One of Sheridan’s junior officers, Theophilus F. Rodenbough, described the preparations for the expedition: The command was stripped of all impediments, such as unserviceable animals, wagons and tents. The necessary ammunition train, two ambulances to a division, a few pack-mules for baggage, three days’ rations and a half-day’s forage carried on the saddle, comprised the outfit.

Subscribe Today

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

At six o’clock on the morning of May 9, Sheridan’s force, accompanied by six batteries of horse artillery, moved south at a carefully measured, energy-conserving pace along Telegraph Road, which led from Fredericksburg to Richmond. Stretching for 13 miles, the Union column was hardly operating incognito. Within two hours of getting underway, first contact was made with the enemy when elements of Brig. Gen. Williams C. Wickham’s Confederate brigade began to make harassing attacks on the rearmost units.

Wickham’s hit-and-run attacks did not even slow Sheridan’s progress. The general himself, when told that his column had come under fire from enemy cavalry, confidently roared out for all to hear: Keep moving, boys. We’re going on through. There isn’t cavalry enough in all the Southern Confederacy to stop us. Meanwhile, the Federal vanguard, Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s Michigan Brigade from Brig. Gen. Wesley Merritt’s 1st Division, was forging ahead toward Beaver Dam Station, a terminal for the Virginia Central Railroad. As fortune would dictate, Custer’s men arrived just as 400 Union troops, captured by the Confederates in the Battle of the Wilderness, were about to be loaded aboard a train for transport to Richmond. When ordered to march double time the few hundred remaining feet to the station, the prisoners halted and refused to move, even when their Confederate captors threatened to fire on them. Then, seeing their threats to be futile, the Rebel cavalry formed a battle line between the prisoners and Custer’s charging column.

The ensuing clash was short-lived, and few of the Confederates got away. Most ended up prisoners, while their former captives were liberated. One of the Southerners was a squeaky-voiced teenager who, as much to the annoyance of several of his comrades as to the prisoners, had taunted the captive Yankees incessantly, his favorite refrain being, Well, boys, Daddy Lee has got you! One of the Union prisoners, John Urban of the Pennsylvania Reserves, later wrote: After the fight was over, we found our tormentor in the hands of the cavalry, and he was the most frightened man I ever saw. Some of the boys could not help but tease him about the change of affairs. One of them exclaimed: ‘Well, my lad, Daddy Grant has got you!’

In addition to freeing the prisoners, Custer occupied the station, where he found vast stores of pork, cornmeal, fish, sugar, rum, medical supplies and a trainload of flour. Custer then had the station and several adjacent buildings burned. The Union troops took what they could of the Rebel stores, including several barrels of whiskey-until Sheridan rode up and ordered the barrels destroyed. Even so, many troopers managed to get some of the whiskey into their canteens, some scooping it from the ground before it vanished into the soil. Custer’s men also destroyed two locomotives and 100 train cars and tore up 10 miles of adjacent railroad track and telegraph lines before camping for the night.

While Sheridan was beginning his drive on Richmond, Stuart spent May 8 guiding and deploying the men of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s corps, now under the command of Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson following the wounding of their commander during the Battle of the Wilderness. In a reprise of his activities at Chancellorsville a year earlier, Stuart was commanding infantry as well as dismounted cavalry during the desperate fighting at Spotsylvania when word reached him that Sheridan was on the move.

Stuart’s first reaction was a fateful miscalculation that could only have been the product of misjudging the enemy’s intentions. Apparently expecting only a typically timid Union cavalry raid and not wanting to deprive Lee of the services of his cavalry corps (as he had been accused of doing at Gettysburg), Stuart committed only three of his six brigades — roughly 4,500 horsemen — to the task of opposing Sheridan. Taking Brig. Gen. James Byron Gordon’s brigade of North Carolina cavalry with him, Stuart joined up with the cavalry division of Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Fitz Lee and set out to intercept the Federal force. He spent the night riding on a westerly circuit toward Beaver Dam Station, arriving there on the morning of May 10. By that time, Sheridan’s force had resumed its march on Richmond and was 30 miles to the south.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to