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[563] inspiriting effect.1 General Wright had already brought order out of confusion and made dispositions for attack. These were left unchanged by Sheridan, except that Custer's cavalry division was transferred to its place on the right flank. A counter-charge was begun at three o'clock in the afternoon. Notwithstanding the success of the morning, or rather by reason of that success conjoined with bad discipline, the Confederates were at this time in a very unfit moral condition to resist attack, for a large part of Early's force, in the intoxication of success, had abandoned their colors and taken to plundering the abandoned Federal camps.2 The refluent wave was as resistless as the Confederate surge had been; the enemy was driven out of Middletown and beyond, and pressed upon back to Cedar Creek. The retreat soon became a rout, in which the Confederates abandoned much material. The Union infantry halted within their old camps; but the cavalry, forcing the passage of Cedar Creek, hung on the flanks and rear of the enemy and followed beyond Strasburg till night put an end to the pursuit. Early succeeded in halting his force for the night at Fisher's Hill, and next morning continued his retreat southward. In the pursuit all the captured guns were
1 The dramatic incidents attending the arrival of Sheridan have perhaps caused General Wright to receive less credit than he really deserves. The disaster was over by the time Sheridan arrived; a compact line of battle was formed, and Wright was on the point of opening the offensive. Wright certainly had not the style of doing things possessed by Sheridan, but no one who knows the steady qualities of that officer's mind can doubt that he would have himself retrieved whatever his troops had lost of honor.
2 General Early, in an address made to his army subsequent to this action, held the following language: ‘Had you remained steadfast to your duty and your colors, the victory would have been one of the most brilliant and decisive of the war. But many of you, including some commissioned officers, yielding to a disgraceful propensity for plunder, deserted your colors to appropriate to yourselves the abandoned property of the enemy; and subsequently, those who had previously remained at their posts, seeing their ranks thinned by the absence of the plunderers, when the enemy, late in the afternoon, with his shattered columns, made but a feeble effort to retrieve the fortunes of the day yielded to a needless panic, and fled the field in confusion, thereby converting a splendid victory into a disaster.’
1866.
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