Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 27.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

I was sorry I could not be with you at the unveiling of the monument to our men at Front Royal, and I dissent from some historical statements in Major Richards' address. I do not agree with him that our men were hung in compliance with General Grant's orders to Sheridan. They were not hung in obedience to the orders of a superior, but from revenge. A man who acts from revenge simply obeys his own impulses. Major Richards says the orders were ‘a dead letter’ after I retaliated, which implies that they had not been before. I see no evidence to support such a conclusion. In his letter in The Times, Major Richards says that Sheridan's dispatches about hanging our men were ‘visionary’; i. e., he never hung any. If so, the order had always been ‘a dead letter.’ No one ever heard of his hangings until his dispatches were published a few years ago. Sheridan was then dead, but his posthumous memoirs say [284] nothing about hanging, although two pages are devoted to an account of the killing of Meigs and Custer's burning dwelling-houses in Rockingham county in revenge. Meigs was not killed by my men; we never went that far up the Valley.

Sheridan's dispatches in the war records about the men he hung were not even a revelation to me, for they revealed nothing. They were simply specters of imagination, like the dagger in the air that Macbeth saw. If Sheridan had communicated Grant's dispatch of August 16th to any one to be executed, it would have been to Blazer, who commanded a picked corps that was specially detailed to look after us. In his report, Blazer speaks of capturing some of my men; he never mentions hanging any. Those he captured were certainly not hung, for I saw them when they came home after the close of the war. The following dispatches record the rise and fall of Blazer:

(Indorsement):

Approved: By order of the Secretary of War.

‘Two of Captain Blazer's men came in this morning—Privates Harris and Johnson. They report that Mosby with 300 men attacked Blazer near Kabletown yesterday about 11 o'clock. They say that the entire command, with the exception of themselves, was captured or killed. I have ordered Major Congdon with 300 Twelfth Pennsylvania cavalry to Kabletown to bury dead and take care of wounded, if any, and report all facts he can learn. I shall immediately furnish report as soon as received.’

Exit Blazer.

Richards commanded in the Blazer fight. I was not there. As an affair of arms it surpassed anything that had been done in the [285] Shenandoah campaign and recalled the days when Knighthood was in flower.

When we sent Blazer and his band of prisoners to Richmond they would not have admitted that they ever hung anybody. Major Richards refers to Grant's order to destroy subsistence for an army, so as to make the country untenable by the Confederates, and pathetically describes the conflagration. He ought to know that there had been burning of mills and wheat stacks in Loudoun two years before Grant came to Virginia. Grant's orders were no more directed against my command than Early's. Augusta and Rockingham were desolated, where we never had been. But I can't see the slightest connection between burning forage and provisions and hanging prisoners. One is permitted by the code of war, the other is not. After General Lee's surrender I received a communication from General Hancock asking for mine. I declined to do so until I could hear whether Joe Johnston would surrrender or continue the war. We agreed on a five days armistice. When it expired nothing had been heard from Johnston. I met a flag of truce at Millwood, and had proposed an extension of ten days, but received through Major Russell a message from Hancock refusing it, and informing me that unless I surrendered immediately he would proceed to devastate the country. The reply I sent by Russell was: ‘Tell General Hancock he is able to do it.’ Hancock then had 40,000 men at Winchester. The next day I disbanded my battalion to save the country from being made a desert. If anyone doubts this, let him read Hancock's report. If it was legitimate for Hancock to lay waste the country after I had suspended hostilities, surely it was equally so for Grant to do it, when I was doing all the damage in my power to his army. Stanton warned Hancock not to meet me in person under a flag of truce, for fear that I would treacherously kill him. Hancock replied that he would send an officer to meet me. He sent General Chapman. The attention Grant paid to us shows that we did him a great deal of harm. Keeping my men in prison weakened us as much as to hang them.

Major Richards complains of the ‘debasing epithets’ Sheridan applied to us. I have read his reports, correspondence and memoirs, but have never seen the epithets. In common with all Northern and many Southern people, he called us guerrillas. Although I have never adopted it, I have never resented as an insult the term ‘guerrilla’ when applied to me. Sheridan says that my battalion was ‘the most redoubtable’ partisan body that he met. I certainly take no exception to that. He makes no charge of any act of inhumanity [286] against us. The highest compliment ever paid to the efficiency of our command is the statement, in Sheridan's Memoirs. that while his army largely outnumbered Early's, yet their line of battle strength was about equal on account of the detachments he was compelled to make to guard the border and his line of communication from partisan attacks. Ours was the only force behind him. At that time the records show that in round numbers Early had 17,000 present for duty, and Sheridan had 94,000. The word ‘guerrilla’ is a diminutive of the Spanish word guerra (war), and simply means one engaged in the minor operations of war.

I had only five companies of cavalry when Sheridan came, in August, 1864, to the Shenandoah Valley. A sixth was organized in September. Two more companies joined me in April, 1865, after the evacuation of Richmond. They came just in time to surrender. I don't care a straw whether Custer was solely responsible for the hanging of our men or jointly with others. If we believe the reports of the generals, none of them ever even heard of the hanging of our men; they must have committed suicide. Contemporary evidence is against Custer. I wonder if he also denied burning dwelling-houses around Berryville.

Restopchin, the Governor of Moscow, claimed the credit of the burning of it when it was thought to have been the cause of Napoleon's retreat, but afterward it became known that it was not the cause of it; to escape the odium, he denied all responsibility for it, and declared that it was done by incendiaries for plunder.

I once called at the White House in 1876 to see General Grant; sent him my card, and was promptly admitted. When I came out of his room, one of the secretaries told me that General Custer had called the day before, but that General Grant refused to see him. The incident is related in the Life of Custer. A few weeks afterward Custer was killed in the Sitting Bull massacre.

Our acts our angels are—for good or ill—
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

Major Richards further says ‘that there was scarcely a family in all that section that did not have some member in Mosby's command.’ If that is true, I must have commanded a larger army than Sheridan. I didn't know it. He describes the pathos of the scenes that might have been if the ‘severe and cruel order’ had been executed to transfer the families from that region to Fort McHenry, and says it would have ‘paralyzed’ my command. If so, that would have [287] been a more humane way of getting rid of it than killing the men. Now, I have never considered women and children necessary appendages to an army; on the contrary, I would rather class them with what Caesar, in his Commentaries, calls impedimenta. Homer's heroes were not paralyzed when Helen was carried off to Troy; it only aroused their martial ambition. Sheridan knew that if he did anything of the kind it would stimulate the activity of my men; so he didn't try it. As for our lieutenant-colonel, who, as Major Richards says, married in that section, I think that, if Sheridan had captured his wife and mother-in-law and sent them to prison, instead of going into mourning, he would have felt all the wrath and imitated the example of the fierce Achilles when he heard that Patroclus, his friend, had been killed and his armor had been captured. ‘Now perish Troy!’ he said, and rushed to fight.

Very truly yours,