September 24, 1864---"The Burning"

SEPTEMBER 24, 1864:    

 “The Burning”:

Philip Sheridan decides that if Jubal Early’s men will not come out, his men will go in. Sheridan orders the burning of every crossroads, town, farmstead, homestead, millhouse, barn, rick, cottage, tree and crop in the Shenandoah Valley, hoping in this way, to cut the legs from under Early’s forces.

The residents’ horses are impressed into the Union army, as are their chickens, pigs and cows. The harvest is seized. “The Burning” is methodical; Sheridan’s men advance slowly up the Valley, spreading ruin as they go. The Burning lasts two weeks, long weeks for the denizens of the Shenandoah Valley.

Sheridan encounters some resistance: Mosby’s Rangers and groups of Early’s men skirmish with Sheridan’s forces at New Market and Woodstock and along the Valley Pike. The Southerners establish a redoubt in the Luray Valley (a part of the Shenandoah Valley surrounded by uplands), and forbid Sheridan’s forces entry.    

The Burning has largely been excised from published accounts of the Civil War and is remembered mostly in the folk histories of the old families that live in the Valley today.

Warfare in the Valley reduced everything to its lowest common denominator, that of  sheer brutality. General Grant's orders to Sheridan to "make all the Valley a desert" and a "barren waste" and to follow the enemy "to the death," echo the sentiments of Mosby's men, who rode into battle yelling, "Wipe them from the face of the earth!" and "Take no prisoners!"  Even a Union chaplain spoke of the need to "peel this land" like a piece of fruit.  Dead soldiers, tortured, hanged, and mutilated, of both sides were found with one-word notes pinned to their clothes, staked through their bodies, or worst, carved in their flesh:  “Retaliation!”

While the Valley burns, General Sterling Price C.S.A. raids Union-held Missouri, likewise scorching the earth.

Angered at the loss of Athens, Alabama and the defeat of Confederate men by United States Colored Troops, General Nathan Bedford Forrest C.S.A. takes the city of Athens, Georgia by convincing the Union garrison commander that he is leading at least 15,000 men. In truth, Forrest has only 4,500. It is a trick The Wizard has used before, more than once, and it works again. The Union men are marched off to P.O.W. camps, all but the U.S.C.T., who are enslaved on Forrest’s orders.