The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (112 page)

Early had never been one to avoid responsibility, nor did
he delay approval of the plan. He would march tonight and strike at dawn, he announced at a council of war called that afternoon. Gordon would be in charge of the turning column made up of his own and the divisions of Ramseur and Rodes, the latter now commanded by its senior brigadier John Pegram, recently recovered from the leg wound he had taken in the Wilderness. Kershaw would move through Strasburg, also under cover of darkness, and attack on the right of the Valley pike, crossing lower Cedar Creek to join the flanking effort as soon as he heard Gordon open fire, and Brigadier General Gabriel Wharton — successor to Breckinridge, who had been recalled to eastern Virginia on the eve of Fisher’s Hill — would advance along and to the left of the turnpike, accompanied by Rosser’s troopers, to menace and fix the Federals in position on the far side of the creek while the massed Second Corps, with Kershaw’s help, struck their flank and drove them north across his front. Rosser then would take up the pursuit, as would Lomax, whose horsemen were to come upon the field by a roundabout march through Front Royal in order to cut off the blue retreat this side of Winchester, fifteen miles beyond Middletown, which was close in the Union rear. The plan was elaborate, involving a convergence by three columns, but it seemed pat enough to Early and his lieutenants, who went straight from the meeting to prepare for the various night marches designed to yield revenge for the two defeats they had recently suffered, here in the Valley from which their army took its name. The first of these — Third Winchester — had occurred exactly a month ago tomorrow, and this made them and their butternut veterans all the more eager to get started on the observance of that anniversary.

Aided by the light of a moon only three nights past the full, Gordon’s column set out shortly after dark, the men of all three divisions having left their cooking utensils and even their canteens behind to avoid any give-away clink of unnecessary metal, and was in position in the shadows close to Bowman’s Ford before daybreak, half a mile beyond the confluence of Cedar Creek and the river, prepared to splash across on signal. Similarly, accompanied by Early and his staff, as well as by most of the army’s guns, Kershaw moved undetected around Strasburg to the near bank of the creek, across which he could see low-burnt campfires glowing in the darkness. Wharton followed, turning off to the left of the macadamized pike, preceded by Rosser, whose troopers rode at a walk to muffle the sound of hoofbeats on the stony ground. At 4.30, after an hour’s wait on the creekbank, Early told Kershaw to go ahead and cross. He did, and while he was getting his men back into column on the other side, the boom of Rosser’s horse artillery came from well upstream, along with the rattling clatter of picket fire nearby on the right, where Gordon was fording the Shenandoah just off the unalerted Union flank. The surprise was
complete, if not quite overwhelming at the outset. “As we emerged from a thicket into the open,” one of Kershaw’s South Carolinians later wrote, “we could see the enemy in great commotion. But soon the works were filled with half-dressed troops, and they opened a galling fire upon us.”

Kershaw charged, and as he did so, racing uphill through the spreading dawn, Gordon struck the left rear of the hastily formed blue line, which promptly broke. Elated (for these were Crook’s men, the so-called West Virginians who had flanked them unceremoniously off Fisher’s Hill four weeks ago) the Confederates surged forward on a broad front across the turnpike, pursuing and taking prisoners by the hundreds. With only a bit more time for getting set, Emory’s corps fared little better, its unbraced ranks plowed by shells from rebel batteries massed on a hill beyond the creek. Fugitives from the four routed divisions fled northward through Wright’s camps, in rear of which his Potomac veterans were falling in for battle. By now the sun was rising, alternately bright and pale as drifts of smoke blew past it, and the graybacks — joined at this stage by Wharton, who had been left with nothing in his front — came on yelling as they drove Wright’s troops northeast across the open fields, first to a second and then to still a third position nearly two miles in rear of Middletown, where Jackson had captured Banks’s wagon train in May of ’62. This seemed to some a comparable achievement, while others went further afield in search of a parallel triumph. “The sun of Middletown! The sun of Middletown!” Early kept exclaiming, as if to say he had found his Austerlitz.

It was now past 9 o’clock, and he was delighted that within a scant four hours he had driven seven infantry divisions from the field with only five of his own, taking in the process more than 1300 prisoners, 18 guns, and an uncounted number of flags.

He was delighted; but he was also satisfied, it seemed. “Well, Gordon, this is glory enough for one day,” he declared on meeting the Georgian near the front soon afterward. They stood looking across the fields at the Yankees reduced to stick men in the distance. “This is the 19th,” he went on. “Precisely one month ago today we were going in the opposite direction.” Gordon too was happy, but his thoughts were on the immediate future, not the past. “It is very well so far, General,” he replied, “but we have one more blow to strike, and then there will not be left an organized company of infantry in Sheridan’s army.” His chief demurred. “No use in that. They will all go, directly.” The Georgian was doubtful, and said so, indicating the bluecoats on the horizon. “This is the VI Corps, General. It will not go unless we drive it from the field.” Once more Early shook his head. “Yes, it will go directly,” he insisted as he continued to wait for the whipped Federals to withdraw.

Gordon said no more just then, but he later wrote: “My heart went into my boots.” He was remembering “that fatal halt on the first day at Gettysburg,” as well as Old Jube’s daylong refusal, back in May, to let him strike Grant’s unguarded flank in the Wilderness, which he believed had cost the Army of Northern Virginia the greatest of all its victories.

His heart might have sunk still deeper if he had known what was happening, across the way, while he and his chief stood talking. Sheridan had just arrived and was reassembling his scattered army for an all-out counterattack. True to his promise to return from the capital in two days, “if not sooner,” he had slept last night in Winchester and had heard the guns of Cedar Creek, some fifteen miles away, while still in bed this morning. Dismissing the cannonade as “irregular and fitful” — most likely a reconnaissance-in-force by one of Wright’s brigades — he tried to get back to sleep, without success. At breakfast, the guns still were muttering in the distance, faint but insistent, and he ordered his staff and cavalry escort to saddle up without delay. On the way out of town, he noticed “many women at the doors and windows of the houses, who kept shaking their skirts at us and who were otherwise markedly insolent in their demeanor.” It occurred to him that they “were in rapture over some good news,” mysteriously received, “while I as yet was utterly in ignorance of the actual situation.” What was more, the sound of firing seemed to be moving to meet him; an ominous development. But it was not until he crossed Mill Creek, beyond Kernstown, and reached the crest of a low hill on the far side, that he and his staff and escort saw their worst fears confirmed by “the appalling spectacle of a panic-stricken army.”

His first notion was to rally what was left of his command, here if not still farther back toward Winchester, for a last-ditch stand against the rebel force, which might or might not include Longstreet and his famed First Corps. With this in mind, Little Phil ordered his staff and escort to form a straggler line along the crest of the hill: all, that is, except two aides and a score of troopers, who would proceed with him toward Cedar Creek to find out what had happened.

In the course of the twelve-mile ride — “Sheridan’s Ride,” it came to be called — his purpose changed. Partly this was because of his aggressive nature, which reasserted itself, and partly it was the result of encountering groups of men along the roadside boiling coffee. That did not seem to indicate demoralization; nor did the cheers they gave when they saw him coming up the turnpike. “As he galloped on,” one of the two aides later wrote, “his features gradually grew set, as though carved in stone, and the same dull red glint I had seen in his piercing black eyes when, on other occasions, the battle was going against us, was there now.” Grimness then gave way to animation. He began to lift his little flat-topped hat in jaunty salute, rather as if in congratulation
for a victory, despite the contradictory evidence. “The army’s whipped!” an unstrung infantry colonel informed him, only to be told: “You are, but the army isn’t.” He put the spurs to Rienzi — an undersized, bandy-legged man, perched high on the pounding big black horse he had named for the town in Mississippi where he acquired him two years ago — and called out to the retreaters, “About face, boys! We are going back to our camps. We are going to lick them out of their boots!” He kept saying that, shouting the words at the upturned faces along the pike. “We are going to get a twist on those fellows. We are going to lick them out of their boots!”

And did just that: but not with the haste his breakneck manner had implied. Arriving about 10.30 he found Crook’s corps disintegrated and Emory’s not much better off, though most of it at least was still on hand. Wright’s, however, was holding firm in its third position, a couple of miles northwest of Middletown, its line extended southeast across the turnpike by Merritt’s and Custer’s horsemen. Sheridan got to work at once, concentrating on getting Emory’s troops, together with a trickle of retreaters who were returning in response to the exhortations he had shouted as he passed them on the pike, regrouped to support Wright in his resistance to the expected third assault by Early’s whooping graybacks. Nor was he unmindful, even at this stage, of the fruits a sudden counterstroke might yield. “Tell General Emory if they attack him again to go after them, and to follow them up, and to sock it to them, and to give them the devil. We’ll have all those camps and cannon back again.” Emory got the message, and reacted with a sort of fervid resignation. “We might as well whip them today,” he said. “If we don’t, we shall have to do it tomorrow. Sheridan will get it out of us sometime.”

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.”