The message raced along the Shenandoah Valley via signal flag and reached the Confederate Army of the Valley on the night of October 16, 1864. Major General Stephen Dodson Ramseur, in charge of one of the three infantry divisions in Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s army, was the recipient of joyous news: Ellen “Nellie” Richmond Ramseur, his wife, had given birth.
“His joy was full deep in his heart,” an observer later wrote in a letter to Nellie. Ramseur had “tears of sympathy for you.”
Ramseur hailed from North Carolina, where he was born on May 31, 1837. He attended Davidson College for a year at the age of 16 but left to accept an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1855. Graduating from the academy on the brink of hostilities in 1860, he resigned on April 6, 1861. His first command with the Confederacy was as a captain in the artillery, and he saw service on the Virginia Peninsula under Maj. Gen. John Bankhead Magruder. In April 1862, Ramseur was elected colonel of the 49th North Carolina Infantry and led the regiment through the Seven Day’s campaign, where he received his first of many wounds when a musket ball broke his right arm above the elbow. He would suffer from paralysis of the arm and recuperated between Richmond and his family home in Lincolnton, North Carolina.
Ramseur earned his promotion to brigadier general through this ordeal on November 1, 1862. He took over the brigade formerly commanded by George B. Anderson, a fellow North Carolinian who was mortally wounded at the battle of Antietam. Ramseur’s first major action in command of the brigade was at Chancellorsville, where he was wounded again when a shell fragment struck him in the leg. He was transported back to Richmond and treated there. Ramseur was supposedly so incapacitated that a lady friend he dined with had to cut his food for him. However, the strong-willed Tar Heel was back in command of the brigade for the Gettysburg campaign.
After active campaigning ended in the middle of October 1863, Ramseur rushed home. He had pushed back his wedding to Nellie from mid-September; on October 28, they finally married at Woodside plantation in Milton, North Carolina—Nellie’s birthplace.
By the spring of 1864, Ramseur was a rising star in the Army of Northern Virginia. After surviving the first battle of the Overland campaign in the Wilderness, Ramseur again attracted the attention of a Union musket. At the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, a minie ball stuck him in the right arm, completely passing through the limb slightly below the elbow. Ramseur refused to leave the field.
Maj. Gen. Stephen Dodson Ramseur (FSNMP)
He regained his strength and, by the end of May, was appointed to command Jubal Early’s old division. The redoubtable Ramseur was up to the task and, the following month, was promoted to major general.
Ramseur would serve that summer in all the Second Corps’ engagements, from Lynchburg to Maryland. Back in Virginia, he fought through battles against Union Gen. Philip Sheridan’s forces. The latest in that string of maneuvers had brought the Confederate army to Fisher’s Hill, where Ramseur was in camp when the cheerful news of fatherhood finally arrived on that October 17 morning.
After his initial elation subsided, Ramseur composed himself to write a letter to his beloved Nellie. He wanted to know all the details, from the sex of the baby, to how Nellie was feeling. He also made an attempt to relay the love he felt for his wife and child. The overjoyed new father and husband expressed that he could not love his wife more than he did at that very instant, loving her “more devotedly, tenderly than ever before.” He thanked and marveled at how God had brought her safely through labor and the mercy He had shown both of them during this time. Ramseur would write of the future, “may He soon reunite us in happiness & peace a joyful family,” he concluded.
Ramseur would never be reunited with his family, though, nor know the sex of his child.
Forgotten in that brief interlude of familial joy was the war, which came intruding back the following day. Ramseur was called to Early’s headquarters to be briefed on future operations. Doubtlessly feeling his new responsibility, Ramseur composed a will before leaving for the meeting with Early and the other officers.
The meeting would culminate in the battle of Cedar Creek, fought on October 19, 1864. During the battle, late in the afternoon, Ramseur was mortally wounded when a bullet entered his right side, passed through both lungs, and finally lodged below his left arm.
Ramseur was mortally wounded during the culminating action of the Valley Campaign’s final battle. (WRHS)
Grimes, who had sat and shared with Ramseur the great news of him being a father, wrote two weeks after the battle about the “death of the brave and heroic soldier.” The fellow Tar Heel said the loss of Ramseur was “not only a loss to this division but to his State and the country at large. No truer or nobler spirit has been sacrificed.”
The Confederacy’s autumn campaign in the Shenandoah Valley suffered a mortal wound at Cedar Creek, too. What had opened in midsummer as a hopeful effort evaporated away with shocking swiftness as Union forces overwhelmed Early’s bedraggled Confederates even as they’d been on the cusp of victory.
The wounded Ramseur was captured later that night while traveling in an ambulance with the retreating army. He was taken to Belle Grove plantation, which was serving as Phil Sheridan’s headquarters. In keeping with the brother-versus-brother symbolism of the American Civil War, a few old friends from West Point stopped by to pay their respects. George Custer, Wesley Merritt, and Henry DuPont—all Union officers—sat or spoke with Ramseur as he lay dying that night. The North Carolinian was in severe pain, once expressing to DuPont, “you don’t know how I suffer.”
Ramseur wanted the fact to be known that he “died a Christian and had done his duty.” His fervent wish was that he could see his precious Nellie one more time and meet just once his little child.
Unfortunately this was not to be. Ramseur died the following morning, October 20, 1864. He was 27 years old. He had been married one week short of one year.
The Confederacy had even less time to live.
“NO TRUER OR NOBLER SPIRIT HAS BEEN SACRIFICED.”
Fort Stevens, which guarded the approach to Washignton D.C., from the north along the 7th Street Pike (now Georgia Avenue) was named for slain Union Brig. Gen. Isaac Stevens. Stevens, who’d been a U.S. Congressman and the first governor of Washington Territory, was killed at the battle of Chantilly in September of 1862. Fort Stevens, one of 68 forts that ringed the captial, boasted an armament of 905 guns—with placements for some 600 more. (PG)