After driving the Confederates off Fisher’s Hill in September, Major-General Philip Sheridan began the second phase of his campaign by destroying the Shenandoah Valley to deprive Confederate troops of the vital foodstuffs harvested there. As October began, Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah was laying waste to the area around Harrisonburg.
The defeated Confederate Army of the Valley, led by Lieutenant-General Jubal Early, retired east of Harrisonburg to Brown’s Gap in the Blue Ridge. Early was reinforced by Major-General Joseph B. Kershaw’s infantry division from the Army of Northern Virginia, and he planned to resume the offensive as soon as he could regroup. In the meantime, scouting and raiding parties harassed the Federals.
On October 3, a Federal surveying party consisting of Lieutenant John R. Meigs and two soldiers came across three Confederate horsemen near Dayton, southwest of Harrisonburg. The Confederates cut Meigs’s throat and took one soldier prisoner. The remaining soldier escaped and told Sheridan what happened. Having taken a liking to Meigs for his topographical skill, Sheridan was enraged.
The commander declared that Meigs and his companion had been murdered (unaware that the companion was taken prisoner) by guerrillas aided by locals. As Sheridan later wrote, “The fact that the murder had been committed inside our lines was evidence that the perpetrators of the crime, having their homes in the vicinity, had been clandestinely visiting them, and been secretly harbored by some of the neighboring residents.”
In response, Sheridan ordered Brigadier-General George A. Custer’s cavalry division to destroy every house within five miles of Dayton. “The Burning,” as residents later called it, began on the 4th and continued for two days. Federals pleaded with Sheridan to spare Dayton itself, as most people there were Unionists and pacifists. Federal troops helped Dayton residents pack their belongings in anticipation that Sheridan would refuse, but at the last moment he granted the town a reprieve. Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Wildes of the 116th Ohio recalled:
“All hands turned to and helped to carry everything back to the houses, and the people of Dayton anyhow, if of no other place in the South, believed there were at least some Yankees who had some humanity in them. There was not a man in the regiment who would not have faced death in a dozen battles rather than to have burned that village in the presence of those weeping, imploring and helpless women and children.”
Although he spared Dayton, Sheridan carried out his threat of killing two Confederate partisans held as prisoners and announced that in the future, he would execute two prisoners for every one Federal soldier killed by partisans. It was later revealed that the Confederates who killed Meigs were actually scouts in Early’s army, not partisans.
Actual partisan activity was taking place around the same time further down the Valley. John S. Mosby’s Confederate raiders operated near the Maryland and Virginia border, where they captured a Federal supply train and killed several troopers comprising its escort. Rumors swirled among Sheridan’s men that some troopers may have been killed after they surrendered, prompting cavalrymen to kill six men they captured from Mosby’s command. Four of them were shot and two were hanged with a sign left beneath them: “Such is the fate of Mosby’s men.”
Enraged Confederates retaliated by killing Sheridan’s chief quartermaster, Lieutenant-Colonel Cornelius W. Tolles, and his medical inspector, Dr. Emil Ohlenshlager. Meanwhile, Sheridan’s Federals continued laying waste to the Valley. A reporter wrote on the 5th, “The atmosphere, from horizon to horizon, has been black with the smoke of a hundred conflagrations, and at night a gleam brighter and more lurid than sunset has shot from every verge.”
Despite orders to leave private property alone, “there have been frequent instances of rascality and pillage… The completeness of the devastation is awful. Hundreds of nearly starving people are going north. Our trains are crowded with them. They line the wayside. Hundreds more are coming; not half the inhabitants of the Valley can subsist on it in its present condition.”
According to a member of Early’s staff:
“I rode down the Valley with the advance after Sheridan’s retreating cavalry beneath great columns of smoke which almost shut out the sun by day, and in the red glare of bonfires which, all across that Valley, poured out flames and sparks heavenward and crackled mockingly in the night air; and I saw mothers and maidens tearing their hair and shrieking to Heaven in their fright and despair, and little children, voiceless and tearless in their pitiable terror.”
The Federal depredations also prompted Early to hurry and launch a new campaign. General Robert E. Lee, commanding both Early and his own Army of Northern Virginia, warned him, “You have operated more with divisions than with your concentrated strength. Circumstances may have rendered it necessary, but such a course is to be avoided if possible.”
Taking no heed, Early dispatched a cavalry division led by Major-General Thomas L. Rosser (formerly commanded by Major-General Fitzhugh Lee, who had returned to Petersburg) to stop Custer. Rosser’s troopers attacked the Federals at Brock’s Gap, but the Confederates could not match the Federal strength and were forced to withdraw.
Early then “determined to attack the enemy in his position at Harrisonburg.” However, when the Confederates came out of Brown’s Gap, they found that Sheridan had fallen back to Woodstock, 20 miles north. Early’s men then advanced to New Market instead.
Federal General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant had initially directed Sheridan to continue moving southward up the Valley before turning east to join the Federals at Petersburg. But Sheridan asserted that this would pull him too far from his supply base in a region teeming with raiders, marauders, and a still-dangerous (albeit weakened) Confederate army. Grant consented to Sheridan’s proposal to turn back north up the Valley, station his army near the Potomac River, and send the Sixth Corps back to Petersburg.
At Woodstock on the 7th, Sheridan reported his campaign of destruction to Grant:
“I have destroyed over 2000 barns filled with wheat, hay and farming implements; over 70 mills, filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over 4000 head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3000 sheep. This destruction embraces the Luray Valley and Little Fort Valley, as well as the main valley. A large number of horses have been obtained, a proper estimate of which I cannot now make.”
Sheridan also reported that his troops sent 400 wagons filled with people drafted into the Confederate army from Harrisonburg to Federal-occupied Martinsburg because they were Quakers, Dunkers, or some other sect of pacifists who refused to fight for the Confederacy. He wrote, “The people here are getting sick of war, hithertofore they have had no reason to complain, because they have been living in great abundance.”
According to Sheridan, “the best policy will be to let the burning of the crops of the valley be the end of this campaign.” He then wrote ominously, “Tomorrow I will continue the destruction of wheat, forage, &c., down to Fisher’s hill. When this is complete the Valley, from Winchester up (south) to Staunton, 92 miles, will have but little in it for man or beast.”
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