Terrible Swift Sword (32 page)

Cedar Creek concluded Sheridan's campaign against Early's army. When it began in August, he wrote, “we found our enemy boastful and confident, unwilling to acknowledge that the soldiers of the Union were their equal. . . . . When it closed . . . . this impression had been removed from his mind.”
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NOVEMBER 1864–MARCH 1865

ON NOVEMBER 28, 1864, Wesley Merritt's 1st Cavalry Division crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains at Ashby's Gap and, like destroying angels, swooped down on the farmland to the east. It was another punitive raid on “Mosby's Confederacy”—Loudoun County, the homeland of Lieutenant Colonel John Mosby's 43rd Battalion Partisan Rangers. Philip Sheridan had written to Major General Henry Halleck two days earlier, “I will soon commence on Loudoun County, and let them know there is a God in Israel. . . . . Those who live at home, in peace and plenty, want the duello part of this war to go on; but when they have to bear their burden by loss of property and comforts they will cry for peace.”
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Since Cedar Creek, the Rangers and other Confederate partisans and bushwhackers had continued to waylay couriers, ambush small Union detachments, and pillage and burn wagon trains. As a result, large cavalry escorts were required to ensure the
delivery of supplies. Urged by Ulysses Grant to devastate the countryside “so that it will not support Mosby's gang,” Sheridan was acting decisively.
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While the burning of the upper Valley in October had targeted the Confederacy's breadbasket, this mission of destruction took aim, for the second time since mid-August, on Mosby's support base. Sheridan ordered Merritt to burn all barns and mills, to drive off all livestock, and to “clear the country of forage and subsistence” that Mosby might use.
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While the raid was under way, Sheridan told Brigadier General John Stevenson, who was in command at Harper's Ferry, “Should complaints come in from the citizens of Loudoun County tell them that they have furnished too many meals to guerrillas to expect much sympathy.”
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For four days, Merritt's 4,000 cavalrymen desolated the countryside and filled the sky with black smoke. They spared the Unionist Quakers when they could, but no one else, slogging through slush, sleet, and snow to carry out their grim task. When the mission ended, Merritt's men had driven off or destroyed 3,000 to 4,000 sheep, 5,000 to 6,000 cattle, and nearly 1,000 hogs. They seized between five and seven hundred horses. A forage depot and several hundred tons of hay were destroyed, along with barns, stables, smokehouses, and corncribs. Losses totaled millions of dollars.

Despite these impressive numbers, Merritt was not entirely satisfied with the raid's results. “It was found next to impossible to come in contact with any guerrillas,” he wrote. The “Gray Ghost” and his men were famously able to seemingly materialize and vanish at will, baffling pursuit and all attempts to entrap them. Nor had the scorched-earth raid caused the farmers and townspeople whose property was destroyed to repent their support of Mosby's men and turn against them.

Still, Merritt's riders had so denuded Loudoun County of food and forage that Mosby was compelled to quit it. With Robert E. Lee's permission, he divided his command, sending half of his men to northeastern Virginia.
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IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING Cedar Creek, the Army of the Shenandoah had busied itself with small-bore operations such as these. Jubal Early's army had withdrawn nearly to Staunton, and it was being parceled out for Robert E. Lee's defense of Petersburg and Richmond. And so Sheridan had immersed himself in the pursuit of the Rebel partisans and guerrillas, in building a spy network composed of secret loyalists, and forming a credible intelligence-gathering unit: Major Henry K. Young's sixty scouts, who roved the countryside, often dressed in Rebel uniforms to obtain information more easily from loyal Confederate citizens.

Sheridan paid the scouts bonuses for information, after first cross-examining them to satisfy himself that they were telling the truth. Young, too, sometimes secretly trailed his men to ensure the veracity of their reports. Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Newhall, Sheridan's adjutant general, wrote that Young's men “were much more afraid of the general and of the major than they were of the enemy.”
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From his spy network, Sheridan learned that guerrilla leader Major Harry Gilmore was in Harrisonburg, thirty miles north of Staunton. He sent two of Young's scouts to shadow him. A few days later, they reported that Gilmore was staying in a house outside Moorefield, West Virginia, ninety miles southwest of Winchester. Two other scouts dispatched to Moorefield learned that Gilmore was planning to welcome twenty new recruits coming from Maryland. The scouts obtained detailed information about Gilmore's men, their numbers, and where they were camped.

In February 1865, Sheridan launched a daring effort to capture Gilmore. Young and twenty of his scouts set out for Moorefield, with three hundred Union cavalrymen following, fifteen miles to their rear. Young and his scouts galloped into Gilmore's camp, claiming to be the Maryland recruits and warning that Yankee troopers were after them. As Gilmore's men prepared to face the enemy horsemen, others led Young to Gilmore's room, where the guerrilla leader was in bed, asleep. Before Gilmore could snatch up the pistols that he kept under his pillow, he had become Young's prisoner.
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Days later, the Rebels struck back, seizing Generals George Crook and Benjamin Kelley while they slept at Crook's hotel headquarters in Cumberland, Maryland. Crook and Kelley were spirited to Richmond and later exchanged.
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LEE AND GRANT RECALLED units from the Shenandoah Valley to Petersburg. Major General Joseph Kershaw's division left on November 15. Two weeks later, VI Corps marched away to join Grant, followed by a division from Crook's VIII Corps; Crook's other division went to Cumberland, where Rebels captured Crook.

Confederate major general John Gordon's II Corps departed in mid-December. As he left the Shenandoah for the last time, Gordon described the blighted landscape: “Heaps of ashes, of half-melted iron axles and bent tires, were the melancholy remains of burnt barns and farm-wagons. . . . . Stone and brick chimneys [stood] alone in the midst of charred trees which had once shaded the porches of luxurious and happy homes.”

Gordon's departure left Early, as he went into winter quarters at Staunton, with just Brigadier General Gabriel Wharton's infantry division and Thomas Rosser's and Lunsford Lomax's small cavalry brigades. Sheridan, with an infantry division from XIX Corps and Alfred Torbert's three cavalry divisions, went into winter camp near Winchester.
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The War Department passed along information from West Virginia officials that Rosser was planning a cavalry attack on the B&O Railroad in that state. Rosser was not in West Virginia, Sheridan replied. He went on to say that if he reacted to the “always alarming” reports emanating from West Virginia, “I certainly would have my hands full,” and gratuitously added that West Virginia's authorities were “stupid in their duties and actions.”

War Secretary Edwin Stanton tartly pointed out that his department had forwarded the information to Sheridan in the belief that “such information might be useful and desired by you, as it is by other commanders who are your seniors.” In the future, added Stanton by way of chastisement, he would expect such correspondence “to be received with the respect due the Department of which you are a subordinate.”
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GRANT HAD LONG NAGGED Sheridan to destroy the Virginia Central Railroad near Gordonsville, thereby severing the Rebel supply line between western Virginia and Richmond. In December, Sheridan sent Torbert's cavalry divisions over the Blue Ridge Mountains to carry out Grant's orders. Torbert led Wesley Merritt's and William Powell's divisions through Chester Gap, while George Custer's division rode up the Valley toward Staunton.

The Confederates had the Union cavalry under surveillance from the moment it left camp and thwarted Torbert's raid at every turn. Rosser, in partial payback for Tom's Brook, surprised Custer's troopers in their camp near Lacy Springs before reveille in a sleet storm and drove them from their bivouac, capturing prisoners, horses, and equipment. Lomax turned Torbert away from Gordonsville. During the ride back to Winchester, Merritt's and Powell's divisions destroyed forage and cattle but suffered greatly from frostbite.
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IN THE VALLEY, HUNGER was abroad everywhere; the Yankees had destroyed the farmers' crops, burned their barns, and run off their livestock.

While Sheridan had pitilessly carried out the total-war policy that had caused this state of affairs, he also revealed a compassionate streak. On Christmas Day 1864, Sheridan sought the War Department's permission to share his rations with the Valley's citizens. Halleck refused to grant it. “While the men of Virginia are either
serving in the rebel ranks, or as bushwhackers are waylaying or murdering our soldiers, our Government must decline to support their wives and children,” he wrote.

Later in the winter, however, the government relented and sent emergency rations by train to Winchester. After the war, a claims commission awarded compensation to Union loyalists whose property Sheridan's army had destroyed.
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IN FEBRUARY 1865, GRANT once more ordered Sheridan to destroy the Virginia Central Railroad and the James River canal—and to then capture Lynchburg, the Confederates' southwestern Virginia arsenal. Afterward, circumstances dictating, Grant said, Sheridan either could march to North Carolina and join General William Sherman or return to Winchester.
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After balking for months at Grant's wishes for just such an expedition, Sheridan now obeyed without objection. He recognized that no more major fighting would occur in the Shenandoah Valley and that the war would soon be over. He did not want to miss its final act.

It is debatable whether Sheridan ever seriously considered marching to Lynchburg. He clearly did not intend to join Sherman, believing that the war's very last battles would be fought in southern Virginia. Grant, as he lately was wont to do with Sheridan, had laid out possible options, leaving it to Sheridan to decide how to proceed.

Sheridan knew that few Rebels remained to stop him from marching on Gordonsville. His female spy network in the southern Shenandoah Valley had informed him of the steady drain of men from Early's army in Staunton, leaving him with just 2,000 troops. One of his spies was a letter carrier who permitted Sheridan's scouts to read the mail that she couriered between the Valley and Baltimore. Another woman, who visited the Rebel camps often, had agreed to aid Sheridan on the condition that he obtain her husband's release from a Union war prison. Her information was so valuable that Sheridan also gave her money to set up her husband as a tinsmith in Baltimore.
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