Decision at Tom's Brook

George Custer, Tom Rosser, and the Joy of the Fight

William J. Miller

• Publisher: Savas Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781611213089
• eBook ISBN: 9781940669656
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

The Battle of Tom's Brook, recalled one Confederate soldier, was "the greatest disaster that ever befell our cavalry during the whole war." The fight took place during the last autumn of the Civil War, when the Union General Phil Sheridan vowed to turn the crop-rich Shenandoah Valley into "a desert." Farms and homes were burned, livestock slaughtered, and Southern families suffered. The story of the Tom's Brook cavalry affair centers on two young men who had risen to prominence as soldiers: George A. Custer and Thomas L. Rosser. They had been fast friends since their teenage days at West Point, but the war sent them down separate paths—Custer to the Union army and Rosser to the Confederacy. Each was a born warrior who took obvious joy in the exhilaration of battle. Each possessed almost all of the traits of the ideal cavalryman—courage, intelligence, physical strength, inner-fire. Only their judgment was questionable. Their separate paths converged in the Shenandoah Valley in the summer of 1864, when Custer was ordered to destroy, and Rosser was ordered to stop him. For three days, Rosser's gray troopers pursued and attacked the Federals. On the fourth day, October 9, the tables turned in the open fields above Tom's Brook, where each ambitious friend sought his own advancement at the expense of the other. One capitalized upon every advantage fate threw before him, while the other, sure of his abilities in battle and eager to fight, attempted to impose his will on unfavorable circumstances and tempted fate by inviting catastrophe. This long-overlooked cavalry action had a lasting effect on mounted operations and influenced the balance of the campaign in the Valley. Based upon extensive research in primary documents and gracefully written, award-winning author William J. Miller's Decision at Tom's Brook presents significant new material on Thomas Rosser, and argues that his character was his destiny. Rosser's decision-making that day changed his life and the lives of hundreds of other men. Miller's new study is Civil War history and high personal drama at its finest.

CHAPTER ONE

Devastation in the Shenandoah

“If the War is to Last Another Year …”

By March 1864 the war was almost three years old. For much of that time, the most successful army north, south, east, or west, had been Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. On battlefields across Virginia and Maryland, Lee’s army had regularly flogged its principal opponent, the Army of the Potomac. Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, almost despairing, knew that if he were to win reelection in the coming November and see the Union restored, the Federal armies would have to defeat Lee. Lincoln’s long search for the man to direct the Union’s military efforts and win victories in Virginia ended on March 9, 1864, when he promoted Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to lieutenant general and named him general in chief of all the Federal armies. From the time of his appointment Grant stressed unity and cooperation among the Union’s armies, and he brought a single-minded relentlessness to the drive for victory. To emphasize the importance of victory in the Eastern Theater, Grant decided to direct the war from his headquarters in the field in Virginia.

Grant’s goal in Virginia was simple: Destroy Lee’s army as a fighting force. To accomplish this goal, he planned to apply unremitting pressure on Lee’s army and on all of the resources of the Confederate government and the Southern people. By using his larger army to threaten Richmond, Virginia, the Confederacy’s capital, Grant would force Lee to defend it with his smaller force. The necessity of protecting Richmond would, Grant hoped, deprive Lee of one of his great assets—his inventive aggressiveness. Throughout the war Lee had displayed a bold and creative military mind and a willingness to accept risks. Grant believed constant pressure would chain Lee and his army to the defenses of Richmond and rob him of the freedom to use his army offensively. This strategy would instead give Grant the freedom to maneuver and to attack the weak points in Lee’s static defenses. To a large degree Grant would be able to choose where and on what terms he wished to fight, while Lee would only be able to react to circumstances rather than create them. In other words, Grant intended to seize the initiative and never let it slip away.

The confident and capable Gen. U. S. Grant, shown here in June 1864 at Cold Harbor, Virginia, made control of the Shenandoah Valley an essential part of his plans. LOC

Throughout the spring and summer of 1864, Grant launched attacks that bought him closer to Richmond and sapped the strength of Lee’s army. In his effort to weaken the Confederate army however he could, Grant increasingly ordered attacks against Lee’s supply lines. In the hope of cutting off food, medicine, equipment, and other necessities of war, Grant’s focus changed to the city of Petersburg, a transportation hub 21 miles south of Richmond. He also sent troops against the railroads west of Richmond that connected the capital to the rest of the Confederacy. Federal columns focused on the Virginia Central Railroad at Staunton and Trevilian Station. Though Lee’s cavalry foiled the Federal cavalry movement aimed at Trevilian, Federals reached Staunton, destroyed machinery and warehouses there, and moved on toward an even more important logistical target: The railroad nexus at Lynchburg, Virginia. The intersection of three railroads—the Orange and Alexandria, the Virginia and Tennessee, and the Southside Railroad—made Lynchburg one of the key military points in Virginia. Desperate to preserve his vital logistical links, Lee detached the Second Corps of his army, about one-quarter of his entire strength, that June and sent it to Lynchburg by rail and forced marches under Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early. The corps arrived at Lynchburg in time to drive off the Federal raiders.

The increasing Federal activity in western and central Virginia made plain to all what Lee already understood: While Richmond could be threatened from the north, east, and south, the key to the city might well lie to the west. The decision of the Confederate government to move its capital to Richmond in the spring of 1861 ensured that the armies would fiercely contest control of the 96 miles of Virginia Piedmont between Richmond and the U.S. capital at Washington. Confederate strategists had soon recognized the advantages offered by Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley just west of the Piedmont region.

The Valley stretched 140 miles from Lexington northward to Harpers Ferry. While the Valley lay 90 miles west of Richmond, it lay only 55 miles west of Washington, a fluke of geography that gave the Confederates the advantage of a secluded path behind the mountains to a point close to, and even north of, the U.S. capital. Two years earlier, when an enormous Federal army under Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan had threatened Richmond from the east, Lee found that an active and aggressive Confederate force operating in the Shenandoah could be an important component in the defense of his capital city. In that spring of 1862, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson dazzled observers and befuddled opponents by marching his small army more than 600 miles and fighting six battles in less than three months, four of them on the tactical offensive. Jackson’s performance aided Lee’s defense of his capital in two ways. First, it had forced President Lincoln and his advisors to divert reinforcements that otherwise would have gone to the Federal army moving on Richmond. Second, Jackson’s active operations had created fear in the White House. The president’s counselors had worried that Jackson might threaten Washington and began to think defensively rather than offensively. By June 1864 Jackson was dead, but Lee believed the same strategy might again relieve pressure on the defenders of Richmond. He sent another active and aggressive commander to the Shenandoah with a force just large enough to divert the Federal focus on Richmond. After General Early’s troops drove off the Federals threatening Lynchburg, Lee directed Early to move into the Valley and operate against Federal targets there.

Gen. Robert E. Lee, whose greatest battles in 1864 were logistical. LOC

Lee had chosen the right man for the job. Jubal Early was by temperament one of the more impatient and aggressive leaders in the Confederate service. A graduate of West Point in 1837, the Virginian had served in Florida against the Seminoles and in the Mexican War. For most of the two decades before the secession crisis, however, Early had practiced law and dabbled in Virginia politics. Though he had opposed secession, he immediately joined the Confederate army and served competently at every grade from colonel to corps commander. Early was, above all, a patriot, intensely loyal to the cause and to R. E. Lee. He served at his assigned post without absences, except for a brief period when wounded. During the slow weeks of inactivity in February 1864, Early asked Lee if he could have leave to travel home briefly, adding, “I wish you, however, to understand that I am willing to do any service that you think I can do with benefit to the country…. I think all private considerations should give way to the public interests in these times.”¹

Early was forty-seven years old but looked older. A lifelong bachelor who was sometimes too fond of drink, Early had a good many rough edges and could be difficult to work for. “Early had a reputation of being somewhat rude at times,” wrote one man who had served in his staff. “He was stricken while in Mexico with that dread disease, inflammatory rheumatism. He got over the rheumatism, but he never got over the inflammatory part of it, and that is what gave him his reputation.” Early had many detractors, but Lee valued his loyalty and commitment, his ability to work independently, and, perhaps most of all, his aggressiveness. Whether it was a match of intellect in a courtroom, a public battle of wits in the press, or a contest of wills on a battlefield, Early never shied away from a scrap and was always eager to get at the enemy.²

Gen. Jubal A. Early, irascible, profane, and difficult to please, was also aggressive, intensely loyal, and one of Robert E. Lee’s most trusted generals in 1864. LOC

In following Lee’s orders, Early wasted no time before moving northward through the Shenandoah Valley. In the first week of July, “Old Jube,” as the soldiers called him, led his army across the Potomac River into Maryland. After defeating a small Federal force on July 9 at the Monocacy River near Frederick, Early pushed southeastward and two days later stood on the outskirts of Washington itself. General Grant detached two divisions of infantry to ensure the safety of the capital, but Early had already decided the fortifications around the city were too formidable for him to breach with his relatively small force. Instead, he turned his men westward and marched away from Washington with the intention of returning to Virginia. Before re-crossing the Potomac, Early sent a force of cavalry into Pennsylvania with orders to occupy Chambersburg and demand a ransom. Federal troops in the Valley had recently destroyed the homes of prominent citizens, and Early sought retribution. Under orders from Early, Brig. Gen. John McCausland demanded the people of Chambersburg pay $100,000 in gold or $500,000 in greenbacks. When they could not pay the ransom, McCausland ordered the town burned, an act that would further accelerate the cycle of brutality in the war’s fourth summer.³ Early’s forays into Maryland and Pennsylvania had served Lee’s purpose: Grant had yet another distraction from his efforts at Petersburg.

Although Early’ efforts were indeed a distraction, Grant also viewed the situation in the Shenandoah Valley as an opportunity to advance his goal of grinding down and eventually destroying Lee’s army. Grant welcomed every opportunity to strike any portion of Lee’s army no matter where, so Early’s force operating in isolation almost 100 miles from Lee was an inviting target. Even more enticing to Grant was the nature of the Valley itself. He understood that the importance of the Shenandoah to the Confederacy went beyond its value as an isolated avenue of movement on the strategic flanks of Richmond and Washington.

The United States census of 1860 revealed that Virginia, which at that time included the future state of West Virginia, was one of the more fertile and productive areas on the continent. In the production of wheat, corn, rye, and oats, and in the cash value of farms, Virginia ranked among the leaders of all the states in the Union. Most of that production came on the expansive farms east of the Allegheny Mountains—in the Virginia counties that would join the Confederacy. The eight counties in the Shenandoah Valley included about 10 percent of the land area of Confederate Virginia and were home to about 10 percent of the state’s population. However, according to the census figures, the Valley counties produced far more than 10 percent of the state’s yields of important farm products. The counties of Augusta and Rockingham in the southern portion of the Valley were agricultural dynamos, each ranking among the top three counties in the state in the production of wheat, corn, wool, rye, hay, clover seed, and butter and cheese. More horses, milch cows, and hogs lived in Augusta and Rockingham counties in 1860 than in any other area of equal size in the state. The cash value of farms in Augusta totaled nearly $11,000,000, the most of any county in Virg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Prelude: “Come, Let us Die Like Men”
• Preface: The Cavalrymen and the Joy of Battle
• Dramatis Personae in the Story of Tom’s Brook, in Order of Rank
• Chapter 1: Devastation in the Shenandoah
• Chapter 2: Federal Cavalry Ascendant
• Chapter 3: The Savior of the Valley
• Chapter 4: No Quarter on the Back Road
• Chapter 5: General Sheridan Loses Patience
• Chapter 6: Decision at Tom’s Brook
• Chapter 7: No More Flanks
• Chapter 8: Merritt Opens the Turnpike
• Chapter 9: The Woodstock Races
• Chapter 10: Exhilaration and Despair
• Chapter 11: General Rosser’s Long Fight
• Appendix A: Organization of Cavalry Forces at Tom’s Brook
• Appendix B: Strengths and Losses
• Appendix C: Notes on Maps and Topography
• Bibliography