In the fall of 1864, George Custer was at the top of his game. In three and a half years of war, he had risen from being a second lieutenant to a brevet major general. He had fought in countless engagements large and small, some of which were among the great battles of the war, and in which he played a significant role. He had married the love of his life and was nationally known and acclaimed. In November, Private George Perkins of the 6th New York Independent Battery gave his assessment of Custer in part of a regular series of reports he wrote for the Middlesex Journal:
In the whole of the campaign which commenced with the battle of Winchester, no general has won more praise than Custer, and in this last fight he has fairly doubled his laurels. He is a great favorite and everybody claims that he has nobly earned the second star on his shoulder. He seems to possess all the fire and courage of Kilpatrick, but infinitely more judgment. In personal appearance he is the very model of a dashing cavalry officer. His figure is slight and elegant and he sits on his horse most gracefully. His costume is a dark red velvet cavalry jacket, with pants of a light drab. His long yellow hair flows out from beneath a broad brimmed hat, and streams in ringlets far behind him as he rides along at a swift canter. His features are strongly marked and pale. His voice is heavy yet musical. The members of his old brigade always cheer him when he passes, and he always returns the compliment by waving his hat above his head. No wonder he is admired when to graces of person he adds excellence of mind. When he lifts his hat his fair complexion and hair, and fine contour of head give him the look of a young Apollo.1
The back-and-forth continued between the cavalry in the valley through the fall. Custer and Rosser continued to spar, and at times the contests seemed to take on a personal quality. During one fight, Custer spied Rosser’s battle flag among retreating enemy troops and led a regimental charge to try to seize it. The charge lost momentum before the riders could overtake the flag bearer, but Custer and three other men kept riding hard for the banner and almost took it.2
As the year waned, the two armies settled into winter quarters. The weather was severe, with frequent snow and bitter cold. “The rigor of the season was very much against the success of any mounted operations,” Sheridan recalled. But the winter was especially punishing for the besieged Confederates in Richmond, and Grant wanted to increase their misery by breaking up the railroads that fed the gloomy capital.
On December 19, two Union cavalry columns set off south. The larger, Merritt’s and Powell’s divisions led by Torbert, headed east through Chester Gap with orders to skirt the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains south of Charlottesville, disrupting the Virginia Central Railway lines there, then moving on to Lynchburg and breaking that supply line as well. The second column, with Custer’s division, would proceed straight down the valley as a diversionary force, engaging the Confederate units there and pushing on to link up with Torbert at Lynchburg 175 miles from Winchester. The columns were traveling light, with no artillery or wagons, carrying their supplies with them. “Nothing but extremely bad weather will prevent good results,” Sheridan wrote optimistically to Grant.3
Early was holed up in Staunton, with a reduced force and uncertain will to fight. Custer was confident that he would be in Lynchburg for Christmas. But it was hard going for the men and their horses. Cold temperatures, ice, snow, and sleet slowed the column and did nothing for morale.
Two days later Custer’s men were bivouacked at Lacey Springs, about sixty miles south of Winchester, outside of Harrisonburg. In the predawn hours, word came from the picket line that rebels were advancing. Custer began to ready his men, and just as they were going to horse, “a yell and a simultaneous volley, and the flash of rebel carbines and rifles, gave warning that the enemy was already in their camp in large force.” In the darkness Rosser’s cavalrymen had infiltrated the Union perimeter wearing Federal wool overcoats. Troops fired almost randomly with pistols and carbines, while rebels engaged hand-to-hand with drawn sabers. Union troops fell back, re-formed, and charged the enemy. But between the darkness, the intermingled units, and the Confederates in blue, it was unclear how the contest was going. “The only way to distinguish friend from foe was by the sound of the voice,” one report read. “It finally came to a fight like that of the Irishman, every man ‘on his own hook.’”4 In the confusion, troops from both sides would make for camp with prisoners to find themselves among the enemy. At Custer’s headquarters a rebel soldier came up and asked him which regiment it was. “Take off that blue overcoat,” Custer ordered, and took the man prisoner.5
The weight of battle turned against them, and the Union troops withdrew, many men riding bareback because they had not had time to saddle their mounts. Custer captured two battle flags and took twenty-seven prisoners, but lost two killed, twenty-two wounded, and twenty prisoners to Rosser. Meanwhile, Torbert’s column was checked by Lomax’s cavalry and some infantry sent from Richmond near Gordonsville, and the two columns returned to Winchester, with hundreds of men frostbitten and with little to show for their efforts.6
As the winter of 1864–65 drew to a close, the war was looking bleak for the Confederacy. Around the same time Custer was being run out of Lacey’s Springs, General Sherman arrived in Savannah, completing his march through Georgia. By mid-February he was in Columbia, South Carolina, and pressing north, sparring as he went with rebel General Joseph E. Johnston’s weary troops. The siege of Richmond continued, and Jubal Early’s command had been pared down to furnish defenders for the Confederate capital. At year’s open he could only muster a few thousand troops to defend the Shenandoah Valley, and many of them were young boys and other replacements.
The valley was ripe for the taking. On February 20 Grant wired Sheridan, “As soon as it is possible to travel I think you will have no difficulty about reaching Lynchburg with a cavalry force alone.” This movement, coupled with massed cavalry actions in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, along with Sherman “eating out the vitals of South Carolina—is all that will be wanted to leave nothing for the rebellion to stand upon.”7
Sheridan’s force faced little opposition as they moved south. “Parties of the enemy made their appearance on our flanks,” he wrote, “but no attention was paid to them.”8 Early’s defensive force at Staunton consisted of “a local provost guard, and a company of reserves, composed of boys under 18 years of age.”9 Rosser attempted a delaying action but failed, and with the road to Staunton open, Early evacuated the city and fired the bridge over Christian’s Creek.
Sheridan’s force occupied the town on March 2, and he immediately ordered Custer to give chase to Early to prevent him from withdrawing to Richmond. Early had drawn up his forces, two brigades of infantry and Rosser’s cavalry, in an entrenched defensive line outside the town of Waynesboro, ten miles east on the road to Charlottesville. The weather was inclement, cold and rainy. Early intended only to delay the Union forces while he withdrew his artillery, for which he had no horse teams.
The rebels had formed a line on the outskirts of the town, the left anchored near a bow in the South River. As Custer approached with his column, he noted that the flank was exposed in front of the river, inviting an attack. He hurriedly sent three regiments against Early’s weak left while he assaulted the center with two brigades, swiftly breaking the line. “The rebels fired one volley,” the New York Herald reported, “and then fled like sheep.”10 The 8th New York and the 1st Connecticut Cavalries charged through the town, “sabering a few men as they went along,” and seized the river crossing at the opposite end, cutting off the main Confederate escape route. “The enemy threw down their arms and surrendered,” Sheridan noted, “with cheers at the suddenness with which they were captured.”11 Early lost 9 pieces of light artillery, 13 battle flags, and over 1,200 of the 1,600 men he commanded.
Early and his general officers escaped the net, along with Rosser’s cavalry. “It has always been a wonder to me how they escaped,” Sheridan said, “unless they hid in obscure places in the houses of the tow
n.”12 In fact, Early had been cut off from his command by Custer’s sudden movement, and, climbing a hill outside of Waynesboro to view the battle, he said he “had the mortification of seeing the greater part of my command being carried off as prisoners.”13
Custer pushed across the Blue Ridge through Rockfish Gap toward Charlottesville, fighting muddy roads and cold, driving rain. The city fathers met his mud-spattered troops outside of town and surrendered it without a fight. Custer paused there for a few days as the rest of Sheridan’s force came up, and set about destroying the locks of the James River canal connector and tearing up the rail lines heading east, west, and south.
While in town Custer’s men commandeered the presses of a local newspaper and published the Third Cavalry Division Chronicle, which contained the general’s official reports of the recent days’ actions. A notice called for people to furnish “donations” of provisions to Custer’s division and was signed “Jubal Early, commissary for General Sheridan’s army.” An advertisement offered “Two Dollars Reward, Confederate Currency,” for information concerning the whereabouts of a runaway slave, “Jube, answering to the name of Early,” and a one-cent reward for Rosser.14
Rosser’s house was nearby, and his wife, Betty, invited Custer in for a brief visit. She knew it would be her husband’s wish to show some hospitality even though “she never supposed she could bring herself to speak to, much less invite a Yankee officer into her home.”15 As he was leaving, George held out a gold pen to her baby Sarah, whom she was holding, saying, “Give this to your Papa dear, and tell him it is from a friend who whipped him yesterday.” Mrs. Rosser said no, but Sarah grasped the pen, and by the time Betty got it from her, “the Yankee was down the steps and in the saddle in a flash.”16
With no strong force opposing him, Sheridan chose to move east rather than toward Danville and Sherman beyond, tearing up railroads and hunting the remains of Early’s forces. Custer’s division moved to Frederick Hall Station to break tracks, piling up railroad ties and heating rails on top, then wrapping the red-hot rails around telegraph poles. Custer inspected the telegraph office at the station and found a dispatch from Early to Lee indicating he was planning a surprise cavalry attack on Sheridan’s forces near Goochland using 150 men of the 1st Virginia Cavalry under Colonel Morgan. Custer immediately set out to find and destroy them.
The chase was lively; when Early saw the Federal cavalry approaching in the distance, he knew he had been found out and scattered his force. Federal horsemen surged ahead with a whoop, and Custer shouted that the man who brought in Early would receive a thirty-day furlough. At one point Captain Burton of Custer’s staff closed to within a few yards of Early and his orderly, but given the orderly’s more pristine uniform, took him for the general and demanded he surrender. The orderly responded by shooting Burton’s horse. Early finally escaped over the South Anna River, fleeing on foot; he was saved by the onset of night.17 With a heavy heart, Robert E. Lee relieved “Old Jube” of command on March 30. With the destruction of Early’s army complete and the valley secure, Sheridan remarked, “Custer is a trump.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“FIGHTING LIKE A VIKING”
Sheridan’s cavalry rejoined the eastern army for the final push on Richmond. Torbert took command of the rump of the Army of the Shenandoah to maintain security in the valley, and Sheridan elevated Merritt to corps command over Devins’s, Crook’s, and Custer’s divisions.
Richmond’s last remaining supply lines were the Danville and Southside Railroads. Grant planned to swing forces four miles west of the rebel works around Petersburg, seize the ford over Hatcher’s Run, then cut the Southside Railroad near Sutherland’s Station. He could then move north and bottle up Lee’s army and the Confederate government, ending the war. Grant’s greatest fear in the weeks leading up to the campaign was that Lee would sense the growing danger, abandon Richmond, and move west to unite with Johnston’s army in North Carolina. But the symbolic importance of Richmond kept Lee in place.
Sheridan began the movement on March 29 with the Cavalry Corps and infantry from II and V Corps. He was hampered by strong rains and muddy roads, and the going was slow. A key objective was the strategic crossroads of Five Forks, just south of the Hatcher’s Run ford, which Merritt’s scouts learned was lightly defended. He pushed two cavalry brigades forward against the mud and stubborn fire from rebel pickets, reaching the objective by mid-morning on the thirty-first.
But the Confederates had gotten wind of Sheridan’s plan and were already on the move. A force of ten thousand men under Major General George Pickett crossed Hatcher’s Run and swept down on Merritt’s overmatched cavalry, pushing them south toward Dinwiddie Courthouse.1 Pickett had three brigades of cavalry under Rosser, Fitzhugh Lee, and W. H. F. “Rooney” Lee (second son of the Confederate commander); the three infantry brigades from his division; and two more from Bushrod Johnson’s. After a check administered by Gregg’s and Gibbs’s brigades, Pickett reformed and continued to push south.
Custer had been at the rear with the baggage train as the battle developed. As Pickett’s men drove the Union troops, Sheridan sent riders back to bring Custer forward on the double. “Custer never required more than simple orders on such an occasion,” Sheridan’s adjutant general, Colonel Frederick C. Newhall, recalled, “for he had in himself the vim which insured a prompt response to the wishes of the commanding general.”2 He rushed to the front with Capehart’s and Pennington’s brigades following, and when he arrived, “a scene of the wildest excitement prevailed,” a reporter wrote.3 Custer set the band to play “Garryowen” to rally the retreating cavalry and ordered dismounted troopers of Capehart’s brigade to tear down fences to assemble breastworks.4
Pickett’s troops soon emerged from the woodline across a long field, in a “handsome and imposing line of battle” according to Major Henry E. Tremain of Crook’s staff. Union guns brought them under long-range fire, but the “long, single, unsupported line of infantry [swept] over the undulating plain and scarcely deigning a reply to the warning compliments from our artillery.”5
Custer set his available command to horse and assembled them for a charge. After conferring with Sheridan, he rode to his men, but Sheridan called him back.
“General! General!” Sheridan said firmly. “You understand? I want you to give it to them.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll give it to them,” Custer replied hurriedly.6 He readied his line for the saber charge and set out. But the ground was soft from the days of rain, and the horses became stuck, some falling, others throwing their riders. A charge was impossible, and Custer would have to find another way to “give it to them.”
The rebels came on. “They were the flower of the Army of Northern Virginia,” Chaplain Charles A. Humphreys of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry recalled, “and were led by one of its best fighting Generals—Pickett. They seemed to us utterly reckless of death. In the face of our severest fire they would swoop down upon us across an open field with such a careless swing, it seemed as if they enjoyed being on the skirmish line, and we suspected that they had such a miserable time of it in camp that they preferred standing up to be shot at.”7 The Union line firmed up with the arrival of Pennington’s brigade, and the troopers prepared for contact behind their hastily erected defenses.
As Pickett’s men came on, Sheridan, Merritt, Custer, and their staffs galloped down the Union line, hats aloft and colors flying, as the band played “Hail Columbia.” The troops cheered wildly. Rebel sharpshooters took long-range shots at the party, scoring some hits among the junior staff and wounding New York Herald correspondent Theodore C. Wilson (who was “out of place,” Sheridan observed gleefully).8
The rebels advanced in the teeth of fire from Union horse artillery, but the outnumbered cavalrymen lay low behind their breastworks until Pickett’s men were within yards of their position. “Then they opened,” Sheridan wrote, “Custer’s repeating rifles pouring out such a shower of lead that nothing could stand up against
it.” The Confederates “recoiled in dismay” and pulled back quickly to the safety of the wood line. “For that night, at least,” Chaplain Humphreys recalled, “Dinwiddie was safe.”9
Sheridan was uncertain whether Pickett would continue the advance the next day, but he was ready for him if he did. Pickett’s force was extended beyond the Confederate line, leaving his left flank vulnerable. Sheridan rushed word to Warren commanding V Corps, east of Dinwiddie, to “attack instantly and in full force” if the rebels advanced, and even if they didn’t, to “attack anyway” at first light. Sheridan would hold the front with Custer while Warren swept in behind, and they would bag the lot of them.10
But Pickett understood the danger as well and pulled back to a position around Five Forks. An order came down from Robert E. Lee to “hold Five Forks at all hazards. Protect road to Ford’s Depot and prevent Union forces from striking the south-side railroad. Regret exceedingly your forced withdrawal, and your inability to hold the advantage you had gained.” But even Five Forks was too far extended. Pickett was about four miles out from the end of the rebel works with no flank support. The Five Forks defense did not allow him to anchor on Hatcher’s Run, which was two miles to his rear. Fitz Lee believed that “Pickett’s isolated position was unfortunately selected” and thought it would have been better to establish a “line behind Hatcher’s Run or at Sutherland Station [that] could not have been flanked.”11 But his uncle’s order to Pickett was unambiguous, and the rebels dug in. “I immediately formed line of battle upon the White Oak Road and set my men to throwing up temporary breastworks,” Pickett wrote. “Pine trees were felled, a ditch dug and the earth thrown up behind the logs.”12 As one report described it, “they fortified this empty solitude as if it had been their capital.”13
The next morning a thick, cold fog lay on the Dinwiddie battlefield. When the mist had lifted enough to see to their front, Custer’s men spotted some soldiers but could not tell who they were, friend or foe. Some thought they were Pickett’s command, others believed they were troops from Warren’s V Corps that had moved between them and the rebels in the early morning darkness. After some debate, one of Custer’s staff said he saw “most unmistakably blue, and dashed boldly down toward a mounted officer” who was riding between the lines. There followed a challenge, some questions, then the report of a pistol. Custer’s officer came galloping back to report that the opposing line was “positively gray—a very gray gentleman having shot at him and called him some highly improper names.”14
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