The Long Road:
The Battle of Cedar Creek
" The human animal dances
wildest at the edge of the grave."
Rita Mae Brown
While the Rebel Army was sneaking around in the dark to get into position to attack his army, General Sheridan was sleeping on a down-filled mattress at a private home in Winchester, twelve miles to the north. He was en route to joining his troops after being summoned to Washington and had opted to stop to sleep on a real mattress indoors rather than spend another hour in the saddle and try to sleep on a camp cot.
As the Confederate attack began and his troops were being scattered across the Shenandoah hills, Sheridan was awakened by a duty officer who reported hearing artillery firing in the vicinity of Cedar Creek. There was no worry in Sheridan; he knew that General Wright has scheduled a full-bodied reconnaissance mission that morning and surmised he had jacked up a Rebel battery or two.
Shortly thereafter, something caused his battle instincts to kick in; he roused himself, dressing hurriedly, and ordered a speedy breakfast and saddled horses.
Not an hour later, to the discordant tune of the distance sound of cannon, Sheridan and his officers hit the Valley Turnpike and hooked up with the 117th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry, his official escort unit, at Mill Creek.
Hearing the sound of battle increase from sporadic hiccups to a steady rumble, Sheridan became increasingly more agitated as the riders headed south at a steady gait. Hitting a rise above Mill Creek, Sheridan and the officers came upon a sight no commander ever wants to witness: hundreds of wounded men, alongside perfectly fit soldiers in various stages of undress, few with weapons, and supply and field wagons and caissons, rushing out of the valley. An army on the run, shaken, shattered, demoralized.
It was more than a retreat from an advancing enemy; it was full-fledged soldier-flight. Sheridan’s first order was to halt the retreat by throwing a cordon of troops bivouacked in Winchester across the road and fields approaching the city. That duty was left to one of his accompanying colonel as Sheridan and a contingent of a dozen officers and soldiers started the long ride to the battle. “Stop them and turn them around,” Sheridan shouted at Colonel J.W. Forsyth, his chief of staff. “This day isn’t done. Not yet and not in this fashion.”
The small group of mounted men, all bunched up in a trotting wad, started south along the road, Sheridan stood in his stirrups and waved his tiny, round hat: “You’re goin’ the wrong way, boys! We’re goin’ the right way. Follow us! We’ll be all snug in our camp by nightfall!”
Some soldiers did turn around as if on a greased shaft and started walking back toward the distant rumble of cannons and small arms fire; some still holding their rifles, others empty handed, following the general’s plea based on drummed-into-them instinct and faith. For as long as possible, the mounted officers stuck to the road or to the side of it, extolling the retreating army to turn around and “make an accountin’ of yourselves!” But the going was too slow due to the backlog of wagons and masses of men still heading away from the battlefield. Without a sign or order, Sheridan spurred Rieni off to the west, heading straight for the covering forest; his men followed at a gallop, thinking he knew where he was going. Sheridan, they knew, in all things military never questioned his instincts, and had been proven right more times than wrong.
Laying out the ground around the Cedar Creek bivouac areas in his mind, Sheridan knew that Early’s troops must have approached his army from the least likely route – around the base of Massanutten Mountain. Impossible, he thought. Probable, he re-thought. That’s the only way the Rebs could have made a surprise attack. That, or some officer or officers were dead in the brain.
Assuming – knowing – the point of the initial attack, Sheridan also knew – assumed – the main force of Union soldiers would have been driven to the west. By cutting across country just south of Kernstown, a tiny hamlet whose main business concern was a blacksmith shop and a small general store, not only would he save time getting to the battlefield, but he could be hopeful of avoiding a full contingent of the enemy, and, hopefully, intersect chunks of his retreating army.
Sheridan thought kindly of Kernstown as they passed through the town. It was the site of one of the few Union victories in the Shenandoah, and one of the few times General Stonewall Jackson and his southern boys had ever been defeated. Colonel Nathan Kimball had met Jackson’s forces head-on and sent them running east in a mighty hurry.
"Helped that Jackson had faulty information on our strength. Helped that Kimball had more than 8,000 men instead of the 3,000 number that had Jackson attacking in high spirits. Might be a good sign if we could meet Early later today right, on this hallowed ground." The thoughts did not stick around long; Sheridan knew the battle was ten miles to the south and west and the likelihood of retracing his steps to this community was not in any logical reckoning.
After traveling several miles in a more or less perpendicular route to the Turnpike, the image of the hundreds, thousands of soldiers streaming toward Winchester haunted the commander, and, without warning, without explanation, he turned directly toward the road. As expected, it was packed with soldiers, but this mass of blue coats was different from those just outside Winchester; these men had been corralled and mentally hog-tied by berating officers. They had regrouped in loose fighting units by company and regiment and seemed to be leisurely awaiting further instructions.
One of Sheridan’s officers commented on the “strangeness of the scene before us,” but no return comment was made. The scene was, indeed, not what Sheridan or a single one of the men accompanying him thought they’d see on this ride. A strange, tentless camp had been set up along the roadside, a few campfires were blazing, coffee pots set blackening at their edges. Some men, “apparently tuckered out from all that retreatin,’” one of the accompanying officers stated rather loudly. Sheridan silenced him with a stern look. “Now’s not the time for recriminations. Now’s the time for healing.” A poignant pause – long, drawn out – followed. “Now’s the time for believin’. Then comes the time for fightin.”
He stood up in his stirrups, yeehawed to the troops, and started forward. And he looked over his shoulder at his support guard, smiled and said, “And, by God, WINNIN’!”
More than a few of those officers and soldiers accompanying thought he had gone daft. They knew Sheridan was good. But nobody was that good. Not here. Not now. Not in this situation. And, certainly, not with these broken men.
Time
to retreat in another direction
Yield and you need not break,
Bent, you can straighten,
Emptied, you can hold,
Torn, you can mend . . .
Disappointed, you can be fulfilled.
Defeated, you can be victorious.
Passages, the Tao
Men of the Ninth, after their counterattack had been repulsed and they were pushed further away from the inviting breastworks, and not knowing the fate of other regiments, found themselves bunched up, looking for some inspiration, some direction in which to turn. Colonel Cahill opted to order his men to double-time back to the north, around Hupp’s Hill, which housed Rebel artillery. The southern gunners were preoccupied, being more interested in the peppering the locations of the Eighth and Sixth Corps.
Once around the mountain, the regiment, gathering up fast-running comrades along the way like iron filings lining up on a magnet – along with strays from the other corps – turned due east toward the Valley Turnpike. Cahill surmised the Confederate forces were concentrating on ground west of Middletown and up the Cedar Creek hollows and ravines. Heading away from those particular places seemed the logical thing to so.
Spying the Turnpike a half mile away, clogged with retreating comrades, Cahill ordered the Ninth to form up in companies in an open field; he could find no personal comfort in joining hundreds of defeated men rushing to God knows where. Colonel Cahill ordered his officers and non-commissioned officers to make “sure your boys rest, ‘cause I suspect we’ll be headin’ back. If not this day, then the one that follows.”
Charles was dog-tired, and was comforted by the thought of resting a bit. His knapsack had an adequate supply of jerky and hardtack, and his canteen was full. Informal orphanage survival lessons are hard to forget. Other soldiers, who ran from their camp with nothing but whatever clothes they were wearing at the time, made their hunger known. Some with food shared (including Charles); others, thinking about the immediate, and assuredly uncertain, future, deferred by ignoring the not-so-subtle signs from their fellow soldiers. A couple of supply wagons, trying to work their way down the road, caught the eye of a couple of officers. Fifty soldiers were ordered to go to the road and get all the supplies they could carry from the wagons’ storage areas.
It was an order the soldiers relished and readily accomplished despite the admonitions, screams, and curses of the drivers and despite the wagons never stopping. Coffee pots, big tins of coffee and small tins of sugar, and sacks of hardtack were pulled off the wagons and carried to the waiting troops. Fires were quickly struck, and canteen water and coffee grounds started boiling.
It was Lieutenant Colonel Fitz Gibbons who first spied a small knot of Union officers coming toward them from north end of the road.
“It’s Sheridan!” he cried loudly. “Li’l Phil is here, boys. Everthin’ will be all right. It’s General Sheridan!”
The knotted group of soldiers stopped briefly and talked to the Sixth Corps leaders, salutes were exchanged, and the horsemen headed toward the Nineteeth at a temperate speed. Without a leader and without orders, the Ninth rose up as one and their collective yells could be heard up and down the valley.
Sheridan pulled up tight to Fitz Gibbon, who saluted smartly. After formally returning it and surveying the gathering men, Sheridan said, “I got something to say to your boys, Colonel, if that’s all right with you.”
Fitz Gibbon smiled, turned toward Charles, who hovered close-by, awaiting orders, as always. He nodded and Charles thumped out a loud “assembly” call. The troops rushed forward quickly. Before he was ordered to do so, Charles stopped the roll, quieting the reverberations of his drum with his fingertips.
Sheridan took the time to eye the men, moving
his head left to right over the several hundred gathered close in.
“Are we done yet, boys?” he said, in a voice
barely above a whisper. The men leaned in.
“Is this the best we can do?”
“NO!”
Sheridan paused and then shouted so he could
be heard at the furthest edge of the crowd: “If it’s all the same to you, I’d
like to spend the night where you boys spent last night. How’s that sound?” The answer was emphatic and positive.
“Well, then, let’s get to it. How about you
join me and we retreat in the other damn direction!”
Less than a mile away, more than six thousand Confederate soldiers, resting before mopping up scattered pockets of Union resistance, paused as the cheers drowned out even the heavy poo-chu of artillery firing from Hupp’s Hill. The Reb soldiers didn’t wonder about the sound; they knew what it was and didn’t have much use for it.
As Sheridan made ready to turn his horse toward the sounds of battle, Fitz Gibbons stepped forward. “Care for a cup of coffee before we go back where we belong, General?”
Sheridan put his right hand on his hip and guffawed. “Well, Colonel, I think a cup of coffee would go pretty good right now.” He admired the calmness in the man and said as much,.
A cup with a double-wire handle was quickly brought to him; as if by magic, other cups appeared and were dispersed to his men. “To your health, gentlemen,” the general said, raising the tin coffee mug high. “And to the bad health of any Reb soldier that gets in our way this day!”
| George S. Smith is a veteran of
community newspaper wars in four states for more than 40 years. For the
past 12 years he has worked in corporate communications for two Fortune
500 companies and now is senior communications manager for Topcon
Positioning Systems (world's leading satellite positioning company) , in
charge of external and internal communications. With a love of history, and particularly of the Civil War era, Smith recently started researching the Civil War history of his great-grandfather, Charles Montgomery Andres (Army records show "Andre" and correspondence from the War Department concerning a pension is addressed to Charles Aridre, obviously misidentifying the "n" for an "ri.). Andres was a New Orleans orphan and joined the Ninth Connecticut in December 1863, after the Confederacy turned him down as being "too young." Smith is currently working on an historical fiction novel about Andres, a drummer boy, titled "The Long Road." |