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.
