About 8:00 p.m. the column approached Catlett’s Station. Stuart sent Captain William Blackford of his staff to have a look. “I rode all around the outskirts of their encampment,” remembered Blackford, “and found a vast assemblage of wagons and a city of tents, laid out in regular order and occupied by the luxuriously equipped quartermasters and commissaries….” More importantly, Blackford found “no appearance of any large organized body of troops.” (His assessment was right. Of the perhaps 500 Yankees at Catlett’s Station, fewer than 200 were armed.) Neither did the Yankees have pickets around the camp’s perimeter.

Subscribe Today

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

Still better news came from a servant who had mindlessly wandered into Stuart’s lines. According to a witness, the man than told Stuart that “General Pope’s headquarters train was there with all of his official papers, the army treasure chest, and all the personal baggage of the General and his staff.” (Pope himself was at his headquarters several miles away.) “Here was a chance for revenge for the loss of the hat and haversack at Verdiersville,” Blackford concluded. The captured servant even offered to guide Stuart’s troops to the booty. Stuart accepted his tender, but put him under guard nonetheless, with the promise of “kind treatment if faithful, and instant extermination if traitorous.”

The Confederates quietly subdued the few pickets who guarded the camp. Then Stuart unveiled his plan. The 9th Virginia Cavalry under Colonel W.H.F. “Rooney” Lee (Robert E. Lee’s son) would lead the assault into the main camp north of the railroad; another column would ravage the camp south of the tracks. To the men of the 4th Virginia Cavalry, under Colonel Williams C. Wickham, would go the most important task. They would burn the bridge over Cedar Run.

The Confederates took a few minutes to arrange themselves on the edge of the Union camp, their rustling obscured by falling rain and rolling thunder. Stuart rode the line, telling his men to give “their wildest ‘Rebel Yell.’” Then he turned to his bugler: “Sound the charge, Fred.”

The bugler managed barely a note before the dreaded “yell” and the beat of hooves obscured his call. In the Union camp a few Federals reacted to the yell with glee, or only slight annoyance. One Yankee exclaimed, “There must be reinforcements coming on the Railroad.” Another yelled, “There must be good news!” And yet another poked his head out of his tent and yelled, “Hold on you —- —-, you are shooting this way!”

The Confederates of course ignored such entreaties. They careered through the camp “scattering out pistol balls promiscuously right and left,” recorded a jolly staff officer. “Supper tables were kicked over and tents broken down in the [Federals'] rush to get out, the tents catching them sometimes in their fall like fish in a net.” Yankees scattered from their tents toward the woods, some barely dressed, and all thoroughly scared. Chiswell Dabney claimed, “Never have I seen any thing like it[;] men were perfectly frantic with fear.” The scene made veteran Confederates “laugh until they could scarcely keep their saddles,” remembered Blackford.

But there was more than merriment to Stuart’s mission. As the Confederates moved through the first camp, each column broke off for its assigned mission. Rooney Lee’s 9th Virginia received a “withering” volley from a handful of Yankees on the platform at the depot, but it stayed the gray horsemen only briefly. The band of Federals quickly disappeared into the darkness.

Rounding the corner of the depot, Blackford heard “the labored puffing” of a Yankee locomotive trying to escape. “I rode up alongside of the locomotive and ordered the engineer to shut off the steam,” Blackford recorded, “but he would not.” Blackford fired into the engine and threw his leg over the pommel of his saddle to jump aboard. But before he could leap, his horse plunged into a ditch, throwing him hat over boots. The train escaped to spread word of the Rebel raid.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to