Custer took over his division in the midst of the scouring of the valley. The victories at Winchester and Fisher’s Hill had opened the way to the upper Shenandoah and Luray Valleys, and Sheridan pushed his troops eighty-five miles to Staunton to commence the scorched-earth campaign. Union forces burned barns and foodstuffs, destroyed infrastructure, razed fields, and reduced one of the breadbaskets of the South to a charred, smoking ruin. The London Guardian reported on Grant’s “characteristically cruel and ruthless” order to “do all possible damage to the railroads and the crops, to carry off the farming stock and the negroes, to take all available measures for preventing the cultivation of the soil, and, in view of the probability that the war would last for another year, to convert it into a ‘barren waste,’ where not even a blade of grass should be permitted to grow.”18
On September 30, Custer reported that his command “destroyed 9 large mills and about 100 barns yesterday—the mills were filled with flour and wheat; the barns were filled with threshed wheat and hay. I also destroyed a large number of stacks of hay and grain found standing in the fields.” His men also captured over 150 head of beef and 500 sheep. “No dwelling houses were destroyed or interfered with,” he noted, though this policy was sometimes violated.19 The effect was devastating; by one estimate Custer’s and Merritt’s divisions eliminated enough wheat in a single day to feed the entire Confederate Army for a year.20
Sheridan reported to Grant, “The whole country from the Blue Ridge to the North Mountain has been rendered untenable for a rebel army. . . . The people here are getting sick of the war. Heretofore they have had no reason to complain, because they have been living in great abundance.”21
“Waving fields of yellow grain have been made a perfect waste, and overburdened barns burned to the ground,” the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph reported. “The smiling valley of Virginia is now a desert for ninety miles.”22 Assistant Secretary of War Charles Henry Dana visited the valley and wrote approvingly, “[I]t is all a desert there; nothing is left except what corn was standing in the fields. All barns and their contents have been destroyed, and all stacks of hay and grain. All the cattle have been driven out, big and little, horned, hairy, and woolly. . . . Sheridan and Sherman are generals after the style I have always looked for in one respect at least—they devastate indeed.”23
For Southerners the trauma of the burning mirrored Sherman’s destructive march through Georgia. Captain Robert E. Park of the 12th Alabama regiment witnessed the devastation and bemoaned the “barbarous style of the barn-burner Sheridan and his robber followers. Sheridan laid the lovely Valley of Virginia to waste. . . . Such is Yankee civilization, humanity and Christianity!” Park wrote that it is a “matter of sincere congratulation that our chivalrous Southern leaders . . . are made of far different material from that which makes up the bloody butcher Grant, the bummer Sherman, the barn-burner Sheridan, the mulatto-women-lover Custer, and the degraded Beast Butler.”24 Samuel Newton Berryhill, a Mississippian known as “The Backwoods Poet,” encapsulated Southern attitudes in a poem entitled “Sheridan,” which read,
From Shenandoah’s valley fair,
Borne on the chilly midnight air,
There comes a wail of wild despair—
Sheridan.
Women and babes—the old, the lame,
Are shivering round the smouldering flame,
And quivering lips pronounce thy name,
Sheridan. . . .
Destruction o’er that land has past,
And left the fields a blackened waste;
No food is there for man nor beast—
Sheridan. . . .
The “crow” that flies on pinions fleet,
Need take no “rations” there to eat;
For Yankee flesh shall be his meat,
Sheridan.
Confederate cavalry, particularly troops commanded by Thomas Rosser, dogged Sheridan as he commenced his withdrawal from the ruined valley. Rosser joined Early on October 5, fresh from the successful “Beefsteak Raid” outside Richmond, in which rebel cavalrymen rustled 2,500 head of Union cattle from Grant’s rear and herded them back to Confederate lines. Rosser was optimistically dubbed the “Savior of the Valley,” and his self-named “Laurel Brigade” was expected to punish the Yankee invaders.25 Rosser was given two more brigades to fill out a division and began pursuing Sheridan north.
The rebels were outraged at the scouring of the valley and eager for revenge. They harassed Union columns with hit-and-run attacks, picking off stragglers, turning back patrols, and generally keeping up the pressure. At first Rosser tracked the Federals at what Sheridan called “a respectful distance,” but by the third day of the withdrawal he “had the temerity to annoy [the Union] rear guard considerably.” Rosser dealt the Federal cavalry some smart blows on October 7 and 8, and “tired of these annoyances,” Sheridan wrote, “I concluded to open the enemy’s eyes in earnest.” He sought to finish the “Savior of the Valley” and instructed Torbert that he “expected him either to give Rosser a drubbing next morning or get whipped himself.”26
Custer had ridden six miles ahead of the army but was called back late on October 8, taking up a position west of the town of Tom’s Brook Crossing with orders to “attack and whip the enemy” in concert with Merritt’s division. Custer moved toward Rosser on Back Road, with Merritt’s division to his left along the Valley Pike facing Major General Lunsford Lomax’s rebel cavalry. Sheridan watched the action unfold from a perch atop Round Hill north of town, expecting his men to “inflict on the enemy the sharp and summary punishment his rashness had invited.”27
The Confederates were outnumbered, but Rosser was confident. “I’ll drive [the Federals] into Strasburg [eight miles down the valley] by 10 o’clock,” he vowed. Rosser had taken a strong position along Spiker’s Hill, a steep ridge on the south bank of Tom’s Run. “Near the base of this ridge the enemy had posted a strong force of dismounted cavalry behind stone fences and barricades of rails, logs, &c.,” Custer wrote, “while running along near the summit was a second and stronger line of barricades, also defended by dismounted cavalry. On the crest of the ridge the enemy had six guns in position, strongly supported by columns of cavalry.”28
The battle began early the morning of the ninth when a brigade under Pennington, then a volunteer colonel commanding the 3rd New Jersey Cavalry, pushed Rosser’s pickets near the town of Mt. Olive back onto the main body. An artillery duel commenced, with neither side gaining significant advantage. Custer’s guns were plagued by faulty ammunition but held their own. On the eastern side of the field, Merritt’s division moved to battle, with Devin’s brigade exploiting a gap between the two rebel formations along a creek called Jordan Run and flanking Lomax.
Custer sent Pennington forward with a strong line of mounted skirmishers to feel the enemy. From the stubborn resistance, it was clear that Rosser was in a strong position. Under close observation by the foe, Custer prepared two brigades under Pierce and Kidd for a frontal assault. When his line was ready, Custer rode out in front of his command, stopped his horse ahead of the line, doffed his wide-brimmed hat, and saluted Rosser with a flourish. Kidd wrote, “Custer and Rosser, in war and peace, were animated by the same knightly spirit.”29
“You see that officer down there,” Rosser said to his staff, watching the salute. “That’s General Custer, the Yanks are so proud of, and I intend to give him the best whipping to-day that he ever got. See if I don’t.”30
“The entire line was ordered forward,” Custer wrote, “and when sufficiently near the enemy the charge was sounded.” It was a difficult assault, with Tom’s Brook running across the field in front of them and the strong emplacements along Spiker’s Hill. But Custer wasn’t simply dashing in recklessly with drawn sabers. While Rosser’s attention was fixed on his old West Point chum, Custer had already dispatched the 18th Pennsylvania, supported by the 8th and 22nd New York, to swing far to the right to mount a separate attack. They crossed Tom’s Brook upstr
eam and thundered in on Rosser’s left flank and rear as Custer led the other two brigades forward on the front and right. “The enemy seeing his flank turned and his retreat cut off broke in the utmost confusion,” Custer wrote, “and sought safety in headlong flight.”31
Custer’s men rushed after the retreating rebels for two miles where they formed a brigade to check the Union onslaught. The Federal cavalry were pushed back at first, but Pennington and Wells reformed their brigades for a massed charge. “Gen. Custer, attended by his staff and escort, dashed forward with his flag in the most heroic manner,” a battlefield reporter noted, “and joined with his command in a grand charge and chase for the enemy’s artillery. It was an extremely interesting and exciting scene.”32
“Before this irresistible advance the enemy found it impossible to stand,” Custer wrote. “Once more he was compelled to trust his safety to the fleetness of his steed rather than the metal of his saber.”
Sheridan, who watched the battle from Round Hill, said, “The result was a general smash-up of the entire Confederate line, the retreat quickly degenerating into a rout the like of which was never before seen.” The Federals captured eleven pieces of artillery, a few of which were brand new and seeing their first action. They also bagged over three hundred prisoners, a herd of cattle, and numerous wagons and supply trains. Among them were General Rosser’s headquarters’ wagons and papers and some of the items that Custer had lost at Trevilian Station.
The Confederates fled over twenty miles to Woodstock, and the battle soon became known as “The Woodstock Races.” Thomas Munford called it “the greatest disaster that ever befell our cavalry during the whole war,” based on the loss of so many guns and wagons.33 Custer summed up the rebel loss, saying they were “deficient in confidence, courage, and a just cause.”34 Jubal Early notified Robert E. Lee that “the enemy’s cavalry is so much superior to ours, both in numbers and equipment. . . . and it is impossible for ours to compete with his.”35 Commenting on the performance of Rosser’s “Laurel Brigade,” Early said tartly, “The laurel is a running vine.”
That night Custer donned Rosser’s captured uniform and paid a visit to the sleeping Brigadier General William Henry Seward Jr., son of the secretary of state. He woke the startled brigadier to announce that he was Rosser and Seward was his prisoner.36 The next day, Rosser sent Custer a note:
Dear Fanny,
You may have made me take a few steps back today, but I will be even with you tomorrow. Please accept my good wishes and this little gift—a pair of your draws captured at Trevilian Station.
Tex
Custer sent Rosser’s dress uniform coat to Libbie and replied to Tex:
Dear friend,
Thanks for setting me up in so many new things, but would you please direct your tailor to make the coat tails of your next uniform a trifle shorter.
Best regards G.A.C.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“LET THE SWORD DECIDE THE CONTEST”
After Tom’s Brook, the War Department sent Sheridan a note of thanks for his “brilliant victories” over the rebel cavalry, and the New York Herald reported that “it is believed that no organized Rebel forces will have the temerity to show themselves while General Sheridan is in the Valley.”1
Ten days after Tom’s Brook, Sheridan’s men were encamped a mile and a half southwest of Middletown, in a defensive position along Cedar Creek. Custer’s division was spread out over five or six miles, securing the right flank. On the night of October 17, Rosser had led a five-hundred-man raiding force to infiltrate Union lines and kidnap Custer, but they hit the wrong camp.2 Private George Perkins of the Sixth New York Independent Battery saw the general the next day: “October 18, 1864: Met Gen. Custer and staff, who were going out doubtless to visit the pickets. I had a better view of him than ever before, and was struck by the extreme brightness of his yellow hair which he wears long in ringlets. He looks quite old in face in comparison with the remainder of his appearance.”3
Sheridan had been called back to Washington days earlier and was spending the night in Winchester prior to his return. He had planned to launch a major cavalry action back into the valley after Tom’s Brook, but he abandoned the idea after a dispatch was captured from Longstreet to Early saying that reinforcements were arriving and to “be ready to advance on Sheridan as soon as my forces get up, and we can crush him.” To Early this sounded like a fine idea.
During the night of October 18–19, Early quietly moved three columns of over twenty thousand men toward the Union position on Cedar Creek. The night was foggy and still, so peaceful that one reporter said, “Even the mules seemed to be dozing.” The first sign of trouble came at four in the morning when rebel forces attacked Union pickets on the extreme right of the army. Custer sounded “to horse” and readied his command for battle, but after the Confederates seized the ford at Cupp’s Mill, they stopped their attack. Custer reported the incident and stayed at the ready, but for the next hour nothing else happened.
The attack on the right was a ruse to divert attention from the Union left. There, troops from Major General John B. Gordon’s corps, spearheaded by a division led by Custer’s West Point friend Stephen Dodson Ramseur, surprised and drove back Union pickets into the camps of Crook’s VIII Corps. The rush of the enemy through the darkness and fog was so sudden and disorienting that Confederates were inside the Union perimeter before alarms could be raised. Hundreds of men were taken prisoner without firing a shot, many in their bedclothes. VIII Corps fell back in disorder, and the rebels pushed on to hit Emory’s XIX Corps just over the Valley Pike. “The rebels hesitated not,” a reporter wrote, “but pressed on, as a dashing cataract, over all barriers, completely surprising, and in a measure stampeding, the left of General Sheridan’s line.”4
The men of XIX Corps were also surprised, and their defense was hampered by rebel gunfire and the retreat of VIII Corps through their ranks. By then the sun was coming up. As the mist dispersed, Union troops saw the rebels under Ramseur had already flanked them and were in their rear. XIX Corps stood longer than VIII Corps had, but gradually began to break under the pressure on their left and from Kershaw’s division on their front. General Emory had his horse shot from under him as he tried to form his troops against the determined assault. Unformed Union troops retreated, and supply trains were taken quickly north along the road to Winchester to keep them out of enemy hands.
General Horatio G. Wright, commanding the army in Sheridan’s absence, ordered XIX and VI Corps under Major General James B. Ricketts to form on high ground on the west side of Meadow Brook, a tributary to Cedar Creek running west of Middletown. VI Corps set up a defense and fought stubbornly, but could not hold and soon retreated in good order.
Custer learned of the rolling disaster on the left shortly after daybreak from Torbert’s aide Captain Coppinger. He brought in his scattered command and helped firm up the defense on the right and manage the retreat, rallying men who were “falling back in disorder and without any sufficient or apparent cause.”5 General Wright, bleeding from a musket ball wound to his chin, ordered Custer to the extreme left of the army to help Merritt’s 1st Division stem the enemy advance. Custer left behind three regiments under Colonel Wells to manage the right, which thus far had not seen hard fighting.
The cavalry, particularly Merritt’s men, helped secure the left flank while the infantry retreated and reformed a mile north of Middletown. Torbert praised the 1st Division for its determination, saying that while “many a horse and rider was made to bite the dust, they held their ground like men of steel.” Custer’s men engaged the enemy with sharpshooting and artillery. Around 10:30 the fighting began to wind down, and was carried on mainly as an exchange of artillery fire. Rebel troops were resting from their long night’s march and morning’s fight, looting supplies from the Federal stores they captured. Had the battle ended then, it would have been a resounding Confederate victory. Union forces had been pushed back two miles; given up hundreds of prisone
rs, two dozen guns, and numerous wagons and supply trains; and suffered heavy casualties.
But around the time the fighting paused, cheers could be heard behind the Union lines, faintly at first, then growing stronger. Sheridan had appeared, riding a black pacer named Rienzi, waving his hat as he sped down the line, greeted with wild enthusiasm. Early that morning in Winchester, Sheridan had heard reports of artillery fire in the distance, but he assumed they were from a planned reconnaissance. But at 9:00 a.m. while he was riding through the town, he heard unmistakable sounds of battle. As he hurried south, “the head of the fugitives appeared in sight,” he wrote, “trains and men coming to the rear with appalling rapidity.” As the New York Herald put it, he “found a scene of skedaddles.” Sheridan halted the retreat and, “taking twenty men from my escort, I pushed on to the front.”6
Sheridan’s dash to Cedar Creek became part of American military legend. American poet and portraitist Thomas Buchanan Read wrote a poem about the twenty-mile ride (actually closer to twelve miles), which was as much about the horse as the man, and rendered a painting to go along with it. “He seemed to the whole great army to say, / ‘I have brought you Sheridan all the way / From Winchester, down to save the day!’” wrote Read. Rienzi, named for a raid Sheridan led on Rienzi, Mississippi, was renamed Winchester after this ride.
Sheridan restored order to the scene and began to reform his army. The right flank was coming under pressure as rebel infantry and Rosser’s cavalry pressed Wells’s brigade. Sheridan immediately shifted the 3rd Division to meet the threat, saying, “Go in, Custer!”
A gap had opened between the enemy cavalry and infantry. Custer, exploiting the rolling ground, pushed Pierce’s battery to a position close to where the enemy had massed. “Being undiscovered,” he wrote, “I caused my battery to open suddenly at short range; at the same time charged with about three regiments. The effect was surprising and to none more so than to our enemies, who, being entirely off their guard, were thrown into the utmost confusion by this sudden and unexpected attack.” The cavalry charge by Pennington’s brigade threw back Rosser’s men for a mile and ended the threat to the right.
The Real Custer Page 15