed his pickets toward the crossroads town of Cold Harbor—its name a British appellation for an inn without hot food. Kidd wrote that a glance at a map explained the town's importance: there were “roads radiating from it in all directions.”
Lee also recognized Cold Harbor's significance and sent his nephew's cavalry division to hold the crossroads until Major General Robert Hoke's infantry division could get there. On May 30, Fitzhugh Lee's men built fence-rail breastworks just outside the town and waited for the Yankees.
23
Alfred Torbert, recently returned to duty after an illness, reached Cold Harbor on May 31 with his 1st Division. It attacked Fitzhugh Lee's left while simultaneously assaulting his front, with Custer leading a saber charge. The Confederates repulsed the attacks but abandoned their breastworks upon receiving reports of approaching Union infantry—which were actually miles away. Sheridan rode into the town with Torbert's division, and a brigade of Gregg's division joined him later.
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Any pride that Sheridan might have taken in capturing the town vanished when he learned that Confederate infantry brigades were coming his way. He decided that he should withdraw. “My isolated position . . . . made me a little uneasy,” he wrote. To Meade and Grant, he wrote, “With the heavy odds against me here, I do not think it prudent to hold on.”
25
Grant and Meade, however, believed that Cold Harbor was too important strategically to be abandoned. Ordered to hold the town, Sheridan's 5,500 troopers occupied the breastworks from which, hours earlier, they had driven Fitzhugh Lee's men.
At daylight on June 1, units from two Rebel infantry divisions commanded by Major General Joseph Kershaw struck Sheridan's troopers. Sheridan's cavalrymen beat back two Confederate assaults, waiting both times until the attacking Rebels were within the range of their Spencer repeaters before opening up. They held on until late morning, when Major General Horatio Wright's VI Corps reached Cold Harbor. “Never were reinforcements more cordially welcomed,” wrote Kidd, adding that it was the beginning of the enduring bond between the Cavalry Corps and VI Corps.
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AFTER LOSING 7,000 MEN in a calamitous frontal assault at Cold Harbor on June 3, then 3,000 more over the ensuing two days, Grant stopped trying to break Lee's lines northeast of Richmond. On June 7, the Army of the Potomac prepared to
swing eastward again, prefatory to crossing the James River and either menacing Richmond or attacking Petersburg—or both.
Grant sent the Cavalry Corps on a destroying mission west of Richmond in the hope of drawing off the Army of Northern Virginia's cavalry so that Grant's army might cross the James River unopposed. Sheridan would lead two divisions—roughly 5,500 cavalrymen and four horse artillery batteries—to Charlottesville, leaving Brigadier General James Wilson's 3rd Division with Grant.
Sheridan was ordered to destroy the Rivanna River railroad bridge at Charlottesville and to rendezvous there with Brigadier General David Hunter's 20,000 troops from the Department of West Virginia. Together, Sheridan and Hunter were to then wreck the James River canal and tear up the Virginia Central Railroad all the way to Staunton. This would effectively sever Lee's supply line to the Shenandoah Valley. “It is desirable that every rail . . . . should be so bent and twisted as to make it impossible to repair the road without supplying new rails,” Sheridan's orders said.
In the months ahead, Grant would continue to harp on destroying the railroad and canal. While attacking the Rebel armies at a half dozen points was the core of his strategy, crippling the Confederate transportation system was another element. Down the James River canal and Virginia Central Railroad to Richmond flowed food, clothing, and weapons from the Shenandoah Valley and from Lynchburg, a major supply depot. Grant believed that shutting off these conduits would weaken Lee's forces and bring hardship to the doorsteps of Richmond's citizens.
After finishing their rampage, Hunter and Sheridan were to rejoin the Army of the Potomac. While Grant's instructions did not spell out the mission's object of drawing the Rebel cavalry away from Richmond, Sheridan asserted, “The diversion of the enemy's cavalry from the south side of the Chickahominy was [the raid's] main purpose.”
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TRAVELING AT THE WALKING pace favored by Sheridan, the Cavalry Corps rode north of Richmond and then turned west, following the north bank of the North Anna River. The troopers soon noticed that Confederate soldiers were shadowing them. Major General John Breckenridge's corps, sent by Lee to thwart Hunter in the Shenandoah Valley, kept Sheridan under observation until Wade Hampton and Fitzhugh Lee could catch up.
Following the railroad west from Richmond, Hampton's division and three batteries joined Breckenridge's infantry. Not far behind was Fitzhugh Lee, who had farther to travel. Breckenridge continued marching west to confront Hunter, while Hampton's and Lee's cavalrymen took responsibility for Sheridan's two divisions.
The Cavalry Corps crossed to the North Anna's south bank and camped on a road to Trevilian Station on the Virginia Central Railroad, ten miles east of Gordonsville and twenty-eight miles from Charlottesville. Hampton's division was close by. Fitzhugh Lee's division was several miles away, at Louisa Court House.
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SHERIDAN HAD NOW LED the Cavalry Corps for two months, through battles major and minor. His hard-bitten cavalrymen had taken their measure of “Little Phil,” as some of them had begun calling him. They liked the fact that he was blunt, open, and unpretentious, equally at ease speaking with privates and generals. Captain Henry A. DuBois, the Cavalry Corps's assistant medical director, wrote that when they first met, Sheridan talked freely to him and DuBois's tent mate, Dr. Morris Asche, drawing out their opinions about the army and sharing his own views. DuBois wrote,
He wore the uniform of a major general, but there was no constraint in his manner in talking to us, although our rank was but that of captains—nor on the other hand did we feel any reserve towards him on account of his rank. . . . . He came into the tent an utter stranger and in less than an hour both of us not only believed in him but felt an affection for him. . . . . I thought this very strange—this love at first sight, and without apparent reason. . . . . Soon, however, I found that others felt much as I did—that we had a personal ownership in him, that he would at all times acknowledge, and this without any feeling of superiority.”
The soldiers in the ranks felt the same way, observed DuBois, “much as they would towards a brother in whom they had unlimited confidence and whose interests were also theirs.”
Sheridan's men also noted his careful operational planning and his interest in topography and intelligence from scouts and spies—all integral to a battle plan's success. “There was an alertness, evinced rather in look than in movement,” Kidd observed. “Nothing escaped his eye, which was brilliant and searching and, at the same time emitted flashes of kindly good nature.” During combat, Sheridan, like Grant, smoked cigars incessantly, “a constant cloud enveloping him in his busiest moments.”
Normally reserved and restrained, he habitually concealed his emotions, except in battle, when he was “clear to the front,” exhorting his men, wrote Captain Edwin Parsons. At those times, he was altogether aggressive and ruthless and became enraged when he witnessed “stupidity, cowardice, incompetence, and panic.” Then,
wrote newspaper correspondent James Taylor, “strange, novel, picturesque oaths, made up on the spot, would burst from him spontaneously.”
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In a profile of Sheridan, J. W. Miller of the
Cincinnati Commercial
wrote, “Sheridan was more than magnetic. He was electric.” Sheridan's men were just beginning to appreciate their commander's tremendous abilities.
30
JUNE II, 1864–TREVILIAN STATION—It was a clear day that held the promise of sweltering heat. The Cavalry Corps was in the saddle, marching toward Trevilian Station, where it would begin wrecking the Virginia Central Railroad.
Sheridan's men had not ridden far before they collided with Wade Hampton's cavalry. During the night, Hampton's division had interposed itself between Sheridan and the station. Severe fighting spread up and down the line.
Hampton and Fitzhugh Lee's plan called for Hampton to drive in Sheridan's front, while Lee struck Sheridan's flank. They would then pin the Cavalry Corps against the North Anna River and destroy it.
Sheridan and Hampton had fought before, at Haw's Shop, Hampton's first action since suffering severe head wounds at Gettysburg. The diminutive Irishman from Ohio and the strapping, six-foot South Carolina aristocrat were about to wage one of the largest all-cavalry battles of the war.
Wherever they found themselves, Sheridan and his staff habitually winkled out every nearby logging trace, wagon road, and footpath on their maps. Their attention to topographic arcana now paid off: they discovered a road that swung around Hampton's right flank and then angled toward Trevilian Station.
Sheridan ordered Custer's brigade down the road in the hope of turning Hampton's flank. While Hampton and Sheridan fought it out and Fitzhugh Lee rode to his planned rendezvous with Hampton, the Wolverine Brigade, unseen, tiptoed around Hampton's right flank.
But the meandering road did not bring the brigade close to Hampton's flank but instead veered around it and deposited the Wolverines in Hampton's rear, near Trevilian Station. To their delight, the Michigan troopers spotted Hampton's wagons parked on a nearby knoll. “They went through our center like a thunderbolt,” wrote a Rebel officer assigned to guard the wagon train. Custer's brigade quickly scooped up eight hundred prisoners, 1,500 horses, six caissons, forty ambulances, and fifty army wagons. The Wolverines couldn't believe their great luck.
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They could not savor it for long though. Learning of this development, Hampton detached Brigadier General Thomas Rosser's brigade from his heavily engaged
division. Rosser, a former West Point classmate and friend of Custer's, struck the Wolverine Brigade from the west, driving it eastward.
The Rebels recovered everything that Custer's men had seized, plus Custer's black cook, Eliza, nicknamed by his men the “Queen of Sheba.” Eliza managed to escape with Custer's personal valise but not Custer's wife Libbie's love letters, which later appeared in Richmond newspapers.
Soon after Rosser's attack, Fitzhugh Lee's division, galloping in from Louisa Court House, hit Custer from the east. The Wolverine Brigade was surrounded.
 
CUSTER'S DISMOUNTED MEN FANNED out in a circle around their artillery in an open, grassy area to fend off the attackers, who outnumbered the Yankees three to one. Custer rode among them, shouting encouragement, as Rebel minié balls plucked at his coat. The Confederates repeatedly attacked the circle. They captured one of Custer's guns; Custer personally led a saber attack and retrieved it. The Wolverines fought for their very lives.
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Through their field glasses, Sheridan's staff officers caught glimpses of Custer's fight in the open grassland. When his headquarters flag was no longer visible, they feared the worst.
Sheridan and his staff led attacks on both of Hampton's flanks and flung Torbert's division at the Rebel center, hoping to break through and relieve the beleaguered Wolverines. Captain George Sanford of the 1st US Cavalry wrote that Sheridan acted on his men “like an electric shock . . . . an immediate and positive stimulus to battle.”
33
 
THE ALL-OUT ASSAULT DROVE Hampton's division backward—into Custer's position. Trevilian Station again fell into Union hands. During the melee, the Yankees took five hundred Rebel prisoners. Gregg's division pushed Fitzhugh Lee eastward, and Torbert pursued Hampton's division west of Trevilian Station.
Sheridan rode up to Custer and asked him if the Confederates had captured his headquarters flag. “Not by a damned sight!” Custer exclaimed, removing it from inside his shirt, where he had secreted it after his color sergeant was killed. “There it is!” Custer's stand—not his last—cost his brigade 416 casualties.
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HAMPTON AND LEE RENDEZVOUSED west of Trevilian Station and began digging entrenchments to block Sheridan from marching on Charlottesville. The Cavalry Corps went into camp for the night.

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