Those Damn Horse Soldiers: True Tales of the Civil War Cavalry - Hardcover

Walsh, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765312700 ISBN 13: 9780765312709

Publisher: Forge Books, 2006

Synopsis

Many accounts of the Civil War battles, armies, and key figures have been written over the years, but none have looked at the bloodiest war in our nation's history through the eyes of the cavalry. The horse soldiers in the Civil War are often referred to as the last of the cavaliers, men who valued their honor as much as their cause. In this sweeping saga George Walsh brings to life anew the gallant horse soldiers of the North and South, showing in dramatic detail how their raids and expeditions affected the outcome of the war and how their fortunes waxed and waned.

About this title

About the Author

GEORGE WALSH, is the former editor-in-chief at Macmillan Publishing Group and a longtime journalist. He discovered and published the Pulitzer Prize--winning Civil War classic The Killer Angels, which still has more than two and half million copies in print. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One 
THE EAST, MARCH 23-JUNE 6:
ASHBY IN THE SHENANDOAH
 
Thirty-three-year-old, soft-spoken Turner Ashby, whose forebears had fought with distinction in all of America's wars, would himself come to fame during a few short months in 1862 as the daring commander of the 7th Virginia Cavalry during Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign. But on this fateful March 23, as the Confederates neared the hamlet of Kernstown, just south of Winchester, he was unwittingly leading his chief into disaster. Jackson with his badly outnumbered force earlier had withdrawn from Winchester before the Federal advance. Now he was under pressure to counterattack in order to hold General Nathaniel Banks and his 38,000 men in the Shenandoah and keep them from the gathering assault on Richmond. So when Ashby reported that James Shields, one of Banks's division heads, was withdrawing from the Kernstown-Winchester area, Jackson with 3,500 men pushed forward, thinking he would overwhelm Shields's rear guard. Instead Jackson blundered into Shields's entire division--some 7,000 strong.
 
Ashby had been misled. Following a series of skirmishes, his scouts had slipped into Winchester and talked to sympathizers, who told them that the enemy was evacuating. But the departure was only a sham. Shields had anticipated that Jackson would be attacking, and had ordered the greater part of his force to remain concealed around Kernstown. Though the Confederates fought desperately during the ensuing battle, they had little chance against the long odds. The chagrined Ashby, smarting over his intelligence lapse, was everywhere on the field, making able use of his horse artillery and, late in the afternoon, launching a charge that enjoyed initial success. But by nightfall the storied Stonewall Brigade had fallen back, the Confederates were in full retreat, and Jackson had suffered his only defeat of the war.
 
During this second withdrawal and in subsequent weeks as Jackson moved his troops up the Valley, first to Strasburg and Mount Jackson and then Harrisonburg and Conrad's Store, Ashby was conspicuous in directing the rear guard, delaying and harassing the pursuit. Day after day he would swoop down on scouts and foragers, ambush small units, and with his mobile artillery, shell enemy columns from ever-changing hilltop positions. One Union officer credited him with seizing "every opportunity to annoy us and impede our progress," and was grateful for a Sunday interlude when "Ashby failed to give us his report." Reflected Jackson mapmaker Jedediah Hotchkiss: "Ashby . . . always keeps the enemy at bay. I hope he may be preserved."1
 
Though Jackson did not know it at the time, Abraham Lincoln and the Union high command, believing that the Confederates would not have attacked unless they were in much greater numbers, were thrown into panic. They soon canceled Banks's withdrawal from the Shenandoah, keeping his troops from aiding in the assault on Richmond and giving Stonewall a strategic triumph.
 
 
There would be many tactical wins as well, great and small, in the Valley Campaign to come. The demanding Jackson knew full well that Ashby was charismatic and without fear, utterly dedicated, and the only man who could--at least to some degree--control the rowdy and rambunctious Valley cavalry. In the aftermath of Kernstown, therefore, Jackson never made an issue of the breakdown in intelligence. Indeed, despite his reservations about Ashby's abilities as a disciplinarian, he would acknowledge and even laud his lieutenant's personal traits: "His power of endurance [was] almost incredible, his tone of character heroic, and his sagacity almost intuitive in divining the purposes and movements of the enemy."
 
Henry Kyd Douglas, one of Jackson's aides, would describe Ashby as having "a striking personal appearance, about five feet ten inches, graceful and compact, black eyes, black hair, and a flowing black beard. His complexion was of the darkest brunette. . . . His face was placid not stern; even his smile was shadowed with a tinge of melancholy."
 
The Federals had slain one of Ashby's brothers during a bloody skirmish in the Valley the year before, bayoneting him while he lay unhorsed and helpless, and the loss had increased Ashby's resolve. "His face did not flush in battle . . . ," Douglas continued, "only the melancholy passed away. . . . As a colonel with an independent command he was active, vigilant, energetic, never at rest. . . . The statements of Ashby with regard to the strength and position of the enemy were singularly accurate: [only] once, at Kernstown, was he deceived. [But] his idea that [the volunteer] should not be subjected to very much starch and drill . . . caused the only failures he ever made."2
 
That he was an inspirational leader was plain. "One glance at the features of Ashby confirmed the high estimate that I had formed of him," said one of his troopers after their first meeting. "I said to myself, 'If I follow you, I go far.' " Reported an awed Valley contemporary: "He told me that he had been under fire for sixty consecutive days. . . . But he found no inconvenience from it. 'I eat a few apples, drink some spring water, and draw up my swordbelt a hole or two tighter, and I'm all right. It's just as good as eating.' "3
 
But Ashby did not lead by speechifying. Just after the Kernstown affair, noted Jedediah Hotchkiss, "a Federal sharpshooter, in Edinburg, fired at him but hit . . . and killed the horse that a little boy they called Dixie, who was following Ashby, was riding. As the horse fell Dixie tumbled off, then jumped to his feet to run. Ashby called him back to get his saddle and coolly waited for him under a continuing fire from sharpshooters." More than once, indifferent to danger, he would sit on his mount, eating a hard-boiled egg or a crust of bread while balls whizzed by him. "Never mind [the bullets]," he would say to companions, "I am very hungry." These casual heroics were not lost upon his troopers.
 
Historian Douglas Southall Freeman summed up the man and his leadership thus: "Away from bugles and battle smoke, Turner Ashby's mien was that of a mild, affable and modest gentleman, to whom men and women were equally attracted. Like (Jeb) Stuart, he was rigid though not ostentatious in morals and in speech similarly clean; but, unlike Stuart, he had no banter and probably little humor. Those admirers who always remembered how he looked [rarely] recalled anything he said. He spoke best with his sword."4
 
 
The third of six children, Turner Ashby was born on October 23, 1828, in Fauquier County, Virginia, just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the son of a prosperous merchant who owned Rose Bank, a comfortable 15-acre estate, and who leased an additional 800 nearby acres for farming. Ashby's father died when he was seven, however, and thereafter the family suffered through a slow financial decline, losing Rose Bank in the process. Young Ashby nonetheless emerged as a popular figure in the area, gaining fame in local hunts and in riding tournaments. A cousin would write that he exhibited "a dash and fire few young men have ever possessed . . . for it was seldom that he failed to carry off first honors. . . . His superb management of his horse . . . and his grace were the marvel of his day."5
 
During the 1850s Ashby, then in his mid-twenties, went into the mercantile business himself, opening a store that catered to the immigrant Irish laborers who were extending the Manassas Gap Railroad. The venture proved a success, and it gave him a degree of financial security, enabling him to buy a home he called Wolf's Crag. He also became the captain of a mounted militia, formed to keep order in the community, which attracted the adventurous and well born and gave him considerable prestige. When John Brown struck Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, intent on seizing a federal arsenal, arming slaves, and fostering an uprising, Ashby and his troopers rushed to the scene and assisted in Brown's capture.
 
The Virginian was no rabid secessionist, however, and he continued to hope that war could be averted. Some months later, he showed his restraint and innate sense of civility firsthand. The occasion was a large and well-attended evening reception that Ashby, a bachelor, was giving at Wolf's Crag for some neighbors, their daughter, and a visiting Northerner who was courting her. While the host was off enjoying the party, a rejected suitor approached the young couple and made an insulting remark.
 
"Isn't it a sublime piece of impudence for a Yankee and a Black Republican to come down here and accept the hospitality of a Virginia gentleman?" he asked.
 
"You should be the last person to criticize . . . ," the young woman retorted. "You have profited by [my father's] indisposition to draw social lines too sharply. You have been received by him as a guest on several occasions."
 
Thinking he would save everyone embarrassment, her fiancé decided to leave Ashby's home. But the matter did not end there. The troublemaker followed him into the cloakroom and continued the confrontation.
 
"What I have just said had reference to you and was meant to be insulting," he persisted.
 
The Northerner had no desire for a duel, but neither did he wish his fiancée to think him a coward. A challenge was given and accepted, and arrangements were made to go out in the darkness and settle the matter with pistols by torchlight.
 
Here Ashby entered the cloakroom, his outrage concealed by a calm and deliberate manner. "What is the time set for our meeting?" he said, addressing the troublemaker.
 
"I am to fight Mr. ------ immediately."
 
"Mr. ------ has nothing to do with this affair," Ashby said. "He came to my house tonight as my guest. . . . The invitation was Turner Ashby's word of honor that he should be treated as a gentleman. . . . I am sorry to have to explain these points of good breeding to you . . . but you have shown your ignorance of them. . . . The insult is mine, not his, to resent. . . . If you are not prepared to make a proper and satisfactory apology, both to my guest and me, you must fight Turner Ashby. . . ."
 
The man backed down immediately, saying he had been drinking and making profuse apologies.6
 
 
Once the war was joined in April 1861, Ashby and his militia reported to Harpers Ferry, where the Rebels had seized the Federal arsenal. In the ensuing weeks there and elsewhere around the Shenandoah, he enhanced his reputation, moving the Confederate inspector general to state: "I visited the position opposite the Point of Rocks, distant twelve miles from [Harpers Ferry], where Captain Ashby of the Virginia cavalry, an excellent officer is stationed. . . . His cavalry is employed in active reconnaissance." In June his troop and others were formed into the 7th Virginia under the ailing Colonel Angus W. McDonald, a sixty-two-year-old West Pointer. Ashby, promoted to lieutenant colonel and second-in-command, would soon move up a notch in rank and replace McDonald.
 
Ashby's unit saw no action at First Manassas, but remained in the Valley. There in October, while conducting an assault on Bolivar Heights in the rear of Harpers Ferry, he foresaw the value of mobile artillery--light cannon drawn by horses and serviced by cannoneers on horseback. He organized the first such unit and, though he knew nothing of artillery himself, was fortunate in the men who staffed it. They were young, as many cannoneers were, but also graduates of the Virginia Military Institute, and well versed in the mathematics of bombardment. Their leader was Captain R. Preston Chew, eighteen, who before the war ended would command all the horse artillery in Lee's army. Chew would say that his chief, whom he would observe in some one hundred engagements, "was with us constantly on the battlefield," and always "without consciousness of danger . . . and ever alert and quick as lightning to take advantage of any mistake of the enemy."7
 
Two months later, Lieutenant William Poague of Jackson's Rockbridge Artillery, during a sortie to disrupt Union troop movements on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, would see Ashby in action for the first time. "The enemy seemed to be searching the whole region with his fire . . . ," he marveled. "Did I dodge? Yes: just as low as my saddle pommel would allow. But who was that man out there walking slowly back and forth . . . with arms folded apparently enjoying a quiet promenade, totally indifferent to the hellish fire. . . . That was Turner Ashby--a man of the coolest courage and finest nerve I ever knew."
 
Robert L. Dabney, a Presbyterian minister soon to be Jackson's chief of staff, attributed the cavalryman's risk taking to deep sorrow over his brother's death. "He evidently regarded his life as no longer his own . . . wherever death flew thickest, thither he hastened." His seeming immunity to wounds "filled the Federal soldiers with a species of superstitious dread. At the sound of his well-known yell, and the shout of 'Ashby' from his men, they relinquished every thought of resistance and usually fled without pausing to count the odds in their favor." To the residents of the Shenandoah, he was the stuff of legend. "Especially was the enthusiasm of the people stimulated by the chivalrous and modest courage of Ashby, whose name roused the hearts of the youth, like the peal of a clarion."8
 
 
By late April 1862, just weeks after Kernstown, serious trouble was brewing between Jackson and Ashby. Two events triggered the contretemps. In one instance a company of troopers, perhaps fifty men, were captured when they neglected to post a nighttime guard. In another disaster a second company, sent off on a bridge-burning raid, failed dismally in their mission when most of the men found some applejack and got drunk.
 
Jed Hotchkiss, who observed the latter fiasco, would say, "I never saw a more disgraceful affair--all owing . . . to the want of discipline. . . . When Ashby's men are with him, they behave gallantly, but when they are away they lack the inspiration of his presence, and being undisciplined they often fail to do any good." Jackson aide Kyd Douglas was more sympathetic: "Had [Ashby] been as full of discipline as he was of leadership his success would have been more fruitful and his reputation still greater. Yet it should be remembered that he had little time for instruction of any kind. From the beginning his only drill ground was the field of battle. . . . He was compelled to organize his troops while on the gallop."
 
The ordinarily rigid Stonewall, who knew how much he needed Ashby's leadership, was between a rock and a hard place. The problem was that the cavalryman did not see there was a problem. He regarded his troopers as an extended Valley family, and had little patience with military structure, fearing it would "cramp, if not crush, [their] spirit." His command now consisted of twenty-one widely scattered companies, each headed by a captain reporting directly to Ashby but otherwise making individual decisions--a recipe for chaos.9
 
Jackson's solution was to assign the...

About this edition

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0765312700
• ISBN 13: 9780765312709
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480