The Real Custer (24 page)

Sheridan had been called back to Washington days earlier and was spending the night in Winchester prior to his return. He had planned to launch a major cavalry action back into the valley after Tom's Brook, but he abandoned the idea after a dispatch was captured from Longstreet to Early saying that reinforcements were arriving and to “be ready to advance on Sheridan as soon as my forces get up, and we can crush him.” To Early this sounded like a fine idea.

During the night of October 18–19, Early quietly moved three columns of over twenty thousand men toward the Union position on Cedar Creek. The night was foggy and still, so peaceful that one reporter said, “Even the mules seemed to be dozing.” The first sign of trouble came at four in the morning when rebel forces attacked Union pickets on the extreme right of the army. Custer sounded “to horse” and readied his command for battle, but after the Confederates seized the ford at Cupp's Mill, they stopped their attack. Custer reported the incident and stayed at the ready, but for the next hour nothing else happened.

The attack on the right was a ruse to divert attention from the Union left. There, troops from Major General John B. Gordon's corps, spearheaded by a division led by Custer's West Point friend Stephen Dodson Ramseur, surprised and drove back Union pickets into the camps of Crook's VIII Corps. The rush of the enemy through the darkness and fog was so sudden and disorienting that Confederates were inside the Union perimeter before alarms could be raised. Hundreds of men were taken prisoner without firing a shot, many in their bedclothes. VIII Corps fell back in disorder, and the rebels pushed on to hit Emory's XIX Corps just over the Valley Pike. “The rebels hesitated not,” a reporter wrote, “but pressed on, as a dashing cataract, over all barriers, completely
surprising, and in a measure stampeding, the left of General Sheridan's line.”
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The men of XIX Corps were also surprised, and their defense was hampered by rebel gunfire and the retreat of VIII Corps through their ranks. By then the sun was coming up. As the mist dispersed, Union troops saw the rebels under Ramseur had already flanked them and were in their rear. XIX Corps stood longer than VIII Corps had, but gradually began to break under the pressure on their left and from Kershaw's division on their front. General Emory had his horse shot from under him as he tried to form his troops against the determined assault. Unformed Union troops retreated, and supply trains were taken quickly north along the road to Winchester to keep them out of enemy hands.

General Horatio G. Wright, commanding the army in Sheridan's absence, ordered XIX and VI Corps under Major General James B. Ricketts to form on high ground on the west side of Meadow Brook, a tributary to Cedar Creek running west of Middletown. VI Corps set up a defense and fought stubbornly, but could not hold and soon retreated in good order.

Custer learned of the rolling disaster on the left shortly after daybreak from Torbert's aide Captain Coppinger. He brought in his scattered command and helped firm up the defense on the right and manage the retreat, rallying men who were “falling back in disorder and without any sufficient or apparent cause.”
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General Wright, bleeding from a musket ball wound to his chin, ordered Custer to the extreme left of the army to help Merritt's 1st Division stem the enemy advance. Custer left behind three regiments under Colonel Wells to manage the right, which thus far had not seen hard fighting.

The cavalry, particularly Merritt's men, helped secure the left flank while the infantry retreated and reformed a mile north of Middletown. Torbert praised the 1st Division for its determination, saying that while
“many a horse and rider was made to bite the dust, they held their ground like men of steel.” Custer's men engaged the enemy with sharpshooting and artillery. Around 10:30 the fighting began to wind down, and was carried on mainly as an exchange of artillery fire. Rebel troops were resting from their long night's march and morning's fight, looting supplies from the Federal stores they captured. Had the battle ended then, it would have been a resounding Confederate victory. Union forces had been pushed back two miles; given up hundreds of prisoners, two dozen guns, and numerous wagons and supply trains; and suffered heavy casualties.

But around the time the fighting paused, cheers could be heard behind the Union lines, faintly at first, then growing stronger. Sheridan had appeared, riding a black pacer named Rienzi, waving his hat as he sped down the line, greeted with wild enthusiasm. Early that morning in Winchester, Sheridan had heard reports of artillery fire in the distance, but he assumed they were from a planned reconnaissance. But at 9:00 a.m. while he was riding through the town, he heard unmistakable sounds of battle. As he hurried south, “the head of the fugitives appeared in sight,” he wrote, “trains and men coming to the rear with appalling rapidity.” As the
New York Herald
put it, he “found a scene of skedaddles.” Sheridan halted the retreat and, “taking twenty men from my escort, I pushed on to the front.”
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Sheridan's dash to Cedar Creek became part of American military legend. American poet and portraitist Thomas Buchanan Read wrote a poem about the twenty-mile ride (actually closer to twelve miles), which was as much about the horse as the man, and rendered a painting to go along with it. “He seemed to the whole great army to say, / ‘I have brought you Sheridan all the way / From Winchester, down to save the day!'” wrote Read. Rienzi, named for a raid Sheridan led on Rienzi, Mississippi, was renamed Winchester after this ride.

Sheridan restored order to the scene and began to reform his army. The right flank was coming under pressure as rebel infantry and Rosser's cavalry pressed Wells's brigade. Sheridan immediately shifted the 3rd Division to meet the threat, saying, “Go in, Custer!”

A gap had opened between the enemy cavalry and infantry. Custer, exploiting the rolling ground, pushed Pierce's battery to a position close to where the enemy had massed. “Being undiscovered,” he wrote, “I caused my battery to open suddenly at short range; at the same time charged with about three regiments. The effect was surprising and to none more so than to our enemies, who, being entirely off their guard, were thrown into the utmost confusion by this sudden and unexpected attack.” The cavalry charge by Pennington's brigade threw back Rosser's men for a mile and ended the threat to the right.

For the next few hours, Sheridan readied his men for an attack. Early did little to impede this work, though around 1:00 p.m. he made a halfhearted and short-lived move north. But he was outnumbered and no longer enjoyed the element of surprise. His three-mile line was thin and poorly defended on its flanks. The more numerous Union forces, on the other hand, were reinvigorated and had something to prove after their ignominious flight that morning.

Sheridan ordered a general advance late in the afternoon. The movement started well, but as the lines converged, Early's left overlapped the Union right and could have begun to roll it up. But Sheridan ordered a brigade under General McMillan to charge the angle of the flanking force, which cut them off from the main body. That charge was “the death-knell of the Confederacy,” according to one observer.
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Meanwhile, Custer's cavalry were forming for their own charge. Overcome with emotion, George rode up to Sheridan and threw his arms around him before returning to lead his cavalrymen against the disrupted rebel flank. “Custer's troopers sweeping across the Middletown meadows and down
toward Cedar Creek, took many of them prisoners before they could reach the stream,” Sheridan wrote, “so I forgave his delay.”

“It was apparent that the wavering in the ranks of the enemy betokened a retreat,” Custer recalled, “and that this retreat might be converted into a rout.” Custer charged ahead, breaking the rebel left as the rest of the army made contact down the line. He fought across the same ground that had been contested earlier that day, pausing and reforming to press the increasingly disorganized foe. “Here mingled lay the dead and wounded of both armies,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel John W. Bennett of the 1st Vermont Cavalry, “and as our men gazed upon the naked forms of their dead and wounded comrades—the former entirely and the latter partially stripped by our inhuman foe—the deep murmurs that ran along the ranks foreshadowed the impetuosity of the coming charge.”
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Custer's men moved forward in plain view of the retreating enemy, who were being pressed back on Meadow Brook and Cedar Creek beyond. “Seeing so large a force of cavalry bearing rapidly down upon an unprotected flank and their line of retreat in danger of being intercepted,” Custer wrote, “the lines of the enemy, already broken, now gave way in the utmost confusion.” Rebels threw down their weapons and ran for it, and “in a headlong and disgraceful manner sought safety in ignominious flight.” As one reporter put it, the charge “swept the enemy off the face of the earth before it every where.”
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A small group of enemy troops rallied across Cedar Creek and delivered some hot fire to their pursuers at short range. Custer kept up the momentum and dashed forward with the 1st Vermont and 5th New York. “Hearing the charge sounded through our bugles,” Custer wrote, “the enemy only stood long enough to deliver one volley; then, casting away his arms, attempted to escape under cover of the darkness.”

“Confused and terrified the enemy threw down their arms and trampled upon each other in their frantic attempts to escape,” Lieutenant Colonel Bennett recalled. “My men rushed upon them as though
they were the appointed avengers of their comrades slain. Considering our numbers, the slaughter was fearful.”
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There developed what Custer called “an exciting chase after a panic-stricken, uncontrollable mob. . . . prisoners were taken by hundreds, entire companies threw down their arms, and appeared glad when summoned to surrender.”

“The road was full of charging cavalry,” Confederate Private George Q. Peyton recalled, “and I saw Custer with his long curls hanging down his back.”
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The pursuit continued into evening, through Strasburg and miles beyond. George said later, “The darkness of the night was intense, and was only relieved here and there by the light of a burning wagon or ambulance to which the affrighted enemy in his despair had applied the torch.”
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A bridge collapsed over a stream south of Strasburg, forcing many wagons to be abandoned. Others were ridden down and halted. James Sweeney and Frederick Lyons of the 1st Vermont Cavalry in Custer's division ordered one wagon to halt. The driver said, “The General ordered the ambulance to go on.”

“What General?” Sweeney said.

“General Ramseur,” the driver replied. Sweeney was wearing a light-colored jacket, and the driver had mistaken him for a rebel.

“That is the very man I am looking for,” Sweeney said, and they captured the ambulance, the general, his surgeon, and his flag, which was emblazoned “On to Victory.”
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Ramseur had been the hero of the morning's battle, rolling up the Union left flank and routing two Corps. He was a tested combat leader who had been in most of the major engagements in the east.
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Morris Schaff described him as “dark eyed, stern [and] dignified.”
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In the course of that day's battle, he had two horses shot out from under him and was wounded in the arm but kept fighting until a musket ball pierced his lungs.

Custer learned of his friend's plight and had him taken to Sheridan's headquarters, at the Belle Grove mansion, to be tended to. There,
Ramseur saw his West Point friend Henry DuPont, first in the Class of May 1861, then a captain with the 5th U.S. Artillery. DuPont would be awarded a Medal of Honor for standing by his guns that day while the Union line collapsed in the face of Ramseur's assault. Henry had been present at the going-away party Custer hosted at Benny Havens for Ramseur and Wesley Merritt in April 1860. In fact, five of the six cadet revelers were on the field of Cedar Creek that day. They were missing John Pelham of Alabama, who had been killed at the Battle of Kelly's Ford, in March 1863. Ramseur asked for Merritt, but he was away with his troops and did not return in time.

Ramseur died the next day at Sheridan's headquarters. He asked Custer to cut a lock of his hair for his precious wife, Nellie. His last words were “I die a Christian and hope to meet her in heaven.” The day before the battle he had received word Nellie had given birth to a baby girl.
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The victory at Cedar Creek had come at a high cost: over 5,700 Federals killed, wounded, or missing, compared with 2,900 of Early's men. But it ended up being a Union win, which is more than could have been said at midday. The Federals seized over fifty guns, numerous battle flags, countless wagons, and hundreds of prisoners. The mood at Belle Grove was exultant. When Custer saw Sheridan that night, he hugged him and whirled him about in the air, shouting, “By God, we've cleaned them out and got the guns!” He did the same to Torbert, who responded “There, there, old fellow; don't capture me!”
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