Terrible Swift Sword (29 page)

 

FIFTEEN MINUTES PAST SUNRISE, and one hour into the battle, Kershaw's and Wharton's divisions, as well as Evans's division from II Corps, were converging on Major General William Emory's XIX Corps along a curved axis extending from the south to the northeast. Emory's two divisions were under arms and behind their breastworks. The heavy musketry and yelling on Thoburn's knoll a mile to the south had first awakened them to their danger. The sound from the subsequent fight at Belle Grove mansion had been noticeably closer, just a half mile to the east. Then, swarms of fleeing soldiers had streamed past. Now the gunfire had fallen off, but Emory's men could see gun flashes flickering through the fog—like lightning from an approaching storm.

Emory sent Colonel Stephen Thomas and three regiments straight into the juggernaut's path. In a densely wooded area, Thomas's brigade collided with Evans's division. They fought with clubbed muskets, bayonets, and bare hands—”more like demons than human beings,” a Union soldier wrote. One-third of Thomas's infantrymen were killed or wounded in ten minutes; the 8th Vermont lost 106 of its 175 men. They “fought like tigers,” Captain S. E. Howard proudly wrote of the Vermonters. The columns of Evans, Kershaw, and Wharton marched on. Minutes later, they slammed into XIX Corps's breastworks.
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Captain De Forest and other XIX Corps officers had tried to rally the remnants of Crook's three broken divisions as they drifted rearward “with curious deliberation . . . . not in the least wild with fright, but discreetly seeking the best cover, slipping through hollows and woods, halting for rest and discourse behind buildings.” The beaten men steadfastly ignored the officers' pleas to stop and fight, wrote Howard. “The chief trouble with them seems to be that they have got out of their places in the military machine,” De Forest observed.
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VIII Corps's disintegration had placed the Rebels in positions overlooking the XIX Corps camp, transforming it “from a fortress into a slaughter pen.” The Rebels drove Emory's troops from their breastworks in a frenzy of hand-to-hand fighting, blasted them with musket fire on the open ground, and drove the two divisions, brigade by brigade, from their positions. It was over in thirty minutes.

XIX Corps fell back in orderly fashion, retreating 1,000 yards at a time, turning and firing. The troops slid down the steep-sided banks of Meadow Creek, scaled the opposite bank, and threw up fieldworks on VI Corps's left flank. XIX Corps's path of retreat was clearly delineated by the profusion of men's bodies, horse carcasses, and blood, “in splashes . . . . and zigzag trails,” more than De Forest had ever seen before on a battlefield. “The firm limestone would not receive it, and there was no pitying summer grass to hide it.”
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It was just 7:30 a.m., and Early's assault troops had swept away two of Sheridan's three infantry corps. Five Union divisions, or nearly 20,000 men, had astonishingly been wiped from the battlefield by a smaller Rebel force. Early's gamble had succeeded brilliantly.

 

VI CORPS'S THREE DIVISIONS were the Army of the Shenandoah's last hope of stemming the Confederate blitz. Early's army pounded two of them backward—those of Colonel J. Warren Keifer and Brigadier General Frank Wheaton. They joined the stream of refugees from VIII and XIX Corps.

That left just one intact Union infantry division south of Middletown: Major General George Getty's. When he saw that Wheaton's and Keifer's divisions were retreating and that the Rebel divisions of Ramseur, Wharton, and Pegram were closing in on him, Getty looked around for a better position.

Several hundred yards to the rear lay a crescent-shaped hill—the Middletown cemetery. “In perfect order,” Getty's three brigades withdrew to the field of granite headstones and markers, while stolidly ignoring the “universal confusion and dismay . . . . crowds of officers and men, some shod and some barefoot, many of them coatless and hatless . . . . all rushing wildly to the rear; oaths and blows alike powerless to halt them; a cavalry regiment stretched across the field, unable to stem
the torrent. . . . . It was a sight that might have demoralized the Old Guard of the first Napoleon.”
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Minutes after positioning his men in strong, horseshoe-shaped works in the cemetery, Getty glimpsed Pegram's 1,700-man division advancing in solid lines through the thinning fog. He ordered his 4,000 men to hold their fire until the Rebels running up the slope toward them were thirty yards away. The eruption of musketry sent Pegram's troops reeling backward. Getty's division instantly counterattacked, driving the Rebels across Meadow Brook. Early ordered a second assault by Pegram and a third by Wharton's division. All of the attacks failed to dislodge Getty.

Getty's stand was the first time that Sheridan's troops had stopped the Rebels that morning. The gritty fight in the cemetery had also distracted Early from marching up the Valley Turnpike and severing the Union army's path of retreat. About an hour after it deployed in the cemetery, Getty's division began an orderly withdrawal as Rebel gunners began zeroing in on them.
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THE IRASCIBLE, ARTHRITIS-TORMENTED EARLY, who had suffered defeat upon defeat over the past month, experienced an exquisite moment of exhilaration as he and his staff neared Middletown. For once, everything was going Early's way. Even the fog was now lifting, as though sensing that the Rebels no longer needed it.

Captain S. V. Southall, a staff officer, watched Early's face become “radiant with joy” upon receiving another piece of good news. Early suddenly exclaimed, “The sun of Middletown! The sun of Middletown!” remembering Napoleon Bonaparte's famous cry at Austerlitz in 1805 when the sun emerged during his army's climactic attack on the Russo-Austrian forces.
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Getty's stand had given Horatio Wright time to send 7,500 cavalrymen and five horse artillery batteries to the Valley Turnpike north of Middletown to take up defensive positions. After Getty withdrew from the cemetery and Early's men resumed marching up the turnpike, they encountered Merritt's and Custer's cavalry divisions. Each approach by the Rebels was met by a torrent of gunfire from the Yankees' Spencer repeaters.

From Middletown, Early studied the Yankee cavalry, which potentially threatened his right flank, and the cemetery hill where Getty's division had repulsed three attacks. Gordon had just directed Colonel Thomas H. Carter, the chief artillery officer, to open fire on Getty's division—ultimately driving it off. Gordon intended to pursue Getty and VI Corps northward and destroy them.

Early rode up to Gordon. “Well, Gordon,” he said, “this is glory enough for one day.”

In his
Reminiscences of the Civil War
, Gordon wrote that he replied, “It is very well so far, general; but we have one more blow to strike, and then there will not
be left an organized company of infantry in Sheridan's army.” He told Early that he had sent Carter's artillery to bombard VI Corps.

Early responded, “No use in that; they will all go directly.”

Gordon told Early that VI Corps would not go unless driven from the field.

“Yes, it will go too, directly,” Early responded.

Gordon was stunned. “My heart went into my boots,” he wrote. Gordon envisioned consequences as fatal as those attending the Confederates' failure to seize the high ground at Gettysburg on the first day or the hesitation to assault Ulysses Grant's exposed flank in the Wilderness. “If one more heavy blow had been delivered with unhesitating energy, with Jacksonian confidence and vigor, and with the combined power of every heavy gun and every exultant soldier of Early's army, the battle would have ended in one of the most complete and inexpensive victories ever won in war,” wrote Gordon.
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Thomas Rosser, the Confederate cavalry commander whom Custer had chastened ten days earlier, also ran up against Early's inflexibility. Rosser asked Early to permit his two brigades to break off their ineffectual skirmishing with the enemy cavalry on the Union right so that he could charge down the Valley Turnpike behind Gordon's corps. Early rejected Rosser's proposal. “I could have done great execution upon their broken ranks,” Rosser wrote. Instead, his 1,700 men played an insignificant role in the battle.
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Early would later explain in his report to Robert E. Lee that “so many of our men had stopped in the camp to plunder (in which I am sorry to say that officers participated), the country was so open, and the enemy's cavalry so strong, that I did not deem it prudent to press farther. . . . . I determined, therefore, to content myself with trying to hold the advantages I had gained until all my troops had come up and the captured property was secured.”
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It was 10 a.m. when Jubal Early decided to break off the attack. His exhausted men, who had been marching and fighting without food since eight o'clock the previous night, had not eaten a square meal in weeks. Their clothing was ragged, and hundreds of them were barefoot. It is questionable whether they could have rallied for one last assault.

Not having to, they fell upon the Yankees' amply supplied camps like wolves, snatching up shoes, hats, trousers, blankets, pots, pans, and tent cloths. “The world will never know the extreme poverty of the Confederate soldier at this time,” wrote Sergeant John Worsham of the 21st Virginia Infantry. Laden with plunder, they rejoined their units and stretched out to rest, savoring their loot and their great victory.
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DURING HIS JOURNEY TO Washington, Sheridan worried about his army at Cedar Creek. It was impossible not to, after reading the intercepted Confederate message
purportedly signed by Longstreet—canard or not—and after Early's sudden reappearance at Fisher's Hill. Sheridan believed he had acted prudently by recalling VI Corps and sending Torbert's two cavalry divisions back to Wright from Front Royal. But he wondered whether he should have even gone to Washington. He wondered whether the Rebels were planning a surprise.

Upon reaching the capital at 8 a.m. on October 17, Sheridan went directly to the War Department. Before he met with War Secretary Stanton and Army Chief of Staff Halleck, Sheridan requested that a special train be readied to take him back to Virginia at noon. He wished to complete his business at the War Department as speedily as possible. Perhaps he had a premonition of disaster; his
Personal Memoirs
don't say.
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Stanton and Halleck endorsed Sheridan's plan to send most of his army to Grant at Petersburg and to build a defensive line across the northern Valley. Two engineering officers—one of them Colonel George Thom, who had employed Sheridan in corduroying roads in Mississippi in 1862—were detailed to accompany him back to the Shenandoah and to assist in designing the defenses. His business in Washington completed, Sheridan left on the special train from Union Station at noon. By dusk, Sheridan's party was in Martinsburg, West Virginia, where it spent the night.

The next morning, October 18, Sheridan, with a three-hundred-man cavalry escort, set out on horseback for Winchester. But the two engineers from Washington—one of them overweight and the other “correspondingly light”—were unaccustomed to traveling by horseback, and it took the party most of the day to cover the twenty-eight miles to their destination. Before nightfall, Sheridan and the engineer officers surveyed the Winchester countryside for likely defensive positions.

A courier from General Wright at Cedar Creek reported to Sheridan that all was quiet. That night, he visited a friend, Aaron Griffith, and slept in the home of a local tobacco merchant, Lloyd Logan, who lived across the street from Griffith.
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JUST BEFORE 6 A.M. on October 19, Colonel Oliver Edwards, in charge of a VI Corps brigade on duty in Winchester, awakened Sheridan to report artillery fire coming from Cedar Creek. Sheridan was unconcerned; Wright's report from the previous night had said that XIX Corps was sending out a reconnaissance that morning. But Sheridan rose and dressed, anxious to return to his army.

Sheridan requested that the grooms saddle Rienzi, his towering black warhorse from Mississippi. After a quick breakfast, he and his escort left the Logan house. When, as they rode through Winchester, some townswomen mocked him and his escort by shaking their skirts at them, Sheridan worried that something might have happened to his army. At the edge of town, the sound of firing was louder, and he
stopped to listen. Riding to the top of a ridge, Sheridan saw his worst nightmare: his army in panicked retreat.

With Major George Forsyth, Captain Joseph O'Keefe, and a dozen troopers, Sheridan rode on toward Cedar Creek, shouting at the retreating soldiers that he encountered to turn back. Having broken a rowel on one of his spurs, he asked Forsyth to cut him a switch to urge on Rienzi. He lightly struck his horse's shoulder with the stick, and Rienzi at once broke into “that long swinging gallop, almost a run, which he seemed to maintain so easily and so endlessly—a most distressing gait for those who had to follow far.”

As they rode toward Cedar Creek, Forsyth closely watched Sheridan's face to try to fathom what he was thinking. When the turnpike, jammed with wagons and men, became impassable, they left it and galloped over the fields.

Sheridan was debating whether to reform his army in new lines to his rear, somewhere outside Winchester, or to strike back hard. Every atom of his being urged a counterstroke. He reasoned that his men had confidence in him because of the army's success in the Valley so far. Previously, he had always responded “at the slightest sign of trouble or distress” and had succeeded in turning temporary setbacks into stirring victories.