University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
HUNTER'S RAID UP THE VALLEY.—STONEWALL
JACKSON'S GRAVE.

Our advance upon Lexington was in four columns—General
Averell's cavalry on the extreme
right; Crook's West Virginia infantry right centre;
Sullivan's infantry left centre; and Duffié's
cavalry on the extreme left, having in fact wandered
over to the east side of the Blue Ridge and
there lost its way—as was the custom of its General
Commanding.

The enemy, under General McCausland—who
succeeded General Wm. E. Jones, killed at Piedmont
a few days before—fell back before our
advance, but not without offering a vigorous
opposition. The brigades of Imboden, Vaughan,
Echolls, “Mudwall” Jackson, Jones, McCausland,
and a cloud of guerillas under Mosby, Gilmer, and
McNeil, broke down all bridges in their rear, obstructed
the roads wherever feasible, and from
every eminence played on the heads of our advancing
columns with their artillery, while also doing
a large bushwhacking business from the dense
woods through which we had to pass.

But the weather was beautiful in that beautiful

valley, and our troops in the highest spirits. At
Stanton we had sent back our prisoners, numbering
about thirteen hundred Confederate soldiers,
and had dismissed some five or six hundred other
prisoners—old men and mere boys belonging to
the Reserve Militia—as not worth any further
thought. We had also sent back all our spare
transportation and stores not absolutely needed—
the guard for this train consisting of one Ohio
regiment of volunteers whose term of service had
expired, two regiments of Ohio militia only called
out for one hundred days, and a battalion of
cavalry—the whole under command of Major-General
Julius Stahl, who had been slightly
wounded in the shoulder some few days before
at Piedmont, while leading the last charge in
which the rebels had been broken. Stahl's orders
were, on his return, to collect all the troops he
could at Martinsburgh—probably about five thousand—and
then to follow after us with a train of
extra ammunition and supplies.

Never did an army advance through a lovelier
country than was the Shenandoah Valley between
Stanton and Lexington in that soft month of June.
Vast fields of purple and white clover gave ample
and delicious pasturage to our cattle; and from a
pocket-book then carried, we extract the first
stanza of a song commenced, but never finished—
nor now ever likely to be:

Occasionally light showers just freshened the
atmosphere; and the lofty peaks of the Blue
Ridge on our left, clothed with foliage and verdure
to their highest summits, looked lovely
enough to deserve the pencil of Church or Bierstadt.
The country around showed no signs of
war, save here and there, at advantageous points,
some rail-fence rifle-pits thrown up by the enemy
the night before, and from which they were continually
driven or outflanked by our advancing
columns.

MARKS OF PREVIOUS CONFLICT, AND TEMPER OF
THE PEOPLE.

Up the Shenandoah to Harrisonburgh, the country
had been traversed and desolated in repeated
campaigns—fields without fences, showing where
armies had encamped; desolate and fire-blackened
stone chimneys, standing up like pillars to mark
where happy homes had ceased to be; long grave-trenches
of red earth, recalling the legend that here
Stonewall Jackson had whipped Banks, or Milroy,
or given rude check to Fremont, or held his own
and accomplished his purpose of retreat, despite
the headlong fury of General Shields's attack.

Martinsburgh was a desolate and forsaken town,
which had changed masters half a dozen times
under the fluctuating fortunes of battle—soon to
have two changes more. Winchester was much
the same—aristocratic and bitterly rebellious—
with vast earthworks and forts on the hills surrounding
it, but utterly indefensible from the
nature of the country in which it lay. At Strasburg
and Woodstock the people were sullenly
silent as we passed through the streets—only
some shrill-tongued females having the boldness
to cry:

“We've seen men with your colored clothes go
up this valley afore; and we've seen 'em come
back this way a mighty sight faster than they
went up.”

All the bridges from Cedar Creek to Newmarket
had been broken down by General Sigel,
about ten or twelve days before our advance, in
his headlong retreat from the latter place, fancying
himself pursued all the way by the victorious
forces of General Breckinridge, who had really
only followed him in force as far as Edinburgh—
also a bitterly rebellious and much-scourged town,
famous in the South for its manufacture of patent
medicines. At Newmarket, or rather at Rood's
Hill, on this side of it, we came on the shocking
débris of the recent battle, many scores of our men
being so imperfectly buried that their blackened

and wormy limbs protruded through the earth,
while the air was horribly impregnated with the
Bouquet de Rottenhoss—as “Porte Crayon” used
to call the dead remains of our cavalry and artillery
animals.

ANECDOTE OF “PORTE CRAYON” AND GENERAL
SIGEL.

And here let me give a little story of “Porte
Crayon,” and then this digression shall terminate:

It was after the battle of Newmarket, while
Sigel was in headlong retreat down the Shenandoah
turnpike, that news reached his small and
discomfited army of General Averell's success in
destroying certain important railroads in South
Western Virginia.

“Oh ho!” said Colonel Strother (“Porte Crayon”),
who was then Sigel's chief of staff. “By
Jove, boys! the Department of West Virginia is
doing a big business, General Averell's tearing
up the railroad, and General Sigel's tearing down
the 'pike!”

To make the matter better, an innocent young
staff officer tried to cheer his chopfallen General
by repeating this story to him as “Porte Crayon's”
last bon mot; but the General couldn't see
it in any such light.

“By gar,” he exclaimed, “I vill not haaf beoples
zayin' dem kind o' tings! By gar, I pelief
dere are beoples on mein staff who are not griefed
to zee me dearin' down de 'pike! By gar, Colonel
Strodare must not zay dem kind o' tings, or he
veel be court-martial!”

Let me add, in justice to our Teutonic General,
against whom this story rather tells, that Colonel
Strother was at all times emphatic in speaking of
the perfectly reckless manner in which General
Sigel exposed himself and staff in the last hours
of the battle of Newmarket—the gallant Colonel,
now Adjutant-General of Virginia on Governor
Pierpont's staff, equally asserting that there was
no trace of cowardice in General Sigel, as there
certainly was none of generalship.

And now to return from our digression, and
hasten on to Lexington as fast as possible.

BATTLE OF PIEDMONT.—A BAD CASE OF WHIP.

Quitting Harrisonburgh, which we had entered
with only some inconsiderable skirmishing, we
amused the enemy for a few days by some feints
on their strong—indeed, nearly impregnable—
lines at Mount Crawford, just in front of us; and
then suddenly wheeling to the left—our movements
covered by a cloud of cavalry, under the
guidance of poor young Meigs of the Engineers,

since killed, son of the Quartermaster-General—
we crossed the Shenandoah at Port Republic on
pontoons and by wading; and then found ourselves
in a virgin part of the valley, which had
never previously seen our uniforms except on
prisoners being sent to Lynchburgh by Lee or
Jackson. This was on the 4th of June, 1864,—
a miserable day, the rain pouring in torrents; and
well for us that it did so, as it helped to mislead
the enemy.

Next morning, at daylight, commenced the battle
of Piedmont, or Stanton, as the enemy more
properly called it—Stanton being the prize at
which we aimed. The forces actually engaged
were about equal, General Hunter having some
nine thousand men actually in action, while the
enemy had about the same—strongly posted, however,
on a range of hills, horse-shoe shaped, and
heavily timbered, and further protected by rifle-pits
and rail-fence barricades, hastily thrown up
the night before. The rebel morning report of
the day previous, found on the dead body of
General Jones that afternoon, showed that he had
then under him 6,800 regular Confederate soldiers,
while we knew that he was joined on the
morning of the engagement by Vaughan's brigade
from East Tennessee, and also by about fifteen
hundred militia—old men and young boys, not
worth the powder required to kill them—hurried

forward from Stanton and Lynchburgh on news
of our advance.

The fight, though not large in numbers, was
singularly obstinate and fluctuating, the enemy
beating back repeated charges of our infantry and
cavalry, under Generals Sullivan and Stahl—for
neither the divisions of Crook and Averell had
then joined us; and it was quite late in the afternoon,
after a long and sweltering day of battle,
when the movement of the gallant Colonel Thoburne's
division across the narrow valley and its
charge up hill upon the enemy's right flank,
decided the contest in our favor. General Wm.
E. Jones, their commander, was killed, as also
five colonels, thirty or forty officers, and some
seven or eight hundred men killed or wounded;
and we had about eighteen hundred prisoners,
including the worthless reserve militia, seventy
regular officers, and twenty-eight hundred stand
of arms, as the spoils attesting our success.
But for the coming on of night, and the broken,
heavily-timbered nature of the country, the famous
feat of “bagging” that army—so popular with
Congressional orators and enthusiastic editors—
might have been easily accomplished; for a worse
whipped or more utterly demoralized crowd of
beaten men never fled from any field.

ALEXANDER H. H. STUART.—ONE LOYAL POLITICIAN
IN VIRGINIA.

Next day we entered Stanton without any regular
opposition, destroying the railroad thoroughly
on each side of it, and also enormous quantities
of quartermaster, commissary, and ordnance stores
there accumulated; and, riding into town, the
first person the writer had any conversation with
was the Hon. Alexander H. H. Stuart, once a Whig
member of the Washington Cabinet, and now
again becoming prominent in Virginia politics.
He was a handsome, portly, tall, middle-aged and
gray-headed gentleman, a good deal resembling
Mayor Berret, of Washington; and one observation
that he made to us—indeed, almost the first
—was memorable in that land of secession proclivities:

We were sitting, with Mr. Stuart, the Mayor,
County Clerk, and other dignitaries of the town,
on the stoop of the Stanton Bank, when the head
of our infantry column appeared, preceded by a
band of music, playing “Hail Columbia,” and an
enormous banner of the Stars and Stripes, almost
breaking the long pole—for there was a thunder-storm
just then—on which the soldiers carried it.

“That's a grand old tune,” said Mr. Stuart,
somewhat huskily, and with a slight quaver in his
voice. “A grand old tune, and a grand old flag.

It's long since I have seen the one, or heard the
other”—and he looked as if he were not sorry.
It is but justice to Mr. Stuart to add, that he was
one of those who had vehemently opposed the
ordinance of secession, and was always regarded
as being so much a Union man as it was safe for
any one to be in those parts, during the entire
rebellion.

A SONG BY OUR IRREPRESSIBLE ORDERLY.

While referring again to our field note-book for
these particulars—hastily jotted down at the time,
and jumbled up with all manner of army and
private memoranda—we find in pencil, on the
back of a rough morning report sent in by General
Sullivan, the following lines, hastily scribbled,
and which we now publish for the first time, as
some indication of the kind of thoughts with
which the mind amuses itself and seeks relaxation
in the midst of scenes like these. It is a soldier-song
in verity—a song of the rank and file, rough
and wholly unpolished; but not, we think, without
some true spirit of the camp in its hasty
stanzas:

MARCH FROM STANTON, AND CAPTURE OF LEXINGTON.

At Stanton we were soon joined by the infantry
division under General Crook, and the cavalry
under General Averell; our force being
thus raised—allowing for what we had to send
back from here with the prisoners and trains—to
an effective body of some twenty thousand men;
and it was with this force we were advancing
against Lexington when this paper of “recollections”
opened.

Our first day's march of twenty miles from
Stanton brought us to a little hamlet variously
styled Midway or Steele's Tavern; and the next
day's march, notwithstanding all the vehement
though irregular opposition offered by McCausland,
brought us by noon on a hill overlooking
the pretty city of Lexington.

Here we found that McCausland was making
what promised to be a resolute stand—the Lynchburgh
canal defending his right flank, while a
branch of the Shenandoah river, sweeping round

a high perpendicular bluff of rock on which was
situated the Lexington Military Institute, offered
a serious barrier to our progress. The bridge by
which he had crossed into the town was now a
pile of smoking ruins, and all our efforts to find a
ford or lay our pontoons were met with determined
opposition. From every house and eminence
commanding the river and its approaches,
and from the windows and grounds of the Military
Institute, a close and deadly fire both of musketry
and artillery was kept up against us; and
it was not until late in the afternoon that McCausland
abandoned this defence, finding his left flank
in danger of being turned, and his retreat cut off
by General Averell, who had found a ford some
miles higher up and crossed with his cavalry.

It thus came to pass that it was late that evening
before we entered Lexington; and now, before
speaking of Stonewall Jackson's grave, let the
writer be permitted a few words of explanation
as to two acts committed at this place, for which
General Hunter has been most acrimoniously,
and, as we shall prove, most senselessly and unjustly
abused. We refer to the burning of Gov.
Letcher's house and the Virginia Military Institute.

BURNING OF EX-GOVERNOR LETCHER'S HOUSE.

The West Virginia troops, forming, with some
regiments from Maryland, the élite of our little
army, were furious beyond measure against John
Letcher. He had been a Union man, they said,
who had sold his principles for promotion in the
rebel service; and, as was the case with all apostates
of this kind, had then signalized his devotion
to his new faith by unheard-of oppressions
and cruelties against all of his former associates
who persisted in remaining faithful to their creed
of loyalty. They charged against him gross and
wanton outrages upon the liberties, lives, and property
of all the loyal men within his reach; and so
strongly was their desire for retaliation manifested,
that General Hunter, in order to protect the family
of the fugitive ex-Governor, who had only fled
the night before, directed that a guard of two
companies from some Ohio regiment—the 116th,
if we remember rightly—should be detailed for
the security of Mr. Letcher's residence. Several
officers of General Hunter's staff, also—of whom
Captain Towne, chief signal officer, was one, and
Captain Prendergast, since killed, another—took
up their quarters with the Letchers—partly as it
was a pleasant, though small and rather modest
mansion; and partly to give additional protection
to the frightened family of females—ex-Governor

Letcher having fled the night previous to our
entrance.

Thus matters stood until next day, when some
soldiers of the 9th West Virginia, under Colonel—
now General—Duvall, happened to find in an
abandoned printing-office, already half set up in
type—the manuscript in John Letcher's hand,
and over his signature, of a proclamation to the
citizens of “Rockbridge and other Counties,” calling
upon them to “arise and slay the foul Yankee
invader;” and if unable to offer any organized resistance,
then from behind every tree and stone in
the valley, to kill us as they could. It was, in other
words, a direct incitation to bushwhacking and
murder; and if Mr. John Letcher had been caught,
not only would his house have been burned—as
the houses of four other bushwhackers, and only
four, had previously been—but he would have
been hung on the first tree with a little paper
pinned on his breast bearing this brief but pregnant
legend:

What folly and something worse it is, while
General Sherman goes blameless for having burned
down whole towns and cities that offered any
resistance, to censure Hunter for his course in this
valley campaign, wherein—at least, so far as we

have knowledge—he only caused five private
dwellings to be destroyed, and these on conviction
that the proprietors were assassins and bushwhackers!

BURNING OF THE VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE.

As to the cry raised against “Uncle David” for
the destruction of the Virginia Military Institute,
that is still, if possible, more senseless and unjust.
General Smith, commanding the Institute, as we
have good evidence, protested to General McCausland
against defending Lexington, and more especially
against using the Institute as one of the
points of defence—stating the town to be wholly
indefensible, in his judgment, and that it would
be made liable to bombardment and destruction
by such a course; and especially pleading that to
fire from the windows of the Institute on our
troops, or to use it in any manner as a military
point, would likewise, and still more strongly,
necessitate its destruction.

To this McCausland replied by showing his
orders from General Lee, which were to contest
every mile of our advance with the utmost obstinacy,
every hour gained against us being important,
as the division of Breckinridge and the
corps of Ewell under General Jubal Early, were
then hastening forward by rail from Richmond to

his relief. General Smith, as we have heard, still
maintained that using the Military Institute (of
which, by the way, Vaughan, Imboden, McCausland,
and nearly all the other Virginia leaders of
prominence had been graduates,) could do no
good, but would certainly result in its destruction;
and finally, when McCausland persisted in his
course, General Smith asked to be relieved from
service under him, and marched away with his
cadets down the canal tow-path to Lynchburgh.

As to the order of General Lee, we are certain
—the original telegram having been captured
next day in the house of General Smith, at which
McCausland and the other generals had stopped
over-night; and as to General Smith's protest and
subsequent action in the matter, they were related
to us next morning by a very intelligent and
respectable old black man—General Smith's butler
or steward—to whom we were indebted for many
comfortable meals during the next two days.

This Institute, at the burning of which the
writer looked with feelings of inexpressible regret
though fully satisfied of the justice of the act,
was an exact copy of the West Point Academy in
architecture, and perhaps more handsome—certainly
more modern, elegant and commodious in
the houses of its professors, of whom the great
Stonewall Jackson had been one. The more
valuable books of its library, however, and instruments

of its scientific, astronomical, and chemical
departments, had been removed before our advent.
It contained large quantities of arms and ordnance
stores, and it must be remembered that its students
had been organized into a battalion of infantry
and had fought against us, not many days
before, at Newmarket. On its roll of graduates,
too, could be found the names of hundreds of
prominent rebel officers; and this, en parenthèse,
opened our eyes to comprehend how it came to
pass that the South had such good officers uniformly
on the breaking out of the war, while ours,
except the regulars from West Point, were then
so ignorant—nearly all the young aristocracy of
the South having been trained to arms in just
such institutions as this of Lexington, Baton
Rouge, and so forth. This burning took place on
the 12th of June, 1864.

STONEWALL JACKSON'S GRAVE AND ITS PECULIAR
MONUMENT.

And now for a visit to Stonewall Jackson's
grave—Jackson who has always impressed us as
one of the most veritable heroes of these degenerate
days. We know not who wrote that magnificent
soldier-lyric in his honor, entitled “Stonewall
Jackson's Way;” but do know, despite its
roughness, that it is one of the grandest tributes

ever paid by the Muse to the character of a Hero.
It is fiery, and loving, and droll, and full of pathos
—a song for the full appreciation of which, perhaps,
one should have made a campaign or two in
the Shenandoah, and beheld all the monuments
of his genius. “Ah,” said an old rebel prisoner
to us once, when we asked him which of their
generals he had most faith in: “Ah, Colonel!
Johnsing we guess to be the retreatin'est general
we ever had; but the grittiest and the flankin'est
was Stonewall Jackson.”

The churchyard in which poor Stonewall lies is
just on the borders of the town, and must have
been a pretty and neat little place of burial before
the war. It has heavy borders of moss roses and
the dark roses of the South along its walks, and
these were in richest bloom when we paid our
visit. Beautiful white marble monuments are
scattered around in profusion; but looking at
their dates it will be seen that few of these have
been erected since the breaking out of the rebellion.
Death has been since then too busy in the
South to receive such honors; and the long, close
rows of freshly-made graves—more especially
those of a dozen young cadets killed at Newmarket—had
no other trophy or memorial than a
small shingle at the head of each, bearing a brief
and rudely painted inscription.

Exactly in the centre of the churchyard is the

grave of the great rebel leader—a little bank of
earth sodded over with green clover, and with two
little dark boards (now probably chipped away by
relic-hunters) at its head and foot. Near to its
head, also, a tall pine flag-staff sprang nakedly up
into the air; and on this, until carried away by
McCausland in his retreat, had waved a Confederate
battle-flag, worked in threads of silk, and
gold, and silver, by certain secession-sympathizing
peeresses of England—the Countess of Arundel
and Surrey, if we remember rightly, having been
prominent in the work. This battle-flag, with a
sentry in gray walking up and down beneath it,
had formed Stonewall Jackson's only monument;
and now both had disappeared!

Suppose McCausland had left both sentry and
flag on guard by that solitary grave, who believes
that either would have been disturbed? Would
not both have been held sacred as portions of the
tomb of a good and gallant soldier? At any rate
this thing is very sure: that, if either or both had
to be taken away, the writer would have striven
hard to shirk in his own person that particular
tour of duty; and this feeling, so far as he could
ascertain, was unanimous amongst all his younger
associates.

Just in rear of the flag-staff were two handsome
white marble tombs enclosed within an iron railing—one
sacred to the memory of the wife, and

the other to that of a beloved child of “Professor
T. J. Jackson of the Virginia Military Institute.”
Doubtless had the rebellion prospered, a splendid
tomb would in time have arisen to Jackson's memory;
and, even as things are—so catholic is the
admiration which valor rouses—we would gladly
contribute our mite towards the erection of some
substantial memento to the great Genius—as General
Lee was the great Respectability—of the
Southern war.

Let it not harm us in the esteem of our friends
of the Loyal League if we confess the weakness
of having pulled some dark roses of the South and
strewed them on Jackson's grave, taking away in
return—reverently and with uncovered heads—
some few blades of clover which we have still
preserved in a locket as one of the war's most
precious relics,—our flagrant “treason” in this
act having been shared at the time by an officer
of far higher position, whose name as a cavalry
leader on the Union side was then a terror throughout
the Shenandoah and Kanawha valleys.

ODD TOMB OF AN ECCENTRIC OLD LADY.

It is when we feel most grave and sentimental
that a sudden presentation of any ludicrous thought
or object becomes most irresistible to the nerves
of laughter; and of this we had an illustration on

letting our eyes rest for a moment upon the tomb
of an old lady whose remains are deposited precisely
opposite Stonewall Jackson's feet. This
tomb is a square house of granite, probably ten or
twelve feet square; and into its door-way this
eccentric old dame—a Mrs. Hammond or Hammel,
we think—had caused the hall-door of her
house, painted green, with her name regularly
engraved on a brass plate, and with a brass handle,
a brass keyhole, and a brass bell-handle in
the adjacent wall, to be inserted; so that it just
looked as if we had nothing to do but pull the
bell and ask was the defunct occupant within.
No tomb more quietly ludicrous have we ever
seen; and though it shocked us to laugh in the
vicinity of Jackson's grave, we could not but
laugh heartily in spite of all our efforts to be
serious.

GEN. GRANT'S ORDERS.—IMPORTANCE OF THIS
RAID.

As to what were General Grant's orders in this
campaign, contrasted with what were General
Hunter's acts, we find our space already so largely
occupied by this hurried memoir, that we must
hold over their consideration for another article;
in which will also be given the two days of battle
before Lynchburgh, with the engagements of

Liberty, Salem, and the retreat across the Alleghanies
and up the Kanawha valley, terminating
at Gauley Bridge. Of this raid—so much misunderstood
by the public, for the reason that we
had cut loose from communications, and the only
reports that were heard of our “miscreancies”
reached the North through the Lynchburgh and
Richmond rebel papers—it must suffice for this
chapter to say: that General Grant has borne his
official testimony to its being, in his judgment,
the greatest, most daring, and most ably conducted
raid of the war up to that time, and the most
important in its results. Hunter's only fault was
that his tender and noble heart did not allow him
to execute one-tenth part of the severity of his
orders; but of this in full hereafter. Let us also
add that it has now been ascertained that General
Lee, at the time of this raid, had set apart 35,000
picked men under General Early to hurry forward
to reinforce Johnson, who was then facing
Sherman opposite Atlanta, with nearly balanced
forces; and that, had those reinforcements reached
Johnson at that time, Sherman might have fared
ill in the retreat he would have been compelled to
undertake towards Nashville. It was Hunter's
success in the Valley, which was Lee's arsenal and
granary, that compelled Early with his men to be
sent to save Lynchburgh; and thus it was, and
thus only, that Sherman was enabled to carry out
his superb strategetical conception of the march
from Atlanta through the bowels of the Confederacy.