Terrible Swift Sword (28 page)

The outstanding issue was Grant's and Sheridan's standing disagreement over the Army of the Shenandoah's next move. Sheridan wished to man a strong defensive line in the northern Valley and to send most of his army to Grant. But Grant persisted in prodding—but never ordering—Sheridan to march on Charlottesville and Gordonsville in order to destroy the Virginia Central Railroad and James River canal, then to advance on Richmond from the west. He had repeatedly proposed this movement since August. Each time, Sheridan had demurred.
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Grant's plan was undoubtedly sound strategy, for if Sheridan succeeded, he would threaten Richmond and Petersburg from the west while Grant kept up pressure from the southeast. Richmond might fall, and with it the Confederacy. But Sheridan, unwilling to risk ceding the Valley to Early, balked.

OCTOBER 1864

PHILIP SHERIDAN DEPARTED FOR WASHINGTON the evening of October 15 to consult with War Secretary Edwin Stanton and Major General Henry Halleck. Sheridan's cavalry commander, Major General Alfred Torbert, and some cavalry units accompanied him from his headquarters at the Belle Grove mansion near Cedar Creek. At Front Royal, Torbert planned to join Colonel William Powell's two brigades for a major cavalry expedition to Charlottesville and Gordonsville, while Sheridan continued to Washington.

But Sheridan had no sooner reached Front Royal than a courier galloped up with a note from Major General Horatio Wright, the VI Corps commander whom Sheridan had left in charge in his absence. Union signal officers, Wright reported, had intercepted a message that was being relayed by semaphore from the Rebel signal station on Three Top Mountain:

Wright's accompanying note expressed his concern that the Confederates were planning to attack. With a strong cavalry force, Jubal Early might turn his right flank, he wrote, and “give us a great deal of trouble. I shall hold on here until the enemy's movements are developed, and shall only fear an attack on my right.”
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Sheridan was highly skeptical. He believed the message was a canard “and hardly worth attention.”
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But if it happened to be true that James Longstreet—whom Sheridan, perhaps remembering Chickamauga, regarded as “one of the ablest of the Confederate generals”—was on his way, Wright would need every available man. Sheridan postponed the Gordonsville raid and sent Torbert and his cavalrymen back to Wright, keeping one regiment to escort him and his staff officers to the railroad that would take them to Washington.

“The cavalry is all ordered back to you; make your position strong,” he counseled Wright. “If the enemy should make an advance, I know you will defeat him. Look well to your ground and be well prepared.” He promised to return in two days, if not sooner.
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CEDAR CREEK RISES IN the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains and crosses the Shenandoah Valley. Meadow Brook, at the bottom of a deep ravine, empties into Cedar Creek three-fourths of a mile west of the Valley Turnpike; two miles north of the turnpike bridge is Middletown. Cedar Creek continues eastward through Strasburg, where it is thirty yards wide, shallow, and fast. About a mile east of Strasburg, it joins the North Fork of the Shenandoah River and sweeps around the base of Massanutten Mountain.

East of the Valley Turnpike, Cedar Creek's banks are sharp and steep. Rippling northwestward from the creek is a series of densely wooded ridges and plateaus. Here the Army of the Shenandoah rested in idle watchfulness along a five-mile line.

“Cedar Creek was a good place for water, but a bad place for a fight,” observed a Massachusetts soldier. “Very crooked, fordable, but with steep banks difficult for
artillery or wagons,” except at the fords where ramps had been carved out, noted Major James Kidd of the 6th Michigan Cavalry. The Yankees would discover that the folded, grooved terrain was difficult ground on which to maneuver.
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MAJOR GENERAL JOHN GORDON'S plan of attack would certainly achieve overwhelming surprise—if it in fact worked. Nothing so audacious had been attempted during the war: a dawn attack, its preparations cloaked in secrecy, by 18,000 men against a wholly unsuspecting enemy numbering up to 40,000, after an all-night march that included fording two rivers. If Gordon's plan succeeded, it would not only turn upside down the balance of power in the Valley but might well be the war's most glittering triumph.

In the Union camps north of Cedar Creek, October 18 ended with a striking crimson sunset. Trumpeters from the 1st Connecticut Cavalry played “Home Sweet Home” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The 2nd Ohio Cavalry glee club sang favorites around the campfire, including “Lorena.”
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Shortly after 8 p.m., the 9,000 infantrymen of Gordon's II Corps—three divisions led by Major Generals Stephen Dodson Ramseur and John Pegram and Brigadier General Clement Evans (commanding the late Robert Rodes's division)—crossed the Valley Turnpike near Fisher's Hill. In near-complete silence, forbidden to carry any equipment that rattled, the men forded the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. The cold water and the piercing nighttime chill of October in the mountains were sharply unpleasant, but without complaint the ragged, sinewy Rebels marched all night to their staging area. Under the waning gibbous moon, they followed a narrow footpath to the base of Massanutten Mountain and a wagon road along the south bank of Cedar Creek.

Gordon had taken the precaution of posting guides at every fork along the route and at every creek ford to point the way for the Rebel foot soldiers. The men spoke in whispers when they spoke at all. A hundred yards or so beyond where Cedar Creek joined the Shenandoah River, the Confederates halted. They waited for the cold gleam of daybreak and the signal to cross the Shenandoah a second time and begin the assault.

 

CROSSING THE TURNPIKE BEHIND Gordon's corps, Major General Joseph Kershaw's 3,000-man division skirted the northwestern bank of the Shenandoah River and halted on the south bank of Cedar Creek upstream from Gordon. On a ridge a mile to the north slumbered Colonel Joseph Thoburn's forward-posted division of George Crook's VIII Corps.

Early had direct command of Kershaw's and Brigadier General Gabriel Wharton's divisions. Wharton's men, with Brigadier General Lunsford Lomax's cavalry, quietly waited north of Strasburg, ready to lunge northward up the Valley Turnpike.
Across the Cedar Creek bridge and along the road was Major General William Emory's XIX Corps, between VIII Corps on the Union left and VI Corps on the right.

At the same time, Thomas Rosser was poised to lead two cavalry brigades against Wesley Merritt's and George Custer's mounted divisions on the Union far right. It was a feint, designed to trick the Yankees into bracing for an all-out attack on their right flank, while the Rebels delivered a paralyzing blow to the Union left.

It was a complex plan meshing four assault groups—and four objectives to be struck simultaneously miles apart. Early and Gordon were also flouting two cardinal rules of offensive warfare: attackers should outnumber defenders, and one should never divide his army in the face of the enemy. In a few hours, they would learn if their shoot-the-moon gamble had paid off.

By 4:30 a.m. on October 19—the eighty-third anniversary of Lieutenant General Lord Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown—everyone was in place. And then something unplanned occurred: a swaddling fog reduced visibility to the length of one's arm and muffled and distorted sound. The conditions favored surprise and confusion.

In the murky half light, Rebel officers turned away from the river to strike a match and check their watches as the minutes ticked down to the moment of attack. “The whole situation was unspeakably impressive,” wrote Gordon. “Everything conspired to make the conditions both thrilling and weird.”
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CROOK'S MOUNTED PICKETS, ASTRIDE horses standing in the river shallows with water churning around their hooves, heard Gordon's men moving in the fog, despite the Rebels' precautions against making noise. They dutifully reported the movement to headquarters. Crook placed his command on alert but sent no one out to investigate. “Not a private in the army, and hardly an officer . . . . believed that the often-beaten and badly-beaten Early would venture an attack,” wrote Frank Flinn of the 38th Massachusetts Infantry.
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At 5:30 a.m., Colonel William Payne's small Rebel cavalry brigade, pistols blazing, suddenly materialized before Union vedettes in the swirling river fog. The Yankees, from Powell's division, took to their heels. The attack was the signal for Gordon's divisions, poised to cross the Shenandoah at Bowman's Ford, to plunge in. To the west, Kershaw's division splashed across Cedar Creek, and Wharton's men began marching down the Valley Pike toward the Cedar Creek bridge. The Army of the Valley had launched its attack.
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THE SHENANDOAH RIVER WAS chest deep and freezing. Gordon's men emerged from the waters at Bowman's Ford gasping from cold and shivering in their soaked
clothing. Their officers wasted no time in sending them jogging northward up a farm road. Without complaint, in fact grateful to be able to generate body heat to counter the effects of the freezing river water, II Corps rapidly covered a mile and a half.

When they were well behind and east of Thoburn's forward division—and within striking distance of the rest of Crook's VIII Corps near the Army of the Shenandoah's headquarters at Belle Grove mansion—they stopped, wheeled left, and waited silently. A few hundred yards to the west, but invisible in the fog, were two Union divisions, 7,500 men total, under Colonels J. Howard Kitching and Rutherford Hayes, the future nineteenth president. Gordon hoped to destroy them both and to make Sheridan his prisoner.
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Captain John De Forest, a XIX Corps staff officer, was in the saddle early to send off a reconnaissance in force to Fisher's Hill when he heard, coming from Crook's corps to his left, “a shrill prolonged wail of musketry . . . . followed by scream on scream of the Rebel Yell.” It was Kershaw's South Carolinians attacking Thoburn's division.

In less than five minutes—before many of the Yankees had time to get dressed—the Rebels were inside Thoburn's breastworks. “The men sprang from their tents, and fled without boots or clothing save what they had worn through the night,” wrote Major Aldace Walker of the 11th Vermont Infantry, who witnessed the flight. “The very tents were pulled off from some as they lay in their blankets.” A few managed to reach their breastworks without orders, ready to fight, but they were instantly flanked and taken in reverse. The Rebels captured seven guns before they could be fired.
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A few minutes later, Gordon's II Corps advanced in solid lines without skirmishers against Kitching's and Hayes's divisions. The Yankees' first awareness of the Rebels' presence dawned when Gordon's seven brigades emerged from the fog bank, running and shrieking their high-pitched foxhunter's yell. The bluecoats fell back in confusion. Some were trapped in a ravine and shot by the Rebels. “It looked like murder to kill them huddled up there,” a Confederate soldier wrote.
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In just thirty minutes, Crook's “Buzzards”—the 9,000 men of VIII Corps—had been utterly routed. These were the same veteran troops who had spearheaded the triumphant attack at Fisher's Hill. Major Walker understood their panic. “A night surprise, total and terrific, is too trying for the morale of the best troops in the world to survive.”
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Hayes's horse was shot out from under him as he vainly attempted to stem the onslaught; Hayes landed hard on the ground and was badly bruised. An aide lent Hayes his horse, and a short time later he was struck in the head with a spent minié ball, “a slight shock”—and his second battle wound of the war. The morning was a sobering turn of events for Hayes, who had recently enjoyed a period of
good fortune. The Ohio lawyer had learned that he had been nominated in absentia for Congress and that his wife had given birth to a boy, their second. At Fisher's Hill, Hayes's division had led the decisive attack. Today, however, it was hurriedly retreating.
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THE COURAGEOUS ACTIONS OF a few bought precious time for their VIII Corps comrades to escape safely. Two batteries under Captain Henry DuPont, Crook's artillery commander, whose family business supplied the Union army with nearly half its gunpowder, held off Kershaw's Rebels for a short time. Some officers—including Wright, the VI Corps commander, bleeding profusely from a minié ball wound to the chin—rallied 1,500 of Crook's soldiers and made a stand between Belle Grove and the Valley Turnpike. They held off Gordon's columns for thirty minutes, enabling most of the army's wagon train to ride away to Middletown.
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The armies groped for one another through the miasmic fog, now considerably thicker with the addition of billowing clouds of gun smoke. At the attack's outset, the Confederates had had the distinct advantage of knowing where they were with respect to the enemy. But with everyone now in motion, they became nearly as disoriented as the Yankees. Directional momentum and their carefully drawn attack plan, however, yet favored the Confederates over the fumbling Yankees.
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