Union major Henry Harrison Young was born for war. “It was very rare to find a man who found in the most deadly peril his greatest pleasure, and who sought out danger not only in the line of duty, but because he reveled in it.” Young thrived in battle and lived for it. His commanding officer, Colonel Oliver Edwards, later wrote, “We had many officers who in civil life had shown nothing above average ability, that in the hour of trial, amidst the carnage of battle, proved themselves possessed of heroic quality, yet these gallant men were not fearless; they loved life, and they knew the danger they were going to meet, and could be relied upon to charge up to certain death without faltering.”1
Young, however, was truly fearless, a five-foot-five, wiry Rhode Islander who relished the thrill of combat. Mustering into Company B of the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteer Infantry as a second lieutenant in 1861, Young fought through many battles, his first being at Bull Run in July 1861. Writing to his mother, Young described how combat at Manassas changed him: “You say you think it [the suffering] would discourage anyone from going to war. The fact is, no one knows what fighting is till they have seen it; and they that have, after it is over and they think about it, there is a longing for it again that no one knows who has not experienced it.”2
Young thrived in the chaos of battle and sought out the rush of adrenaline that combat generated. His brigade commander remembered, “He was always ready to dash through the hottest place, to cheer on a wavering regiment or to rally a disorganized one.” During the Battle of Fredericksburg in mid-December 1862 and the slaughter of frontal assaults on Confederate positions at Marye’s Heights, Young would leave no man behind. “He discovered a wounded soldier of the 2nd Rhode Island in such a position that he was exposed to the fire of both sides. Leaping from his horse amid a shower of bullets, he was himself wounded in the arm, but dragged the poor fellow to the shelter of a tree; it was but the work of a moment, yet amid the noise and confusion of battle seemed wonderfully cool and deliberate.”3 After completing a dangerous mission in which Young obtained intelligence that even Sheridan’s own elite Jessie Scouts had failed to produce, Young captured the general’s attention: “I have been looking for that man for two years, and I want him.”4
Young’s current boss, Edwards, the provost marshal of the area, where the impressive Rhode Islander was his inspector general, adamantly protested the transfer: “I would rather you would take my right arm than to take him from me.”5
“I will not take an officer of your staff from you without your consent,” Sheridan replied, “but I want him and will make him Major and personal Aide-de-Camp on my staff. I will let him pick one hundred men from my command, arm them and command them as he likes, and report to me.”6
Believing the change to be in the best interest of the Union, Edwards reluctantly relented. But surprisingly, Young did not immediately jump at Sheridan’s prestigious offer. “It required almost coldness as well as entreaty to send him from me,”7 Edwards recalled.
Sheridan wanted to expand his Jessie Scouts and put them under leadership that was not a desk-bound supervisor but a hands-on, fighting officer. Young fit the bill perfectly. As an inspector general, Young loved to be in the thick of things. To penetrate enemy lines, he would don a Confederate uniform. Much of his tradecraft came from riding with Blazer’s Scouts. “Young at every opportunity rode out at the side of Captain Blazer and learned much of the methods of such irregular warfare, much that must afterward have proved of incalculable value.”8
Young’s mount matched his rider. The expert horseman preferred a “little gray horse, a special favorite, on which he placed a great reliance, for by its matchless speed and noble work it had several times extricated him from positions of extreme peril.”9 A contemporary who interviewed Young’s men and relatives wrote of the dashing officer that he was “imperturbably cool, patient, shrewd, and with a quiet way about him, yet frank and ingenious—it seemed that there was nothing he could not accomplish.”10
One incident revealed his ingenuity and humor. Once while scouting, he came upon a Confederate recruiting station and allowed himself to be recruited. “ ‘Come here! You’re a likely-lookin’ young feller—how about enlistin’?’ Young listened to the sergeant’s pleading—‘didn’t know but what he would someday—well, mebbe he would then.’ More argument; suddenly the sergeant had him—enlisted.” Young showed up on the appointed day, but instead of joining the Confederate Army, he captured the sergeant, all his “hard-earned recruits, and the entire contents of the office.”11
In pursuit of one notoriously dangerous bushwhacker who “boasted that he never was so happy as when he let out the life-blood of a Union prisoner,”12 Young requested three Confederate uniforms and two soldiers. They tracked and found the man, who wounded one pursuer and shot the horse out from under the other, leaving the diminutive, wiry Young to battle the man in hand-to-hand combat alone. Somehow, the Rhode Islander single-handedly managed to bind and bring the murderous thug back to headquarters.
Young worked hand-in-glove with his right-hand man, Sergeant J. E. McCabe. The twenty-three-year-old Pennsylvania native had already weathered a slew of battles with Company A, 17th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, including Gettysburg, Brandy Station, and Cold Harbor, and had been on the doomed Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid in Richmond. McCabe caught Colonel Oliver Edwards’ attention after the cavalryman survived a mission where he shot his way out of an ambush with Mosby’s Rangers. Outnumbered three to one, McCabe “was attacked by about thirty men of Mosby’s guerrillas. I fought my way through without losing a man and got back to Winchester with my return dispatches.”13 Edwards placed Young and McCabe on a joint mission that forged their friendship and trust in each other. After leading several dozen cavalrymen behind enemy lines, engaging in several successful skirmishes with the enemy, and capturing multiple prisoners, the indomitable Young paid McCabe the ultimate compliment when he told the sergeant as they approached Winchester, “ ‘Sergeant McCabe, you understand better how to handle this affair than I do; I wish you would take charge from now on.’ I took charge and we captured several more Rebels that day. By the time we got back to Colonel Edwards’ headquarters, we had in all seventeen Rebel prisoners and one of them was [a] notorious guerrilla.”14
Once Sheridan had found the man to lead the Jessie Scouts, Henry Young, he decided to once again make it a larger organization. Realizing the news would leak to the Confederates, the general called it a battalion of Scouts when it was, in fact, only a company. McCabe reflected, “[Sheridan] suggested that we should organize a full company of a hundred men for scouting purposes. So we picked the men we wanted, mounted them and furnished them with grey uniforms and two revolvers each,” often carried in the top of their high boots. The men were sometimes armed with seven-shot Spencer carbines depending on the mission. Merging the existing Jessie Scouts, such as Arch Rowand, James White, Dominick Fannin, Alvin Stearns, James Campbell, and others into the new company, Young adopted the tradecraft developed by the Scouts as well as Richard Blazer. “We frequently went into the Rebel line, learned to talk the Southern language and became familiar with each regiment, brigade, division, and corps of the Rebel army, and after that went among them as full-fledged Rebels.” McCabe acted as a true noncommissioned officer. The sergeant conveyed Young’s orders to the men. “We had fifty-eight to sixty men all the time, and every day and night some of our men were within the Confederate lines.… I had charge of the men, and any orders that were given to the men were given by me.”15
Young and McCabe picked some extraordinary individuals for the elite unit that would become known as Sheridan’s Scouts. One of those men, William H. Woodall, was a Confederate deserter who became a civilian Scout. The twenty-one-year-old “killed his superior officer for making an insulting remark about his (Woodall’s) sister, and fled the Confederate lines and came into ours at Winchester,” remembered Rowand. “He told his story to General Sheridan, gave valuable information, offered his services as a scout, which was accepted, and although tested and watched, under orders from the General, by the balance of us, he proved true in every instance.”16
After the disaster at Kabletown, and with Blazer himself captured, McCabe also integrated some of the remaining members of Blazer’s Scouts into the unit. As with Blazer’s Scouts and Mosby’s Rangers, their training was on the job. After his Scouts received weapons and Confederate uniforms, Young decided an exceptionally difficult mission was needed to forge unit cohesion and discipline—if it didn’t get them all killed. Young planned to have his tiny band ambush a large unit of Confederate cavalry many times the Scouts’ numbers. Young had his men positioned on horses behind trees where the Confederates often passed, creating a kill zone. They waited and waited for what seemed like an eternity in the frigid November air until the Confederate cavalry rode into sight.
On Young’s “shrill signal, [he] whirled his horse about, and fired his [Spencer] carbine in the faces of the Confederate troops. His men followed him; the carbines roared like artillery; bullets raked the column, down whose bloody lanes the Yankees rode at the charge, firing their revolvers on either side without mercy.” The charge routed the massive Confederate force and created “pandemonium,” while Young lost only one man.17 Like Mosby, Young employed psychological warfare, and fear of the unseen enemy would wear on the Confederates.
Along with a mastery of psychological warfare, Young was a chameleon. A master of disguise, the Rhode Islander served behind the lines so often that “his disguises had to be changed and varied constantly; now it was one role, now another—private soldier, deserter, countryman, peddler, Confederate officer.” Young allegedly went after Mosby himself under cover. One scheme involved infiltrating Federal men who claimed to be deserters into Mosby’s camp. “But [the deserters] must have been the wrong men for their opportunity, for nothing seems to have come of it.”18
As winter approached, Grant’s army was stalemated in Petersburg. Grant had attempted to cut off Richmond from the south at the vital supply center and railhead of Petersburg, located some twenty miles south of the Confederate capital, after the bloody battles at Cold Harbor and Lee’s stand at North Anna. The attack on Petersburg had begun in the middle of June. Grant hoped to quickly storm the city but was thwarted by the Confederates, and a bitter siege ensued as both sides had battled in trenches and fortifications ever since. In Georgia, Sherman had begun his infamous March to the Sea on November 15, during which he aimed to cripple the South by destroying their industrial base and means of transportation. Sheridan, however, continued to conduct intelligence operations in the Shenandoah Valley even while settling down for the winter, as he realized the value of his Jessie Scouts. “I now realized more than I had done hitherto how efficient my scouts had become since under control of [Major] Young, for not only did they bring me almost everyday intelligence from within Early’s lines, but they also operated efficiently against the guerrillas infesting West Virginia.”19