The Real Custer (26 page)

This was easier said than done. In August 1864, the 8th Illinois Cavalry regiment was ordered into the area near Upperville and Middleburg. Their orders were to “destroy, as far as practicable, the sources from which Mosby draws men, horses, and support”; to “arrest and bring in all males capable of bearing arms or conveying information, between the ages of eighteen and fifty”; and to “impress all wagons, and bring them in loaded with forage; destroy all crops of hay, oats, corn, and wheat which you cannot bring in, and seize all horses.”
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The regiment did its best to follow these expansive orders, but Mosby's network in the area remained intact, and actions taken against civilians only hardened the resolve of those secretly supporting the insurgents.

Custer employed rough tactics from the start. In August 1863 he sent a squadron to the home of one of Mosby's officers, a major named Williams, “with instructions to hang him to the nearest tree, if they caught him.” Williams evaded capture, but Custer's men “removed his family from the house, and burned it down,” freeing Williams's slaves and appropriating his horses and cattle.
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Over time these punitive measures became more common and were used in an escalating war of tit for tat.

On the evening of October 3, 1864, Sheridan's chief engineer, Lieutenant John R. Meigs, and two other soldiers were waylaid by a like number of rebels along the road between the towns of Harrisonburg and Dayton, half a mile from Sheridan's headquarters. One soldier escaped, one was captured, and Meigs was killed. Meigs was a well-known and respected young officer, first in the West Point Class of 1863 and the son of Major General Montgomery C. Meigs, the quartermaster general of the Army. The surviving soldier reported that they had been attacked by surprise by men wearing Union uniforms, and Meigs “was killed without resistance of any kind whatever, and without even the chance to give himself up.”
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The death shocked the Army and the Northern public. Young Meigs was held in high regard throughout Sheridan's command, and Sheridan also knew that Meigs's vindictive, rebel-hating father would expect some type of reprisal. “Determining to teach a lesson to these abettors of the foul deed—a lesson they would never forget,” Sheridan later wrote, “I ordered all the houses within an area of five miles to be burned.”
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Sheridan gave the job to Custer. It was not as extensive as the burning operations he had recently conducted further to the south, but its purpose was revenge, not military necessity. The area to be torched included the village of Dayton, Virginia, and Custer was prepared to wipe it out on Sheridan's order. However, shortly after he set about the burning, Custer received orders from Sheridan to “cease his desolating work.” New facts had arisen in the investigation of Meigs's death that suggested that the ambush was fairer than originally reported, and Meigs had resisted capture and gone down fighting. Sheridan instructed Custer to spare the remaining buildings but nevertheless to “fetch away all the able-bodied males as prisoners.”
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Union troops sometimes faced resistance on their reprisal missions. In August 1864, one of Custer's pickets was killed in a confrontation with Mosby's men, and some others were wounded and captured. In retaliation, he ordered Colonel Alger of the 5th Michigan to burn four homes of known rebel sympathizers near Berryville. A fifty-man detachment was dispatched under Captain Drake to go about the grim detail. They erected a barricade on the main road to prevent flight, then began the burning.
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When the first house was in flames, Captain Drake took a few men to another dwelling five hundred yards away. The residents, women and children, seeing what had happened to their neighbors, ran outside pleading with the soldiers not to torch their home. The soldiers, unmoved by the appeals, kept to their duty and lit the second house.

Nearby, concealed in a ravine, two hundred rebels had gathered and were observing the proceedings with growing outrage. An Irishman
named Larry exclaimed to his fellows, “Jasus, if that wouldn't make a man fight, I don't know what would!” Larry leapt up and led a sudden, furious charge on the surprised Federals.
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Williamson wrote,

            
The man who could stand within the glare of burning dwellings, and witness unmoved the pitiful spectacle of pleading mothers with their frightened little ones clinging around them, and see the merciless savages who wrought this ruin gloating over the wreck they had made, and proceeding to a repetition of their cruel deeds of incendiarism, and not feel an impulse which would drive him to avenge such savagery, would not deserve the name of man. It seems hardly credible that men could be found in a civilized age, so lost to all sense of humanity as to thus rival the savage cruelties of Indian warfare.
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Mosby's men rushed Lieutenant Allen's group, which was near the first burning house. The overwhelmed Union soldiers broke and fled down the road but were blocked by their own barricade. They veered to the side but encountered a large stone wall running perpendicular to the road, and fleeing down it, they hit a corner and were trapped. The Federals attempted to surrender but were cut down to the last man. “Our men were demons that day,” John Munson recalled. “Thirty of the burners were killed and wounded, mostly killed. We took no prisoners and gave no quarter.”
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By this time Mosby's activities had become so troublesome that Grant ordered family members of his troops taken hostage and that Mosby's men be summarily executed if captured. “The families of most of Mosby's men are known, and can be collected,” he advised Sheridan. “I think they should be taken and kept at Fort McHenry, or some secure place, as hostages for the good conduct of Mosby and his men. Where any of Mosby's men are caught hang them without trial.”
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Sheridan
wasted no time implementing the order. “Mosby has annoyed me and captured a few wagons,” he responded the next day. “We hung one and shot six of his men yesterday. I have burned all wheat and hay, and brought off all stock, sheep, cattle, horses, &c., south of Winchester.”
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Subjecting Mosby's men to summary execution raised a critical legal question regarding their status as lawful combatants. Mosby's defenders argued that his men were part of an organized Confederate unit, and thus entitled to consideration under the laws and customs of war. But the Federals considered them brigands to be treated with summary justice. Mosby argued that his command “has done nothing contrary to the usages of war” and that “there was passed by the last U.S. Congress a bill of pains and penalties against guerrillas, and as they profess to consider my men within the definition of the term, I think it would be well to come to some understanding with the enemy in reference to them.”
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Custer had already proved willing to mete out summary justice on partisans and soon had an opportunity to implement Grant's order. After the Third Battle of Winchester, when Custer was trying to break through Confederate defenses south of Front Royal, Captain Chapman of Mosby's command learned of a large Union supply train headed for the area. He arranged an attack, but Custer got wind of Chapman's designs. Rather than sending a small guard with the train, he personally led a much larger force not far behind it. When Chapman attacked the train, Custer quickly deployed forces to block his line of retreat. Realizing he had been trapped, Chapman turned his men and charged Custer's troopers, who had set up a line across a defile. Most of the Mosby men were able to cut their way out to freedom, but six were captured.
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Custer made a public example of the raiders. He paraded them through Front Royal, clearly intending to execute them. Custer led his troops through the town, “dressed in a splendid suit of silk velvet,” a witness wrote, “his saddle bow bound in silver or gold. In his hand he
had a large branch of damsons, which he picked and ate as he rode along. He was a distinguished looking man, with his yellow locks resting upon his shoulders.”
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The prisoners were “led through the streets of Front Royal with ropes around their necks—one poor fellow led before the very eyes of his mother pleading for mercy for her boy,” one man recalled.
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A rebel named Rhodes was “lashed with ropes between two horses,” another eyewitness wrote, “and dragged in plain sight of his agonized relatives to the open field of our town.”
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Trooper Rhodes was the first to die. A Union soldier volunteered to be the executioner and “ordered the helpless, dazed prisoner to stand up in front of him, while he emptied his pistol upon him.” Two more were shot, while the rest were hanged from a large walnut tree.
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A note attached to one of the hanged men read, “This would be the fate of Mosby and all his men.”

The reaction among the partisans was electric. “There was at once a rumor set afloat that we were to fight thereafter under the black flag,” Munson recalled, “and as a proof of it Custer's act was pointed to. Men examined their pistols more carefully.”
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Mosby wrote to Robert E. Lee to inform him of the “brutal conduct of the enemy” in his area of operations, against civilians and soldiers alike. He noted the Front Royal executions and proposed to “hang an equal number of Custer's men whenever I capture them.”
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Lee forwarded the proposal to Richmond, where it was “cordially approved.”
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Lex talionis
, the law of retaliation, became the rule. From then on it would be an eye for an eye.

Mosby was already holding twenty-seven prisoners from Custer's command, and at a meeting of his officers at Rectortown on November 6, they decided to execute seven of them. The executions were in retaliation for the six killed at Front Royal and one other, A. C. Willis of Company C, who was hanged by Colonel William H. Powell in retaliation for Mosby's men executing a Federal spy.
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Mosby gathered the prisoners and informed them that he had “an account to adjust with Custer.” They were ordered to draw lots from a hat, seven of which were marked for death. A witness wrote:

            
It was a painful scene, and one never to be forgotten. . . . One of the captives laid his head on the shoulder of a comrade and wept like a child. Another prayed earnestly until it came his turn to draw, which he did with trembling hand. Holding up the paper and looking at it, his eyes brightened as he exclaimed: “Blank, by God! I knew it would be so.” One said to a more fortunate companion: “Tell my mother I died like a man.” Some could not overcome their feelings, and begged piteously for their lives. . . . It was not merely in a spirit of revenge that these men were condemned, but it was a measure to which Mosby was forced to resort, by the brutal acts of Custer and Powell.

“Our own men, too, were scarcely less affected,” John H. Alexander recalled. “The prisoners had been in our company a day or two, and, as was always the case after the first embarrassment of capture had passed, quite pleasant relations had been established between them and us. We had ridden together, laughed and talked, and divided our rations and tobacco with them; and indeed between some of them and us quite a feeling of comradeship existed. The precipitation of the present state of affairs was a shock to all of us.”
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A drummer boy who drew a death slip was spared on account of his youth, and the redraw condemned Lieutenant Disoway of the 5th New York Heavy Artillery. “And must I be hanged?” he said philosophically. The drawing done, the prisoners were marched off at nightfall toward Winchester by a guard led by Lieutenant Edward F. Thomson “with
orders to execute them on the Valley turnpike as near General Sheridan's headquarters as possible.” Along the way they encountered another party led by Captain Montjoy, who was bringing in some fresh Union prisoners. Lieutenant Disoway took a chance and made a Masonic distress signal. Montjoy, a Mason, convinced Lieutenant Thomson to hand over Disoway and another of the prisoners who was also a Masonic brother in exchange for two of the new prisoners. So Disoway survived, though Mosby later said critically to Montjoy that his command was “not a Masonic lodge.”

On the way to the hanging, the Confederates realized they did not have enough rope, so they stopped at houses to collect bed cord from old-fashioned beds with which to bind and hang the men. It was a rainy night, and visibility was poor. Near Berryville, about ten miles east of Winchester, one of the prisoners escaped in the darkness, so the Mosby men decided to carry out the executions there rather than risk losing more of the condemned.

Three men were hanged by being hoisted by their necks and died cruelly of strangulation. This took a long time, so the captors decided to shoot the remaining three. The men were lined up and pistols aimed at them. At a command, two of the weapons discharged, but a third failed. “The revolver on my right went off, the revolver on my left went off, and the revolver that was in my face failed to explode,” wrote Charles E. Marvin, acting quartermaster's sergeant in the 2nd New York Cavalry. “The click of the hammer on the tube went through me like an electric shock.”
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Marvin, who had meanwhile freed his hands, sprang on his intended executioner, knocked him down and fled into the trees. The other two prisoners fell, though one of them, named Bennett, was only wounded and was shot again. The Mosby men made a brief search for Marvin, who had hidden behind a tree, but they missed him in the darkness and gave up. Before leaving, the executioners pinned onto one of
the hanged men a note written by Mosby reading, “These men have been hung in retaliation for an equal number of Colonel Mosby's men hung by order of General Custer at Front Royal. Measure for measure.”
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