August 11, 1864---"Great terror"

AUGUST 11, 1864:     

Since General Philip Sheridan U.S.A.’s August 1^st appointment to command Federal troops in the Shenandoah Valley, he has been girding up for a large-scale confrontation with Jubal Early. Sheridan began moving against Early’s HQ at Winchester, Virginia on August 10^th.  In response, Early evacuates Winchester this day, and moves south.

In the wake of the explosion at City Point, Rebel War Clerk John Beauchamp Jones writes with some (though ultimately false) hope in his diary: 

  

Dispatches from secret agents at Washington state that Grant[’s Petersburg] campaign is considered a disastrous failure, and it is anticipated that henceforth [his headquarters] is to be transferred from Richmond to Washington. They say President Lincoln’s face expresses “great terror.”