The Killing of Crazy Horse, page 22
So it went. Within days, lucky Phil Sheridan was jumped to command of a brigade to fill the vacancy of a general moving up. Three weeks later, when his eight hundred men were attacked by a Confederate force of five thousand at Booneville, Mississippi, Sheridan extracted an astonishing victory by sending two companies down a little-known woods road to attack the Confederates in the rear just as he assaulted them in front. The rebels panicked and fled. Five fellow officers, all brigadier generals, promptly wired Halleck: “Brigadiers scarce; good ones scarcer … The undersigned respectfully beg that you will obtain the promotion of Sheridan. He is worth his weight in gold.”15
A general’s star soon came Sheridan’s way. In Mississippi, too, he acquired a black gelding with three white stockings which stood five feet eight inches at the shoulder, a gift from one of his officers. Sheridan named the horse after the Mississippi town where he got him: Rienzi.16 It was a big horse for a small man. President Lincoln himself once remarked that Sheridan was “a brown, chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can skratch them without stooping.”17 Soldiers joked that Sheridan, at five foot four (or five, or six, according to the witness), had to climb up his saber to mount the big Morgan. Sheridan may have been small—by the last year of the war his men were calling him “Little Phil”—but there was a great deal of fight in him. When fortune offered him an opportunity he generally improved it, and in 1864 General Ulysses Grant brought him east to command Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley. Among the generals under Sheridan was his friend from Ohio, West Point, and the Indian wars in California, George Crook, in command of a force with the imposing title of the Army of West Virginia. In reality it was little more than two divisions stretched thin.
Sheridan had risen fast, Crook not so fast. If Sheridan was lucky, you could say Crook was unlucky. He got off to a slow start, no fault of his own, under Major General John C. Frémont, known as “the Pathfinder” for his early explorations of overland routes to California. Frémont ran for president but lost, and then proved a failure at war. The men under him, including Crook, got little chance to show their merits. In one early fight Crook was wounded in the foot by a “spent ball,” which soon hurt like blazes, worse even than the poisoned arrows of the California Indians. After Frémont resigned his command, Crook and his 36th Ohio were attached to Major General John Pope’s headquarters in time to witness the Union disaster at Second Bull Run in August 1862; after the battle Crook rounded up stragglers—“my first introduction to a demoralized army.” Nightfall ended the rout and a drizzling rain next day gave the Union forces time to move out.
Crook’s Civil War followed the classic pattern—an endless ordeal of marching and counter-marching, bad food and foul weather, opportunities lost and campaigns that sputtered out, all of it punctuated with bloody fights small and large. Sometimes these fights were very large, with thousands of men killed, wounded, or reported missing. Crook was at South Mountain on the fourteenth day of September 1862 and at Antietam on the sixteenth. From Virginia he was transferred to Tennessee for a year’s list of places and dates, including Chickamauga, where armies broke or held, then returned to Virginia and the Shenandoah early in 1864.
Crook rose, but not fast. It was the custom to reward officers in the regular army with brevet ranks for valor or performance. Besides the honor, the practical consequence was the fact that a brevet rank could trump regular rank when command on the field was in question. But that rarely happened. The honor was the main thing. Crook got his share of brevets, and he was promoted general of volunteers, and he was eventually placed in command of the grandly named Army of West Virginia. But in a long war which catapulted all sorts of unexpected men to national prominence, glory in the newspapers, and excited talk in Washington, the steady, dependable, laconic George Crook never approached center stage. He was not outwardly a warm or effusive man, but the officers under him, and the men under them, generally trusted and liked him. One who learned to value Crook was Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, commander of the 23rd Ohio Infantry at the Battle of Cloyd’s Mountain in May 1864. On the morning of the battle Crook surveyed the rebel position with a field glass and remarked, “They may whip us, but I guess not.”18 A battery of Confederate artillery entrenched on a hill threatened Crook’s men. To put it out of action required a charge across a muddy stream and an open field three hundred yards wide. It was soon littered with the bodies of dead and wounded Union officers and men, but the battery was taken and the field won. “It being the vital point,” Hayes wrote to an uncle of the desperate run across the open field, “General Crook charged with us in person … Altogether, this is our finest experience in the war, and General Crook is the best general we have served under.”19
Crook in his clipped way had guessed right; it was the Confederates who got whipped. His men rarely heard him go beyond a few flat words of that sort. But there was something reassuring in his watchful way. “We all feel great confidence in his skill and good judgement,” Hayes wrote his mother. Calm on the outside, Crook was imagined by his men to be calm all the way through, but it was not entirely so.
Hurt pride was Crook’s secret vice. He felt others got the credit for things he achieved. “It has been ever thus through my life,” he wrote of an early incident in California when a newly arrived officer took credit for something Crook had done. “I have had to do the rough work for others afterwards to get the benefits from it.”20 After Sheridan took command in the Shenandoah in July 1864, Crook perhaps felt his star might shine a little more. Sheridan was a friend; he knew the sort of man Crook was and wouldn’t need reminding. They often met in the evening to talk about the California days.
But credit for military success proved harder to share than memories of early Army days, and in the course of the Shenandoah campaign small injuries to Crook’s self-regard gradually accumulated, opening a gap between the two men which steadily widened. First came fights at Opequon Creek near the town of Winchester and at Fisher’s Hill, two of the three climactic battles that ended southern control of the Shenandoah. No arena of conflict had changed hands more often during the war. By one count the town of Winchester had been won and lost seventy times when Sheridan set his sights on it again in mid-September 1864. Grant listened to his plan and told him, “Go in.”21
The battle eventually called Third Winchester was one of the stupendous fights so common during the war, with almost ten thousand men killed, wounded, or missing on both sides in the course of the day. Crook’s part in the fight was small but critical and brilliantly executed. In mid-battle he departed from the letter of his orders when he saw an opportunity to flank Jubal Early’s men, breaking their line and capturing over a thousand Confederate soldiers. By day’s end Early was in full retreat up the valley turnpike to Fisher’s Hill nearly twenty miles to the south. Crook and Sheridan shared a moment of strange intimacy on entering the town of Winchester, where they were met in the street by three highly excited and effusive girls, exulting over the victory. They spoke so openly and loudly of their pleasure in the Union victory that Crook, who knew them well, tried to quiet them with a reminder, as Sheridan recorded in his memoirs, “that the valley had hitherto been a race-course—one day in the possession of friends and the next of enemies—and warned [them] of the dangers they were incurring by such demonstrations.” Something of Crook’s plain, steady character is revealed in this frank warning to the girls that the Union’s brilliant victory, owing so much to his own role, might be followed as quickly by a reversal.22
But even as these two men savored the day’s victory a seed of anger was sprouting in Crook’s heart; the thousand Confederates his men had captured had been led from the field—“gobbled up”—by the late-arriving Union cavalry, who got the credit for their capture. “I complained of this to Sheridan,” Crook recorded, “who asked me to say nothing about it in my report, but that he saw the whole affair, and would give me credit for it.”23
Two days later at Fisher’s Hill the story was repeated almost verbatim. In Sheridan’s quarters on September 21, the night before the battle, Sheridan at first wanted to attack Early’s right, which was anchored on a bluff—the actual Fisher’s Hill—overlooking the Shenandoah River. A different approach was suggested by one of Crook’s division commanders, Colonel Hayes. Better, he said, to send Crook’s two divisions around to Early’s left, up over a timbered mountain. Early had placed his weakest units there, a clear sign he was convinced no attack would come that way. Sheridan at length agreed, and prepared the rest of his army to make a great to-do next day along Early’s front, convincing the Confederates that the attack would come head on. Hayes did the talking, but one of the officers present, Captain Henry A. Du Pont, later wrote that everybody understood the plan to move secretly up over the mountain was really Crook’s idea.
Conceiving it was the easy part; much harder was the exhausting uphill march the following day, starting before dawn and continuing until four o’clock in the afternoon, with Crook on foot leading the way. He believed that an officer of infantry should walk with his men, not ride. They made the climb in two long parallel lines, with flags lowered and keeping silence. When the time came to attack, Crook had only to order a left flank, march! and his divisions were instantly facing down the timbered hillside toward the unsuspecting Confederates, who were still expecting an attack from the opposite direction. As soon as Crook’s men started down the hill a great roar came up from all of their throats at once. This must have been one of the signal moments of Crook’s life—a perfectly executed maneuver, an unsuspecting enemy, the soft fruit of victory ready to fall into his lap. In his autobiography he wrote,
Unless you heard my fellows yell once, you can form no conception of it. It beggars all description. The enemy fired a few shots afterward, but soon the yell was enough for them. The most of them never stopped to see the fellows the yell came from, but dug out. By the time we reached the open bottom there weren’t any two men of any organization there.24
The collapse of Early’s left was soon followed by the breaking of his whole army, one division after another peeling away, as the panic spread across the southern line from left to right. Soon Early was retreating pell-mell up the valley turnpike, heading south. Sheridan was hoping for the ultimate in military success—the capture of an entire army—but the cavalry divisions he had sent on ahead to block the turnpike and trap Early’s army, and the infantry he had sent in pursuit, pressing Early from behind, both quit as darkness came and went into bivouac. Sheridan was infuriated by this “backing and filling”; what he wanted, he roared in a message, was “resolution and actual fighting, with necessary casualties.”25 But of course the moment was lost. Early had received a sound whipping, but his army was intact. At day’s end Sheridan was thinking of the failure, Crook of the triumph. He had conceived the plan and marched his men for twelve hours to get into position. His attack had rolled up the enemy. But the newspaper reports did not single out Crook for praise; recognition of his merit would have to wait on Sheridan’s official report, just as it did for the battle at Winchester.
But it was a third incident not quite a month later that poisoned the friendship of Crook and Sheridan for good and all. Over the intervening weeks Sheridan and his army chased Early right up the Shenandoah Valley, until the northern transport began to show signs of strain. Better, Sheridan thought, to call a halt and move back down the valley, destroying barns and carrying off the year’s harvest. Grant could not argue. This had been his idea—to “eat out Virginia clean and clear as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the remainder of the season will have to carry their own provender with them.”26 Sheridan did the job thoroughly. By mid-October he was back down the valley near the town of Middletown and the point where Cedar Creek flowed into the Shenandoah, just north of Fisher’s Hill. Early’s army had of course followed them back down, his cavalry nipping at Union heels. Sheridan was meanwhile summoned to Washington for a meeting on endgame strategy. Grant, Sheridan, and Halleck, general of the Army, all had different ideas about what to do next. But Sheridan went uneasily; an intercepted message suggested Early might have been reinforced. Sheridan thought the message a ruse but wasn’t sure. He spent half a day in the capital, then hurried back to Winchester, where he spent the night of October 18, about fifteen miles north of the point where his army had deployed in a line blocking the valley turnpike. Holding the left of the line was Crook with his two divisions.
Now Crook learned about flanking marches from the receiving end. On the ground at the time there was only one clear warning of what was to come. Crook’s officer of the day, hearing noise in the dark beyond the pickets standing guard, went out to investigate. He did not return. It is not clear when Crook learned of this fact, which should have stirred him to action. But he recorded early signs of trouble aplenty in his memoirs, beginning with Sheridan’s removal of the cavalry pickets from Crook’s front. These pickets were an early-warning system; without them Crook’s divisions were exposed. Crook also notes that his divisions were deployed more than a mile from the rest of the army. This meant they were further exposed. Finally, Crook informs us that his divisions had been whittled away by losses in battle and by the removal of men detailed for guard duty and the like elsewhere. He was down “to less than three thousand men.” He was simultaneously exposed and weakened.
The reader of Crook’s memoir, noting the many excuses for the general laid out in advance by Crook the author, is amply warned of the gathering catastrophe, which arrived on the morning of October 19. “Just at the peep of day,” Crook writes, his men in their tents and trenches were suddenly assaulted by four Confederate infantry divisions which had made their way undetected over a narrow mountain path—much as Crook had done at Fisher’s Hill. Surprise was complete. Crook’s men broke. The rest of Sheridan’s army panicked as well and soon the whole Union force was retreating in the direction of Middletown in total disarray. At a stroke, in effect using Crook’s own plan, Early was about to regain everything he had lost, and it was Crook, whose men broke first, who had opened the way. By late morning Sheridan’s army was desperately reforming itself west of the town of Middletown. “Our new line was getting stronger all the time by stragglers joining from the rear,” Crook recorded.27 It was as close as he could bring himself to claiming that the situation was under control. Of course, it was not.
Sheridan meanwhile had been woken at about six o’clock in the morning by an officer reporting the sound of artillery to the south. Desultory firing was not uncommon, so he did not immediately rise. He lay and worried. Then he got up, asked again about the artillery, ordered breakfast, ordered the horses to be saddled, worried about the message he had concluded was a ruse.
Sheridan thus stirred himself with increasing urgency until he mounted at about nine a.m. and with three staff officers and a cavalry escort headed south on the road to Cedar Creek, listening all the while. At one point he dismounted and put his ear to the ground. Now he stopped trying to reassure himself. The sound of the cannons was steady, it was louder, and it was coming his way. Just south of Kernstown, he came to the first signs of disorder and confusion among troops and wagons along the road, soon followed by the panicked chaos of an army in full retreat.
At first, Sheridan thought of trying to establish a new defensive line at Winchester, but then the fighting spirit boiled up in him, he remembered his victories, he told himself the men would fight if he rode to lead them, and that is what he did. Sometimes he was on the road, sometimes he took to the fields alongside to get round the wagons and men. He took his hat off because the soldiers liked that. The cheers buoyed him along and the officers riding with him noted that his jaw was set, his eyes were fiery.
“About-face, boys!” he shouted to the soldiers streaming down the pike away from Cedar Creek. “We are going back to our camps! We are going to get a twist on those fellows! We are going to lick them out of their boots!”28
Twelve or fifteen miles up the valley pike Sheridan charged on his big black horse, Rienzi. When he got to Middletown he found his army in the process of reforming, just as Crook would write later. From about ten thirty until about four in the afternoon Sheridan reformed and reorganized his army, waiting until he thought it was ready, and then he attacked back up the road to Cedar Creek. “Go after them!” Sheridan yelled when the Confederates took to their heels. “We’ve got the god-damnedest twist on them you ever saw.” He drove Early’s divisions first from their captured positions and then, whipped and thoroughly beaten, all the way back to Fisher’s Hill, where the Confederates spent a night before continuing on south.
While Early was facing the reality of defeat that evening at Fisher’s Hill, Sheridan took a seat beside Crook at a campfire on Cedar Creek. Crook’s worst day was Sheridan’s greatest. But by Crook’s account Sheridan said to him a remarkable thing about his ride from Winchester and the turning of the tide of battle. Sheridan was no sentimentalist, but it is hard to see his words as anything but salve on the wound of a friend. “Crook,” he said, “I am going to get much more credit for this than I deserve, for, had I been here in the morning the same thing would have taken place, and had I not returned today, the same thing would have taken place.”29
More credit than he deserved? It had been another bloody day—5,600 men lost by Sheridan, half as many by Early—but the casualties did not reveal the import of the event. Cedar Creek was one of the great and decisive Union victories of the Civil War; it turned defeat into resounding triumph in the space of a day, pushed Early right out of the valley, and sealed the reelection victory of President Lincoln three weeks later. Sheridan had the kind of warlike spirit that inspired men on the battlefield; at Cedar Creek they felt better as soon as they saw him. He deserved plenty of credit, but what he got was astounding, the kind of thing that lifts a man from ordinary mortal to legend. It happened this way. On Monday morning, November 3, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the actor James Murdoch was preparing a selection of patriotic verse he had promised to read at a local theater that night. His friend Buck—Murdoch’s nickname for the painter and occasional poet Thomas Buchanan Read—was with Murdoch when Read’s brother-in-law arrived with a copy of the latest Harper’s Weekly. In it was Thomas Nast’s drawing of Sheridan on Rienzi, dashing from Winchester to Cedar Creek. “Buck,” said the actor, “there’s a poem in that picture.”
A general’s star soon came Sheridan’s way. In Mississippi, too, he acquired a black gelding with three white stockings which stood five feet eight inches at the shoulder, a gift from one of his officers. Sheridan named the horse after the Mississippi town where he got him: Rienzi.16 It was a big horse for a small man. President Lincoln himself once remarked that Sheridan was “a brown, chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can skratch them without stooping.”17 Soldiers joked that Sheridan, at five foot four (or five, or six, according to the witness), had to climb up his saber to mount the big Morgan. Sheridan may have been small—by the last year of the war his men were calling him “Little Phil”—but there was a great deal of fight in him. When fortune offered him an opportunity he generally improved it, and in 1864 General Ulysses Grant brought him east to command Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley. Among the generals under Sheridan was his friend from Ohio, West Point, and the Indian wars in California, George Crook, in command of a force with the imposing title of the Army of West Virginia. In reality it was little more than two divisions stretched thin.
Sheridan had risen fast, Crook not so fast. If Sheridan was lucky, you could say Crook was unlucky. He got off to a slow start, no fault of his own, under Major General John C. Frémont, known as “the Pathfinder” for his early explorations of overland routes to California. Frémont ran for president but lost, and then proved a failure at war. The men under him, including Crook, got little chance to show their merits. In one early fight Crook was wounded in the foot by a “spent ball,” which soon hurt like blazes, worse even than the poisoned arrows of the California Indians. After Frémont resigned his command, Crook and his 36th Ohio were attached to Major General John Pope’s headquarters in time to witness the Union disaster at Second Bull Run in August 1862; after the battle Crook rounded up stragglers—“my first introduction to a demoralized army.” Nightfall ended the rout and a drizzling rain next day gave the Union forces time to move out.
Crook’s Civil War followed the classic pattern—an endless ordeal of marching and counter-marching, bad food and foul weather, opportunities lost and campaigns that sputtered out, all of it punctuated with bloody fights small and large. Sometimes these fights were very large, with thousands of men killed, wounded, or reported missing. Crook was at South Mountain on the fourteenth day of September 1862 and at Antietam on the sixteenth. From Virginia he was transferred to Tennessee for a year’s list of places and dates, including Chickamauga, where armies broke or held, then returned to Virginia and the Shenandoah early in 1864.
Crook rose, but not fast. It was the custom to reward officers in the regular army with brevet ranks for valor or performance. Besides the honor, the practical consequence was the fact that a brevet rank could trump regular rank when command on the field was in question. But that rarely happened. The honor was the main thing. Crook got his share of brevets, and he was promoted general of volunteers, and he was eventually placed in command of the grandly named Army of West Virginia. But in a long war which catapulted all sorts of unexpected men to national prominence, glory in the newspapers, and excited talk in Washington, the steady, dependable, laconic George Crook never approached center stage. He was not outwardly a warm or effusive man, but the officers under him, and the men under them, generally trusted and liked him. One who learned to value Crook was Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, commander of the 23rd Ohio Infantry at the Battle of Cloyd’s Mountain in May 1864. On the morning of the battle Crook surveyed the rebel position with a field glass and remarked, “They may whip us, but I guess not.”18 A battery of Confederate artillery entrenched on a hill threatened Crook’s men. To put it out of action required a charge across a muddy stream and an open field three hundred yards wide. It was soon littered with the bodies of dead and wounded Union officers and men, but the battery was taken and the field won. “It being the vital point,” Hayes wrote to an uncle of the desperate run across the open field, “General Crook charged with us in person … Altogether, this is our finest experience in the war, and General Crook is the best general we have served under.”19
Crook in his clipped way had guessed right; it was the Confederates who got whipped. His men rarely heard him go beyond a few flat words of that sort. But there was something reassuring in his watchful way. “We all feel great confidence in his skill and good judgement,” Hayes wrote his mother. Calm on the outside, Crook was imagined by his men to be calm all the way through, but it was not entirely so.
Hurt pride was Crook’s secret vice. He felt others got the credit for things he achieved. “It has been ever thus through my life,” he wrote of an early incident in California when a newly arrived officer took credit for something Crook had done. “I have had to do the rough work for others afterwards to get the benefits from it.”20 After Sheridan took command in the Shenandoah in July 1864, Crook perhaps felt his star might shine a little more. Sheridan was a friend; he knew the sort of man Crook was and wouldn’t need reminding. They often met in the evening to talk about the California days.
But credit for military success proved harder to share than memories of early Army days, and in the course of the Shenandoah campaign small injuries to Crook’s self-regard gradually accumulated, opening a gap between the two men which steadily widened. First came fights at Opequon Creek near the town of Winchester and at Fisher’s Hill, two of the three climactic battles that ended southern control of the Shenandoah. No arena of conflict had changed hands more often during the war. By one count the town of Winchester had been won and lost seventy times when Sheridan set his sights on it again in mid-September 1864. Grant listened to his plan and told him, “Go in.”21
The battle eventually called Third Winchester was one of the stupendous fights so common during the war, with almost ten thousand men killed, wounded, or missing on both sides in the course of the day. Crook’s part in the fight was small but critical and brilliantly executed. In mid-battle he departed from the letter of his orders when he saw an opportunity to flank Jubal Early’s men, breaking their line and capturing over a thousand Confederate soldiers. By day’s end Early was in full retreat up the valley turnpike to Fisher’s Hill nearly twenty miles to the south. Crook and Sheridan shared a moment of strange intimacy on entering the town of Winchester, where they were met in the street by three highly excited and effusive girls, exulting over the victory. They spoke so openly and loudly of their pleasure in the Union victory that Crook, who knew them well, tried to quiet them with a reminder, as Sheridan recorded in his memoirs, “that the valley had hitherto been a race-course—one day in the possession of friends and the next of enemies—and warned [them] of the dangers they were incurring by such demonstrations.” Something of Crook’s plain, steady character is revealed in this frank warning to the girls that the Union’s brilliant victory, owing so much to his own role, might be followed as quickly by a reversal.22
But even as these two men savored the day’s victory a seed of anger was sprouting in Crook’s heart; the thousand Confederates his men had captured had been led from the field—“gobbled up”—by the late-arriving Union cavalry, who got the credit for their capture. “I complained of this to Sheridan,” Crook recorded, “who asked me to say nothing about it in my report, but that he saw the whole affair, and would give me credit for it.”23
Two days later at Fisher’s Hill the story was repeated almost verbatim. In Sheridan’s quarters on September 21, the night before the battle, Sheridan at first wanted to attack Early’s right, which was anchored on a bluff—the actual Fisher’s Hill—overlooking the Shenandoah River. A different approach was suggested by one of Crook’s division commanders, Colonel Hayes. Better, he said, to send Crook’s two divisions around to Early’s left, up over a timbered mountain. Early had placed his weakest units there, a clear sign he was convinced no attack would come that way. Sheridan at length agreed, and prepared the rest of his army to make a great to-do next day along Early’s front, convincing the Confederates that the attack would come head on. Hayes did the talking, but one of the officers present, Captain Henry A. Du Pont, later wrote that everybody understood the plan to move secretly up over the mountain was really Crook’s idea.
Conceiving it was the easy part; much harder was the exhausting uphill march the following day, starting before dawn and continuing until four o’clock in the afternoon, with Crook on foot leading the way. He believed that an officer of infantry should walk with his men, not ride. They made the climb in two long parallel lines, with flags lowered and keeping silence. When the time came to attack, Crook had only to order a left flank, march! and his divisions were instantly facing down the timbered hillside toward the unsuspecting Confederates, who were still expecting an attack from the opposite direction. As soon as Crook’s men started down the hill a great roar came up from all of their throats at once. This must have been one of the signal moments of Crook’s life—a perfectly executed maneuver, an unsuspecting enemy, the soft fruit of victory ready to fall into his lap. In his autobiography he wrote,
Unless you heard my fellows yell once, you can form no conception of it. It beggars all description. The enemy fired a few shots afterward, but soon the yell was enough for them. The most of them never stopped to see the fellows the yell came from, but dug out. By the time we reached the open bottom there weren’t any two men of any organization there.24
The collapse of Early’s left was soon followed by the breaking of his whole army, one division after another peeling away, as the panic spread across the southern line from left to right. Soon Early was retreating pell-mell up the valley turnpike, heading south. Sheridan was hoping for the ultimate in military success—the capture of an entire army—but the cavalry divisions he had sent on ahead to block the turnpike and trap Early’s army, and the infantry he had sent in pursuit, pressing Early from behind, both quit as darkness came and went into bivouac. Sheridan was infuriated by this “backing and filling”; what he wanted, he roared in a message, was “resolution and actual fighting, with necessary casualties.”25 But of course the moment was lost. Early had received a sound whipping, but his army was intact. At day’s end Sheridan was thinking of the failure, Crook of the triumph. He had conceived the plan and marched his men for twelve hours to get into position. His attack had rolled up the enemy. But the newspaper reports did not single out Crook for praise; recognition of his merit would have to wait on Sheridan’s official report, just as it did for the battle at Winchester.
But it was a third incident not quite a month later that poisoned the friendship of Crook and Sheridan for good and all. Over the intervening weeks Sheridan and his army chased Early right up the Shenandoah Valley, until the northern transport began to show signs of strain. Better, Sheridan thought, to call a halt and move back down the valley, destroying barns and carrying off the year’s harvest. Grant could not argue. This had been his idea—to “eat out Virginia clean and clear as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the remainder of the season will have to carry their own provender with them.”26 Sheridan did the job thoroughly. By mid-October he was back down the valley near the town of Middletown and the point where Cedar Creek flowed into the Shenandoah, just north of Fisher’s Hill. Early’s army had of course followed them back down, his cavalry nipping at Union heels. Sheridan was meanwhile summoned to Washington for a meeting on endgame strategy. Grant, Sheridan, and Halleck, general of the Army, all had different ideas about what to do next. But Sheridan went uneasily; an intercepted message suggested Early might have been reinforced. Sheridan thought the message a ruse but wasn’t sure. He spent half a day in the capital, then hurried back to Winchester, where he spent the night of October 18, about fifteen miles north of the point where his army had deployed in a line blocking the valley turnpike. Holding the left of the line was Crook with his two divisions.
Now Crook learned about flanking marches from the receiving end. On the ground at the time there was only one clear warning of what was to come. Crook’s officer of the day, hearing noise in the dark beyond the pickets standing guard, went out to investigate. He did not return. It is not clear when Crook learned of this fact, which should have stirred him to action. But he recorded early signs of trouble aplenty in his memoirs, beginning with Sheridan’s removal of the cavalry pickets from Crook’s front. These pickets were an early-warning system; without them Crook’s divisions were exposed. Crook also notes that his divisions were deployed more than a mile from the rest of the army. This meant they were further exposed. Finally, Crook informs us that his divisions had been whittled away by losses in battle and by the removal of men detailed for guard duty and the like elsewhere. He was down “to less than three thousand men.” He was simultaneously exposed and weakened.
The reader of Crook’s memoir, noting the many excuses for the general laid out in advance by Crook the author, is amply warned of the gathering catastrophe, which arrived on the morning of October 19. “Just at the peep of day,” Crook writes, his men in their tents and trenches were suddenly assaulted by four Confederate infantry divisions which had made their way undetected over a narrow mountain path—much as Crook had done at Fisher’s Hill. Surprise was complete. Crook’s men broke. The rest of Sheridan’s army panicked as well and soon the whole Union force was retreating in the direction of Middletown in total disarray. At a stroke, in effect using Crook’s own plan, Early was about to regain everything he had lost, and it was Crook, whose men broke first, who had opened the way. By late morning Sheridan’s army was desperately reforming itself west of the town of Middletown. “Our new line was getting stronger all the time by stragglers joining from the rear,” Crook recorded.27 It was as close as he could bring himself to claiming that the situation was under control. Of course, it was not.
Sheridan meanwhile had been woken at about six o’clock in the morning by an officer reporting the sound of artillery to the south. Desultory firing was not uncommon, so he did not immediately rise. He lay and worried. Then he got up, asked again about the artillery, ordered breakfast, ordered the horses to be saddled, worried about the message he had concluded was a ruse.
Sheridan thus stirred himself with increasing urgency until he mounted at about nine a.m. and with three staff officers and a cavalry escort headed south on the road to Cedar Creek, listening all the while. At one point he dismounted and put his ear to the ground. Now he stopped trying to reassure himself. The sound of the cannons was steady, it was louder, and it was coming his way. Just south of Kernstown, he came to the first signs of disorder and confusion among troops and wagons along the road, soon followed by the panicked chaos of an army in full retreat.
At first, Sheridan thought of trying to establish a new defensive line at Winchester, but then the fighting spirit boiled up in him, he remembered his victories, he told himself the men would fight if he rode to lead them, and that is what he did. Sometimes he was on the road, sometimes he took to the fields alongside to get round the wagons and men. He took his hat off because the soldiers liked that. The cheers buoyed him along and the officers riding with him noted that his jaw was set, his eyes were fiery.
“About-face, boys!” he shouted to the soldiers streaming down the pike away from Cedar Creek. “We are going back to our camps! We are going to get a twist on those fellows! We are going to lick them out of their boots!”28
Twelve or fifteen miles up the valley pike Sheridan charged on his big black horse, Rienzi. When he got to Middletown he found his army in the process of reforming, just as Crook would write later. From about ten thirty until about four in the afternoon Sheridan reformed and reorganized his army, waiting until he thought it was ready, and then he attacked back up the road to Cedar Creek. “Go after them!” Sheridan yelled when the Confederates took to their heels. “We’ve got the god-damnedest twist on them you ever saw.” He drove Early’s divisions first from their captured positions and then, whipped and thoroughly beaten, all the way back to Fisher’s Hill, where the Confederates spent a night before continuing on south.
While Early was facing the reality of defeat that evening at Fisher’s Hill, Sheridan took a seat beside Crook at a campfire on Cedar Creek. Crook’s worst day was Sheridan’s greatest. But by Crook’s account Sheridan said to him a remarkable thing about his ride from Winchester and the turning of the tide of battle. Sheridan was no sentimentalist, but it is hard to see his words as anything but salve on the wound of a friend. “Crook,” he said, “I am going to get much more credit for this than I deserve, for, had I been here in the morning the same thing would have taken place, and had I not returned today, the same thing would have taken place.”29
More credit than he deserved? It had been another bloody day—5,600 men lost by Sheridan, half as many by Early—but the casualties did not reveal the import of the event. Cedar Creek was one of the great and decisive Union victories of the Civil War; it turned defeat into resounding triumph in the space of a day, pushed Early right out of the valley, and sealed the reelection victory of President Lincoln three weeks later. Sheridan had the kind of warlike spirit that inspired men on the battlefield; at Cedar Creek they felt better as soon as they saw him. He deserved plenty of credit, but what he got was astounding, the kind of thing that lifts a man from ordinary mortal to legend. It happened this way. On Monday morning, November 3, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the actor James Murdoch was preparing a selection of patriotic verse he had promised to read at a local theater that night. His friend Buck—Murdoch’s nickname for the painter and occasional poet Thomas Buchanan Read—was with Murdoch when Read’s brother-in-law arrived with a copy of the latest Harper’s Weekly. In it was Thomas Nast’s drawing of Sheridan on Rienzi, dashing from Winchester to Cedar Creek. “Buck,” said the actor, “there’s a poem in that picture.”
