Beal noted that Custer and his men were completely at his mercy, and orders had come down the previous evening to fire on any Union troops who showed themselves. But Beal had already decided during the night that his “sense of justice and honor” prevented him from killing men in cold blood who would not have known the risk. “I did not give the command to fire and close from right and left upon them,” he said, “but I ordered one of my soldiers to tell him our orders changed in the night, and I would give him one chance for his life, and that was retreat in haste, or I would be compelled to fire, though they were unarmed and defenseless.” Custer and his men quickly rode away. A year later Beal, wounded at Cedar Creek and left for dead by the retreating rebel troops, fell into Union hands. He wrote a letter to Custer relating the earlier episode and asking for parole, especially given his condition. He later received word that by Custer’s order he was to be left at the residence in Strasburg where he was convalescing, and they bid him to “go home to my young wife I had married a short time before, who was thinking of me as dead.”7
In September 1863, Confederate forces in the west faced serious reverses, and General James Longstreet’s corps was detached from Lee’s army to reinforce Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. This gave General George Meade an opportunity. On the morning of September 13, Union forces pushed over the Rappahannock upstream from Fredericksburg and drove the rebels from Brandy Station to Culpeper, where at midday three cavalry divisions under Buford, Gregg, and Kilpatrick were set to converge.
Confederate guns were emplaced on a ridge outside of town. The 2nd New York Cavalry took “very severe artillery fire,” said one report, “as great trees broken off and shattered clearly proved.” Colonel H. E. Davies, commanding Farnsworth’s old brigade, ordered a battalion of the 2nd New York under Lieutenant Colonel Harhaus and Major McIrwin to take the guns. The troopers galloped down a hill facing the battery, “a perfect avalanche of shot and shell crashing above them, and ploughing the ground around them,” dressed the line at the base, then “charged up with such impetuosity that every thing gave way before them.”8
Kilpatrick then tried to move left around Culpeper to capture a train that was departing in haste before the enemy onslaught. Custer’s brigade scattered rebel skirmishers posted on the edge of the town, but the advance was frustrated by a stream swollen from recent rains. One hundred men from the 7th Michigan waded and swam the stream and charged up a hill on the other side, running off a rebel gun and some sharpshooters, securing that flank.
Meanwhile, Confederate cavalry had established a new defensive position in the woods just on the other side of the town, and rebel guns placed on a high hill began to punish the Union forces. Kilpatrick ordered a battalion of the 1st Vermont Cavalry, commanded by Major William Wells, to neutralize the threat. Custer dashed up to accompany the assault.
The charge was “of unequalled gallantry,” one report read. The Vermonters were “obliged to dash through the town, and down a steep hill, through a ravine, and then up a steep and very high hill to the battery, which, meanwhile, was belching forth its shell and canister upon their ranks. But it could not retard the speed nor daunt the spirit of the ‘Boy General of the Golden Locks’ and his brave troops.” The cavalrymen swarmed the rebel guns, and Custer, “armed only with his riding whip, compell[ed] many a man to surrender at discretion.” Cavalryman Willard Glazier said that “no soldier who saw [Custer] on that day . . . ever questioned his right to a star, or all the gold lace he felt inclined to wear.”9
The battle continued for hours after, with a series of charges and countercharges. Shot and shell rained into Culpeper, and a Confederate account noted that “women were shrieking, soldiers were groaning with their wounds, and children were crying from fright, and the death-shots hissing from afar were howling and screeching over the town.” At four in the afternoon, the rebels finally quit their defense and withdrew eleven miles to the Rapidan River. The assault netted numerous guns and over one hundred prisoners, but Custer was wounded by a Confederate shot, “which killed his horse and came near killing the general.” A shell had taken off part of his boot and wounded Custer in the leg. He went up to General Pleasonton and said, “How are you, fifteen-days’-leave-of-absence?” referring to the leave granted a wounded man. “They have spoiled my boots but they didn’t gain much there, for I stole ’em from a Reb.” Colonel Theodore Lyman noted that “the warlike ringlets got not only fifteen, but twelve [additional] days’ leave of absence and have retreated to their native Michigan!”10
The furlough was well timed. George had important business to attend to in Monroe. He had not been there since the previous spring, and this would be his first visit as a general. He had important matters to discuss with Libbie and was also determined to have a talk with her father, at the very least to make sure the judge was aware of his achievements. George and Libbie had honored her father’s admonition against the two having any direct contact and had carried on correspondence through Libbie’s friend Annette Humphrey. “Friend Nettie” and “Friend Armstrong” exchanged many letters, and in this way the indirect courtship continued. Libbie’s friend Marguerite Merington said that George was “never allowed too abundantly to hope nor too utterly to despair,” though at times he veered between the two.11
Libbie and her family had been away at Traverse City but by chance returned to Monroe the day after George arrived. Libbie wrote her cousin Rebecca Richmond that since George and Nettie were such good friends, “of course I saw him at once, because I could not avoid him. I tried to but I did not succeed.” She confided that George “proposed to me last winter, but I refused him more than once, on account of Father’s apparently unconquerable prejudice. I never even thought of marrying him. Indeed I did not know I loved him so until he left Monroe in the spring.”12 George wasted no time and renewed his intention to marry Libbie. “The General’s proposal was as much a cavalry charge as any he ever took in the field,” she recalled. “Proposing the second time I saw him as a violent contrast to the ambling ponies of my tranquil girlhood.”13 During this visit they made a pledge to each other, short of a formal engagement.
But nothing would happen without the judge’s approval, and he was not yet ready to give his daughter over to George. Father Bacon sensed something was up during the furlough and artfully dodged the topic. He saw George off at the train station, where the young suitor said he had wanted to talk to the judge but would write instead. Mr. Bacon replied, “Very well.” In Baltimore en route back to his command, George wrote Nettie that Libbie would have to intercede if there was any hope of getting her father’s permission. “I feel her father, valuing her happiness, would not refuse were he to learn from her own lips our real relation to one another,” he said.14
Back at the front, George was plunged almost immediately into battle. After the victory at Culpeper, the Union line moved up to the Rapidan. General Lee had no intention of letting it stay there. On October 9, he launched a massive flanking maneuver around Meade’s right aiming for Centreville, an offensive that became known as the Bristoe Campaign. The next day, as Lee’s forces pressed north, Custer was ordered to pull back from his forward position to Kilpatrick’s headquarters at James City, west of Culpeper. He arrived that afternoon to find the town already occupied by rebel cavalry under the command of his West Point friend P. M. B. Young. There was a brief battle in which the 5th Michigan charged the rebel positions. The cavalrymen were turned back by sharpshooters from the 1st South Carolina firing from behind a stone wall. Custer noted that “most of my command rested on their arms during the night.”
The next day Custer disengaged and headed east for Culpeper. On reaching the outskirts of the town, he learned that rebel cavalry were moving up behind him in force. The pursuers were Wade Hampton’s division, under direct command of Jeb Stuart. Custer paused, expecting an attack that did not come. He then received urgent orders to make for the Rappahannock. The brigade moved through Culpeper with the band playing the “sauc
y air of Yankee Doodle,” according to Colonel Edward B. Sawyer of the 1st Vermont Cavalry, and in the faces of the inhabitants they could “plainly read the expression ‘good riddance.’”
The cavalry moved up the railroad line toward the river. Rebels again pressed from the rear, and more enemy troops emerged on Custer’s left, “evidently attempting to intercept our line of march to the river,” he wrote. By the time Custer’s men reached the familiar field of Brandy Station, skirmishing in his rear forced him to move his guns to the head of the column to keep them from falling into enemy hands. Fire also erupted from the south; a reinforced cavalry division under Fitzhugh Lee was moving toward them but had mistakenly brought their artillery to bear on Hampton’s men, an error they soon corrected. Then a courier arrived with more bad news: enemy horsemen under General James B. Gordon had rushed ahead of the column and cut the route to the river crossing. “The heavy masses of the rebel cavalry could be seen covering the heights in front of my advance,” Custer wrote. “A heavy column was enveloping each flank, and my advance confronted by more than double my own number. The perils of my situation can be estimated.” As Colonel Sawyer put it, “The scene began to grow interesting.”
An artillery duel commenced while Custer weighed his options. Just then General Pleasonton rode up, having also been caught in the envelopment. Custer proposed a direct route out of the quandary: “cut through the force in my front, and thus open a way for the entire command to the river.” Pleasonton approved, and the push was on. Custer formed the 6th and 7th Michigan as a holding force, with the 5th and 1st facing the front on the right and left. “I informed them that we were surrounded,” Custer wrote. “We had either to cut our way out or surrender—which we had no intention of doing.”15
Custer struck up the band before the attack, “which excited the enthusiasm of the entire command to the highest pitch,” he said, “and made each individual member feel as if he was a host in himself.” Willard Glazier recalled that Custer, “the daring, terrible demon that he is in battle, pulled off his cap and handed it to his orderly, then dashed madly forward in the charge, while his yellow locks floated like pennants on the breeze.”16 Custer’s men made “a magnificent charge,” Colonel Sawyer recalled, “but finding the rebel line formed beyond a ditch too wide for his horses to leap, had, after the exchange of a few rounds, been obliged to retire in considerable disorder.”
By this time Buford’s cavalry had joined the fight, along with the rest of Kilpatrick’s division. They formed on the high ground of Fleetwood Heights with Buford on the left and Kilpatrick on the right. Buford’s men faced more level ground and made a massed charge against the encroaching rebels. Custer’s men regrouped and attacked the force to the right, along with the First Brigade commanded by Brigadier General Henry E. Davies. The Federals “fought desperately for self-preservation,” Jeb Stuart recounted. “The woods near Brandy Station were speedily occupied by the sharpshooters of Lomax and Chambliss to resist the [Union] force moving from Fleetwood to the relief of the other column, and an engagement ensued of the most obstinate and determined character.”17
“The scene had become wild and exciting,” Colonel Sawyer wrote. “The batteries of the two divisions, and more than an equal number of guns on the rebel side (in all, probably forty), were vigorously playing. Charges and countercharges were frequent in every direction, and as far as the eye could see over the vast rolling field were encounters by regiments, by battalions, by squads, and by individuals, in hand-to-hand conflict.” Glazier said that “no one who looked upon that wonderful panorama can ever forget it. On the great field were riderless horses and dying men; clouds of dust from solid shot and bursting shell occasionally obscured the sky; broken caissons and upturned ambulances obstructed the way, while long lines of cavalry were pressing forward in the charge, with their drawn sabres, glistening in the bright sunlight.”18
Chaos grew on the field. Lines were indistinct, charges and countercharges were uncoordinated, and the two forces became mixed. “It was among the heaviest [fighting] of the war,” recalled rebel John E. Cooke, “and for a time nothing was seen but dust, smoke, and confused masses reeling to and fro; nothing was heard but shouts, cheers, yells, and orders, mixed with the quick bang of carbines and the clash of sabres—above all, and the continuous thunder of the artillery. It was as ‘mixed up’ as any fight of the war.”19
After two hours of fighting and maneuvering, the beleaguered Federal cavalry forced their way across the river, crossing in good order according to Custer. He had led his brigade on charge after charge during the battle, having two horses shot from under him but emerging unwounded.20 The last Union horsemen were on the north bank of the Rappahannock after nightfall, having narrowly escaped a major calamity. Shortly after the two divisions reached safety and the men were preparing to make camp, General Pleasonton received an urgent order from Meade’s headquarters—do not cross the river.21
CHAPTER NINE
THE BUCKLAND RACES
After escaping from the envelopment in the retreat from Culpeper, Custer sent for Major James Kidd of the 6th Michigan Cavalry to mount a reconnaissance mission on enemy forces near Gainesville. “It was my first personal interview with the great cavalryman,” Kidd wrote. “He was at his headquarters, in the woods, taking life in as light-hearted a way as though he had not just come out of a fight, and did not expect others to come right along. He acted like a man who made a business of his profession; who went about the work of fighting battles and winning victories, as a railroad superintendent goes about the business of running trains. When in action, his whole mind was concentrated on the duty and responsibility of the moment; in camp, he was genial and companionable, blithe as a boy.”1
Lee’s unexpected drive north had forced Meade back forty-five miles to Centreville, and the campaign seemed to be a significant Confederate victory. But three days after the brutal Brandy Station fight, Lee’s Third Corps, under the command of Lieutenant General A. P. Hill, was badly mauled by outnumbered yet well-positioned Union defenders at the Battle of Bristoe Station, southwest of Manassas. This blunted Lee’s momentum and effectively ended the Confederate advance.
Lee began to pull back on October 18, and as the rebels moved south, Kilpatrick pursued Stuart closely, with Custer’s brigade in the advance. Kilpatrick was “furious as a wild boar” by one report, looking for payback for the battle at Brandy Station the week before.2 On the nineteenth Stuart’s men made a stand on the south bank of Broad Run, at the village of Buckland Mills. Custer attacked the rebels head-on, but Stuart’s artillery thwarted the assault. After a few more probes, Custer turned the rebel left flank and forced Stuart from his position, driving him a mile down the road. Custer’s men paused in Buckland to rest while Davies’s 1st Brigade continued the chase. Stuart’s cavalry withdrew into the hilly country heading toward Warrenton, ten miles away.
Custer and his staff retired to a manor house called Cerro Gordo, located on a prominence on the north bank of Broad Run, overlooking Buckland Mills. The house belonged to Charles Hunton, a leading Virginia politician, and earlier that day had served as Jeb Stuart’s headquarters. “At the time of our arrival at that point,” Custer wrote, Stuart “was seated at the dinner-table, eating; but, owing to my successful advance, he was compelled to leave his dinner untouched—a circumstance not regretted by that portion of my command into whose hands it fell.” The last of Stuart’s commanders to leave was George’s West Point friend P. M. B. Young. Stuart had advised Young not to tarry, and after a shell exploded nearby and an aide had called out, “They are coming, sir, we must hurry or be cut off from the bridge,” Young and his men evacuated. Shortly after, Custer rode up. He politely asked Hunton’s two daughters, who were minding the house, if he could have his dinner there. They said that it was already on the table, that General Young had just left it.
“Very well, ladies,” Custer said, “Young and I are friends.” Custer and his men sat down to eat and he regaled the sisters wi
th tales of his and Young’s exploits at West Point. Kilpatrick soon joined the group, visibly pleased with the turn of events. He announced that since Stuart had boasted of driving him from Culpeper, he was going to drive Stuart right back to Warrenton.
The congratulatory repast was interrupted by the sound of artillery fire. It came from a column of approaching cavalry that Kilpatrick assumed was Merritt’s brigade. However, a short time later, a mile-long line of Confederate infantry emerged from the distant woods to the south across Broad Run, heading in their direction.
In his enthusiasm, Kilpatrick had ridden hard into a trap. As the Federal cavalry pursued Jeb Stuart and Hampton’s division, Fitzhugh Lee, commanding a cavalry division reinforced with infantry, retired toward Auburn on a parallel track, the movement concealed by the rolling, wooded terrain. After the tail end of Davies’s brigade disappeared down the Warrenton road chasing Stuart, Fitz Lee fired his artillery as a prearranged signal to commence the attack. Stuart turned his men and charged back on the pursuing Union cavalry, while Fitz Lee moved on the Federal rear to close the trap. The plan worked perfectly, Lee observed, because Kilpatrick “was easily misled.”3
“I pressed upon them suddenly and vigorously in front,” Stuart said, “with Gordon in the center and Young and Rosser on his flanks.” Union troops strung out on the road at first resisted, but “the charge was made with such impetuosity . . . that the enemy broke and the rout was soon complete.”4 The confident Federal troops had been caught off guard by the unexpected reversal in fortune. Unable to rally and mount a coherent defense, they scattered north up the road toward Broad Run.
The situation was also heating up back near Buckland Mills. Custer had rushed the dismounted 6th Michigan under Major Kidd across the bridge toward the advancing rebels, along with Pennington’s battery of artillery. Custer first thought the rebels were fielding a similar force of dismounted cavalry, but soon learned he was facing a determined infantry assault. “Pennington’s battery, aided by the Sixth Michigan cavalry, poured a destructive fire upon the enemy as he advanced,” Custer wrote, “but failed to force him back.” The rebel infantry advanced to within twenty yards of his guns before Pennington limbered up and retreated back across Broad Run, followed by the 6th Michigan in good order.
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