Tom's Brook

The Late Unpleasantness

It was a surprise to find gifted, larger-than-life creatures as flawed as a modern President, on the battlefield at Tom’s Brook on October 9, 1864.

Many do not realize that actors of historic proportion would get their first auditions in the Shenandoah theater of war.

There is hardly a brook, hamlet or historical family feud here that is not associated with the name Custer.

Family records state that his comrades-in-arms hated him for the same reasons that brought him to fame, and disaster for the immediate companies under his command, on the plains near the Little Big Horn River, June 25, 1876.

However, contemporary accounts of his checkered exploits at West Point offer a contrasting view, as do the books and articles he wrote.

Many of America’s best and brightest, are often more complicated than they superficially appear in the collective consciousness.

For many reasons, Custer’s is a quintessentially American tale with tragic results, but without glory or immortality for many associated with him. It begs the question of the proportions of fame and tragedy, that constitute the American identity.

His inherent character and attributes shine in early development. By age 17, he had qualified as a grammar school teacher who, realizing that career track was rarely a path to riches and fame, opted for the army where, so he felt, riches were a more likely outcome.

At West Point, he would come perhaps as close any of his 33 classmates or of any student ever enrolled, to dismissal while barely graduating as 34^th in his class of 34. He was to prove however, that academics, manners or decorum, are not the sole determinants of professional advancement, a fact many academics learn only late in life.

The more sterling qualities of George Armstrong Custer, included a graceful, slender, tall, athletic appearance buttressed by a mischievous antipathy to discipline. Early on his boldness in courting success was such that junior officers and men found his appeal irresistible in reflected fame, and whom senior commanders would reluctantly nod to, as exemplary of soldierly bearing.

To boldness, must be added an occasional egocentric rashness of character that if not held in check, would lead to the disaster that eventually caught up with his command.

A quick mind to absorb advantage and immediately act, were repeatedly evident early in the war and his ascendance to senior rank was meteoric.

Napoleon is said to have preferred generals who were lucky above all others: Custer did indeed seem to personify military luck as Son of the Morning Star, his identity in native Indian parlance.

* * *

Writers seeking adversaries of Shakespearean proportion, have made much of the antipathy as well as self-conscious decorum that existed, or was feigned, between 24-year old General George Armstrong Custer, and a Texan named Rosser who was in many ways gifted and flawed to the same degree.

General Thomas Lafayette Rosser, 28-years old at the Battle of Tom’s Brook, was a grey reflection mounted across the modest creek bottom from the flamboyant sailor shirt and black velveteen uniform of Custer on horseback, watching from a distance across the glen close enough to recognize Custer in the enemy lines.

Like Custer, Rosser was regular army as a result of his time at West Point where he resigned a month short of graduation in 1861 to join the Confederacy.

Likewise, Rosser was decisive and arrogantly self-centered, but unlike Custer was more an insubordinate brawler oblivious of any consequences of his unbridled aggression. Rosser, as tall as Custer, but far heavier, was never known for self-reflection, and his unthinking rashness manifested as aggressive tactics that were held in high regard among senior Confederate commanders.

Rosser had distinguished himself in small unit tactics, but had been abruptly promoted by Gen. Jubal Early to a brigadier commander of three brigades just a few weeks before Union commander Sheridan began a campaign of laying civilian Shenandoah to waste.

The fantasy that young Generals Custer and Rosser had been close as roommates at West Point is romantic fiction.

Sheridan had risen to high command by the first week of August, and his orders were to occupy the Shenandoah in such a way as to prevent any possibility of a repeat of General Jubal Early’s march down and through the Valley earlier in 1864, and to threaten the very gates of Washington, D. C., via Loudoun County and Poolesville, Maryland just across the Potomac River a mile or two north of Leesburg.

To this day, the shallow ferry crossing between Leesburg and Poolesville, named White’s Ferry after a prominent hero of the battle of Ball’s Bluff early the war in 1861, Lige White, is crossed twice hourly by a cable-guided barge ferry named the Jubal Early.

Sheridan had been ordered by U. S. Grant to remain south and occupy the higher elevations of the Shenandoah River basin, and to establish bases near Staunton and Lynchburg. However, with its closeness to the center of gravity of Confederate forces at the Gordonsville railhead, and the difficulty of establishing an uncontested supply line from Harper’s Ferry at the mouth of the Valley, Staunton was judged untenable by Sheridan.

By contrast, General Early was tasked by Robert E. Lee, under siege by Grant’s army in Petersburg, to maintain contact with Sheridan’s rear elements and harass them enough to discover Sheridan’s intention, and to provoke them to maintain their Valley presence that would render them unavailable to Grant at Petersburg.

The orders sent to Rosser and his brigade commanders, went out precipitously: the Confederate command confronting Sheridan south of Harrisonburg across the River, did not expect Sheridan’s army of fifteen thousand to begin its northward retreat in early October 1864.

The traditional courtesies of warring armies, distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, slipped steadily downward toward barbarity during Early’s northward march through the Shenandoah Valley attack on Washington, D.C. in mid 1864.

Prior to turning east to D. C. in July, Early had demanded ransom of a Union city in Maryland, Chambersburg, of $500,000. under threat of burning it to the ground, which Early proceeded to do when his deadline was not met.

Some argue this aggression against the non-combatant citizenry, marked the first phase of the escalating cycle of violence of late summer and autumn 1864.

Southern resistance within occupied territories took on desperate guerilla tactics under the command of the highly successful partisan John Singleton Mosby and troops recruited from local residents in Loudon County, and the less well known 43th Battalion in Fauquier County immediately south of the Loudoun Valley and into the Shenandoah Valley, commanded by Elijah “Lige” V. White.

Rosser’s three brigades of troops mounted up and splashed across the river, slamming into Sheridan’s rear guard holding the bridge and river crossing at Bridgewater.

A favored son, a 22-year old staff officer and engineer recognized for his brilliance, West Point valedictorian Major John Meigs, was waylaid and murdered by what seemed to be local resident bushwackers on October 3^rd. Meigs was both the personal protégé of Philip Sheridan as well as the son of the politically powerful Quartermaster General of the Federal army.

The circumstances of Meig’s murder prompted Sheridan to take up his standing order from Grant with unrelenting and sudden vengeance, to render unavailable to the Confederacy, the agricultural resources of the naturally endowed Shenandoah Valley.

After the sack of Chambersburg, any deference paid citizens and noncombatants by the military authorities became a thing of the past.

The hundreds of columns of smoke tracking the Union withdrawal in October, were noted by Rosser’s troops, regiments of which realized in frantic dismay, the smoke came from the burning out of their own families and farms to the north along the river.

* * *

As Sheridan’s legions pulled up stakes at Harrisonburg and moved slowly back northward, they drove with them thousands of confiscated cattle, horses and livestock stolen from the barns that lit up the night sky for miles west of the Blue Ridge to North Mountain, in the valley which spans forty or fifty miles width and seventy in length.

Rosser knew his orders, but had not been tactically prepared to prod his cavalry troops forward against a significantly larger Union force diversified with artillery and infantry to support many cavalry brigades better mounted and armed than Rosser.

North of the river at Bridgeport, three regiments of cavalry held the line, from Upstate New York, from Vermont and from Pennsylvania. From earlier in the war, these units had often shared rear guard and picket duties for the large Corps, and had developed a reputation from long campaigns in other theaters as efficient veterans.

Early in the war, the Confederate cavalry were far superior in skill and mounts, and leadership. By October 1864, the brilliant cavalry tactician Jeb Stuart, was dead. Rosser’s troops were indifferently mounted, ill-trained, ill-armed, poorly disciplined and infuriated with blood lust at the remorseless burning of homes, farms and the theft of livestock and supplies essential to survival of their families through the approaching winter of 1864-65.

* * *

Tasked with the rear guard defense of Sheridan’s army, was General George Armstrong Custer, recently assigned the cavalry command of Sheridan’s Third Division.

Simultaneously, assigned with harassing that same rear guard enough to prevent Sheridan from abandoning the Shenandoah Valley, was General Thomas Lafayette Rosser, as aggressive and avid for preference and military advancement as Custer.

Like schoolgirls, Custer traded handwritten notes across the lines with Rosser chiding and taunting each other. The exchange of bluster and boast was not directed as a campaign of propaganda solely at adversaries but also channeled upward to their higher commands, Sheridan in Custer’s case, and Jubal Early in Rosser’s.

An artist traveling with Sheridan’s command, sketched the deep bow and doffed hat of Custer as he theatrically saluted Rosser whom he knew a little, across Tom’s Brook as moment of confrontation approached on the day of the battle at Tom’s Brook.

Troops at the point of the spear harbored mutual animosity at a more primitive level than the pompous and likely staged and melodramatic shaking of fists at each other between generals facing one another.

By 1864, the military courtesy of prisoner exchange had been severely curtailed as a custom of after-action etiquette.

The conditions in military prisons both north and south were egregious to the point of being little better than medical triage for cases deemed irretrievable from death. The prevalence of malnutrition and lack of shelter from cold and rain, was harsh enough that the prospect of survival of any soldiers captured in action was dim at best.

On this background of tension on both sides, the ferocity of combat when it came to blows, can be imagined but not felt.

* * *

Earlier that year, Mosby became notorious for summarily executing barn burners, even those Union troopers who had surrendered in good faith on capture. Likewise, Union retaliation in the form of hangings, was widely publicized among soldiers and the general public in the North.

Thus, even the unpalatable and fearful prospect of the prison, was bested by certainty of being murdered without trial or recourse.

In many cases such as in Rosser’s command, the specific details of summary execution of Union troopers was wholly unknown for thirty years after the Civil War, and the details and specifics remain sketchy even in 2019.

The nature of cavalry duty, especially protecting the rear echlons from attack, or prosecuting raids on a hated army in withdrawal in the Shenandoah Valley from October 1 through the Battle of Tom’s Brook on October 9^th can only be imagined, as if by Hobbsian criteria nasty, brutish and short.

To these must be added violent, with unseasonably cold rain, sleet and snow to complicate encampments too transitory for tents or dry shelter. The few total of actual wounded or killed during these sharp but small engagements, is puzzling.

To those poorly trained, recent and naïve recruits who had no idea what they were in for, were more often than not captured and many died in Southern prisons.

On this general stage of action in October 1864, the fundamentals of tactics played out as if by the book. What ought to have been heeded by the combatants calling shots, and what actually transpired, was compromised more by the character of the men in command than the cold, hard logistics of materiel and terrain.

Rosser is widely condemned for his personal nature which was reflected in his command decisions, and his lifelong denial of culpability for this disaster, destruction and the everlasting ignominity of his command at Tom’s Brook. The fact that Rosser, contrary to responsibility and military tradition, sought to prevent the truth of his incompetence from finding a place in any reports or archival materials, is fully consistent with his basic nature.

This current age of political mendacity brings to mind much about the dimensions of rigid egotism and command character of Rosser. Unlike the present age in which the media is complicit in spin and untruthfulness, Rosser’s post war efforts from 1865 until his death on March 30, 1910, were a series of verbal and published attacks and suspect defenses of his behavior on October 9, 1864.

The slander and calumny makes for both an entertaining read and a testament to competitiveness absent any sense of logic or evidence supporting spurious arguments.

* * *

Perhaps Custer knew Rosser’s nature better than modern reinterpretation of the Rosser-Custer roommate rumor suggests. There is a certain admirable cunning in the way Rosser’s rout was based on his own recklessness, his overconfidence and a life-long arrogance about his own abilities.

Rosser’s continuous harassment of the far larger federal army moving north, encumbered as it was with the burned or stolen wealth of the 1864 Shenandoah harvest, eventually proved too much for the ever cautious Sheridan who curiously suffers an undeserved reputation for recklessness if not ruthlessness.

On suffering a week of increasingly successful attacks by Rosser’s cavalry on his rear guard, Sheridan issued an order to his cavalry chief, a timid and dissembling General Tolbert, that the same day, he was to abandon the defensive posture, turn about and immediately seize the initiative by attacking Rosser forthwith.

The Union army was withdrawing northward on three parallel roads down (northward) the Shenandoah Valley, each column protected by a cavalry Corps. Custer’s command was assigned the westernmost, and worst, road that tracked the foothills of North Mountain, over hill and dale.

With the mountains on his immediate left, the moving column was vulnerable from attack along their route from the south as well as ambush tactics through the occasional mountain gaps to their left and west.

Like his precipitous elevation to his position across the river from Custer’s rear guard at Bridgeport, and his first attack, Rosser seemed not to have entertained even a possibility that the Union cavalry might turn to face him at some point.

His troops, in their eagerness to get at federal barn burners who had devastated their families and neighbors many of whom had evacuated and were traveling at that point within the Union column in Union wagons, had waited for neither infantry, nor much in the way of artillery to support them as they moved beyond the radius of rescue from Early’s massed army to the south.

* * *

I had two unexpected sightings of troopers when I began working farms other than my own, at Chrysalis winery in Middleburg.

I had expected them to be ghosts of inexperienced New Yorkers, new arrivals to Virginia lost for a hundred and sixty five years, but was shocked when this proved otherwise.

The prevalence of horse boarding operations, one next door to my home farm, means that the sight of riders along Virginia byways is a common experience, and has always been so.

To begin, the farm I had worked nearly twenty years, had existed, had been, and was in sight of the comings and goings of cavalry of both armies during 1861-1865. The coincidence of vineyard and classic cavalry terrain in the rural Virginia countryside is unexpected, or enough so as to pique curiosity and resurrect what I had been bred to accept from an early age, as the Northern role in the battles across the same Virginia countryside in the 1860s.

The pastures, meadows and hill sides, those as had survived the urban blight of development, had happily been adapted to more successful cultivation of wine grapes than had been the case in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It was only very late in the process, that my experience as farmer, vineyard manager and winemaker began to inform and correct my historical and literary avocations, likewise an early and enduring interest.

The route from my farm to the major road south toward Aldie, Middleburg and Upperville, follows back roads that have changed little, and are no better paved now than then, since the Civil War.

It had always been in mind to learn as much of the southern half of the family pedigree, as had been devoted to the military exploits of their northern kin.

Besides, it is a romantic fantasy uninformed by the sometimes bitter and always hard work to return to one’s agricultural, if not cultural, roots. This sort of fantasy is indulged by the parallel fantasy of growing grapes and making wine in a profitable and sustainable way.

Is not the archetypal American a defiant and angry Colonist, musket in hands, furious for his recently violated birthright, and bent on vengeance and restoration, by violent force of arms, of his inalienable rights?

It has been my privilege and obsession to explore, both by study and by the sweat of my brow, the nature and accuracy of these fantasies that are more widely held in confidence than enacted.

* * *

The modest scale of American history is deceptive.

To suggest that there was a battle at such a sub-hamlet scale community as Aldie, seems preposterous.

There are the compulsory white enameled historical markers along an uncurbed roadside, and a dandy brick facade water mill in Aldie that suggest it is of some historical depth as a community.

To stop a moment and obstruct occasional traffic long enough to read a sign, does little to put things in context.

It must be the same in France seventy-five years after the now quiet, tiny agricultural villages were the scenes of violence and the passing of armies.

It takes years of driving past such markers before the curiosity to stop reaches some critical point. There are battle descriptions and plans online but to assemble these in some coherent story, takes time and effort, and surprising bandwith.

It is in the trees alongside a brook over which Route 50 bridges, narrowly, in the village of Aldie, population 400, that I first caught a glimpse of Lt. George Armstrong Custer.

Yes: Lieutenant.

Although Custer had been staff officer with McClellan and made Captain, when McClellan’s staff headquarters was disbanded in April, 1863, he reverted to Lieutenant, his grade when he fell from his thirsty horse on a dusty day that June, climbed out of the stream and remounted, thoroughly soaked head to foot.

Later that afternoon in a slanting field above the village, Custer’s horse, confused by the clatter of musketry and boom of cannon, bolted directly for the Confederate lines. The dust raised by the battle completely disguised Custer’s federal uniform: he came so near the enemy skirmish line, there is little doubt, absent his baptism and wet woolen jacket, that he would have been riddled.

Such was the luck of George Armstrong Custer, and mine, to marvel at water passing under the wooden bridge after parking my car to investigate the historical rumor. I had not been seeking Custer, but sign of cavalry units in which kin had served.

The incident was a reminder that the famous pass closer than seems possible, and better spirits than those we seek, may drop from historical ruminations unexpectedly. The best advice seems to be to follow what Chance offers, as peripheral as it seems at the time.

* * *

Sometime later, it came to pass, that there stood a familiar figure opposite Custer’s skirmish line on that same June afternoon above the sub-hamlet of Aldie, already a Colonel, and graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, the same college where I spent a few days during a holiday break during my undergraduate years with a hometown friend studying there in Blacksburg.

The Colonel’s name was unfamiliar at the time, and a connection only later made the discovery seem all too unavoidable and inevitable.

The soldier, a slight but dignified gentleman, named Col. Thomas Munford, CSA, was no stranger to the battlefields of Virginia in 1863 and later.

After the inglorious defeat of General Thomas L. Rosser at Tom’s Brook on October 9, 1864, while acknowledging his fearlessness and vigor, Munford called out Rosser’s recklessness after warning Rosser of his obviously exposed left flank before being attacked.

Munford had command of one of Rosser’s three regiments.

In Rosser’s greed for action, in addition to ignoring the unease of his staff, Munford among them, Rosser had somehow disregarded the fact that his nearest support and reserve from General Jubal Early was twenty-five miles away. Although Rosser had a dozen good artillery pieces by that time, after a week of limited, glancing skirmishes on Sheridan’s rear guard, he had chosen to site them on a broad, sloping hill that was too broad to be defended by the number of troops at his command.

Rosser’s troops in 1864, had scattered to their assigned dispositions atop Coffman’s Hill facing the prancing dandy, General Custer, on the opposite hill across the glen cut by Tom’s Brook.

Rosser’s bravado and recklessness was cumulative in effect on his better judgement. In the days leading up to Tom’s Brook he had led several successful attacks on raw Union recruits who, not surprisingly, broke ranks, scattered and were captured at both Cootes Store on October 6, and at Mill Creek on October 7.

His boastfulness about the success of his limited attacks, was verbalized to fellow officers as well as committed to paper in dispatches to his commanding officer, General Jubal Early.

Rosser’s list of military sins to that point included leaving Bridgeport for the offensive against Sheridan’s rear guard almost without plan or thought. He had a willful ignorance of Early’s objective and orders, to harass the federal rear enough to keep Sheridan in the Shenandoah, but not so much to invite a general engagement.

The success seemed to go directly to the head of the braggart, aggrieved in thinking himself the equal or better to those who outranked him and had cooler heads.

As for Munford, his troops were assigned the left flank with a limited six-piece battery of guns directly behind and upslope of him.

The two lines, blue and grey, facing each other across the glen of Tom’s Brook, were a line of battle just within the shadow of North Mountain where battle might have been limited or impossible by elevation and the wooded slopes.

Rosser had not anticipated that the union cavalry would face about after the annoyance of harassment became too much for Sheridan, and assumed his would remain the offensive posture as the larger army moved north.

When the far larger Union cavalry suddenly turned and took the field, Rosser remained incapable of foreseeing impending disaster that was obvious to others like Col. Munford who was destined to begin the war a colonel and to finish the war no higher, a colonel.

Like the almost exclusively cavalry stand-off between Custer and Rosser, two similar scenarios with more troops were developing down slope toward the far flatter terrain in the valley floor of the Valley Pike, the main thoroughfare that ran the length of the Shenandoah Valley. Near the River ran a railroad, and the Pike, as a surprise to modern student of history, was paved with blacktop asphalt and thus far more suitable than the road where the Rosser-Custer confrontation was developing closer to North Mountain.

Between the mountain road and the Pike, an intermediate route had been taken by other elements of Sheridan’s withdrawing army. That, too, formed the middle ground of the battle.

The Union attack stalled somewhat when dismounted troopers deployed downhill from Custer, prancing the hill top, were held up by the steep climb up the opposing bank in an advance that could be stalled by musket fire from likewise dismounted Confederate troopers above.

There is some suspicion that Custer, conspicuous in his custom uniform, red kerchief, prancing horse, flowing golden hair and non-regulation broad-brim hat, was employing his peacock ruse tactically.

While he strutted and while a desultory exchange of fire between dismounted troopers on both sides seemed to stall into a balanced stalemate, Custer had sent additional columns of cavalry far to the rear around Munford’s left flank (Custer’s right).

Within a few minutes, the reserve columns crashed into the left of Munford’s poorly covered left flank, applying such pressure that his small artillery batter had to withdraw immediately south, creating panic among the two Virginia regiments facing north who suddenly found themselves under attack from both the front and from their left side.

The frontal attack was slow, uphill and dismounted but the columns breaking through from the west collided with the Virginians, bearing down on the scattering Confederates at a full gallop wielding sabers and pistols.

To the right, Rosser and his other commanders became aware of the breakthrough only too late, after Munford’s dismounted troops had broken and were struggling to reform further back in the face of immediate cavalry and dismounted cavalry attack swarming up two faces of their high ground, many scrambling to find their horses held in the rear, held in readiness by their comrades. One for every four dismounts, one would stay behind to mind the animals.

Seeing the line crumbling across the Brook, Custer grabbed the cavalry guidon immediately in advance of the 5^th New York Cavalry, and the battle across the stream became such a disordered, panic-fueled sprint, it was forever dubbed by both the Union cavalry as well as by the local residents of Mt. Olive and the village of Tom’s Brook, as the “Woodstock Races”, named after both the first village of Confederate safety among the reminder of the larger army some twenty five miles to the south, and the manner in which the action was carried out by mounted mobs of both sides, flat out, through all the villages and roads from Tom’s Brook to Woodstock.

During the rout, not Rosser, nor Munford nor any other senior commander mounted a Confederate stand or counterattack despite several valiant but unsuccessful attempts.

Rosser, furious at the collapse of the cavalry positions on Coffman’s Hill of his 1^st and 12^th Virginia, and the battery of artillery immediately in the rear of Munford, preferred charges against all his junior officers in the attempt to transfer blame for his own recklessness, heedlessness and unwarranted bravado of, as he dubbed himself in the ultimate irony before battle, the “Savior of the Valley”.

Rosser’s campaign of public relations before and after the battle, was rife with sobriquets that took on a bitter and ironic edge in light of the results at Tom’s Brook. He had called himself “Savior of the Valley”, and had named his command, the “Laurel Brigade” referring to the classical Greek martial custom of awarding victors with a crown of laurel.

No less an eminence than General Jubal A. Early, a man not given to hyperbole, jest or mockery, suggested after the battle that the steadfast growth of laurel did not fully capture the performance of Rosser’s Brigade at Toms Brook. Rather, he suggested for renaming, a vine less prone to stay put in one place, such as the “Pumpkin Vine Brigade”, a crop known for its tendency to send out runners in all directions.

* * *

Unlike Thomas Rosser, Thomas Munford was a more circumspect, more sober character.

I had not noted his name in research on the Battle of Aldie, except to note he was a commanding colonel positioned near a devastating Confederate volley on Snickersville Turnpike above Aldie, from behind a low stonewall that emptied the saddles of rank upon rank of relatively green Massachusetts Union cavalry confined in the narrow road flanked by hedgerows and low greenstone walls.

The volley at Aldie had been recorded and noted for the highest rate of casualties in a single federal unit formation in any war before, or since.

It was only later delving into family records that it came to light that Munford had married not one, but two of my grandmother’s Tayloe cousins. His first bride had died shortly after their 1864 marriage. After the war ended, Munford married her sister, and then took over as farm manager for one of the three large Canbrake plantations the Tayloe family owned in Marengo, Perry and Greene (subsequently renamed Hale) Counties in central Alabama west of Selma.

I had been aware of some of the battles my direct kin had suffered in Virginia as low level cavalry troopers in the Fifth New York cavalry.

Tom’s Brook assumed an amorphous attraction because of the somewhat trumped-up Rosser-Custer face off. In fact, a trooper of the same regiment as a trooper of interest from Upstate New York, had been credited with capture of Rosser’s headquarters wagon at Tom’s Brook, including command papers and wardrobe.

The wagon is mentioned in official dispatches after the battle.

What was not, were the post-action antics of General George Armstrong Custer.

Both Custer and Rosser were tall young men, however, Rosser’s girth exceeded Custer’s to a considerable degree.

This adds much to the image of Custer, who donned Rosser’s captured grey uniform coat when capture of Rosser’s headquarters wagon was brought to his attention after the Battle of Tom’s Brook.

For several days, his troops would gape, point and guffaw at the spectacle of their gangly General Custer prancing and swaggering on horseback, swimming in the flapping coils of Rosser’s braided uniform coat unfilled by his slender flesh, much bedecked with gold cord in its labels and sleeves.

These are the images I am left with.

The lonely road awkwardly navigated in 2016, with a Ford F350 truck hauling cabernet sauvignon and better petit verdot, was familiar but for reasons I was not to learn until much later. The fields along the same road had, in the same month 165 years earlier, been protected by three field pieces on each side, just behind Munford’s position when his ranks broke and the federal cavalry had burst across the road eastward.

It was not merely a ghostly and unsung recruit who would play a bit part and vanish to history on that October Wednesday but there, at a diagonal above the Creek: Custer himself.

Yes: that Custer, perhaps dropping a uniform button, or pocket change, or a harness tackle ring among the stone of this same field, yet buried. In a similar way, here a ghostly Munford had fumed at the onslaught, unable to steady his panicked troops galloping on up in leaps and bounds uphill, hounded behind by the climbing dismounted Union horde directly behind and the milling, slashing and circling mounted troopers who had stormed in from their right as they sprinted to the rear for the release of their own nervously held horses.

It remained the image of Custer, the overrun cannons, one of which had been fully charged but was lost and captured before the gunner could pull its lanyard, of Munford running, sword drawn and suddenly an encumbrance as he looked in terror over his shoulder, to the left and right, back pedalling, shouting in the vain attempt to rally his regiment.

Munford had seen enough action that he had a grip on his own reactions and the route to escape, and the best position to turn and face the attackers, a stone fence along Pugh’s Run. Since he escaped capture, it must be assumed he had been mounted or near a mount, and that his attempts had been mature and judicious assessments in the heat of battle, if such a rout and ignominious flight for twenty-five miles can be dignified by the name of battle.

The Union cavalry attacking, had ridden uphill over short stretches, and the horses had been in marginal shape from constant skirmish and march for days, although captured booty and harvest provender had provided a steady source of nutrition.

Somewhere in the dust behind the first waves of pursuit that Wednesday afternoon, were people I felt I knew personally. In any case, I personally knew those who had known them intimately.

It was unclear where they had stood, if at all, in the attacking line with others of the 5^th New York Volunteer Cavalry under command of one of Custer’s immediately junior officers, Major Amos Krom whose term of service would expire the following week at which point he left the Army.

There were indications that one New York trooper had been placed under arrest with confiscation of his weapons on October 6 for refusal to lead his company to burn barns and unhouse civilians just north of Bridgewater.

By October 19^th, his active duty status had been restored and weapons returned for want of junior cavalry officers when the heavy attacks at Cedar Creek began. Where he had been and what he had done the two weeks during which Rosser harassed his rear guard fellow cavalry officers, and during which Custer had pranced and preened, was yet to be discovered.

* * *