Terrible Swift Sword (31 page)

Custer's 4,000 riders passed like a dark shadow over the Middletown meadows, the drumming of their horses' hooves insinuating its way into the awareness of combatants from both armies. To Gordon, it was “a dull, heavy swelling sound like the roaring of a distant cyclone, the omen of additional disaster.” The sound signaled to XIX Corps that it was time to make its leftward half turn. Cavalry and infantry together struck the left side of Early's army with tremendous force.

With shocking suddenness, the Confederate army crumbled, and then broke. By the time Gordon reached his corps, after his consultation with Early, it was too late. The Yankees were rolling up his flank “like a scroll. Regiment after regiment, brigade after brigade, in rapid succession was crushed and, like hard clots of clay under a pelting rain, the superb commands crumbled to pieces,” Gordon wrote.

Gordon attempted to make a stand on the Valley Pike, but Custer's cavalry overwhelmed his men. And then the last of Early's regiments broke and fled in panic into the twilight, “running as fast as a herd of wild, stampeded cattle,” a Rebel soldier wrote. Discarded packs and weapons marked the path of their retreat. A Confederate soldier remembered Early shouting angrily at his routed men, “Run, run, goddamn you, they will get you!”
⁴⁷

As the Rebels raced for their old gun pits on Fisher's Hill, with Sheridan's cavalry in full pursuit, Custer's men hemmed Gordon and his staff on three sides. On the fourth side was a cliff. “The alternatives were the precipice or Yankee prison,” wrote Gordon. He chose the precipice, plunging down it in the dark. Alone, he rode through the fields, seeking out his fellow Rebels, while avoiding the Yankees.
⁴⁸

 

MAJOR GENERAL STEPHEN DODSON Ramseur's division of Gordon's corps, fighting from behind a stone wall, was one of the stubborn holdouts. But Ramseur's
veteran North Carolinians and Virginians broke, too, when the twenty-seven-year-old major general, the youngest in the Confederate army, was shot through both lungs. He still wore on his breast the white flower he had pinned there that morning to celebrate the news of his daughter's birth. As he was sped in an ambulance wagon toward Fisher's Hill, Merritt's cavalrymen swooped down on the train in the dark with flashing sabers, capturing prisoners, cannons, wagons, and ambulances, one of them bearing Ramseur.
⁴⁹

The Yankees took Ramseur to the Belle Grove plantation—it had again become Sheridan's headquarters—where doctors pronounced his wound fatal and prescribed all the laudanum that he could handle. As Ramseur lay on his deathbed in the library, a parade of old acquaintances from West Point and the Old Army paid their last respects, including Sheridan, Custer, Merritt, and Captain Henry DuPont. Ramseur died the next morning. At his request, his enemies sent a lock of his hair to his widow.
⁵⁰

Another deeply felt loss, but on the Union side, was Charles Russell Lowell Jr., the popular, boyish-looking twenty-nine-year-old colonel. Wounded during the Confederates' morning attack, Lowell had continued to lead his cavalry brigade, despite being in great pain. During the Yankee counterattack, however, a sharpshooter shot him in the chest. Like Ramseur, Lowell lived until the next morning, succumbing after having dictated letters to his wife and friends.
⁵¹

 

AT BELLE GROVE PLANTATION, Sheridan and his top officers were celebrating their great victory around a blazing bonfire in the front yard when Custer galloped up to them at about 9 p.m. He leaped off his horse, grabbed Sheridan around the waist, and lifted him high. “By God, Phil!” he exclaimed. “We've cleaned them out of their guns and got ours back!” During the counterattack, Custer's men had captured the lion's share of the forty-eight guns taken—among them cannons seized that morning by the Rebels from Union batteries. One was a long, black rifle cannon—a replacement gun on which a wag at Tredegar Works in Richmond had presciently printed “Respectfully consigned to General Sheridan through General Early.”

As Sheridan had promised, his infantry corps returned to their camps that night. They discovered that the Confederates had stolen their food, tents, and blankets and, during their looting frenzy, stripped naked many of the Union dead. The hungry victors slept under the stars, “among dead comrades and dead enemies.”
⁵²

 

SHERIDAN SENT GRANT A brief report that night, followed by more detailed accounts over the next two days. “We have again been favored by a great victory—a victory won from disaster by the gallantry of our officers and men. . . . . The accident
of the morning turned to our advantage as much as though the whole movement had been planned.”

Early's army was at Mount Jackson, twenty-five miles past Fisher's Hill, and it was still retreating. “The road and country was covered with small arms, thrown away by the flying rebels, and other debris,” Sheridan told Grant, adding that “persons who left the Rebel army at Mount Jackson report it broken up and demoralized worse than it ever has been.”
⁵³

Upon learning of the victory, Major General George Meade wrote to Grant, “To achieve such results after having met the reverse he describes, is one of the most brilliant feats of the war.” Grant ordered a one-hundred-gun salute by his armies in Virginia and wrote to War Secretary Stanton, “Turning what bid fare [
sic
] to be a disaster into glorious victory stamps Sheridan what I have always thought of him, one of the ablest of Generals.”
⁵⁴

In a span of twelve hours, both armies at Cedar Creek had experienced the extremes of triumph and disaster as no other army had or would during the Civil War. The battle cost Sheridan's army nearly 6,000 casualties, twice Early's losses.
⁵⁵

 

SHERIDAN HAD MADE THE unlikely victory possible. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Wildes of VIII Corps observed that the Yankees triumphed “without receiving any reinforcements, save one man—Sheridan.”
⁵⁶

The rare “eleventh-hour victory” transformed Sheridan into one of the nation's best-known military leaders literally overnight. In Washington, DC, citizens paraded by torchlight through the White House grounds in homage to Sheridan and his men. Standing at an open window under the White House portico, President Abraham Lincoln proposed three cheers for Sheridan, adding, “While we are at it we may as well consider how fortunate it was for the secesh that Sheridan was a very little man. If he had been a large man, there is no knowing what he would have done with them!”
⁵⁷

Ten days later, Shakespearean actor Thomas Murdoch read Thomas Buchanan Read's new poem, “Sheridan's Ride,” for the first time at Pikes Opera House in Cincinnati. It was an instant sensation—as was Rienzi, portrayed as a nearly mythic steed that, “like a barque fed with furnace ire,/Swept on, with his wild eye full of fire.” When horse and rider reached their destination, Rienzi “seemed to the whole great army to say:/‘I have brought you Sheridan all the way/From Winchester down to save the day.'”

“Sheridan's Ride” was widely reprinted in newspapers across the North. Read, who was also an accomplished artist, later made an oil painting depicting the famous ride. Thirty thousand people viewed the painting during the first month of its exhibition at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.
⁵⁸

 

CEDAR CREEK SILENCED THOSE who still doubted, after General William Sherman's capture of Atlanta and Sheridan's victories at Winchester and Fisher's Hill, that President Lincoln would be reelected. As recently as August, Lincoln had glumly predicted that voters, weary of a war seemingly without end, would probably vote him out of office, replacing him with someone who would negotiate a peace with the South. But the battlefield triumphs of September and October had reaffirmed the electorate's faith in Lincoln's pursuit of total victory. He ultimately won 212 electoral votes to 21 for the Democratic candidate—Lincoln's former commanding general George McClellan.
⁵⁹

The president's congratulatory note to Sheridan conveyed his relief and gratitude. “I tender to you and your brave army the thanks of the nation, and my own personal admiration and gratitude, for the month's operations in the Shenandoah Valley; and especially for your splendid work of October 19, 1864.”

Late during the night following the battle, Sheridan awoke in his tent to find Assistant War Secretary Charles A. Dana standing beside his bed with a letter from the war secretary. Dana had traveled to Cedar Creek from Washington to deliver it personally. “In the presence of a few sleepy aides-de-camp and of my own tired escort, I presented to Sheridan his commission as major general of the regular army,” wrote Dana, adding that the groggy Sheridan said little but appeared satisfied with the promotion.

Two and a half years earlier, Sheridan was an unknown captain in Mississippi, commanding a cavalry regiment. He was now the fourth-ranking officer in the army, behind only Grant, Sherman, and Meade.

Sheridan obtained brevet major general promotions for Wright, Merritt, and Custer. Custer and the men who captured five Rebel battle flags at Cedar Creek were given the honor of carrying them and eight others to the War Department in Washington. They were loudly cheered when they rode up Pennsylvania Avenue in an omnibus with a flag protruding from each window.

After his midnight promotion, Sheridan and Dana rode the next morning through the Army of the Shenandoah. “I was struck, in riding through the lines, by the universal demonstration of personal affection for Sheridan,” Dana wrote. “Everybody seemed personally to be attached to him. He was like the most popular man after an election—the whole force everywhere honored him.”

When Dana asked Sheridan about it, Sheridan replied, “My practice has always been to fight in the front rank. It is the right thing to do. . . . . [The men] know that when the hard pinch comes I am exposed just as much as any of them.”
⁶⁰

 

“THE YANKEES GOT WHIPPED and we got scared,” Early remarked to some of his officers after Cedar Creek.

There was some truth in Early's terse assessment, but the blame for his army's third defeat in a month was heaped on him alone by Southern citizens, government officials, and writers for the South's leading newspapers. They vilified Early as incompetent and inefficient and unfairly accused of him being a drunkard and a coward. His many critics either did not know, or had conveniently forgotten, that Early, with an army of fewer than 20,000 men, for months had tied up 40,000 elite Union combat troops sent from Petersburg, limiting Grant's movements there. But as the Confederacy's hopes for victory waned, the demand for scapegoats waxed.

Early's generals were some of his harshest critics. Gordon, who had urged Early to sustain the attacks on VI Corps, believed that if “we had concentrated our fire and assaults . . . . they would have destroyed the Sixth Corps hours before Sheridan reached the field.” He disputed Early's assertion that combat soldiers had stopped to loot, noting that an army chaplain had told him that the plundering was done by disabled troops following the army. Rosser, the cavalry commander, said that Early “had no idea of managing cavalry and had very little respect for its efficiency and a low estimate of its value. Yet, after all, it was the cavalry that destroyed him.” Brigadier General Clement Evans wrote in his diary, “The victory is due to the plan and management of Gordon, the defeat is due to Early. When shall we be relieved of his heavy incubus? . . . . It was Early's miserable generalship which lost the battle.”
⁶¹

In his report to Robert E. Lee, Early confessed, “The rout was as thorough and disgraceful as ever happened to our army. The state of things was distressing and mortifying beyond measure.”
⁶²
Early blamed the debacle on the small size of his cavalry force and his troops' “bad conduct”—their ransacking of the Yankee camps and failure to withstand the Yankee counterattack. His officers should have stopped the pillaging, but they had not. “The truth is, we have very few field or company officers worth anything,” Early sourly wrote. Even when Sheridan counterattacked, his army would have yet prevailed “if my directions had been strictly complied with, and my troops had awaited my orders to retire.” Almost pathetically, Early wrote that he had “labored faithfully to gain success, and I have not failed to expose my person and to set an example to my men.” He offered to “surrender [his] command into other hands” if Lee believed it would serve the army's best interests.
⁶³

For all its blame laying and self-pity, Early's report never mentioned the singular decision, made by him alone, that had lost the battle: his failure to press the attack late in the morning. But Early knew in his heart that he should not have stopped. When he handed his report to topographer Jedediah Hotchkiss to carry to Richmond, he instructed Hotchkiss to not tell Lee that “we ought to have advanced in the morning at Middletown,” admitting that “we ought to have done so.”
⁶⁴

 

SHERIDAN'S TRIUMPH EARNED HIM not only accolades from Lincoln and Grant but also the respect and friendship of Sherman, the other member of the triumvirate that would win the war. In a letter to his father-in-law, former Ohio senator Thomas Ewing, Sherman wrote, “Sheridan, as you rightly say, the poor Irish boy of Perry County, is making his mark. . . . . Sheridan is like Grant, a persevering terrier dog and won't be shaken off. He too, is honest, modest, plucky and smart enough.”
⁶⁵

Sherman also wrote a letter to Sheridan. “You have youth and vigor, and this single event has given you a hold upon an army that gives you a future better than older men can hope for. . . . . I shall expect you on any and all occasions to make bloody results.”
⁶⁶