by Bruce Catton
So Grant and Sheridan finished their talk and Grant went back to City Point, and at two o'clock on the morning of September 19 Wilson's cavalry trotted down to one of the fords of the Opequon, went spattering across the shallows, drove in the Rebel outposts, and rode on to feel the main Southern defensive line, horse artillery banging away hard, dismounted troopers laying down a sharp fire from repeating carbines.
The Opequon fords lay perhaps six miles east of Winchester and the VI Corps came over the water at dawn, the sun coming up behind their backs, dirty smoke piling up in the gray sky to the west. The veterans looked and listened, and one of them wrote that they "heard that sound which I believe strikes a chill through the bravest man that lives, and causes him to feel that his heart is sinking down, down till it seems to drop into his boots. I mean the dull rustling of air which is hardly more than a vibration, but which to the experienced listener betokens artillery firing at a distance. When one expects soon to join in the exercise, that signal is not inspiriting." 8
According to Sheridan's battle orders the VI Corps was to come up on the heels of Wilson's cavalry, with Emory's and Crook's men close behind and the rest of the cavalry swinging in a half circle to come down on Winchester from the north. Speedy movement was essential. Early had scattered his forces, and most of his men were spread out somewhere between Winchester and Martinsburg. Perhaps a third of his infantry, supported by artillery and cavalry, was posted in the lines east of Winchester covering the road from the Opequon. If that infantry force could be smashed quickly, Early's troops north of town could be cut off and his army could be destroyed piecemeal. So the VI Corps pressed along and the offensive was under way at last.
Unfortunately, it was not under way very fast. Orders had gone awry somehow and there was an infernal traffic tie-up, and the army moved at a crawl. The road led up the length of a narrow valley, and in some way the whole baggage and supply train of the VI Corps, which was supposed to be sidetracked east of the creek, inserted itself into the line of march right behind the leading infantry divisions, with corps artillery behind it and all the rest of the army to follow. The infantry column thus was cut in half by miles of slow-moving wagons, ambulances, caissons, battery forges, and other lumbering vehicles, and the cumbersome procession could neither be parked by the roadside nor turned around and sent back, because road and valley were too narrow.
The foot soldiers left the road and tried to pass this tangle, but they found themselves scrambling along steep hillsides, through trees and underbrush, creeping up toward the fight at a rate not much better than a mile an hour. The slopes were clogged, as a man in the XIX Corps remembered, with "the hundreds of men who belong to an army but never fight— the cooks, the officers' servants, the hospital gangs, the quartermaster's people, the "present sick' and the habitual skulkers'—not to mention various regiments of cavalry which had been told to wait by the road and let the infantry advance.0
The result was a bungled battle which nearly became a humiliating defeat. Early had plenty of time to pull his scattered divisions together, and when Sheridan finally attacked it was nearly noon, instead of 6 A.M. as he had planned. Even at noon he had only half of his infantry on hand, and a good deal less than half of his artillery, and his battle line had not gone far before it ran into trouble. The three divisions of the VI Corps were going in side by side, with one of Emory's divisions on their right, and somehow the two corps lost contact and let a gap develop, and the Rebels saw it and made a hard counterattack that stopped the VI Corps and sent Emory's men flying.
Emory's other division came up to check the rout, and Upton brought his brigade over to help plug the gap, and after a while the situation was stabilized. Nevertheless, by midafternoon the Federals were doing little more than hold their own, and they had had severe losses. Upton was knocked off his horse by a shell fragment and Sheridan told him to go to the rear and get into a hospital. Upton disobeyed—it was his theory that combat commanders ought to be up front with their troops—and after a doctor put a tourniquet on his wounded leg he got in a stretcher and made the stretcher-bearers take him along with the brigade through the rest of the battle.10
Meanwhile Sheridan was getting the mess straightened out
He was up and down the field in a fury, his dark face aglow, dripping perspiration, his eyes snapping, his black horse all flecked with foam. He had his staff officers take details and comb the woods for stragglers and shirkers, and these recruiting parties caught the spark and went through the underbrush with sabers swinging, herding their captives forward, making brand-new infantry companies out of them, and leading them into the fight with mighty saber thwackings for all laggards. A Connecticut officer who watched them chuckled that he had not seen so much spanking since he was a schoolboy.11
While the stragglers were being rounded up Sheridan demanded recapture of the ground which had been lost to the Rebel counterattack. This job fell chiefly to the 8th Vermont, a veteran regiment whose Colonel Stephen Thomas had once been a leading Democratic politician, stoutly opposed to all coercion of the South. Recently he had gone home on furlough and his former party associates had chided him for deserting the true faith. "Thomas, you've changed," they complained. "We haven't." A true Vermonter, Thomas replied: "Fools never do."
Now he was about to lead his regiment across a meadow and into a smoky grove of embattled Rebels, and the prospect was not inviting. Thomas sized it up, then rode out in front of his regiment, color-bearers beside him, and in his powerful spellbinder's voice he thundered:
"Boys, if you ever pray, the time to pray has come. Pray now, remember Ethan Allen and old Vermont, and well drive 'em to hell! Come on, old Vermont!" 12
Then he wheeled about, his sword held high, and rode at a walk toward the Rebel firing line, without a backward glance. Old Vermont followed, cheering, and a regiment or two in the XIX Corps jumped up to join in the charge, and the Southern battle line began to draw back.
Sheridan went galloping over to the left of his own line, to where General Getty led a division of the VI Corps. Sheridan had at last got Crook's infantry out of the ravine and they were going into battle formation far over on the right, and beside them Sheridan's chief of cavalry, General Alfred Torbert, had two good mounted divisions ready to go, and Sheridan's army now formed a great crescent, five miles from tip to tip, far overlapping the Confederate left flank. It was Sheridan's idea that this crescent must now move forward, and when he came up to Getty—felt hat gripped in one hand, nobody riding with him but a lone orderly—he was all dust and sweat and fire, and he was shouting:
"General, I've put Torbert in on the right and told him to give 'em hell, and he's doing itl Crook too is on the right, and giving it to 'em. Press them, General—they'll run!" He swore a tremendous oath and repeated: "Press them, General —I know they'll run!" 13
And now it was late afternoon, and behind the piled-up battle smoke the sky was streaked with crimson and pale green and yellow in a wild autumn sunset. The Federal battle line was rolling at last, and there was a tumult of artillery and musketry and cheering men—and suddenly it was like the old days, and there was a color and a shine and a drama to combat once more, and if battle was as terrible as ever it had at least begun to sparkle again.
Now and then as the line advanced a check would develop somewhere. Then one of Sheridan's staff would come up at a pounding gallop, to ride the length of the line pointing with his naked saber at the Rebel battle line, all gesture and compelling movement, saying never a word, and the line would lunge forward again. To the north could be seen Crook's battle line—a whole army corps tramping along in perfect order, skirmishers out in front, battle flags leaning forward, the ranks closing faultlessly as wounded men fell out, no one firing yet, every man yelling at the top of his voice.
Upton on his stretcher brought his brigade over to help Colonel Thomas and Old Vermont, and they took the Rebel position, chasing the Southern marksmen out of the wood and away from the hilltop they had b
een holding. The Vermonters drew up behind a stone wall to catch their breath, and suddenly a company officer gestured with his sword and cried: "Boys! Look at that!"
Beyond the lower ground in their front and to their right, two or three miles away, distinct in the clear sunset light, they saw what one man recalled as "a sight to be remembered a life-time"—two divisions of Yankee cavalry massed in solid columns, drawn sabers flashing in the sun like streaks of flame, thundering down at a full gallop to strike the flank and rear of the Confederate line. Southern artillery fired desperately to break the charge, but the charge could not be stopped. The outflanked Confederate line curled up, and the cavalry took guns and flags and prisoners, the squadrons riding wildly over broken fields after fugitive Confederates.
From their hilltop the Vermonters saw it, and they started forward again, and suddenly Sheridan was riding ahead of them, while Rebel bullets searched the dusk. The men saw him and cheered madly, and he swung his hat to them and called back: "Boys, this is just what I expected!"14
Most of the Union soldiers who were in that fight actually got a firsthand, close-up view of Sheridan before the day ended. This was a new thing for a Yankee army, since the commanding general was usually an off-stage presence rarely seen in battle. Sheridan seemed to appear from nowhere, attended by the solitary orderly who carried Sheridan's personal battle flag—a little swallow-tailed banner, half red and half white, bearing the two stars of a major general.
The experience of the 12th Connecticut was typical. The regiment was drawn up in a field, waiting for fresh ammunition, when an officer rode up to ask why they were standing there. While a regimental officer was explaining, a shell burst almost directly over the head of the mounted man. He was unhurt, and as the smoke blew away he called out to the men: "That's all right, boys—no matter—we can lick 'em!" And up and down the line men passed the word: "That's Sheridan!" and they cheered and laughed and waved their caps. Sheridan waved, told them to move forward as soon as they got their ammunition, and then went cantering off.15
The last Confederate resistance ended and darkness came and the cavalry rode hard through Winchester, storming at the Rebel rear guard. Early got his men and most of his possessions away clean, and he was fully entitled to boast that he had fought well against heavy odds, inflicting more loss than he received and balking his foe's attempt to cut off his retreat and destroy his army. It was also true that during the first half of the day the Federal program had been handled with an absolute minimum of skill.16 Yet somehow these facts were not in the least important.
What was important was that the war now was on the upgrade. Sherman had taken Atlanta and sprightly old Admiral Farragut had broken into Mobile Bay, and now the jaunty Rebel army in the valley had been broken and sent streaming off in defeat; and here was the point of rebound for the whole war. The Chicago platform might bewail failure and call for immediate peace, but now the war very clearly was not a failure. Since spring the Confederacy's one hope had been that the people of the North would get tired and quit After Winchester that hope no longer had any roots.
Sheridan followed up his victory. His army went along the Valley Pike, and just south of Strasburg, where a roll of high ground known as Fisher's Hill cuts across the Valley from mountain to mountain, the Confederates made a stand. Sheridan lined up his troops, telling them to keep up a heavy fire whether or not they saw anything to shoot at, and while he bluffed a frontal attack he swung Crook's corps far to the west and brought it in on the Confederate flank. The blow was struck at dusk on September 22, and the whole Rebel line collapsed, losing twelve guns and a thousand prisoners.
Once again the Federal storming columns going up the slope found Sheridan dashing across their front, orderly and battle flag at his heels, Sheridan's black bullet head bare in the breeze: and always he was waving the men on, calling "Come on! Don't stop!" Once he came on a brigade which was winded and had stopped to pant, and he reined up and gestured toward the retreating Confederates, shouting: "Run, boys, run! Don't wait to forml Don't let em stop!" Some soldier piped up to tell him that for the moment they were just too bushed to run, to which Sheridan called back: "If you can't run, then holler!" And holler they did, while the general rode off to press the pursuit.
There was a note to all of this that these Union troops were not used to: a note of triumph assured, a driving flaming will to victory that would stop for no obstacles and accept no excuses. The men responded to it, and wherever Sheridan went now he was greeted by passionate cheers. A VI Corps veteran wrote that ever since McClellan's day it had been a point of pride with his outfit not to cheer any officers—but Sheridan was different, and "tumultuous hurrahs came unbidden from the bottom of every heart and conventional restraint was forgotten." 17
While Early's main body had been trying to hold on at Fisher's Hill, the gray cavalry had been on the other side of the Massanutten Ridge, encamped at Front Royal. Sheridan sent in young General Wilson with his cavalry division to drive them out, and Wilson made his attack in the dense fog of an early morning, splashing through the Shenandoah fords and forming line of battle on the outskirts of the town.
No one could see thirty yards in the gray murk and Wilson was afraid his units would lose touch, so he passed the word that when his own buglers sounded the charge all of the other buglers in the division should pick the call up and repeat it. Since every battery, troop, regiment, and brigade in the division had its own buglers, this meant a lot of music; and the dripping quiet of early dawn was broken by the insistent notes of the charge, blown first by the men at division headquarters and immediately picked up all along the line, until 250 buglers were blaring away together, and the high imperious notes went echoing along the Blue Ridge until it sounded like the voice of ten thousand trumpets. Under it there was a great thunder of shod hooves on soft earth, and the Yankee cavalry went in on the gallop, sabers swinging, every man shouting with the jubilant confidence of an army that has begun to feel that it is invincible. Front Royal was taken and the gray troopers went back up the Valley, and Wilson s regiments assembled in the town and agreed that it was a great day in the morning.18
4 No More Doubt
Thurlow Weed, Republican boss of New York State, told Secretary Seward that "the conspiracy against Mr. Lincoln has collapsed," and those who had been looking for a hard-war man decided to climb on the band wagon. Salmon P. Chase, convinced at last that destiny would not tap his shoulder this year, began to make speeches urging Lincoln's re-election. Michigan's Senator Zach Chandler, bitter-end abolitionist, moved to make a little deal; after which John Charles Fremont, petulant darling of the Republican radicals' lunatic fringe, withdrew his third-party candidacy for the presidency. By Chandler's deal or by sheer coincidence, within forty-eight hours Lincoln accepted the resignation of Postmaster General Blair, whom all of the radicals hated-accepted it, in fact, before Blair had even submitted it.
As September came to an end Lincoln told his old friend Ward Lamon that although "Jordan has been a hard road to travel" he was beginning to think that he would wind up on the right side of the river. Dour old Gideon Welles wrote in his diary that "we are, I think, approaching the latter days of the rebellion."1
So a new feeling was abroad in the land; an exciting, growing conviction that a mighty tide was flowing at last. The armies had created this feeling, and the armies shared in it. Sheridan's troops were driving on up the Valley, surging all over the landscape as they moved, a double file of artillery and battle wagons on the roadway, half a dozen parallel columns of infantry tramping along on either side. The days were cool and sunny and the haunting mellow light of the war's last autumn lay on the land, and the men saw the panorama which they themselves were creating and rejoiced in it. The war had turned a corner, and for the first time these soldiers were learning what it felt like to be victors.
Our march had been a grand triumphal pursuit of a routed enemy," wrote a man in the VI Corps. "Never had we marched with such light hearts; and al
though each day found us pursuing rapidly from dawn till dark, the men seemed to endure the fatigue with wonderful patience."2
Far out on either side of the marching columns were the cavalry flankers, guarding against surprise. In front moved the line of skirmishers, trotting lightly across fields which had long since lost their fences—"skirmishing only enough," the veteran felt, "to maintain a pleasant state of excitement."
Through Mount Jackson the army marched, to Harrisonburg, and beyond that to Mount Crawford, and the cavalry roved on ahead to Staunton and Waynesboro. As it moved, the army picked up a number of Confederate stragglers. These professed deep interest in the Northern election, and to a man they hoped that McClellan would win. A Connecticut soldier told about this in a letter home, adding: "I would state that the ‘hero of the seven days retreat’ is fast becoming unpopular in the army. Not that the soldiers dislike the man so much as the company he keeps." Another man expressed the same view: "There are a good many soldiers who would vote for McClellan but they cannot go Vallandigham for support." 8
Sheridan now had the Valley in his possession, and he believed that Early was not capable of further offensive operations. To Grant it now seemed that Sheridan could break out of the Valley at its upper end, cutting across through Gordonsville and Charlottesville on the thrust Hunter had tried to make three months earlier and rejoining the Army of the Potomac around Petersburg. Sheridan objected. The move would take him far from his base of supplies, and the Rebel guerillas were being more pestiferous than ever. It would be better, he felt, to finish the job of ruining the Valley, take position much nearer to the Potomac, and then send Wright's corps back to Grant. Reluctantly, Grant deferred to his judgment, and on October 6 the army faced about and started back for the lower Valley.4