Six captive Rangers involved in the fight at Front Royal were captured and condemned to die. As a band slowly marched through Front Royal playing the dead march, the six prisoners were led to their deaths. Two Rangers, David Jones and Lucian Love, were shot in front of a church and left to die in their own blood. While that was occurring, Thomas Anderson was marched to an elm tree south of the town and shot.

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A pair of horsemen next rode through Front Royal’s main streets, dragging 17-year-old civilian Henry Rhodes behind them with a rope. His crying mother tried to save the nearly unconscious boy, but her pleas were ignored. Rhodes was dragged to an open field north of town, where he was shot in the face by a volunteer who ‘emptied his pistol upon him.’ His body, dumped in a wheel-barrow and covered with a sheet, was left at his mother’s door.

The last two prisoners, William Overby and a man called Carter, were led off to be hanged by a huge and wrathful crowd of soldiers. Overby stood ‘erect, defiant’ while Carter wept, listening to the band play ‘Love Not, the One You Love May Die.’ Just then Custer rode up, according to a town resident, ‘dressed in a splendid suit of silk velvet…. In his hand he had a large branch of damsons which he picked and ate as he rode along.’

Overby and Carter were taken to a large tree outside of town and offered freedom if they disclosed the location of Mosby’s headquarters. They both refused, and with hands tied behind their backs, the two prisoners were hanged. A sign was attached to Overby’s body reading, ‘Such is the Fate of All Mosby’s Gang.’

Custer and Mosby again clashed on October 7. Lieutenant John Meigs, a young topographical engineer of whom Sheridan was particularly fond, was returning to Custer’s headquarters with two orderlies in a heavy thunderstorm. They met three other riders who were wearing rubber ponchos over their uniforms, but since Meigs was behind Union lines he naively assumed that they were friendly. As Meigs approached, gunfire broke out, killing Meigs and one of the orderlies.

The second orderly got away and spread the news that Meigs had been coldly gunned down. Mosby’s men vehemently denied this (the facts seem to bear them out), but once again truth had no bearing on what would follow. A frustrated Sheridan wrote Grant that ‘Since I came into the Valley from Harper’s Ferry, every train, every small party, and every straggler has been bushwacked by people.’

Sheridan ordered Custer to destroy every house within a five-mile radius of where Meigs was killed. An artist in Sheridan’s camp, James Taylor, watched as Custer received his orders. ‘Never shall I forget the dramatic episode. Custer vaulting into the saddle, and exclaiming as he dashed away, ‘Look out for smoke!’ Custer rode off, declaring ‘I mean to return evil for evil until these scoundrels cease their depredations.’

‘In tears, Custer wept for his unfortunate orderly, who he said was,’shot down like a dog and stripped of all but his trousers’.’ In a short time, Taylor noticed ‘the ugly columns of smoke that rose in succession from the Valley like a funeral pall, told, too well, that he had fulfilled his orders to the letter.’

Mosby’s guerrillas continued to pester Sheridan’s forces in October. Correspondent Francis Long of the New York Herald ald wrote, ‘The intervening country between Harrisonburg and Winchester is literally swarming with guerrillas,’ Grant urged Sheridan to continue destroying whatever was useful for ‘if the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.’

For five days Custer tore into an 85-mile Shenandoah stretch, from Winchester to Waynesboro, burning barns and granaries, destroying bridges and ripping apart railroad track. Custer wanted ‘to put the fear of Hell in these people.’

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