The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox by Shelby Foote
Noon came and went, then 1 o’clock, then 2, and Little Phil continued to withhold his hand: as did Early, across the way.
At 3 o’clock, having at last persuaded his chief to let him undertake a limited attack, Gordon probed the Federal position beyond Middletown, but was easily repulsed. Still Sheridan held back, his numbers growing rapidly as more and more blue fugitives returned from their flight down the turnpike. Finally, after interrogating prisoners to make certain Longstreet was not there, he gave orders for a general advance at 4 o’clock. At first, though their ranks were thinned by looters prowling the Yankee camps in search of food and booty, the graybacks refused to budge. But then one of Emory’s brigades found a weak spot in the rebel line, and before it could be reinforced Custer struck with his whole division, launching an all-out mounted charge that sundered the Confederate force and sent the two parts reeling back on Cedar Creek. “Run! Go after them!” Sheridan cried. “We’ve got the God-damnedest twist on them you ever saw!”
Early did what he could; which, at that stage, wasn’t much. For the past four hours — hearing nothing from Lomax, whose roundabout march with half the cavalry later turned out to have been blocked near Front Royal by Torbert’s third division — he had watched the steady buildup across the way, aware that this, combined with the rearward leakage from his idle ranks, restored the odds to about what they had been at daybreak, when he enjoyed the lost advantage of surprise. Increasingly apprehensive, he withdrew his captured guns beyond Cedar Creek for quick removal in a crisis, and started his nearly two thousand prisoners on their long trek south to Staunton. All this time, the vaunted “sun of Middletown” was declining, and the nearer it drew to the peaks of the Alleghenies the clearer he saw that the Federals not only had no intention of quitting their third position, in which they had little trouble fending off a belated feeling-out by Gordon, but were in fact preparing to launch a massive counterstroke. When it came, as it did at straight-up 4 o’clock, Early managed to withstand the pressure, left and center, until Emory drove a wedge between two of Gordon’s brigades, opening a gap into which Custer flung his rapid-firing troopers; whereupon the Georgian’s veterans, foreseeing disaster, began a scurry for the crossings in their rear. Rapidly the panic spread to the divisions of Kershaw and Ramseur, next in line. Dodson Ramseur — a major general at twenty-seven, the youngest West Point graduate to attain that rank in the Confederate army — tried his best to stay the rout, appealing from horseback to his men, but took a bullet through both lungs and was left to die in enemy hands next day, near Sheridan’s reclaimed Belle Grove headquarters, where he fell.
By then there would be no uncaptured rebels within twenty miles; Sheridan, having spared his hand until he felt that victory was clearly within reach, exploited the break for all he was worth. “It took less time to drive the enemy from the field than it had for them to take it,” according to Merritt, whose division clashed with Rosser’s and overran the Confederate far left. Early pulled in Wharton and Pegram to brace the center, under assault from the VI Corps, but only succeeded in delaying Wright’s advance. Rearward, meantime, a flying column of Union cavalry wrecked the bridge at Spangler’s Mill, just west of Strasburg, with the result that the three miles of turnpike between there and the crossing at Cedar Creek were crowded with artillery and vehicles of all kinds, trapped and at the mercy of the pursuers. Little Phil thus recovered all the guns lost that morning, together with 25 of his adversary’s, which enabled him to report that he had taken no less than 43 pieces at one swoop, though he neglected to mention that 18 of them were his own, recaptured in the confusion of the gray retreat.
Early fell back to Fisher’s Hill in the twilight, intending to make a stand there in the morning, but soon saw that it would not do. Though his casualties were only a bit over half as heavy as Sheridan’s this day —2910, as compared to 5665 — his army, routed for the third time in thirty days, was in no condition for further resistance to an enemy twice its size. He took up the march for New Market before daylight, fighting off Custer’s and Merritt’s horsemen, who snapped at his heels all the way. Summing it up afterwards, Old Jube remarked sadly: “The Yankees got whipped. We got scared.”
No explanation could shield him now, however, from the blame about to be heaped upon his head by his own people; blame that outweighed the praise that had come his way, three months ago, when he hovered defiantly on the outskirts of the northern capital. Indeed, the brightness of that midsummer exploit only served to deepen, by contrast, the shadows that gathered in this dark autumn of the Confederacy, which some were already saying would be its last. In the past thirty days Early had fought three full-scale battles, and all three had turned out to be full-scale routs. It mattered little to his critics that he had obliged Grant to lessen the pressure on Lee by detaching a veteran corps from Meade and rerouting another, on its way by sea to reinforce him, in order to meet Jubal’s threat, first on the far and then on the near side of the Potomac. Nor did it matter that in the course of his follow-up campaign in the Valley, where he was outnumbered roughly three-to-one from start to finish, he inflicted a total of 16,592 casualties on his adversary — the equivalent of still another blue corps, by Sheridan’s own count, and about as many combat troops as he himself had been able to scrape together for any one of those several confrontations — at a cost of less than 10,000 of his own. What mattered in the public’s estimation was that, here on the field of Stonewall Jackson’s glory, Early had been whipped three times running, each time more soundly than before. Tart of tongue, intolerant of the shortcomings of others since the outset of the war, the former Commonwealth’s Attorney of Franklin County now found himself accused of ineptness, inefficiency, incompetence, even drunkenness and cowardice, in the journals and in public and private talk, here in his native Virginia as well as elsewhere in the South.
It was otherwise for Sheridan, whose praises now were being sung throughout the North. “With great pleasure,” Lincoln wrote him, three days after Cedar Creek, “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 the splendid work of October 19.” The following evening, shortly before midnight, he was awakened by Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, who had just arrived from Washington to present him with the most prized of all rewards: his commission as a major general in the regular army, together with a commendation from the Adjutant General’s office citing him “for the personal gallantry, military skill, and just confidence in the courage and patriotism of his troops … whereby, under the blessing of Providence, his routed army was reorganized, a great national disaster averted, and a brilliant victory achieved.” Riding through the camps with Little Phil next morning, October 25, Dana thought he had never seen a general so popular with all ranks: not even Sherman or Pap Thomas — maybe not even McClellan in his heyday.
Grant by then was ready to try still another of his pendulum swings at Lee. After ordering a second hundred-gun salute fired with shotted guns in honor of his protégé’s third victory in the Valley, he wrote his wife: “I hope we will have one here before a great while to celebrate,” and put his staff to work at once on plans for the heaviest strike, so far, at the Richmond-Petersburg defenses. Butler would feint north of the James, with the same number as before, but this time the lunge around the enemy right would be made by no less than 43,000 troops from Hancock, Warren, and Parke, on the theory that what two corps had failed to achieve, just under a month ago, might be accomplished now by three.
On October 27, with Butler already over the river, demonstrating for all he was worth at Fair Oaks, the companion blow was launched. As a further diversion, Parke was to hit the western end of the gray line, just east of Hatcher’s Run, while Hancock and Warren swung wide around that stream to cross the Boydton Plank Road and then press north to get astride the Southside Railroad. Alas, no part of this flanking effort went well, and most parts went very badl
All lines remained the same, north and south of the river, as both armies prepared to go into winter quarters. No more discouraged by this latest failure than he had been by those others outside Petersburg and Richmond, Grant maintained what Lincoln called his “bulldog grip,” prepared to “chew and choke” as long as need be. He could fail practically any number of times, and only needed to succeed but once. “I will work this thing out all right yet,” he told his wife in a home letter.
In any case, this late-October affair down around Richmond went practically unnoticed by a public still absorbed in the recent Shenandoah drama, finding it restorative of the romantic, picture-book aspect so long missing from the war. “The nation rings with praises of Phil Sheridan,” the Chicago Tribune noted, three days after the famous ride that saved the day at Cedar Creek and prompted black Rienzi’s master to change his name to Winchester in commemoration of the exploit. Various poets tried their hand at the subject, including Herman Melville, but the one who caught the public’s fancy best was T. Buchanan Read in a ballad titled “Sheridan’s Ride.”
Hurrah! Hurrah for Sher-i-dan!
Hurrah! Hurrah for horse and man!
its refrain went. Availing himself of a poetic license which the general he praised sometimes employed in his reports, Read doubled the distance of the gallop, eliminated all stops along the way, and had Rienzi himself announce the nick-of-time arrival to the troops:
“I have brought you Sheridan, all the way
From Winchester, down to save the day.”
Widely read and recited, the piece made a fine recruiting and electioneering appeal, especially when delivered by professionals such as James E. Murdoch, a retired actor and celebrated “reader,” whose declamation of the poem at a theater in Cincinnati on November 1, just one week before the presidential contest was to be settled at the polls, threw the crowd into a frenzy of approval for the war and for the men who fought and ran it.
4
Elsewhere — not only in the embattled heartland of the South, but also in places as far afield as Kansas, Vermont, and Brazil — both sides undertook desperate measures, throughout the critical two-month span that opened with the fall of Atlanta, in attempts to influence militarily the early-November political decision that perhaps would begin to end the war itself, come Inauguration Day. For example:
Aside from an abortive Union gunboat probe down White River in late June, which was turned back at Clarendon before the flotilla could enter the Arkansas to help patrol that line of Federal occupation, there had been no significant clash of arms in the Transmississippi since Frederick Steele retired from Camden in late April and Banks and Porter abandoned in May their effort to ascend the Red. Since then, Kirby Smith had seemed content to rest on his laurels, clinging precariously to what was left of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory — “Kirby-Smithdom,” this vast but empty stretch of the continent was called — and resisted all efforts by Richmond and homesick subordinates to persuade him to go over to the offensive, either toward New Orleans or Saint Louis. Discontent to have so many good troops standing idle, even against such odds as here obtained, the authorities instructed him in mid-July to prepare Richard Taylor’s corps, along with “such other infantry as can be spared,” for a prompt movement across the Mississippi to assist in the defense of Atlanta and Mobile. Smith passed the order to Taylor, who had been sulking in Natchitoches for the past six weeks, his hurt feelings, if not his animosity toward his chief, somewhat relieved by a promotion to lieutenant general as a reward for his repulse of Banks. Eager to shake the dust of Kirby-Smithdom from his feet, Taylor looked into the possibility of a crossing, either by ferries or by the employment of what would have been the longest pontoon bridge in history, but replied in the end that it couldn’t be done, since the Federals, getting wind of the project, had stationed ironclads at twelve-mile intervals all the way from Vicksburg past the mouth of the Red, with gunboats on constant patrol between them, day and night. “A bird, if dressed in Confederate gray, would find it difficult to fly across the river,” a reconnoitering cavalryman declared.
Regretfully, for he was as anxious to get rid of Taylor as Taylor was to be quits with him, Smith informed his superiors in Virginia that the shift could not be made. By then the year had moved into August, and Richmond’s answer solved at least a part of his problem by dusting the gadfly Taylor off his back. Stephen Lee having been sent to Georgia to head a corps under Hood, the Kentucky-born Louisianian (and presidential brother-in-law) was ordered to replace him in command of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and Eastern Louisiana, temporarily under Maury at Mobile. On a moonless night, within a week of receiving the order on August 22, Taylor crossed the river in a dugout canoe, swimming his mare alongside, and set out eastward for his new headquarters in Meridian. Before he reached it, Smith — or, more specifically, Sterling Price — had placed an alternate plan in execution, back in the Transmississipi, by launching 12,000 horsemen northward into Missouri.
Originally designed to draw attention away from the downriver crossing, the operation was now to be undertaken for its own sake: first against St Louis, where government warehouses bulged with the goods of war, then westward along the near bank of the Missouri River to the capital, Jefferson City — whose occupation, however brief, would refurbish the somewhat tarnished star representing the state on the Confederate battle flag — then finally back south “through Kansas and the Indian Territory, sweeping that country of its mules, horses, cattle, and military supplies.” So Price was told by Smith in his instructions for the raid, which was also to serve the double-barreled purpose of discouraging the departure of still more bluecoats to lengthen the odds against Hood and Lee, east of the Mississippi, and of attracting recruits to the gray column as it swept through regions whose voters were about to get their chance, as the case was being put to them in the campaign already under way, to “throw off the yoke of oppression.” Mounted on Bucephalus, a warhorse as gray as its rider and stockily built to withstand his two hundred and ninety dead-weight pounds, Old Pap left Camden on August 28 and was joined next day at Princeton by the divisions of Marmaduke and Fagan, who rode with him across the Arkansas River at Dardanelle on September 2, midway between Little Rock and Fort Smith, neither of whose blue garrisons ventured out to challenge the invaders. At Pocahontas on the 13th, up near the Missouri line, Jo Shelby added his division to the column, now 12,000 strong, with fourteen guns, though only about two thirds of the troopers were adequately armed — a deficiency Price intended to repair when he encountered opposition. On September 19, the day before his fifty-fifth birthday, he crossed into his home state, headed for Ironton, eighty miles to the north, terminus of the railroad running south out of St Louis, another eighty miles away. At nearby Pilot Knob there was a Union fort, Fort Davidson, with a garrison of about one t
Assembling his three divisions at Fredericktown on the 25th — a day’s ride east of Pilot Knob, which he intended to move against tomorrow — he received news from St Louis that was both good and bad, from different points of view. Department Commander William Rosecrans, on learning in early September that the graybacks had crossed the Arkansas in strength, wired Halleck a request that A. J. Smith’s two veteran divisions, then aboard transports at Cairo on their way to rejoin Sherman after service up the Red and in North Mississippi, be sent instead to help defend Missouri against this new incursion. Old Brains complied by ordering Smith upriver at once to “operate against Price & Co.” This meant that one purpose of the raid had been achieved before the first blow landed; Price not only had discouraged the sending of more troops east across the Mississippi, he had even provoked a drain in the opposite direction, though at the cost of lengthening the odds against fulfilling his other objectives, including the strike at goods-rich St Louis, whose defenses now were manned by Smith’s 8000 gorilla-guerillas, in addition to its regular complement. In any case, after sending a brigade to rip up track on the railroad above Ironton and thus prevent the sudden arrival of reinforcements, he completed his plans for the reduction of Fort Davidson, twenty miles west of Fredericktown, and had it invested by nightfall the following day. He badly wanted its thousand-man garrison and their arms: especially those seven guns, whose addition would increase by half the firepower of the artillery he had brought along for blasting a path through his beloved Missouri.