Sheridan’s victory at Cedar Creek, together with Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta earlier that fall, had gone a long way toward enabling President Abraham Lincoln to win re-election. Lincoln’s victory at the ballot box, in turn, ensured that the North would continue pressing its ‘hard war’ against the South, and nowhere was that concept more harshly carried out than in the Shenandoah Valley. Throughout the fall of 1864, Sheridan’s troopers fanned out across the lower valley, burning barns, poisoning wells, killing livestock and doing all they could to follow their commander’s orders to ‘consume and destroy all forage and subsistence, burn all barns and mills and drive off all stock in the region.’ Valley residents who complained about the wholesale destruction were told, per Sheridan’s instructions, ‘that they have furnished too many meals to guerrillas to expect much sympathy.’

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in America's Civil War magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

One subordinate who followed Sheridan’s instructions to the letter was Brevet Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer. The flamboyant 25-year-old commanded Sheridan’s 3rd Cavalry Division, and that fall he led his troopers on a series of raids and reprisals against the deadly Confederate guerrillas who patrolled the region. Custer directly owed his new rank to Sheridan, who had requested following the Battle of Cedar Creek that Custer and 30-year-old Brig. Gen. Wesley Merritt, whom Sheridan proudly styled his ‘brave boys,’ be promoted. The impetuous Custer, brave to the point of recklessness, was Sheridan’s particular protégé. Perhaps Sheridan saw something of himself in Custer: Both men had struggled mightily to complete their courses at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Indeed, Custer was the class ‘goat’ in 1861, finishing dead last academically. More likely, however, the unsentimental Sheridan simply appreciated the young Michigander’s unhesitating obedience to orders and his utter lack of remorse in carrying them out.

Repeatedly that fall, Custer crossed swords with Lt. Col. John Singleton Mosby and his 43rd Virginia Cavalry Battalion. Mosby’s men were legally sworn Confederate soldiers, but their irregular raiding habits caused them to be considered guerrillas, and Custer, for one, was not much troubled by military formalities. In early October, near Dayton, Custer had a Southern bushwhacker summarily shot. Two days later, two more captured Confederates were tried as spies and executed. On October 12, one of Mosby’s horsemen was hanged from a tree alongside a roadway, bearing a placard that read, ‘In retaliation.’ And when a favorite trooper in the 6th Michigan was killed by a sniper shot from one of two adjacent houses, the owners of both houses were dragged outside and shot, without reference to which — if either — was the guilty party. Custer was also blamed erroneously for the execution of six Mosby’s Rangers at Front Royal on September 23. In fact, Merritt had commanded the force that captured the Rangers, but Custer was present when four of the men were shot down in a field behind the Methodist Church — one in front of his screaming mother — and two others were hanged from a nearby walnut tree. The flamboyant Custer was easily the most recognizable Yankee on hand for the killings, and residents of the town mistakenly labeled him the chief perpetrator of the outrage. Mosby, who had not been present for the initial attack, began stockpiling any Custer troopers he managed to capture, and on November 6, at Rectorville, he had 27 Federal prisoners draw numbered slips of paper to determine which seven would be executed in reprisal for the murders at Front Royal and the slaying of a seventh Confederate prisoner on October 13. The unlucky seven were led away (two managed to escape) and executed, with a note left dangling from one of the bodies, 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.’

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to