Terrible Swift Sword (17 page)

 

AT YELLOW TAVERN, STUART'S brigades dismounted and took positions on a bluff that paralleled the Cavalry Corps's route back to the Telegraph Road from Beaver Dam Station. The fact that they were dismounted, possibly because the men and horses were worn out from riding all night, meant that one in four of Stuart's troopers was relegated to the job of holding the horses—and was out of the fight. Thus, Stuart had fewer than 2,500 effectives, and having ceded mobility, he would necessarily fight a defensive battle.
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Sheridan personally scouted the ground. Major Kidd said that his demeanor was “calm, unruffled” as he made his battle plan, and he wasted no time in putting it into action.

Merritt's division attacked Stuart's right, was repulsed, attacked again, and drove the Rebels eastward. The Confederates counterattacked, and there were more
charges and countercharges. At about 2 p.m., after three hours of fighting, there was a lull while Sheridan waited for more of his regiments to come up. He studied the ground and decided now to attack Stuart's left.

Sheridan threw Merritt's and Wilson's divisions and one of Gregg's brigades into a battle line and rode along it waving his black hat and shouting encouragement. At about 4 p.m., Custer's Wolverine Brigade led the assault, with Custer and the 1st Michigan charging on horseback while the brigade's other three regiments advanced on foot.
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When the attack came, Stuart was roving the left side of his position on horseback, exhorting his 1st Virginia Cavalry. The proud, storied regiment threw back Custer's first attack. On their next assault, the Wolverines overran Stuart's entire left wing, while the rest of the Cavalry Corps scattered the center and right. Stuart's cavalry broke into small pieces. Thousands of bluecoats, their repeating carbines spraying the Rebels with lead, rode through and around the heavily outnumbered Rebels and their slow-firing muzzleloaders.
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STUART, AT THE FRONT of his broken line, tried desperately to rally his men, firing his pistol into Custer's swarming Wolverines. Then, a dismounted Union trooper, John A. Huff, a forty-eight-year-old private and former top marksman with Berdan's Sharpshooters, shot Stuart from ten or fifteen feet away with a .44-caliber pistol.

Stuart clasped his right side. His hat fell off, and he wobbled on his horse. “Oh, the general! The general!” his men cried as Stuart's horse jerked violently. An aide moved him to a calmer horse, but Stuart could not sit up and so was placed on the ground and leaned against a tree. He ordered all of his men back to the line. An ambulance arrived, along with Major General Fitzhugh Lee, and Stuart relinquished to him command of the cavalry, saying, “Go ahead, old fellow: I know you'll do what is right.”

From the ambulance taking him to Richmond, Stuart saw his men leaving the field. “Go back! Go back! I would rather die than be whipped!” he shouted. It was Stuart's destiny to suffer both fates. His cavaliers withdrew toward Ashland. Sheridan had a clear road to Richmond.
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AS THE MOMENTOUS DAY—momentous because Stuart's celebrated cavalry had been decisively defeated and the South's great cavalry hero mortally wounded—drew to a close, Sheridan's troopers entered the outskirts of Richmond, driving off a small force of defenders and penetrating the capital's outer defenses. From the city center, just three miles away, they could hear church bells tolling the alarm that the enemy was at the gates. Sheridan might have been tempted to ride into the city,
and his men undoubtedly would have followed him. They might even have briefly occupied Richmond—but certainly not for long, for Sheridan knew that nearby Rebel infantry brigades would react quickly.
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Between the capital's outer and middle defenses was a road that Sheridan believed would lead to the Mechanicsville Pike and thence to Fair Oaks, where he planned to make his camp northeast of Richmond. The weather suddenly turned, and wind and rain lashed the bluecoats. They made their wounded as comfortable as possible—the corps had suffered 625 casualties.

Having come closer to the Confederate Capitol and Jefferson Davis's White House than any other Union force, the Cavalry Corps turned away to the north as midnight approached and began to ride toward the Chickahominy River.
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Anticipating this move, the Rebels had booby-trapped the road with trip-wired shells, which began going off when the horses' hooves struck the wires in the dark. The explosions killed several horses, wounded a few men, and brought the column to a halt.

Highly irritated by the enemy's skullduggery, Sheridan ordered twenty-five prisoners brought up. In the pitch darkness, the Confederates were made to get down on their knees and crawl ahead of Sheridan's men, groping for the trip wires. When they found the wires, they had to follow them gingerly to the shells and disarm them. The nerve-wracking work prompted one prisoner to blurt out that a nearby resident had planted many of the shells.

The troopers invaded the resident's house, capturing him and his family. The disarmed shells were placed in his basement, and after the cavalry had ridden on, the Yankees rearmed some of the shells and placed trip wires across the road. If pursuing Rebels struck the wires, the man's home would be blown to bits.
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DURING THIS SEEMINGLY ENDLESS, black, rainy night, thousands of Richmond's militia and regular Confederate infantry commanded by Bragg and President Jefferson Davis were coming after Sheridan's troopers. The Yankees had smashed Jeb Stuart's supposedly invincible cavalry just north of their capital and mortally wounded Stuart, one of the Confederacy's most revered military leaders. And Sheridan's men had sent a real shiver of fear coursing through the capital. The Rebels now wanted revenge.

To reach safety, it was imperative that the Cavalry Corps cross the Chickahominy River north of Richmond. But when Sheridan's men reached the Mechanicsville Road bridge, Fitzhugh Lee and the remnants of Stuart's cavalry were already there, behind fieldworks and barring their way. With the Richmond troops nipping at their heels and the defended river in front of them, the Cavalry Corps was in an extremely dangerous situation.

Rather than try to force a crossing of the barricaded bridge under fire, Sheridan sent a brigade upstream to scout Meadow Bridge. The scouts reported back that the Rebels had burned the main bridge, but the railroad trestle was intact. Moreover, fewer Rebels guarded Meadow Bridge than the Mechanicsville bridge.

They would cross at Meadow Bridge then. Sheridan dispatched Merritt's division to find planking to place between the trestle rails so that horses, artillery, and the supply train could cross. As the rain pelted down, Sheridan declared that they must “make the crossing at all hazards.”

From the Chickahominy's north bank, the Rebels swept the bridge with cannon and musket fire, slowing the work of Merritt's men. Under fire the entire time, they struggled to retrofit the bridge in the rainy darkness while precariously balanced dozens of feet above the rushing river water.

Suddenly, the Rebel force from Richmond, personally led by Bragg, launched a full-scale attack on Sheridan's rear. Wilson's division was driven back toward the river.

Sheridan was everywhere, exhorting his men. The Rebels, he told them, “are green recruits just from Richmond. There's not a veteran among them. . . . . We have got to whip them. We can do it and we will.”

The Rebels' brief advantage evaporated when they marched into killing artillery fire from Sheridan's field batteries and when Gregg's division, hidden in a brushy ravine, rose up and unleashed withering fire from its repeating carbines. Simultaneously, Wilson rallied some of his retreating men, who turned and counterattacked Bragg's right flank, breaking it. The bloodied Confederate infantry recoiled and withdrew behind Richmond's outer defenses, forfeiting its chance to destroy Sheridan's cavalry between the capital and the river.

Three of Merritt's dismounted regiments waded across the Chickahominy to drive off the Confederates firing on the bridge but were hurled back. As the Rebel artillery raked the river and bridge with grapeshot and canister and small arms fire stabbed at them from the wet, black woods, Merritt's men stubbornly continued working on the bridge.

After Merritt's regiments were repulsed, two dismounted regiments from the Wolverine Brigade braved the gauntlet of enemy fire and crossed the bridge on the railroad ties. They attacked the Rebels and drove them back to their breastworks. The Wolverines kept them pinned down there for two to three hours, until the bridge builders had completed their work.

When the bridge was ready for use, Merritt's division and seven other regiments formed a line and drove the Confederates from their breastworks. Having beaten all comers, the Cavalry Corps made its camp at Walnut Grove and Gaines Mill, where it rested and collected its wounded.

“My command is in fine spirits with its success,” Sheridan reported to Grant. The enemy's cavalry “was very badly whipped.” He bullishly added, “If I could be permitted to cross the James River and go southward, I could almost ruin the Confederacy.”
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SHERIDAN DID NOT YET know it, but the Confederacy was mourning Stuart's death. He had died during the evening of May 12 at his brother-in-law's home in Richmond. During his last hours, Stuart had sung his favorite hymn, “Rock of Ages,” with his minister and friends and conversed with Jefferson Davis, who visited him that morning. Stuart told Davis that he was willing to die “if God and my country think I have fulfilled my destiny and done my duty.” Stuart's wife, Flora, informed that her husband had been badly wounded, set out for Richmond but arrived too late.

Upon learning of his cavalry chief's death, Robert E. Lee put his hands over his face and retired to his tent. Later, he told one of Stuart's staff officers, “I can scarcely think of him without weeping.” Stuart's successors led the Rebel cavalry with surpassing competence but none with Stuart's swashbuckling brio.
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SHERIDAN'S TROOPERS RECROSSED THE Chickahominy at Bottom's Bridge, southeast of Richmond, and rode to Haxall's Landing on the James River, where Major General Benjamin Butler's medical officers treated the Cavalry Corps's wounded, and Sheridan's troops obtained food, clothing, and supplies. On June 24, sixteen days after the raid began, Sheridan and his triumphant cavalrymen rejoined the Army of the Potomac, having inflicted on the Rebel cavalry “the most thorough defeat that had yet befallen them in Virginia.”

Grant was pleased with the results and amused when he laid eyes on some of Sheridan's officers wearing new naval uniforms obtained at Haxall's Landing. “Hallooo, Sheridan, have you captured the navy?” Grant asked. In a letter to Major General Ambrose Burnside, Grant recounted the material losses inflicted by the cavalry, which had also “whipped Stuards [
sic
] Cavalry and had carried the Outer works at Richmond besides whipping the infantry sent out to drive him away.”

Yellow Tavern ended the Southern cavalry's nearly unbroken record of superiority. While the Union cavalry had faced just two of Stuart's six brigades at Yellow Tavern, it had fought with complete self-assurance. The unintended result of Sheridan's quarrel with George Meade was the Cavalry Corps's realization of its full potential.

During Sheridan's absence, the Army of the Potomac had fought one of the most savage battles of the war at Spotsylvania Court House on May 12. At the end of the day, there was no winner, only a torn battleground drenched in the blood of 6,800
Union casualties and 5,000 Confederate killed and wounded. Fighting continued fitfully over the next week up and down the Rebel line without a decisive outcome.

The combatants finally disengaged on May 21. Since it had crossed the Rapidan seventeen days earlier, Grant's army had lost a staggering 36,000 killed, wounded, or captured to Lee's more than 20,000 casualties. But Grant gave no thought to quitting.
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THE ARMY OF THE Potomac resumed its march toward Richmond, with Sheridan's Cavalry Corps leading the way over the pontoon bridges spanning the Pamunkey River at Hanovertown Ford. During the three weeks since the Army of the Potomac had forded the Rapidan and entered the Wilderness, it had scarcely paused in its drive toward the Confederate capital. Grant hoped to break through Lee's army somewhere northeast of Richmond. If the Rebels deflected him further to the south, he would be confronted with Richmond's formidable permanent defenses at the Chickahominy River and the inevitability of a prolonged siege.

Just as determined to force the issue was Lee. “We must destroy this army of Grant's before he gets to the James River. If he gets there, it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time,” Lee wrote to Lieutenant General Jubal Early.
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Riding ahead of Grant's army as it marched southwest to threaten Richmond, Gregg's cavalry division entered the tiny hamlet of Haw's Shop on May 28. Waiting behind barricades were the cavalry divisions of Major Generals Wade Hampton and Fitzhugh Lee and a brigade of South Carolina mounted troops armed with long-range Enfield rifle-muskets. Many regarded Hampton as the Army of Northern Virginia's ablest surviving cavalry leader and the likely heir to Jeb Stuart's mantle. Reputed to be the richest man in the South, Hampton was Stuart's antithesis in matters of style, both personal and sartorial; he was modest and dressed plainly. Robert E. Lee had not yet anointed a successor to Stuart, and for the moment he was dividing the command between his nephew and Hampton.

Ordered to hold Haw's Shop until the Rebel army could cover all of the approaches to Richmond, the five Confederate cavalry brigades drove back Gregg's two brigades with cannon and small arms fire. Just as determined to capture Haw's Shop, Sheridan sent Custer's Wolverine Brigade to reinforce Gregg. Custer's men assaulted the South Carolina brigade, which proved the “most stubborn foe” the Michigan regiments had ever faced, according to Major James Kidd. “The sound of their bullets sweeping the undergrowth was like that of hot flames crackling through dry timber.” Ten minutes after Kidd's 6th Michigan Cavalry went into action, eighteen of his troopers lay dead.