Decision at Tom's Brook: George Custer, Tom Rosser, and the Joy of the Fight

CHAPTER ONE

Devastation in the Shenandoah

If the War is to Last Another Year …

By March 1864 the war was almost three years old. For much of that time, the most successful army north, south, east, or west, had been Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. On battlefields across Virginia and Maryland, Lee’s army had regularly flogged its principal opponent, the Army of the Potomac. Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, almost despairing, knew that if he were to win reelection in the coming November and see the Union restored, the Federal armies would have to defeat Lee. Lincoln’s long search for the man to direct the Union’s military efforts and win victories in Virginia ended on March 9, 1864, when he promoted Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to lieutenant general and named him general in chief of all the Federal armies. From the time of his appointment Grant stressed unity and cooperation among the Union’s armies, and he brought a single-minded relentlessness to the drive for victory. To emphasize the importance of victory in the Eastern Theater, Grant decided to direct the war from his headquarters in the field in Virginia.

Grant’s goal in Virginia was simple: Destroy Lee’s army as a fighting force. To accomplish this goal, he planned to apply unremitting pressure on Lee’s army and on all of the resources of the Confederate government and the Southern people. By using his larger army to threaten Richmond, Virginia, the Confederacy’s capital, Grant would force Lee to defend it with his smaller force. The necessity of protecting Richmond would, Grant hoped, deprive Lee of one of his great assets—his inventive aggressiveness. Throughout the war Lee had displayed a bold and creative military mind and a willingness to accept risks. Grant believed constant pressure would chain Lee and his army to the defenses of Richmond and rob him of the freedom to use his army offensively. This strategy would instead give Grant the freedom to maneuver and to attack the weak points in Lee’s static defenses. To a large degree Grant would be able to choose where and on what terms he wished to fight, while Lee would only be able to react to circumstances rather than create them. In other words, Grant intended to seize the initiative and never let it slip away.

The confident and capable Gen. U. S. Grant, shown here in June 1864 at Cold Harbor, Virginia, made control of the Shenandoah Valley an essential part of his plans. LOC

Throughout the spring and summer of 1864, Grant launched attacks that bought him closer to Richmond and sapped the strength of Lee’s army. In his effort to weaken the Confederate army however he could, Grant increasingly ordered attacks against Lee’s supply lines. In the hope of cutting off food, medicine, equipment, and other necessities of war, Grant’s focus changed to the city of Petersburg, a transportation hub 21 miles south of Richmond. He also sent troops against the railroads west of Richmond that connected the capital to the rest of the Confederacy. Federal columns focused on the Virginia Central Railroad at Staunton and Trevilian Station. Though Lee’s cavalry foiled the Federal cavalry movement aimed at Trevilian, Federals reached Staunton, destroyed machinery and warehouses there, and moved on toward an even more important logistical target: The railroad nexus at Lynchburg, Virginia. The intersection of three railroads—the Orange and Alexandria, the Virginia and Tennessee, and the Southside Railroad—made Lynchburg one of the key military points in Virginia. Desperate to preserve his vital logistical links, Lee detached the Second Corps of his army, about one-quarter of his entire strength, that June and sent it to Lynchburg by rail and forced marches under Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early. The corps arrived at Lynchburg in time to drive off the Federal raiders.

The increasing Federal activity in western and central Virginia made plain to all what Lee already understood: While Richmond could be threatened from the north, east, and south, the key to the city might well lie to the west. The decision of the Confederate government to move its capital to Richmond in the spring of 1861 ensured that the armies would fiercely contest control of the 96 miles of Virginia Piedmont between Richmond and the U.S. capital at Washington. Confederate strategists had soon recognized the advantages offered by Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley just west of the Piedmont region.

The Valley stretched 140 miles from Lexington northward to Harpers Ferry. While the Valley lay 90 miles west of Richmond, it lay only 55 miles west of Washington, a fluke of geography that gave the Confederates the advantage of a secluded path behind the mountains to a point close to, and even north of, the U.S. capital. Two years earlier, when an enormous Federal army under Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan had threatened Richmond from the east, Lee found that an active and aggressive Confederate force operating in the Shenandoah could be an important component in the defense of his capital city. In that spring of 1862, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson dazzled observers and befuddled opponents by marching his small army more than 600 miles and fighting six battles in less than three months, four of them on the tactical offensive. Jackson’s performance aided Lee’s defense of his capital in two ways. First, it had forced President Lincoln and his advisors to divert reinforcements that otherwise would have gone to the Federal army moving on Richmond. Second, Jackson’s active operations had created fear in the White House. The president’s counselors had worried that Jackson might threaten Washington and began to think defensively rather than offensively. By June 1864 Jackson was dead, but Lee believed the same strategy might again relieve pressure on the defenders of Richmond. He sent another active and aggressive commander to the Shenandoah with a force just large enough to divert the Federal focus on Richmond. After General Early’s troops drove off the Federals threatening Lynchburg, Lee directed Early to move into the Valley and operate against Federal targets there.

Gen. Robert E. Lee, whose greatest battles in 1864 were logistical. LOC

Lee had chosen the right man for the job. Jubal Early was by temperament one of the more impatient and aggressive leaders in the Confederate service. A graduate of West Point in 1837, the Virginian had served in Florida against the Seminoles and in the Mexican War. For most of the two decades before the secession crisis, however, Early had practiced law and dabbled in Virginia politics. Though he had opposed secession, he immediately joined the Confederate army and served competently at every grade from colonel to corps commander. Early was, above all, a patriot, intensely loyal to the cause and to R. E. Lee. He served at his assigned post without absences, except for a brief period when wounded. During the slow weeks of inactivity in February 1864, Early asked Lee if he could have leave to travel home briefly, adding, I wish you, however, to understand that I am willing to do any service that you think I can do with benefit to the country…. I think all private considerations should give way to the public interests in these times.¹

Early was forty-seven years old but looked older. A lifelong bachelor who was sometimes too fond of drink, Early had a good many rough edges and could be difficult to work for. Early had a reputation of being somewhat rude at times, wrote one man who had served in his staff. He was stricken while in Mexico with that dread disease, inflammatory rheumatism. He got over the rheumatism, but he never got over the inflammatory part of it, and that is what gave him his reputation. Early had many detractors, but Lee valued his loyalty and commitment, his ability to work independently, and, perhaps most of all, his aggressiveness. Whether it was a match of intellect in a courtroom, a public battle of wits in the press, or a contest of wills on a battlefield, Early never shied away from a scrap and was always eager to get at the enemy.²

Gen. Jubal A. Early, irascible, profane, and difficult to please, was also aggressive, intensely loyal, and one of Robert E. Lee’s most trusted generals in 1864. LOC

In following Lee’s orders, Early wasted no time before moving northward through the Shenandoah Valley. In the first week of July, Old Jube, as the soldiers called him, led his army across the Potomac River into Maryland. After defeating a small Federal force on July 9 at the Monocacy River near Frederick, Early pushed southeastward and two days later stood on the outskirts of Washington itself. General Grant detached two divisions of infantry to ensure the safety of the capital, but Early had already decided the fortifications around the city were too formidable for him to breach with his relatively small force. Instead, he turned his men westward and marched away from Washington with the intention of returning to Virginia. Before re-crossing the Potomac, Early sent a force of cavalry into Pennsylvania with orders to occupy Chambersburg and demand a ransom. Federal troops in the Valley had recently destroyed the homes of prominent citizens, and Early sought retribution. Under orders from Early, Brig. Gen. John McCausland demanded the people of Chambersburg pay $100,000 in gold or $500,000 in greenbacks. When they could not pay the ransom, McCausland ordered the town burned, an act that would further accelerate the cycle of brutality in the war’s fourth summer.³ Early’s forays into Maryland and Pennsylvania had served Lee’s purpose: Grant had yet another distraction from his efforts at Petersburg.

Although Early’ efforts were indeed a distraction, Grant also viewed the situation in the Shenandoah Valley as an opportunity to advance his goal of grinding down and eventually destroying Lee’s army. Grant welcomed every opportunity to strike any portion of Lee’s army no matter where, so Early’s force operating in isolation almost 100 miles from Lee was an inviting target. Even more enticing to Grant was the nature of the Valley itself. He understood that the importance of the Shenandoah to the Confederacy went beyond its value as an isolated avenue of movement on the strategic flanks of Richmond and Washington.

The United States census of 1860 revealed that Virginia, which at that time included the future state of West Virginia, was one of the more fertile and productive areas on the continent. In the production of wheat, corn, rye, and oats, and in the cash value of farms, Virginia ranked among the leaders of all the states in the Union. Most of that production came on the expansive farms east of the Allegheny Mountains—in the Virginia counties that would join the Confederacy. The eight counties in the Shenandoah Valley included about 10 percent of the land area of Confederate Virginia and were home to about 10 percent of the state’s population. However, according to the census figures, the Valley counties produced far more than 10 percent of the state’s yields of important farm products. The counties of Augusta and Rockingham in the southern portion of the Valley were agricultural dynamos, each ranking among the top three counties in the state in the production of wheat, corn, wool, rye, hay, clover seed, and butter and cheese. More horses, milch cows, and hogs lived in Augusta and Rockingham counties in 1860 than in any other area of equal size in the state. The cash value of farms in Augusta totaled nearly $11,000,000, the most of any county in Virginia, and Rockingham was just behind at $9,700,000.⁴ Travelers in the Valley looked upon mile after mile of rolling hayfields and flat, grain-covered bottomland with substantial brick farmhouses and full barns and grazing herds and mountain views and found it all so pleasing to the eye that even soldiers from the North declared it some of the finest and most picturesque country they had ever seen. A handful of large towns had grown up as market centers and, served by three railroads and excellent hard-surfaced turnpikes, the towns and their people thrived by selling the abundant produce of the region’s acres. The Valley was the proverbial land of plenty.

By 1864, three years of war had been hard on all of Virginia, but a Federal officer who campaigned in the Shenandoah Valley that year was struck by the region’s fertility and resiliency. Although army after army had swept up this garden of agricultural wealth on grand strategic missions, he wrote, although huge granaries of golden grain, harvested and garnered by the ceaseless toil of the ever hopeful farmer, together with stacks of hay and forage, were the subjects of prior impressments by the contending armies … in short, after more than three years of systematic war and conscription by the Confederate authorities of all the resources necessary to support a desperate struggle, with monthly raids and annual campaigns upon this country, from Harpers Ferry to Staunton, with the most destructive and disastrous retreats—this valley was still overflowing with the necessary supplies of life.⁵

Grant understood the Shenandoah was a Confederate asset he must not ignore. It was this bounteous region of 4,000-odd square miles that he intended to transform into a desert.⁶ He directed that all food, forage, and livestock should be eaten, driven off or destroyed. He ordered that nothing should be left to invite the enemy to return.⁷ Grant wished the people of the Valley to understand that so long as an army could subsist in the Valley, Federal armies would return again and again. Because the Shenandoah remained the Confederacy’s principal storehouse for feeding its army about Richmond, Grant believed Lee would make a desperate struggle to maintain it.

Just as Lee recognized the value of a bold independent commander in the Valley, Grant reasoned that an aggressive general at the head of a strong Federal force could reap great advantages. First, every mile that such a commander advanced through the Valley would give the Federals possession of crops and livestock on which Lee relied. Second, Lee would not—could not—allow the loss of such a storehouse without fighting for it, which meant diverting part of his precious manpower from the defenses of Richmond and Petersburg.⁸ Grant decided to weaken Lee by forcing him to fight in the Valley, so he sent to the Shenandoah the most energetic, demanding, and aggressive subordinate available: Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan.

The diminutive Sheridan (he stood five feet, five inches tall) was, like Jubal Early, confrontational by nature, even to the point of pugnacity. As a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy, Sheridan had been disciplined for fighting and earned a reputation for not backing down from a confrontation. Graduated from West Point in 1853, Sheridan served early in the war in the infantry as a staff officer in the Western Theater. After being elevated to general, Sheridan’s aggressiveness at the Battle of Chattanooga in late 1863 earned Grant’s admiration. When Grant later sought a relentless fighter to lead the cavalry in Virginia, he declared Sheridan the very best man in the army for the job, despite that Sheridan had almost no significant experience commanding the mounted arm.⁹ Nevertheless, throughout the spring and early summer of 1864, Sheridan’s performance as leader of the cavalry corps justified Grant’s confidence and convinced the general in chief to create the Army of the Shenandoah and to promote the thirty-three-year-old Sheridan to command it. He assumed command in the Valley on August 7, 1864.¹⁰

The indefatigable Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan proved himself the right man for the job of cleaning out the Shenandoah Valley. LOC

As Sheridan’s cavalry chief, the dandyish Brig. Gen. Alfred T. A. Torbert labored to meet his commander’s high standards and succeeded. LOC

As chief of cavalry for the Army of the Potomac, Sheridan had injected great energy into the mounted arm. When he took over command in the Valley, he determined that the cavalry would play a very large role in his operations. Grant agreed to the transfer of more than 8,000 cavalrymen to Sheridan’s army, and gave him a free hand in organizing the troops and appointing their commanders, regardless of seniority. Sheridan immediately called for the services of Brig. Gen. Alfred T. A. Torbert, a cavalry commander with whom Sheridan had worked well.

Torbert hailed from Delaware and was remembered by his West Point classmates as a gentle young man with a ready sense of humor whose disposition was so open and innocent that they could not help but love him. He did not drink or swear and went to church by choice, but he put on no moralistic airs. Those who knew him described Torbert as intelligent, competent, and dependable, and so Sheridan had found him to be. The two men had been at West Point together, and when Torbert arrived in the Valley on August 8, 1864, Sheridan at once appointed him chief of cavalry for the Army of the Shenandoah. Torbert was blessed with an abundance of good cavalry and good commanders, and his troops would be Sheridan’s most effective weapon against Jubal Early.¹¹

Even before appointing Sheridan to command in the Valley, Grant had been emphasizing to his subordinates the importance of denying food and supplies to the Confederate armies. If his goal was to destroy Lee’s army as a fighting force, then starving Lee’s soldiers and horses would move him toward that goal. Grant wanted his troops to eat out Virginia clear and clean … so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them. After Sheridan took command, Grant issued specific orders for eliminating the Valley as a granary for Lee’s army. Give the enemy no rest, the commanding general wrote. Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can. Carry off stock of all descriptions, and negroes, so as to prevent further planting. If the war is to last another year, Grant continued, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.¹²

Throughout August and deep into September, Early and Sheridan maneuvered their troops in the lower Valley like boxers in a ring. Early later wrote that his assignment was to keep up a threatening attitude. By threatening Maryland and Pennsylvania and shutting down the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, he would force the Federals to divert reinforcements from Grant’s army to protect Washington.¹³ Though elements of the armies skirmished frequently, neither commander found an opportunity to strike a heavy blow.

In the third week of September, however, Sheridan saw his chance. He thought Early’s position on the Opequon Creek east of Winchester was vulnerable, and he devised a battle plan to strike the Confederates at dawn on September 19. Sheridan’s 41,000 men soundly defeated Early’s 15,500 Southerners there in what became known as the Third Battle of Winchester. Though the infantry and artillery had battled since before dawn, it was Sheridan’s cavalry that had arrived on Early’s left flank at precisely the right moment and driven the Confederates from the field. Early withdrew his battered army to strong defensive positions at Fisher’s Hill, 17 miles to the south near Strasburg. Sheridan attacked him there three days later and again routed Early. The defeated Confederates withdrew southward almost 70 miles to regroup near Waynesboro in Augusta County.¹⁴

In six weeks, Sheridan had done what Grant had sent him to the Shenandoah to do. He had forced Early to fight, defeated him soundly, and gained control of almost all of the Valley. The next move belonged to Robert E. Lee.

1   U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, DC, 1880-1901), Series 1, vol. 33, pt. 1, 166 (hereafter cited as OR; all references are to Series 1).

2   Daniel on Early, Unidentified newspaper clipping, Jedediah Hotchkiss Papers, Library of Congress, roll 58, frame 443.

3   Unidentified newspaper clipping, Jedediah Hotchkiss Papers, microfilm roll 58, frame 442.

4   Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, DC, 1864), 154-65.

5   Theodore W. Bean, Sheridan in the Shenandoah, Grand Army Scout and Soldiers’ Mail (Philadelphia), March 10, 1883, p. 1, col. 2.

6   OR 37, pt. 2, 329.

7   Ibid., 43, pt. 1, 698.

8   Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York, 1885-86), 2:316, 132, 319, 321.

9   Ibid., 331.

10 OR 43, pt. 1, 721.

11 A.D. Slade, A. T. A. Torbert: Southern Gentleman in Union Blue (Dayton, OH, 1992), 18-19; OR 43, pt. 1, 421-22.

12 OR 37, pt. 2, 300-01; ibid., 43, pt. 1, 917.

13 Because the southern Shenandoah Valley is higher above sea level than the northern portion of the Valley, Virginians refer to the southern, or higher, region as the upper Valley and to the northern region as the lower Valley; Jubal A. Early, Winchester, Fisher’s Hill, and Cedar Creek, in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols (New York, NY, 1887-88), 4:522.

14 Scott C. Patchan, The Last Battle of Winchester: Phil Sheridan, Jubal Early, and the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, August 7 - September 19, 1864 (El Dorado Hills, CA, 2013), 485.

CHAPTER TWO

Federal Cavalry Ascendant

The Cause of All My Disasters.

The twin defeats at Winchester and Fisher’s Hill in late September left Jubal Early’s army in disarray and the general himself dispirited. He wrote to Lee to apologize for the reverses and protested that he was doing his best against vastly superior numbers. Lee replied with an encouraging letter expressing his confidence: A kind Providence will yet overrule everything for our good. Lee firmly explained that he could give Early no more men because there were no more to give. You must use the resources you have so as to gain success. The enemy must be defeated, and I rely upon you to do it…. We are obliged to fight against great odds. ¹ Lee had no intention of abandoning the Valley.

General Sheridan considered his own mission in the Shenandoah Valley nearly accomplished. He had gained control of almost the entire Valley from Harpers Ferry to Staunton, and he believed that Jubal Early’s Confederate army was no longer a serious threat. Sheridan turned his attention to the final details of his assignment—the execution of General Grant’s plan to leave the region a desert. On the night of September 28, Sheridan sent out orders to Destroy all mills, all grain and forage … drive off or kill all stock, and otherwise carry out the instructions of Lieutenant-General Grant…. which means, leave the Valley a barren waste. In carrying out these instructions, no villages or private houses will be burned.²

Artist Alfred Waud’s sketch suggests the buoyant spirits of General Sheridan’s Federal army as it followed Jubal Early’s defeated Confederate troops up the Shenandoah Valley. The men cheer for Sheridan (at left with his staff), who doffs his hat in response. LOC

Over the next 10 days, two brigadier generals would bear primary responsibility for carrying out Sheridan’s orders for destruction: Wesley Merritt, commander of the First Cavalry division, and George Custer, who would lead the Third Cavalry division. In the final days of September and into the new month, the Federal cavalry would roam almost at will over the entire 25-mile width of the Valley from Brown’s and Rockfish gaps in the Blue Ridge north to Luray and west to Bridgewater, burning mills, barns, and machine shops, and desolating the most fertile area of Virginia. After a single day, Custer reported that his troopers had destroyed nine mills filled with flour and wheat, about 100 barns stuffed to the rafters with hay and threshed wheat, many fields of cut and stacked hay and grain, and had herded off 500 sheep and 200 cattle. Custer was careful to mention that no dwelling houses were destroyed or interfered with.³

Wesley Merritt would go about fulfilling his mission in the same way he went about everything: systematically and thoroughly. He had been in command for only two months, but he had met the high expectations of his superiors. The New York-born and Illinois-bred Merritt seems to have been destined a soldier, though as a youth he had no inclination toward the military. As a teenager, he studied law in Salem, Illinois, and only joined the army as an afterthought. In 1855, his younger brother Edward received an appointment to West Point but declined it. Wesley decided to put aside his law books and go to the military academy with the appointment that had been his brother’s.⁴ Five years later he stood twenty-second of forty-one in the Class of 1860 and moved straight into the cavalry, where he served mostly as a staff officer until mid-1863. Although he had little command experience, Merritt was energetic, mature beyond his years and radiated an aura of sober reliability. His professionalism impressed those around him, but an officer who served under him praised him as well for his modesty and for his gentlemanly demeanor. Merritt dedicated himself to doing things the right way without fanfare.⁵

Gen. Wesley Merritt’s rise to high command was marked not by battlefield heroics but by energy, efficiency, and reliability. LOC

The subdued and meticulous Merritt stood on the opposite end of the personality spectrum from his colleague Custer. Born in Ohio but raised mainly in Michigan, Custer was destined to become one of the great characters in the history of the U.S. Army. At West Point, he was by far the most popular cadet, even if he was possibly the worst student. During his cadet years Custer was the Great Tempter personified. Full of fun and caring little for consequences, Fanny, as he was called, relentlessly sought diversion from his duties and thus became the master of ceremonies for those seeking relief from the unremitting cares of cadet life.⁶ Whether it was breaking curfew and inviting fellow cadets to join him for some off-post drinking, killing an officer’s hated crowing rooster and cooking it in the barracks, or inviting a young woman to a sleepover, Custer was ready for thrills even at the price of abysmal grades, mountains of demerits, and a case of gonorrhea. My offences against law and order were not great in enormity, Custer later wrote, but what they lacked in magnitude they made up in number.⁷

The officers in charge at the Academy sought to teach promising young men to accept responsibility, and heaped punishments upon those who were slow to grow up. A common punishment was to require wayward cadets to sacrifice their free time on Saturdays and perform extra tours of guard duty. By his own account, Custer devoted 66 Saturdays to punishment duty during his four years at West Point. His devotion to tom foolery, of course, heightened his appeal among fellow cadets, and his appeal was almost universal. The resolve of the brilliant and the industrious, such as Henry DuPont, Patrick O’Rorke, and Peter Michie, as well as the sluggish and the dull all fell in some manner before Custer’s charms. He had more fun, explained Michie, second in the Class of 1863, gave his friends more anxiety, walked more tours of extra guard, and came nearer being dismissed more often than any other cadet I have ever known. A close friend thought Custer too clever for his own good. He is always connected with all the mischief that is going on and never studies any more than he can help. According to Custer, there were only two positions of distinction in a class—head and foot—and since he could not