Jubal Early’s Pile of Mistakes
1864: The Shenandoah Valley
Roland Green
The Shenandoah Valley runs approximately 130 miles from Lexington, Virginia, to where its namesake river flows into the Potomac at Harpers Ferry. It is one of the most beautiful scenic areas in the eastern United States.
In 1864 it was a military asset, not a tourist attraction. It offered a protected way from northeast to southwest or vice versa. A Union army marching up the valley could sever the important Virginia Central Railroad, capture the salt works at Saltville, menace Charlottesville, and devastate a rich agricultural area conveniently close to Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia. Conversely, a Confederate army marching down the valley could feed itself, cross the Potomac, and strike north into Pennsylvania, northeast into Maryland, or southeast to Washington, D.C.
In 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant was determined to prevent any Confederate initiatives, and perhaps take one of his own. Unfortunately, he sent a boy to do several men’s jobs.
In May, a small Union army marched up the valley. Its commander was Franz Sigel, a hero to German Americans but even more inept than the usual Civil War political general. The Confederates mangled him at New Market, with some help from the cadets of the Virginia Military Institute.
Sigel was eased out. His successor, David Hunter, assembled a larger force, won a small victory, and burned Lexington (including VMI). Then, hearing rumors that Longstreet was on the way with his whole corps, Hunter fled over the Allegheny Mountains into West Virginia.
This left nothing in the valley except the hilly terrain and the crumbling roads to slow a Confederate march to the Potomac—and beyond. Jubal Early from the Army of Northern Virginia promptly marched down it with I Corps, what was left of Stonewall Jackson’s old command.
By all accounts, Early was a close relative of Oscar the Grouch, but he was a capable infantry general. His 15,000 men were about as good as the Confederacy still had—which is to say, about as good as any fighters who have ever marched on American soil.
On July 5, Early crossed the Potomac at Harpers Ferry, his men feeling vengeful over Hunter’s destruction of VMI and civilian property in the valley, and turned toward Washington. On July 9 they encountered an improvised Union mini-army at Monocacy Junction, just east of Frederick, Maryland. The Union commander, Lew Wallace, is better known as a historical novelist than as a combat leader, but he had one good day then, and held up Early’s advance for twenty-four hours.
By this time everybody in Washington except Abraham Lincoln was pushing the panic button. Washington was one of the most strongly fortified cities on earth, but most of its garrison troops were fighting in the trenches around Petersburg. Fortunately Grant understood the crisis the Union faced, and was sending his crack VI Corps and also XIX Corps, newly arrived from the Deep South.
On the morning of July 11, Early was in sight of the U.S. Capitol dome, with still undermanned earthworks the only thing between him and it. However, his men had marched fast and far, in hot weather over dusty roads, and fought a battle on the way. He decided to give them a day off.
Mistake! That day cost Early his last chance of attacking Washington and inflicting a major blow to Union prestige at a critical time. Grant’s Overland Campaign had been a bloodbath, Sherman was still slow-waltzing toward Atlanta, and it was an election year. The Lincoln administration could hardly survive even a temporary loss of its capital, not to mention the loss of supplies and the prospect of having to virtually evacuate Virginia.
But 15,000 fresh Union veterans arrived that afternoon. By next morning the Battle of Washington was canceled before it had begun. Abraham Lincoln got a good look at an infantry skirmish from the parapets of Fort Stevens, nearly giving his handlers heart attacks, but that was about all the excitement until the two Union corps moved out on the trail of the retreating Early.
It was high summer, so the pursuit was hot in several senses of the term. Early was able to keep his distance, and in fact for a while the Union didn’t know which side of the Potomac he was on. He used the fog of war to send two cavalry brigades raiding north, another mistake that suggests Early was not the best combined-arms general in the Confederacy. One brigade burned Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, but Union troopers destroyed that brigade in West Virginia in August. The other rode off to liberate the Confederate POWs at Point Lookout, Maryland, but the Union authorities reinforced the guard and this cavalry brigade took weeks to rejoin Early.
At this point, Grant and Lincoln agreed to deal firmly with Early’s hubris. The reaction was led by Philip Sheridan, formerly chief of the Army of the Potomac’s Cavalry Corps, now commanding a new Department of the Shenandoah. This large military department, or command, had been created by combining the forces of four previous departments in the area. He had orders from Grant to “put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death” and to so waste the valley that “crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their own provisions.”
He also had Lincoln’s promise to back him to the limit. There would be no political interference.
So Sheridan went to the Shenandoah Valley, into which Early had long since retreated. The new Army of the Shenandoah started off with about 43,000 men, in three infantry corps (VI, XIX, and Hunter’s old troops, now the VIII Corps) and three divisions of cavalry. This outnumbered Early by nearly two to one, even though Lee had sent Early what he said bluntly were the last reinforcements he could spare.
Although nearly as short-tempered as Early, Sheridan was a better combined-arms general. He spent most of the month of August getting his army organized while advancing cautiously south. Honors were about even in the skirmishing, leading Early to believe that Sheridan was another timid Union valley commander riding for a fall.
So optimistic did this error make Early that he divided his army to carry out several missions. He soon learned that Sheridan had outflanked him, just in time to concentrate and fight near Winchester on September 19. This first major battle of Sheridan’s campaign was a close-run thing, as two of his corps attacked along diverging lines, to be nearly defeated in detail. But the Union infantry eventually held, the Union cavalry hurried Early’s retreat with a classic cavalry charge, and Winchester changed hands for the last time during the war.
The Confederates retreated to a line of high ground called Fisher’s Hill. On September 22, Sheridan came up with them, holding on to their noses with two corps and kicking them in the pants with the other. Flanked out of position, the Confederates retreated farther south, with the Union cavalry again discouraging loitering.
By now Sheridan was detaching troops to guard his supply lines from Confederate partisans, from John S. Mosby’s elite light cavalry to angry farmers with shotguns and plow horses. The bushwhacking and retaliation were turning the war ugly.
Sheridan’s next move turned it uglier. He withdrew northward while his cavalry destroyed everything that might help the Confederate army—not only food and fodder, but livestock (killed or driven off), barns, mills, stables, bridges, ad nauseam. Union troopers found it distasteful. Confederates found it a horror.
Early found it a dilemma. He could no longer forage a valley that Sheridan was stripping bare. Bring in supplies—in rickety wagons pulled by half-starved draft teams? Leave the valley altogether—and give Sheridan a clean shot at the Virginia Central, Saltville, and possibly Lee’s western flank? Or attack?
A counsel of desperation, but “desperation” was a good one-word summary of the Confederate situation in the fall of 1864. Besides, John B. Gordon, Early’s ablest subordinate, had discovered by a personal reconnaissance that a path led across a wooded ridge and down a small canyon to within four hundred yards of the Union position on Cedar Creek. If a flanking force could move along that path . . .
Gordon got the job. On the night of October 18, he took two divisions along the path, moving in single file and stripped of everything that would make a noise. In the predawn twilight (made murkier by fog) Gordon’s men stormed into the camp of VIII Corps and routed it in a matter of minutes.
The fugitives crashed into the camp of XIX Corps while the men were barely awake, and the Confederates followed, screaming the Rebel yell like fiends from the Pit. XIX Corps gave ground in more order than VII Corps, but still abandoned tents, guns, hot breakfasts, and a steady leakage of fugitives.
By now it was daylight, and Early’s whole army was up, prodding at a VI Corps making a fairly orderly withdrawal, with its rear and flanks screened by two cavalry divisions. That force was almost equal to Early’s whole strength.
Early and Gordon fought a postwar battle of the memoirs. Early claimed that attacks were made on the VI Corps, but that too many men had left his ranks to forage breakfast and loot in the Union camps. Gordon claimed that one more attack would have finished VI Corps and Sheridan’s army, but that VI Corps “would not go unless we drive it from the field.”
Early’s window of opportunity was rapidly closing, because in Winchester (fifteen miles away, not twenty as it says in the poem “Sheridan’s Ride”) Sheridan had heard the predawn gunfire and grown suspicious. After breakfast he saddled up and rode south. When he started meeting fugitives, teamsters and ambulances, and the odd rider, he grew angry and went from there to furious.
So began “the most notable example of personal battlefield leadership in the war” (James M. McPherson). Sheridan rode at a trot, a canter, and only sometimes a gallop, but he left a trail of dust and blue air every mile of the way. Sometimes he swore at the fugitives for being cowards; sometimes he cajoled them with promises of having their own camps back by nightfall. Almost always the fugitives turned around and started back for the battlefield.
Sheridan spent the early afternoon getting his army reorganized, which cost Early his last opportunity to salvage something from the day before Sheridan slammed the window shut on Confederate fingers. A hasty withdrawal might have got away Early’s guns, wounded, prisoners, and even some useful loot from the Union camps.
Instead Early was still on the field when Sheridan’s revitalized men finished tying their last bootlace and rolled forward like an avalanche. The Confederates fought gamely but were overwhelmed by weight of numbers. Gordon himself had to ride his horse off a low cliff to escape.
At every Confederate attempt to rally, Sheridan would ride up to urge his men on, or the cavalry would swing around a flank and start the rout again. The Union infantry did have their camps back by nightfall, when they rested on their arms and left the pursuit to the cavalry. The blue troopers pressed the chase, finally burning a bridge in the Confederate rear and forcing Early to abandon his guns, wagons, and wounded.
Although he had actually inflicted more casualties than he suffered, Early had lost one thing that no surgeon could heal—his army’s fighting spirit.
Early’s chain of mistakes finished the serious fighting in the Shenandoah Valley. Early finished his days as founder of the Southern Historical Society and the cult of Robert E. Lee.
Sheridan finished his as the commanding general of the United States Army.