The lieutenant named on the tombstone, William H. Davis, began the war as a private in the 13th’s Spartan Band (later Company H) and was the last officer in command of the tiny remnant of the regiment when it surrendered at Appomattox in 1865.

Somehow 1LT Davis, who was from Chickasaw County, Mississippi, wound up buried on private property in Lyons. Jess still is trying to figure out exactly how that happened as well as trying to interest the Sons of Confederate Veterans in protecting the grave with a fence. It needs one because the new landowner’s seasonal mowing has periodically scarred the stone and knocked it down

According to the Appomattox Courthouse National Historical Park on the Web, only four 13th Regiment privates surrendered at Appomattox and were freed on parole. Independent historian Jess McLean found that a first lieutenant also was surrendered with them but he is not on the park service’s parole list.

If any other 13th Regiment soldiers had evaded capture at Sayler’s Creek on April 6, they were not included on the parole list. And the paroled were the fortunate ones, for they were immediately released and given passes to facilitate their journey home to Mississippi.

Those who were captured at Sayler’s Creek three days before Appomattox, along with thousands of others from Lee’s army, were marched (some were so weak they had to be dragged by their comrades, according to historian Robert Krick) back to Petersburg. They were crowded onto filthy transports and taken, without food or water, north to Federal prisons. Krick found that some of them died on the way. Many were taken to the Maryland hellhole dubbed Point Lookout. The subsequent assassination of President Lincoln would add to their problems and delay their release until July.

13th memoirist J.S. McNeilly indicated that he was among the imprisoned. He commented on the surrender of Humphreys’ Mississippi Brigade and the two other Mississippi brigades in Lee’s army this way: “In the final roundup at Appomattox Mississippians were woefully scarce even where the army was a skeleton.”

McNeilly counted 698 Mississippians out of a surrendered total of 28,231 Rebel soldiers paroled at Appomattox. He assigned 257 of the 698 to Humphreys’ Brigade. But the park service’s parole records list a total of only eight members of the four-regiment brigade who were issued paroles. In addition to the four from the 13th Regiment, the park service’s list includes a first lieutenant serving as the brigade ordnance officer, one private from the 21st Regiment, and two privates from the 17th Regiment. There is no one listed for the 18th Regiment.

We can assume that the rest of the brigade, in the neighborhood of 250 men altogether, were surrendered at Sayler’s Creek.

According to the Park Service:

“On the morning of April 12^th the remnants of General Lee’s infantry, 21-22,000 men, marched as organized Confederate units for the last time.  They marched from their encampments, east of the village, across the Appomattox River and into Appomattox Court House where they stacked their arms before double rows of Federal infantry.

“There, along the Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road the Confederates laid down what was left of their state and regimental battle flags – many emblazoned with the names of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg and other bloody fields of the last four years.  Before leaving for home the Southerners were issued parole passes.

“The pass was an oath – the Latin root of the word parole means ‘to give your word’- the men swore not to take up arms again ‘until paroled or properly exchanged.’   Thus, the men of Lee’s army were allowed to return to their homes on their own honor and these slips of paper would allow them safe passage through both Confederate and Union military lines on their way homes [sic].”

The four 13th Regiment soldiers for whom McLean found records at Appomattox were: Privates Garnett G. Adams of the Newton Rifles; Green W. Allen of the Minute Men of Attala; Henry H. Alexander of the Pettus Guards; and 1st Lieutenant William H. Davis, originally a 2nd Sergeant private in the Spartan Band, in command. Only the privates are on the park service’s parole list.

Park Service records also included Private Henry F. Alexander of the Pettus Guards. McLean found his name listed in Mississippi state archivist Dunbar Rowland’s muster rolls of Mississippi soldiers, but McLean found no other records of Henry F. ever serving with the 13th Regiment.

Independent historian H. Grady Howell, Jr., found that Captain Gwin R. Cherry of the 17th Mississippi Regiment was in command of the remnant of Humphreys’ Mississippi Brigade at Appomattox, but Cherry is not on the parole list, either. Further adding to the confusion, Howell indicates that the final records of the 18th and 21st regiments show 20 officers and 231 privates of all four regiments were surrendered to General Grant’s army. Apparently all but the eight on the parole list were captured at Sayler’s Creek.

“Stillness at Appomattox” was the title of the concluding volume of a popular trilogy history of the war by journalist Bruce Catton. Written from the victorious Union’s point of view, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. It was the first history I recall reading about anything at all, a few years later when I was thirteen. The image of the stillness seems to have been used by many memoirists and historians after the war.

Krick quotes one Rebel veteran’s use of the word which perhaps best illustrates the idea behind it:

“The great heart of the noble Army of Northern Virginia had ceased to beat forever; and then there ‘was stillness as of death.’”

It was little more than a skirmish, actually, though it extinguished Humphreys’ Mississippi Brigade and most of the 13th Regiment. Then, it was forgotten by almost everyone. Historians ever after generally dismissed the skirmish with a few sentences, and most of them continue to do so.

It was worth a lot more than that to the survivors.

It began when all but a handful of the few score remaining soldiers of the 13th Regiment, and thousands more from the rest of Lee’s army, were pinned on a hillside across a marshy stream by Union cavalry commanded by Gen. George Armstrong Custer.

They had gotten into the box in a roundabout way, through a series of delays brought on by their half-starved condition and much straggling and its consequent disorganization.

The 13th, and the rest of Kershaw’s division was still nominally a part of Longstreet’s Corps, but Longstreet had taken Field’s division to Petersburg and retreated with it west from there. Farther north, Kershaw’s division of  three greatly-diminished Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina brigades, had retreated through Richmond and joined up with Ewell’s Corps, mainly reservists, artillerymen-turned-infantry, and sailors and marines from the scuttled James River fleet. They had all trudged west together through a steady rain. Both the north and south wings of the army of about 35,000 soldiers converged on Amelia Courthouse on Wednesday, April 5.

It was less marching than a kind of semi-organized straggling. Historian Joseph T. Glatthaar: “Their physical deterioration from poor conditioning prevented thousands from keeping up…Thousands dropped out of the retreat march, some falling into Yankee hands and others working their way toward home.”

“We stopped at Amelia all the morning,” recalled artillery commander Porter Alexander, “reorganizing commands & waiting for the rear to close up.”

A planned prepositioning of rations, much anticipated by men retreating on empty stomachs,  was nowhere to be found. The troops spent most of the rest of the day hunting for food for themselves and forage for their horses and mules but without much success in a country stripped bare after four years of invasion and war.

Kershaw’s division was at the rear of the retreat. When they approached the Appomattox River, which was in flood stage from spring rains, no pontoon bridges were available and, Glatthaar reports, they “had to trudge southward and plank the Richmond & Danville Railroad bridge to cross.”

All the delays gave Union Cavalry General Phillip Sheridan plenty of time to get jis troopers ahead of Lee’s retreating army and flank and funnel all of it eastward.

“The march was resumed soon after dark and kept up all night,” wrote 13th memoirist J.S. McNeilly in 1913. “But delayed by transportation trains, artillery, and the attempts of the Federal cavalry to break in on them, daylight found the command only a few miles from Amelia Courthouse.

“The morning of the fateful 6th of April found the retreating troops in pretty bad shape—tired, sleepy, and oh! so hungry! In such condition the straggling was bad, and would have been worse but for the proximity of the Union cavalry and the apprehension of Northern prisons.”

The dawn skies were cloudy and threatening more rain, when they reached marshy Saylor’s Creek. There was an extended halt which lasted for several hours.

Historian Robert K. Krick: “Federal cavalry were in front with the road blocked.”

Before they could decide how to proceed, Glattner summarized, “a combination of Union infantry, artillery and cavalry enveloped both Confederate flanks and utterly crushed them. [Generals] Anderson, Pickett and Bushrod Johnson escaped. Ewell stayed behind trying to rally his whipped men, and fell into Union hands.”

But as McNeilly remembered it for the Mississippi Historical Society, the crushing came after the cornered troops put up a stiff fight, killing and wounding scores of Yankees. He said a defense line was thrown out on the south side of the creek, across the Deatonsville Road.

Kershaw stationed the Mississippi Brigade “now of less than four hundred men, commanded by Lieut. Col. Fitzgerald , on some high ground north of the creek, to check the enemy’s advance as long as possible.

“This rear guard was assailed immediately and vigorously in front and on both flanks….When the brigade was forced back, Col. Fitzgerald took another position, where, with a few men, he held back the advance until surrounded and captured, that the brigade might withdraw across the creek without disorder or disaster.”

Which could have been pretty hard, such a withdrawal, because as he goes on to say, the marshy creek was then waist deep and had steep banks.

“The conflict was so close that a Federal officer rushing to the front to seize the colors of the 21st Mississippi, fell as he was shot, at the feet of the slayer.”

Another Union officer on horseback was more successful, until his horse was killed and the flag recovered. “…[T]he colors were recovered by color bearer Trescott,” McNeilly wrote, “and burned by him that night, as were the colors of the 13th.”

There were other versions of what happened to the 13th Regiment’s last of several battle flags, in addition to McNeilly’s assertion that it was destroyed. One is that of Corporal Charles Derille Eastland of the Winston Guards. He offered his story of what happened to the flag in a letter to Confederate Veteran magazine long after the war.

“‘If the Federal soldier who captured the flag of the 13th Mississippi Regiment April 6, 1865, in the battle of Harper’s Farm or Sailor’s Creek will write to me,” Eastland wrote, “I shall be glad to tell him who shot him through the right shoulder as he ran off with the flag.”

A third version is that the banner was taken from its staff, folded and secreted under the shirt of a 13th Regiment soldier at Saylor’s Creek and survived the war with him. That one makes the most sense, because a tattered 13th Regiment battle flag was preserved at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson. Independent historian Jess McLean photographed it for the cover of his history of the regiment. And a portion of the photograph forms the top of the home page of this blog.

According to McNeilly the deadly capture-the-flag business soon ended and “Maj. Costan, of Gen. Kershaw’s staff, rode up and called for the firing to cease, as all were surrounded and had been surrendered.”

McNeilly goes on to say that the 13th’s Captain Hugh D. Cameron, originally a private in the Alamutcha Infantry, who was “the only one of the four regimental commanders unwounded, commanded the brigade when it was finally rounded up.” He  said Lieut. Col. Fitzgerald was severely wounded, which apparently was why Cameron had assumed command. They both survived the war.

Among the captured soldiers of the 13th Regiment, for whom McLean was able to find records, were Captain Slyvanus Jackson Quinn of the Secessionists, the regimental brass band’s original drum major; Privates William Henry Hailey and Wilson West of the Kemper Legion; Private Charles Wesley Kendall of the Spartan Band; and 2nd Lieutenant Marcet R. Watkins of the Newton Rifles. But there must have been a few score others for whom records no longer exist.

Glatthaar concludes: “The Saylor’s Creek disaster marked the beginning of the very end for Lee’s army. Not only did it lose 8,000 men and large numbers of guns and wagons, but the battle was emblematic of the collapse of the army’s fighting prowess.”

McNeilly admitted as much: “…the sole ray of light that relieved the gloom of being prisoners of war, was that we were also ‘prisoners of hope’—the hope of a square meal. But that hope was dissolved in disappointment and a rainy night.”

So wrote self-described 13th Regiment veteran J.S. McNeilly for the Mississippi Historical Society long after the war.

Lee’s defense that day of the crossroads at Five Forks near Petersburg against Grant’s assault had failed.

“The next day at 4:00 a.m.,” historian Joseph T. Glatthaar wrote, “Grant followed up the success at Five Forks with an assault all along the [Petersburg] line.”

The fighting, though miles away to the south of the 13th Regiment’s defensive entrenchments east of Richmond, raised such a din of artillery and rifles that they could hear the echoes. And they soon learned that Grant had defeated their comrades at Petersburg.

General Lee summoned Gen. Longstreet to help keep the Yankees out of Petersburg itself until what was left of his army could be evacuated. Longstreet rushed Field’s division to the city. Thus, only Kershaw’s division of three brigades, including the 13th Regiment, and some local reservists, remained in front of Richmond on Sunday, April 2.

“At the close of a day that was ominous in its stillness,” McNeilly remembered in 1913, “the pickets were detailed and posted under extra injunction of watchfulness. But the night passed without movement from the greatly superior force in front.”

Monday, April 3, dawned as quiet, “and passed without excitement or stir,” McNeilly wrote. “Orders [had come] during the day to prepare three days’ rations and get ready to march.”

The withdrawal began after midnight, from the right end of the division’s defensive line. The Mississippi Brigade, apparently commanded by Col. William H. Fitzgerald of the 21st Regiment, was on the extreme left of the line. Therefore, it was the last unit to pull out, at half-past two in the morning Tuesday, April 4, according to McNeilly.

The 13th Regiment apparently was commanded by Captain Hugh D. Cameron of the Alamutcha Infantry.

“The march was taken up in the darkness,” McNeilly wrote, “lit up by the baleful glare of the burning shipping on the James…At the rear of the column, we entered Richmond, passing through its streets to Mayo’s bridge, just as the sun rose…”

At least there was the pleasure of doing something besides standing barefooted in a cold, waterlogged ditch. “It was such an infinite relief,” McNeilly continued, “to be free again from the trenches; where we had been more or less closely ‘cabined, cribbed, confined,’ for the past five or six months.”

Confederate reservists and local defense troops joined the retreat but not before following orders to burn whatever might be of use to the Yankees in the city and also to impede their arrival by burning the Mayo bridge over the James River.

Wrote Glatthaar: “Richmond smoldered. Amid the crackle of burning tobacco warehouses and the periodic explosion of ignited ammunition and arms that the Confederacy could not carry, skittish and dispirited soldiers scurried toward safety westward.”

“A detail was made for suppression of the plunder and arson that was rife,” McNeilly continued. “But the bridge across the James being set on fire prematurely, through error or design, the hindmost men had to double quick to avoid being cut off.”

Just which unit of Kershaw’s division was the last Rebel one to leave fallen Richmond behind was ever after a matter of dispute. Some claimed it was South Carolina cavalry troopers who had fired the bridge with pine knots when everyone else was across. Others said it was the Phillips Georgia Legion infantry of Wofford’s Brigade. McNeilly had no doubt of his version.

“It is a thing to be noted,” he recalled, ” that this brigade of Mississippians were the last of the Army of Northern Virginia to march through Richmond—the passing of their waving banners was the visible emblem of the fall of the Confederate capital.”

Longstreet’s artillery chief Gen. Porter Alexander recalled in a memoir many years after the war:

“It was after sunrise [on April 4] of a bright morning when…we turned to take our last look at the old city for which we had fought so long & so hard. It was a sad, a terrible & a solemn sight. I don’t know that any moment in the whole war impressed me more deeply with all its stern realities than this.

“The whole river front seemed to be in flames, amid which occasional heavy explosions were heard, & the black smoke spreading & hanging over the city seemed to be full of dreadful portents. I rode on with a distinctly heavy heart & with a peculiar sort of feeling of orphanage.”

J.S. McNeilly, who claimed to be a veteran of the 13th Regiment though his name is not recorded on the muster rolls of either McLean or Howell, wrote for the Mississippi Historical Society in 1913:

“As there was no firing on the outposts, desertion by men on picket detail was easy and safe. Raised high above the sally port of the Union works, was an arch, topped with lighted lanterns bearing the words: ‘While the lamp holds out to burn, the vilest rebel may return.’”

Historian Robert K. Krick: “Desertions reached epidemic proportions in the Confederate armies during the winter of 1864-1865.”

That was especially true in the Army of Northern Virginia whose scant surviving records show that between Feb. 15 and March 18, almost 3,000 deserted.

“According to Federal records,” however, independent historian Robert G. Evans wrote, “over 1,750 came over to their side, thus leaving about 1,250 who probably just went home.”

Individual soldier records for the 13th Regiment, found by independent historian Jess McLean, confirm that at least seven men from six companies were tallied as deserters from Dec. 1, 1864 through March 1, 1865. Subtracting men in hospital and on furlough, the once 1,000-strong regiment probably numbered fewer than 100 men during the period.

McLean’s deserters were: Private William J. McDaniel of the Newton Rifles; Private William Bates and Private William R. Kellum of the Spartan Band; Private Joseph E. Perry of the Pettus Guards; Fifth Sergeant Frank M. Ross of the Minutemen of Attala; Private R. L. Morris of the Winston Guards; and Private Elias Kelly of the Wayne Rifles.

But there were probably more than these. For one thing, rations were scant and a private’s pay of about $11 a month was almost worthless. Inflation had robbed it of purchasing power. And their duty was more difficult than ever.

“By early spring,” historian Joseph T. Glatthaar wrote, “the Petersburg-Richmond defenses extended forty-five miles. Generally, Rebel defenders stood in the works five to six feet apart.”

And illness among them was prevalent: “Reduced rations with severely limited vitamin intake and excessive exposure to cold temperatures,” Glatthaar continued, “spawned widespread illness that winter. Many soldiers in various brigades suffered bouts of scurvy…Personal hygiene nearly disappeared, which also bred illness.”

General Lee convinced President Jefferson Davis to, as Glatthaar wrote, “authorize amnesty for all deserters who returned to the army within twenty days or reported to an enrolling officer in areas where transportation back to their respective army was difficult.”

One of those who may have been having such difficulties was Major George Lavelle Donald, the onetime 1st Lieutenant of the Secessionists who had taken command of the brigade after Cedar Creek back in October. Donald was  furloughed for forty days on Jan. 25, according to Jess McLean, on “a general leave of indulgence.” He was due back in April but McLean found no record of his return.

The desertions continued. Lee’s staff officer Col. Walter H. Taylor wrote in his memoir “Four Years With Lee,” of this period that “the loss to the army by desertion averaged a hundred men a day.”

The command was so worried that it intercepted letters to soldiers and sent them on to headquarters which found, Taylor wrote, “mothers, wives & sisters [telling] of their inability to respond to the appeals of hungry children for bread, or to provide proper care & remedies for the sick, &, in the name of all that was dear, appealed to the men to come home, & rescue them from the ills which they suffered & the starvation which threatened them.”

The soldiers also were starving. “…it is the insufficiency of rations,” Lt. Col. J.H. Duncan of the 16th Mississippi Regiment wrote his brigade commander. “Our men do not get enough to eat.”

General Kershaw agreed. “To these deficiencies of food I attribute the number of desertions daily occurring and a general feeling of depression existing.”

Historian Glatthaar: “Throughout 1864, rations seldom exceeded a pound of corn meal and a quarter pound of beef or bacon, and only occasionally did men receive vegetables. By early 1865, the commissary could not sustain even that meager bounty. Many days the government could supply troops with either meat or a starch—cornmeal or flour—but not both.”

There were executions of some captured deserters in some units, particularly in Pickett’s division, to try to halt the tide. But in some units desertions were so numerous that some Rebel pickets took to firing on the deserters as they fled to the Union lines.

“Men went across the lines,” Krick wrote in his history of Parker’s Virginia Battery, which was then posted near Chaffin’s Bluff just north of the James River, “and were fired on by their old friends near Parker’s Battery so frequently that, [Private] Royal Figg declared, ‘picket-firing on the lines was more frequently caused by that than by an advance of the enemy.’”

There was a bitter joke of the time which several memoirists recalled in different ways. Here is Longstreet’s artillery chief Porter Alexander’s version: “It was of this period that the story was told of the half-frozen Confederate picket, who sat on a stump & took stock of his nearly bare feet & thin & ragged clothes & empty haversack & exclaimed, “Well, damn me if ever I love another Country!“

Still, as Glatthaar concluded: “Tens of thousands stayed on to the very end. Many of them, like their army commander, placed their faith in God to see them through the crisis.”

Historians report no more than that the division was posted on the Nine Mile Road near Garnett’s Farm, a few miles northeast of the city, in late November. There they dug defensive entrenchments facing Grant’s invading army and began to construct their winter quarters.

But, close to Christmas, they moved about a dozen miles south where they dug similar entrenchments between the New Market and Darbytown roads, and there they remained until the spring.

These were days of little military activity but much privation for the remnant of the Army of Northern Virginia: there was little food or clothing as winter snows and rains pelted the troops in their makeshift shelters. Water stood several inches deep in the wet trenches. Rats and mice plagued the men.

“For firewood,” wrote historian Joseph T. Glatthaar in his ‘General Lee’s Army,’ “soldiers often had to hike a mile to the rear and carry the wood… Off-duty soldiers would have to make two or three trips just to collect enough firewood for the night.

“In  the past men had gone cold or barefoot in winter and hungry for extended periods of time, but nothing compared to the winter of 1864-65.

“…inspection after inspection uncovered a lack of shoes and clothing in serious, often critical numbers…in Kershaw’s division ‘Some of the men are without pants and others nearly so,’ an inspector reported.”

Some of the 13th Regiment’s old brass band was still intact, however, and there were other diversions. On Dec. 27, 1864, 3rd Sergeant Wilborn P. Smith of the Pettus Guards wrote his sister back in Mississippi. The mails apparently still worked, for the letter made it home and was preserved, though independent historian Jess N. McLean found it barely legible.

“Christmas has come once more,” Smith wrote, “and I assure you I spent it far different from what I did last Christmas. Last Christmas I was at Point Lookout [the Union prison camp in Maryland] thinking of home-sweet- home and of all the fine times the people at home were having.

“Well, this Chistmas at least I spent it in the Confederacy. On Christmas our band got permission to go to Richmond on a serenade to play for some of our officers. I…have to pay $2 for a quart of meal. I reckon you can buy a bushel for that. I have money about $150 in cash can make that do me for some time…[the rest was illegible].”

Smith wrote again on Jan. 25, 1865, commenting on a letter received from someone else at home: “…I wrote you by Wallace [1st Lieutenant William Wallace McElroy]…I expect you have been expecting me home. When Wallace left, we had a furlough started up and he felt certain that we would get them, but it failed.

“I would like to get home again very much. I suppose now we will not have one until another long year rolls around, if the war is not ended sooner…”

On March 1, 1865, Newton Rifles 2nd Lieutenant Marcet Watkins was in Richmond where he wrote a brief history of the company which became part of its final records. He concluded it this way:

“Many of our boys, noble heroes, have fallen a willing sacrifice in their country’s cause. while others wear the wooden leg or empty sleeve; but others yet remain a small remnant of as brave and patriotic an army as ever trod the earth to avenge the loss of our comrades by emulating their devotion and heroism in a cause that deserved if it may not achieve success. It is sweet and glorious to die for one’s country.”

The actual return occurred between the 18th and 20th of November, apparently from near Staunton, where the remainder of Gen. Early’s troops were concentrated, through Rockfish Gap to Charlottesville where they could take a train to Richmond.

Kershaw’s Division, including the 13th Regiment, may have followed the late General Stonewall Jackson’s lead and marched through the old Blue Ridge Railroad tunnel under the Gap—eight-tenths of a mile cut through granite in 1858. Jackson’s troops had sometimes used the tunnel to cross the Blue Ridge back in 1862.

From the railroad station in Richmond, the 13th and the rest of the division marched to a defensive position on the Nine Mile Road near Garnett’s Farm, northeast of the city, where they began digging in and building winter quarters.

There was also a flurry of Richmond hospital admissions—to Stuart Hospital, General Hospital #9, Wayside Hospital, and Howard’s Grove. Independent historian Jess McLean found that, on Nov. 19, 62 men of the regiment, probably the most ragged and shoeless ones, were issued new clothing.

Gerald, former commander of the brigade’s 18th Mississippi Regiment had replaced the wounded Gen. Humphreys as brigade commander after the Battle of Berryville.

Gerald would now be replaced by the 13th’s Major George LaValle Donald, putting the regiment back in command of the brigade for the first time since the death of General Barksdale at Gettysburg.

Donald, who was single, had commanded the 13th regiment since the Battle of Fort Sanders at Knoxville. He had enlisted with the Secessionists in March, 1861, at Quitman in Clarke County. Two months later he was appointed a First Lieutenant.

He found a notation on the records of Private Henry Francis Carr of the Secessionists which indicated that Carr was in the great skedaddle.

On Nov. 4, 1864, McLean records in his history of the regiment, Private Carr was “Charged for his Gun and accouterments that he lost October 19, 1864.”

Carr, according to McLean, had enlisted in early July, 1861, when the regiment was in training near Union City, Tennessee shortly before it left for Virginia.

He was then a 30-year-old, unmarried farmer who was joining his 32-year-old married farmer brother, Private James Hamilton Carr who had enlisted in the Secessionists two months earlier.

Near midnight on Oct. 18, he assembled his exhausted troops (now also hungry due to the Union destruction of foodstuffs in the Valley) and led them on a night march up the Valley pike.

It was, according to historian Joseph T. Glatthaar “…the most impressive [Confederate] night movement of the war.”

They trod the narrow, dirt track to where it became macadamized and, finally, after about eight miles they forded the North Fork of the Shenandoah River, just northwest of Strasburg.

In a dense fog, Kershaw’s Division and the 13th Regiment, waded Cedar Creek at Bowman’s Mill Ford, crossed a field and climbed up a low hill to where Sheridan’s army was camped. They opened fire on some New York pickets, capturing a few of them.

It was near dawn on Oct. 19 when they deployed in line of battle and struck the Union camps, including some of the same Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania troops who had beaten them off so decisively at Berryville back in early September.

The fog concealed the Rebel numbers and so the surprise sight of ragged men with rifles flitting through the trees induced a panic in the Union soldiers. Many of them fled in their nightshirts, across the fields of Belle Grove plantation, past the big house where the Union generals had their headquarters.

The rout might have meant decimation or worse for Sheridan’s army, but Early’s troops were spent after their hard march and some had been starving for several days. So, confronted by  boiling breakfast coffee and roasting meat in the abandoned Union camps, they broke ranks and commenced to take what they needed.

“…we expected to do some hand to hand fighting,” Third Lieutenant Hannibal H. Stevens of the Pettus Guards later told Confederate Veteran magazine, “but to our surprise and delight we found not a Yankee there. All had gone. Some of the boys said they could see something like ghosts running through the woods…A volley fired from our line drove them out of sight…

“Then our line passed over the breastworks. Good gracious, what a feast we had. Edibles of every kind and in great abundance… We got some of the good things, filled our tin cups with the coffee and moved on after the Yankees eating, drinking and feeling brave…Our boys were in great need of shoes and clothing and could not resist the temptation, so many broke ranks and supplied themselves. This weakened our lines considerably. Tents had been left standing with blankets and pants in them. They had skipped in nothing but their shirts.”

Seven Union divisions fell back several miles, losing prisoners and artillery and abandoning dead and wounded on the field.

Stevens recalled that the 13th Regiment and other Rebel units reformed and moved on past the Belle Grove mansion, following the Yankee skedaddlers at least a mile “when we found artillery and infantry waiting for us and…we went at them.”

But the pillaging had disorganized things and slowed them all down. It had given time for word to get to Sheridan and he rode to the scene to rally his troops for a counterattack.

“I hastened from Winchester,” Sheridan later reported to Grant, “and joined the army between Middletown and Newtown, [their] having been driven back about four miles. I here took the affair in hand and quickly united the corps, formed a compact line of battle just in time to repulse an attack of the enemy’s, which was handsomely done at about 1 p.m. At 3 p.m. after some changes of the cavalry from the left to the right flank, I attacked with great vigor, driving and routing the enemy…”

Indeed, Stevens recalled, “the Yankees ran us that evening. You bet they did and I will never forget it….We were striking the ground only in the high places.”

They waded back through Cedar Creek and kept on going. “The Yankees halted at their breastworks,” Stevens wrote. “We halted at Fishers Hill” well south of Strasburg.

The Union forces had lost almost 6,000 casualties, the Rebels about 3,000. The 13th sustained 4 killed, 15 wounded and 26 captured, about 29 percent of their estimated strength of 157.

Early’s army didn’t stop long at Fisher’s Hill. Sheridan’s “victory won from disaster” turned up there the next day where his cavalry found only a token rear guard. The rest of Early’s army was long gone “without an organized regiment.”

“For ten miles on the line of retreat,” Sheridan reported, “the road and country was covered with small-arms, thrown away by the flying rebels…”

Private James David Thomas became separated from the rest of the Kemper Legion, according to independent historian Jess McLean. In the dark night of Oct. 19, Thomas stumbled onto a Union camp and was captured.

Historians have concluded that Early’s defeat at Cedar Creek thoroughly broke Confederate resistance in the Shenandoah Valley. There would be no more Confederate offensives there.