Monday, March 18, AD 2024 9:35pm

March 2, 1865: End of the War in the Valley

 

300px-Waynesboro_svg

 

It had been a long and grueling War in the Shenandoah Valley with some towns changing hands some seventy times between Union and Confederate forces.  On March 2, 1865 it came to an end.  Jubal Early’s force, stripped over the winter to shore up Lee’s thin ranks holding the lines at Petersburg, was now reduced to 1500 men.  Sheridan was moving South, initially under orders to move into North Carolina and link up with Sherman advancing into North Carolina.  Not wanting to leave Early in his rear, Sheridan sent twenty-five year old Brigadier General George Armstrong with a division of cavalry, 2,500 men, to find Early.

Custer had graduated dead last in his class at West Point in 1861, making him the class goat.  The “goat” had a spectacularly successful War, rising in rank from Second Lieutenant to Major General of Volunteers. (He had been promoted from Captain to Brigadier General of Volunteers, passing over the intervening ranks, in 1863.)  Daring and combative, Custer had helped transform Union cavalry from lackluster to an able strike force.

Early posted his small force on a ridge due west of Waynesboro, Virginia.  Arriving at 2:00 PM on March 2, Custer quickly saw that Early had fortified his position and that head on attacks would probably not work, but that Early’s left could be turned.  (Early had thought that a thick wood adequately protected this flank.)  Sending one brigade to turn the Confederate left while he attacked frontally with two brigades worked  to perfection.  Virtually the entire Confederate force was taken prisoner with Early and fifteen to twenty Confederates escaping.  Here is Sheridan’s account of the battle from his Memoirs:

 

 

 

General Early was true to the promise made his friends in Staunton, for when Custer neared Waynesboro’ he found, occupying a line of breastworks on a ridge west of the town, two brigades of infantry, with eleven pieces of artillery and Rosser’s cavalry. Custer, when developing the position of the Confederates, discovered that their left was somewhat exposed instead of resting on South River; he therefore made his dispositions for attack, sending around that flank the dismounted regiments from Pennington’s brigade, while he himself, with two brigades, partly mounted and partly dismounted, assaulted along the whole line of breastworks. Pennington’s flanking movement stampeded the enemy in short order, thus enabling Custer to carry the front with little resistance, and as he did so the Eighth New York and First Connecticut, in a charge in column, broke through the opening made by Custer, and continued on through the town of Waynesboro’, never stopping till they crossed South River. There, finding themselves immediately in the enemy’s rear, they promptly formed as foragers and held the east bank of the stream till all the Confederates surrendered except Rosser, who succeeded in making his way back to the valley, and Generals Early, Wharton, Long, and Lilley, who, with fifteen or twenty men, escaped across the Blue Ridge. I followed up the victory immediately by despatching Capehart through Rock-fish Gap, with orders to encamp on the east side of the Blue Ridge. By reason of this move all the enemy’s stores and transportation fell into our hands, while we captured on the field seventeen battle flags, sixteen hundred officers and men, and eleven pieces of artillery. This decisive victory closed hostilities in the Shenandoah Valley. The prisoners and artillery were sent back to Winchester next morning, under a guard of 1,500 men, commanded by Colonel J. H. Thompson, of the First New Hampshire.

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T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Monday, March 2, AD 2015 7:33am

Custer victorious!

Tom
Tom
Monday, March 2, AD 2015 9:20am

Custer was also an enthusiastic participant, under Sheridan, in the burning of the Valley in 1864, a despicable crime against the mainly Dunker and Amish farmers who were not even Confederate supporters, having raised the ire of Confederate officials due to their avoidance of military service.

During the Burning of the Valley, less known than Sherman’s March to the Sea, yet equally brutal, farmsteads and civilian property and houses were indiscriminately destroyed, civilians killed, and no provision made for the homeless and starving valley inhabitants left in Custer’s wake. It was a policy of targeting civilians, not an isolated war crime. It is not far from living memory in the Valley to this day.

Needless to say, no tears were shed in the Valley for Custer when Little Big Horn settled the score.

Dale Price
Dale Price
Monday, March 2, AD 2015 10:25am

Using the Michigan Cavalry Brigade, Custer also managed to stymie the immortal Jeb Stuart at Gettysburg. When he respected his opponent, Custer was a solid officer.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Monday, March 2, AD 2015 11:07am

“George Washington got his Iroquois name of Town Burner during the revolution for ordering his troops to torch Iroquois towns due to their siding with the British in the war.”

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Washington needed to save the frontier. All but one tribe of the Iroquois confederation actively fought for the crown. They didn’t merely side with the Brits. Loyalist terrorists led them on starkly terroristic raids against American civilians in NY and PA, which was (like the Shenandoah Valley for the CSA) the breadbasket of the nascent United States’ Army.

Tom
Tom
Monday, March 2, AD 2015 11:58am

Stephen Starr, a historian of US Cavalry in the War (http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/imh/article/view/10428/14567), not a Confederate sympathizer, wrote of the Burning: “The deliberate planned devastation of the Shenandoah Valley has deservedly ranked as one of the grimmest episodes of a sufficiently grim war. Unlike the haphazard destruction caused by (Gen. William T.) Sherman’s bummers in Georgia, it was committed systematically, and by order.”

Sheridan boasted that he ”destroyed over 2200 barns…over 70 mills… have driven in front of the army over 4000 head of stock, and have killed … not less then 3000 sheep…. Tomorrow I will continue the destruction.” Extant letters by Sheridan’s troops described themselves as ” barn burners ” and ” destroyers of homes. ”

A reported “embedded” with Sheridan described the destruction:
The poor, alike with the rich, have suffered. Some have lost their all. The wailing of women and children, mingling with the crackling of flames, has sounded from scores of dwellings. I have seen mothers weeping over the loss of that which was necessary to their children’s lives, setting aside their own; their last cow, their last bit of flour pilfered by stragglers, the last morsel that they had in the world to eat or drink. Young girls with flushed cheeks, or pale with tearful or tearless eyes, have pleaded with or cursed the men whom the necessities of war have forced to burn the buildings reared by their fathers, and turn them into paupers in a day. The completeness of the desolation is awful.

I know it’s common these days to shrug at such war crimes (deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure); but the CCC reiterates traditional Catholic teaching that: “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.”

While I can’t imagine that Washington ever attempted war crimes specifically intended to destroy civilian farms, homes, and personal property on the scale of the Burning of the Valley or the March to the Sea, if he had it would not make those crimes somehow less morally repugnant.

Sheridan did not just burn a town; he devastated a vast region supporting thousands of civilians, for the express purpose of demoralizing the populace.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Monday, March 2, AD 2015 5:04pm

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is not a manual to be used to plan or conduct a war. The pacifism that has found its way into the Church and become virtual dogma is not dogma at all.

War is ugly, maybe not the ugliest of man’s endeavors but it ranks up there. God does not rule over us with an iron fist. We are left to rule ourselves. As Clausewitz said, war is an extension of politics. Politics is how we govern ourselves.

The Popes who called for the Crusades were not interested in mercy for the Islamic invaders. Queen Isabel the Catholic was merciful and magnanimous in victory but as hard as carbon steel in waging war against the Moors. General Curtis LeMay would have wiped out every living Japanese through saturation bombing if Japan had not surrendered.

General Sherman wanted to leave a path of destruction through the heart of the Confederacy so that that generation and succeeding generations would never again think of inciting war. Innocent people were hurt and killed. This happens in war. South Carolina got it worse than Georgia. South Carolina is where it started and Sherman was going to see to it that they were punished.

I remember a part of the Civil War miniseries on PBS about Gettysburg – far from where I live now but only an hour away from where I used to live between Baltimore and DC. I went there several times on warm weekend summer days. The CSA marched into Pennsylvania, kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery in the South. Georgia, South Carolina, the Shenandoah Valley – they paid dearly for what they wanted.

Randy Ward
Randy Ward
Monday, March 2, AD 2015 8:11pm

These are just a few of the hundreds of facts from Southern and Northern sources about the burning.
Although Grant did not order homes to be destroyed and Sheridan did not account for any, that was what happened, according to Heatwole’s book “The Burning, Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley.” His accounts of homes burned for spite, vengeance or through carelessness come from diaries, letters, military reports and newspaper stories.

A Pennsylvania cavalryman wrote home in mid-October: “We burnt some sixty houses and all most of the barns, hay, grain and corn in the shocks for fifty miles (south of) Strasburg. … It was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.”

Among the unfortunate was John Alexander Herring Sr., who was ill in bed in late September when soldiers showed up at his 1776 estate, Retirement, near Dayton.

Soldiers carried the owner out of the house and dumped him onto the lawn.

From there, he and his wife watched as household possessions were thrown through smashed windows and the house set afire along with the barn and other outbuildings.
Just like no order was ever found from Hitler to destroy the Jews, no order was found about the destruction of the valley, but the officers knew what was wanted and the worst was done to the people of the valley, just as it was done all over the South.

Tom
Tom
Tuesday, March 3, AD 2015 8:41am

Well, if Washington truly ordered Indian crops to be burned, it’s to his shame and infamy, although Custer and the federals would certainly applaud it, since they as little regard for Indian lives and property as they did for Southerners.

Again, although the practice of pillaging civilian farms, towns, and property may be common, there is no moral justification for it in Catholic thought. In war, soldiers are supposed to fight soldiers, and it does not take a “neoconfed” to see a direct moral correlation between the destruction of civilian property in the Civil War and the destruction of Indian civilian populations after the war, and the destruction later wreaked upon helpless civilian targets of laughable “military” value like Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Bad first principles usually result in very bad moral choices.

Dale Price
Dale Price
Tuesday, March 3, AD 2015 11:04am

Yes, the Sullivan Expedition really happened, and it really burned out the Iroquois. But at least Tom acknowledges that it might be repellent. Most people who argue that the Civil War was somehow unique or the first time it ever happened in America ignore or shrug off the Expedition entirely.

They also tend to ignore the Trail of Tears, too. Apparently, it’s only an atrocity if a northerner does it.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Tuesday, March 3, AD 2015 11:46am

The Sullivan Expedition was in response to, and meant to prevent future, Iroquois/loyalist atrocities which had been visited upon PA and NY civilian farming communities which constituted the commissary of the Continental Army. The purpose was to save the nascent United States.

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The circumastances surrounding the depredations in Georgia, the Shanandoah Valley and South Carolina were reversed. The motive was to destroy the nascent Confederate States by ruthless, total war.
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T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Tuesday, March 3, AD 2015 11:54am

History is written by the victors. If Washington had lost, he and the signers of the Declaration of Independence likely would have been hanged, drawn, and quartered. In the history books, Benedict Arnold would be a hero, while Washington would be an arch-terrorist.
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The Brits and loyalists called 1777 the” year of the hangman.” They were confident they would suppress the Revolution and hang the traitors. The Iroquois/loyalists’ savage raids into NY/PA farming areas were part of the strategy. Then, the Rabble in Arms stopped them at Saratoga.

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