A Stillness at Appomattox (150 page)

As
the
army
withdrew
Sheridan
had
the
men
get
the matches
out
again,
and
the
upper
Valley
got
the
treatment which
the
area
below
Strasburg
had
been
given
earlier.
A cordon
of
cavalry
brought
up
the
rear,
and
behind
it
there was
a
blackened
waste.
A
gunner
said
that
"clean
work
was done,"
and
a
newspaper
correspondent
wrote:
"The
atmosphere,
from
horizon
to
horizon,
has
been
black
with
the smoke
of
a
hundred
conflagrations,
and
at
night
a
gleam brighter
and
more
lurid
than
sunset
has
shot
from
every verge."
Orders
were
to
burn
no
dwellings,
but
if
a
burning barn
happened
to
stand
close
to
a
house
the
house
usually went
up
too,
and
the
correspondent
admitted
that
all
of
this incendiarism
could
not
take
place
"without
undue
license" by
stragglers
and
bummers;
so
"there
have
been
frequent instances
of
rascality
and
pillage."

Nearly
all
barns
and
stables
were
destroyed,
he
recorded, most
gardens
and
cornfields
were
ruined,
and
more
than 5,000
head
of
livestock
were
driven
off.
Stout
Union
man though
he
was,
this
correspondent
felt
that
the
devastation "fearfully
illustrates
the
horrible
barbarity
of
war."
Sheridan's orders
were
to
leave
each
family
enough
to
avert
starvation, but
marauding
stragglers
often
carried
away
the
last
morsel. The
newspaperman
summed
it
up:

"The
completeness
of
the
devastation
is
awful.
Hundreds of
nearly
starving
people
are
going
north.
Our
trains
are crowded
with
them.
They
line
the
wayside.
Hundreds
more are
coming;
not
half
the
inhabitants
of
the
Valley
can
subsist on
it
in
its
present
condition."
⁶

A
Confederate
officer
on
Early's
staff
left
bitter
testimony?

"I
rode
down
the
Valley
with
the
advance
after
Sheridan's retreating
cavalry
beneath
great
columns
of
smoke
which
almost
shut
out
the
sun
by
day,
and
in
the
red
glare
of
bonfires which,
all
across
that
Valley,
poured
out
flames
and
sparks heavenward
and
crackled
mockingly
in
the
night
air;
and
I saw
mothers
and
maidens
tearing
their
hair
and
shrieking
to Heaven
in
their
fright
and
despair,
and
little
children,
voiceless
and
tearless
in
their
pitiable
terror."
⁷

Fully
a
year
later,
an
English
traveler
wrote
that
the
Shen
andoah
Valley
looked
like
one
vast
moor.
⁸

Heavy
smoke,
and
blackened
earth,
and
unending
fires
at night:
and
with
the
army
as
it
moved
there
was
an
increasing stream
of
refugees,
as
if
some
strange
emigrant
train
were
off on
an
unimaginable
journey.
At
many
houses,
as
the
cavalry approached,
people
were
all
packed
and
waiting.
They
could ride
in
army
wagons,
perhaps,
and
with
the
army
there would
be
food,
and
if
they
were
asked
where
they
wanted
to go
they
would
reply:
"Anywhere,
to
get
out
of
this."
Many
of the
Dunkers
and
Mennonites
were
setting
out
to
join
relatives
in
Pennsylvania,
and
there
were
scores
and
hundreds
of contrabands
who
were
departing
for
no
one
could
imagine what
goal.
They
had
been
told
that
the
Yankees
killed
colored
people,
but
with
every
barn
for
sixty
miles
going
up
in flames
it
seemed
to
them
that
they
ought
to
leave.

These
contrabands
had
many
children,
who
looked
in wide-eyed
wonder
at
the
odd
things
that
were
going
on.
The surgeon
of
the
77th
New
York
reined
in
once
by
a
rickety
old cart
drawn
by
an
even
more
rickety
horse.
The
cart
seemed to
be
absolutely
brimming
over
with
small
children,
and
the surgeon
asked
the
bandannaed
mammy
who
was
driving: "Aunty,
are
these
all
your
children?"
She
looked
at
him
in mild
surprise
and
protested:
"They's
only
eighteen
of
'em."
⁹

Early
pressed
close
behind
the
rear
guard,
and
his
cavalry
Struck
whenever
it
found
a
chance.
But
things
had
changed since
the
early
days
of
the
war,
when
Confederate
troopers could
ride
rings
around
the
Yankees.
The
Rebel
supply
of horses
was
running
out,
and
manpower
was
getting
low,
and the
squadrons
that
came
in
on
turnpike
and
field
to
harass the
blue
files
no
longer
had
the
old
advantage.
A
Confederate officer
confessed
glumly
that
Sheridan's
cavalrymen
nowadays
"were
more
to
be
feared
than
their
infantry—better
soldiers
all
through."
¹⁰

Sheridan
grew
irritated
by
the
unending
rear-guard
actions,
and
at
last
he
called
in
Torbert
and
told
him
to
end the
nuisance
once
and
for
all:
"Whip
or
get
whipped."
On October
9
Torbert
sent
Custer
and
Merritt
back
for
a
head-on
fight,
and
their
seasoned
divisions
broke
the
Confederate mounted
line
to
bits
and
chased
the
fragments
up
the
Valley for
twenty
miles
and
more,
capturing
men
and
horses
and eleven
guns
and
inflicting,
as
one
of
the
Southern
riders
confessed,
"the
greatest
disaster
that
ever
befell
our
cavalry
during
the
whole
war."
¹¹
The
Union
army
continued
to
retire
at
its
leisure,
smoke
and
flames
still
marking
its
passage,
and by
the
middle
of
October
Sheridan
put
it
in
position
on
a chain
of
low
hills
behind
a
little
stream
known
as
Cedar Creek,
a
little
north
of
the
town
of
Strasburg,
twenty-odd miles
south
of
Winchester.