Terrible Swift Sword (27 page)

 

SHERIDAN HAD BECOME INCREASINGLY exasperated with Rosser's terrier-like rushes on his rear. During the night of October 8, Sheridan's impatience boiled over, and the fiery general stalked off in search of Torbert, his cavalry commander, to prod him into acting “to open the enemy's eyes in earnest.”

He stormed into Torbert's headquarters just as Torbert and his staff were finishing a turkey dinner. Captain George Sanford, a Torbert aide, wrote that Sheridan angrily burst out, “If you ain't sitting here stuffing yourselves, general, staff and all, while the Rebels are riding into our camp! Having a party, while Rosser is carrying off your guns! Got on your nice clothes and clean shirts! Torbert, mount quicker than hell will scorch a feather! I want you to go out there in the morning and whip that Rebel cavalry or get whipped yourself!”
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Until this was done, Sheridan continued, the infantry would not march another mile. He announced that he would ride at daybreak the next morning to the summit of Round Top Mountain to watch Torbert give Rosser his “drubbing.” To Grant, Sheridan wrote, “I deemed it best to make this delay of one day here and settle this new cavalry general.”
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AS THE SUN POKED above the hills on October 9, Custer's 3rd Division faced Rosser's troopers at Tom's Brook Crossing. Custer rode along his line, making sure his brigades were ready for battle. Then, turning toward where Rosser was watching through his field glasses, Custer raised his hat and made a deep bow to his old West Point friend. The men of both armies cheered loudly. It was one of many such instances of Custer's chivalry in battle.

Bugles blared, and Custer's men began to advance. One of Rosser's brigades suddenly burst into the middle of the bluecoats, stopping their forward movement. Custer's seasoned veterans regrouped and renewed their assault. Simultaneously, Merritt's 1st Division fell upon Lomax's two brigades nearby on the Valley Turnpike.

It was open country, ideal for an old-fashioned cavalry fight on horseback with sabers and pistols—as well as for artillery. From Round Top Mountain, Sheridan intently watched the charges and countercharges.

Two hours into the battle, Rosser's flanks collapsed, and Merritt and Custer mounted a great concerted charge along the entire front. The Rebel cavalry, outnumbered two to one, buckled and sagged. Then there was, as Sheridan triumphantly noted, “a general smash-up of the entire Confederate line.” A
Philadelphia Inquirer
reporter who witnessed the battle wrote, “It was a square cavalry fight in which the enemy was routed beyond my power to describe.”
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The rout became a “wild stampede.” Some Rebel cavalrymen stopped along the way to offer brief, but futile, resistance before continuing their flight—past Woodstock, all the way to Mount Jackson, twenty miles away. Sheridan's men nicknamed the rollicking pursuit the “Woodstock Races.”

The Yankees captured eleven guns, all of the Rebel cavalry's wagons and ambulances, and three hundred prisoners. Sheridan reported that some of the guns had never been fired and were stamped “Tredegar Works,” the name of the Richmond foundry where they were made. In one of the captured wagons, the men found an ambrotype of Libbie Custer that had been lost at Trevilian Station.
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The ignominious flight of the Rebel cavalry was an embarrassment to Rosser, Lomax, Early, and everyone involved. George Neese, a gunner in the horse artillery, wrote, “The shameful way that our cavalry . . . . fought, bled, and died a-running rearward was enough to make its old commander, General J.E.B. Stuart, weep in his grave.”
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The Laurel Brigade had never lost a battle until Tom's Brook, and the men were “all very sore about it.” Rosser complained that Early should not have pressured him to attack a larger force without infantry and that the disjointed command structure prevented him from directly communicating with Lomax.
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“This is very distressing to me,” Early wrote in his report to Robert E. Lee. His cavalry, he said, was outnumbered and poorly equipped compared with the Yankees' mounted troops. “It would be better if they could all be put into the infantry; but if that were tried, I am afraid they would all run off.”
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MOSBY SOUGHT ROBERT E. Lee's permission to avenge the executions of Willis and the six men at Front Royal. He mistakenly believed that Custer had ordered the Front Royal executions, when Merritt and Torbert had done so. “It is my purpose to hang an equal number of Custer's men whenever I capture them,” Mosby told Lee. After consulting with the Confederate War Department, Lee authorized Mosby to carry out the revenge killings.

From a prison warehouse in Rectortown, twenty-seven Union captives, some of them Custer's men, were marched to the banks of a creek and ordered to draw slips of paper from a hat. Twenty of them drew blanks; seven drew numbered slips that condemned them to death. Those seven were taken to a place near Custer's headquarters. Three were hanged, two were shot but lived, and two were permitted to
escape by guards who had no stomach for cold-blooded executions. Pinned to one corpse was a note reading, “These men have been hung in retaliation for an equal number of Colonel Mosby's men hung by order of General Custer, at Front Royal, Measure for Measure.”
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In his letter informing Sheridan of the executions, Mosby extended an olive branch with one hand while grasping a sword with the other. “Hereafter, any prisoners falling into my hands will be treated with the kindness due to their condition, unless some act of barbarity shall compel me, reluctantly, to adopt a line of policy repugnant to humanity.” There is no record of any reply by Sheridan, and his
Personal Memoirs
do not mention Mosby's personal letter. However, no reprisals were made for Mosby's executions of the Yankee prisoners. The cycle of revenge killings began to wind down, although Sheridan had not yet finished his business with Mosby.
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HAVING ROUTED THE “SAVIOR of the Valley” at Tom's Brook, Sheridan's army resumed its march down the Shenandoah. On October 10, it crossed Cedar Creek and camped on its north bank, south of Middletown—all except Major General Horatio Wright's VI Corps and William Powell's 2nd Cavalry Division.

Powell's troopers embarked on a raid toward Charlottesville and Gordonsville, while VI Corps marched into Middletown and then turned east toward Front Royal. Sheridan informed Grant on October 12 that Wright's men were on their way to Alexandria, Virginia, and would thence travel by steamship to Petersburg to join Grant's army. “I believe that a rebel advance down the valley will not take place,” he wrote.

But the next day, Early's army unexpectedly appeared at Strasburg, just a few miles from Cedar Creek, and shelled XIX Corps's camp. Two brigades from Crook's VIII Corps forded Cedar Creek to assay the Rebels' strength. Kershaw's division provided the answer by driving them back to their camp during a one-hour fight.

Fearing that Early intended to attack now that VI Corps had left, Sheridan recalled the corps to Cedar Creek and laid plans for an assault on Early. When Early abruptly withdrew his army to Fisher's Hill, however, Sheridan canceled the attack.

Powell's two brigades rode south toward Gordonsville but turned back thirty-five miles short of their objective without engaging the Rebel cavalry in the area. The raid accomplished nothing.

Sheridan's actions during the weeks after Fisher's Hill mystified Confederate major general John Gordon. “Why did he halt or hesitate, why turn to the torch in the hope of starving his enemy, instead of beating him in resolute battle?” Gordon wondered. “Why did General Sheridan hesitate to hurl his inspirited and overwhelming army on us?”

Sheridan had not taken the fight to Early, so Early intended to bring it to Sheridan. As the Army of the Valley settled into its old rifle pits on Fisher's Hill, Brigadier General Stephen Dodson Ramseur wrote to his brother-in-law, “We are all called on to show that we are made of the true metal. Let us be brave, cheerful, and truthful. Remembering that Might is not Right.”
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OCTOBER 18, 1864–THREE TOP MOUNTAIN, OVERLOOKING CEDAR CREEK—Such a bold plan of attack had rarely been hazarded. Confederate major general John Gordon and Jedediah Hotchkiss, the Confederate army's foremost topographer, had excitedly sketched its bare outlines while descending Three Top Mountain, the northernmost part of Massanutten Mountain. Three Top overlooked Strasburg, Front Royal, and, most importantly, Phil Sheridan's Army of the Shenandoah, whose encampment was spread over the ridges and low plateaus that rippled northwestward from Cedar Creek and the Shenandoah River's North Fork.

At the request of Jubal Early, whose arthritis prevented him from joining them, Gordon, Hotchkiss, Brigadier General Clement Evans, and Gordon's chief of staff, Major Robert Hunter, had surmounted boulders and steep cliffs to reach the summit of Three Top, the location of the Confederate signal station. It was a fine autumn day, and through their field glasses, the men had a superb view of the bluecoat camps, their breastworks, pickets, and vedettes. Gordon was able to count the Yankees' guns. “I could see distinctly the three colors of trimmings on the jackets respectively of infantry, artillery, and cavalry,” he wrote. Hotchkiss drew a map of it all.

The difficult descent and the ride back to Fisher's Hill gave Hotchkiss and Gordon time to discuss an intriguing idea: a surprise attack. Having beat the Rebels at Winchester, Fisher's Hill, and Tom's Brook, the last thing Sheridan's army would expect was an attack by Early's battered army—especially since it had just withdrawn to Fisher's Hill from positions close to Cedar Creek. When the survey party returned to Fisher's Hill, Early summoned all of his generals to a meeting.
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John Gordon had spent his boyhood in northern Georgia near Chickamauga Creek on land appropriated from Cherokee chief John Ross after his forced exile on the Trail of Tears. Smart and articulate, Gordon became a lawyer. When the war broke out, he joined a mountaineer regiment. Although Gordon had no military training, he was fearless, aggressive, and a natural leader. He rose rapidly through the Confederate army's ranks.

Gordon had fought at First Manassas, in the Seven Days battles, then at Antietam (where he was wounded several times), Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania
Court House before coming to the Valley with Early as a brigadier general and division commander. When Early was promoted to lieutenant general and named commander of the Army of the Valley, Gordon assumed leadership of Early's II Corps.

At the council of generals, Gordon argued for an immediate attack. Early needed little persuading; Sheridan's wholesale devastation of the Valley's fields, barns, mills, and livestock had destroyed Early's larder; his men were hungry. “I was now compelled to move back for want of provisions and forage, or attack the enemy in his position with the hope of driving him from it, and I determined to attack . . . . by surprise if I could,” Early wrote.
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From Three Top Mountain, Gordon had concluded that the Union left flank—anchored by George Crook's VIII Corps—was the Army of the Shenandoah's most vulnerable point. Opposite Crook, directly across Cedar Creek and the North Fork of the Shenandoah River, was the sheer northern face of double-domed Massanutten Mountain. With the mountain crowding against the waterways near Crook, it appeared a highly unlikely attack route. Sheridan and his generals would expect the Confederates to target the more accessible Union right flank, not its left. This was exactly why Early should attack Crook, Gordon believed.

Achieving surprise would be tricky. The Rebels must secretly bring a large assault force to the wagon road wedged between the base of Massanutten Mountain and the river. Gordon believed this was possible. He was convinced that if such an attack could be properly executed and pressed to completion, “the destruction of Sheridan's army was inevitable.”

Gordon's plan was a brilliant gamble—and one that Early was willing to take. If the attack broke Sheridan's army, Early might once more threaten Washington, as he had three months earlier, and stampede Northern voters into rejecting Abraham Lincoln in the coming election. Lincoln's successor might agree to a negotiated peace with the Confederacy.
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WHEN EARLY HAD SUDDENLY reappeared at Strasburg, Sheridan had recalled VI Corps, after first starting the 15,000 men to Grant at Petersburg. But then Early had withdrawn to Fisher's Hill, and the threat had seemingly receded.

On October 12, War Secretary Edwin Stanton requested that Sheridan come to Washington to consult with him before Stanton sailed to City Point for discussions with Grant.
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Major General Henry Halleck, the army's chief of staff, followed Stanton's message with a telegram reporting that no new Rebel reinforcements had been sent from Richmond to Early, although he peevishly added that he had “very little confidence in the information collected at [Grant's] headquarters. If you can leave
your command with safety, come to Washington as I wish to give you the views of the authorities here,” Halleck wrote.
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