Terrible Swift Sword (26 page)

 

ON SEPTEMBER 23, A band of Mosby's Rangers led by Captain Samuel Chapman pounced on a Union ambulance train outside Front Royal. Too late, they spotted a brigade from Brigadier General Wesley Merritt's 1st Cavalry Division nearby; Merritt's men came to the train's rescue. As the partisans raced toward Chester Gap, a small Union detachment led by Lieutenant Charles McMaster tried to block their escape. In the melee, McMaster fell to the ground, riddled with bullets, and was trampled by the partisans' horses during their flight.

When Union cavalrymen found McMaster's body, they concluded that he was killed after he had surrendered. In retribution, the Yankees shot four partisan captives and hanged two others on a hill overlooking Front Royal. A placard was draped over one of the hanged men. It read, “This will be the fate of Mosby and all his men.”
²⁰

 

PARTISANS SWEPT DOWN ON an ambulance escorted by Union cavalry behind Union lines. When the shooting stopped, VI Corps quartermaster Cornelius Tolles and Dr. Emil Ohlenschlager, the corps' medical director, had been mortally wounded. In reprisal, some of Colonel William Powell's 2nd Cavalry Division troopers hanged a Mosby Ranger, Absalom Willis, with a placard reading, “Hanged by the neck in retaliation for the murder of a U.S. soldier.”

Powell announced that henceforth two partisans would be shot or hanged for every Union soldier killed, and “if two is not sufficient I will increase it to 22 to one.” Not long after that, Mosby and his men derailed and burned a train on the B&O Railroad and robbed a group of Union paymasters of $168,000 in cash.
²¹

 

LIEUTENANT JOHN MEIGS WAS the Army of the Shenandoah's chief engineering officer and one of the Union army's most talented mapmakers. During Sheridan's first days in the Valley, Meigs had tutored him in the area's topography; he had since become one of Sheridan's favorite subordinate officers.

It had rained all day on October 3. Meigs and two orderlies had spent the daylight hours in rain slickers, mapping the Harrisonburg area and plotting the Army
of the Shenandoah's positions so that Sheridan could move his men quickly. At dusk, while riding on a public road between Dayton and Harrisonburg on their way to camp, they overtook three mounted men dressed in blue uniforms. Believing the riders to be comrades, Meigs and his companions joined them. The strangers, however, were Rebel scouts from Brigadier General William Wickham's cavalry brigade.

Accounts differ over what happened next, but the outcome was clear: when the gun smoke cleared, Meigs lay dead in the muddy road, and one of his companions had been taken prisoner. The third surveyor managed to escape. He raced to Sheridan's headquarters to report that the Rebels had killed Meigs without warning as he cried, “Don't shoot me!”

Sheridan believed the surveyor's account, true or not. Not only had he lost his prized topographer, who had become somewhat like a son to the bachelor general, but the shooting had occurred a mere mile and a half from headquarters and inside Union lines—suggesting to Sheridan that the Confederates had been visiting their homes in the area. Sheridan vowed to “teach a lesson to these abettors of the foul deed—a lesson they would never forget.” The next day, he ordered all the homes within five miles burned to the ground.

Anticipating just this eventuality, the Rebels had released their prisoner on the condition that he tell Sheridan what had actually happened. According to the Confederate scouts, they had gotten the drop on Meigs and his assistants. The two survivors had thrown up their hands, but Meigs had fired a pistol from beneath his slicker, wounding Private George Martin in the groin. Martin's companions had then shot Meigs.
²²

The burn area included the town of Dayton, which erupted in frenzied activity when residents were told what was planned. Some of the women threw their arms around the necks of the Yankees, begging for mercy. Although required to carry out Sheridan's order, some soldiers helped citizens remove their possessions from their homes. Before long, Dayton's main street was jammed with wagons piled high with furniture and clothing—all streaming out of the village.

But before Dayton could be consigned to the flames, Sheridan—persuaded either by the released prisoner's report or, according to another account, by the pleadings of his subordinate officers—rescinded the burn order. Instead, he ordered buildings burned near the site where Meigs was shot and the arrest as war prisoners of all able-bodied men in the area. But the Yankees' hatred of the Rebel partisans and their protectors continued to boil.
²³

 

FLUNG BACK BY EARLY'S troops near Waynesboro, to which the Rebels had withdrawn after Fisher's Hill, Torbert's cavalrymen on September 29 began driving off
livestock and burning crops and farm buildings in the rich farmland between Staunton and Waynesboro. They killed livestock and put barns, mills, and foundries to the torch. A young schoolteacher wrote with bitter sarcasm, “Truly the great? [
sic
] General Sheridan has achieved a wonderful victory over the helpless women and children of the Valley of Virginia.” At the same time, a
New York Herald
reporter triumphantly wrote, “We destroyed enough wheat to subsist the whole rebel army for a year to come.”
²⁴

But this was only a foretaste of the widespread destruction that commenced on the day that Torbert's cavalry reached Harrisonburg, with the memory of Meigs's murder still fresh.

 

LIKE A FISHERMAN'S NET, the cavalry spread out behind Sheridan's infantrymen on October 6 as they marched down the Valley toward Winchester. One of the bleakest chapters of the war now began.

The cavalrymen drove off all livestock and destroyed crops, barns, and outbuildings in their path, at last fulfilling Grant's August 26 instructions to the letter. “If the war is to last another year,” he had written, “we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”
²⁵
The Union cavalrymen had endured too many bush-whackings to “shrink from the duty,” Wesley Merritt wrote. Rebel partisans and highwaymen, he said, “had committed numerous murders and wanton acts of cruelty on all parties weaker than themselves. Officers and men had been murdered in cold blood on the roads.”

The invaders “came up the Valley sweeping everything before them like a hurricane,” wrote one resident. “There was nothing left for man or beast from the horse down to the chicken.” Taking burning brands from victims' fireplaces, the Yankees set fire to their barns, mills, and outbuildings. A newspaper correspondent wrote, “The atmosphere, from horizon to horizon, has been black with the smoke of a hundred conflagrations, and at night a gleam brighter and more lurid than sunset has shot from every verge. . . . . The completeness of the devastation is awful.”

Spared ruin were the homesteads of Dunkards and Mennonites. They were loyal to the Union, as were members of those sects everywhere, because of their unbending hatred of slavery. But many of them wanted to leave the Valley and asked for Sheridan's assistance; they feared that if they remained, the Rebels would return and draft them into the Confederate army. Peter Hartman, one of the supplicants, described Sheridan as “the most savage looking man I ever saw” but approvingly observed that he gave each of them a horse from the army's herd.
²⁶

Sheridan watched the methodical destruction with approval. “As we marched along the many columns of smoke from burning stacks, and mills filled with grain, indicated that the adjacent country was fast losing the features which hitherto had
made it a great magazine of stores for the Confederate armies,” he wrote.
²⁷
Like Grant and Sherman, he believed that by obliterating the Confederate granary, destroying the fighting spirit of its people, and crippling the Confederacy's ability to recover, they would end the war sooner and save lives. “There is more mercy in destroying supplies than in killing their young men. . . . . If I had a barn full of wheat and a son, I would much sooner lose the barn and wheat than my son,” Sheridan wrote. Until the end of his life, Sheridan remained convinced that this was the right choice.
²⁸

Not all the combat veterans obeyed the orders to burn and destroy. Lacking a taste for vandalism, some of them applied the torch sparingly. A detachment from the 2nd Ohio Cavalry left many barns standing in its area of operation, and other units, too, made less than a clean sweep.

Some of those who most distinguished themselves on the battlefield made the poorest incendiaries. Yet, most of the Union troopers did their job, disagreeable as they may have found it. They worked fast. One officer blew a whistle when it was time for his men to move on to the next farm.

Some residents fought back. One man shot and killed a Union officer and threw the man's body into his burning barn. Another farmer stood on a haystack and fired steadily at a column of Yankees until they riddled him with bullets.
²⁹

 

MAJOR JAMES KIDD OF the 6th Michigan Cavalry had painstakingly labored to get some grain mills in the area up and running, and they were producing flour for Kidd's cavalrymen when Merritt ordered them burned. “The wheels were not stopped but the torch was applied and the crackling of flames intermingled with the rumbling of the stones made a mournful requiem,” wrote Kidd. Women and children pleaded with the soldiers for some flour before the mills were burned, but they received none.

As Kidd and his men watched, the flames spread beyond the mills and threatened homes. “Women with children in their arms stood in the street and gazed frantically upon the threatened ruin of their homes, while the tears rained down their cheeks.” Kidd ordered his men to prevent the homes from burning. The homes were saved.
³⁰

Custer's men executed a civilian found in the woods with a rifle. They killed him even after a merchant told them the man was developmentally disabled. Afterward, the merchant warned Custer with remarkable prescience, “You will have to sleep in a bloody grave for this.”
³¹

At the end of the second day of the scorched-earth march, Sheridan was able to report to Grant from Woodstock,

Loyal Confederate citizens bitterly denounced the systematic ruin of the Valley. Mrs. Hugh Lee of Winchester wrote in her diary, “Sheridan-Sheridan, what demon of destruction has possessed you? God grant that you may meet with a righteous compensation.”

The
Richmond Whig
urged reprisals. “They chose to substitute the torch for the sword. We may so use their own weapon as to make them repent.” The
Whig
proposed burning a Northern city in retaliation. “It is a game at which we can beat them. New York is worth twenty Richmonds.”
³³

The calculated destruction had an immediate impact on Early's army. He reported to Lee on October 9 that because nearly everything in his area of operation had gone up in smoke, “I will have to rely on Augusta [Georgia] for my supplies, and they are not abundant there.” Until those supplies arrived, the Rebels were reduced to picking corn in the countryside and bartering labor for food. “Our mess is shucking corn for a farmer who will pay us for our services in flour,” wrote Confederate Private Creed Davis in his diary.
³⁴

 

BRIGADIER GENERAL THOMAS ROSSER'S Laurel Brigade trailed Sheridan's army as the Yankees burned and destroyed. Rosser, twenty-seven, was a West Point classmate and friend of George Custer. Until he was severely wounded in 1862, Rosser was an artillery officer and best known for having shot down a Union observation balloon. Returning to duty, he was given command of a cavalry regiment and quickly made a reputation for daring attacks, much like his former classmate.

His proud cavalrymen wore laurel sprigs in their hats, just as members of Custer's Wolverine Brigade had adopted the red cravat as its signature, in imitation of their leader. At Trevilian Station, Rosser was wounded again while leading his brigade against Custer's. The friends were fated to soon meet in battle once more.
³⁵

The Valley's Confederate loyalists anointed Rosser the “Savior of the Valley” before his men had even fired a shot—so desperate were they to believe that Sheridan might yet be driven off and their farmsteads preserved. Early demonstrated his confidence in Rosser by giving him Fitzhugh Lee's two brigades while Lee recovered from wounds suffered at Winchester. With his division of 3,000 men, Rosser skirmished with Sheridan's rearguard—Custer's division—near Brock's Gap on October 6, the day “the Burning” commenced. Operating nearby, but independently, was Early's
other cavalry division, commanded by Brigadier General Lunsford Lomax. The two divisions reported separately to Early and had little contact with one another.
³⁶

On October 7, the thick smoke from the smoldering fields and barns so cloaked both armies that Rosser fell upon Sheridan's rear before either side was even aware of the other's presence. Inspired by their “hatred of the wretches” destroying their food supply, the Rebels scattered Sheridan's cavalrymen and pursued them for miles. Rosser's division continued to follow the Union army north toward Strasburg. When his men bivouacked on October 8, a Union cavalry force was camped nearby, on the other side of Tom's Brook.
³⁷