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212 The American Civil WarThe irascible but able General Jubal A. Early fought
against heavy odds in the Shenandoah valley. General Lee
called him 'my bad old man.' (Public domain)
As Confederate options near Richmond
and Petersburg narrowed in 1864, General
Lee determined to take advantage of the
valley again. He sent his trusted and able
lieutenant, General Jubal A. Early, to raise
Jackson-like hell in that vulnerable sector.
Significant operations had been under
way in the valley for several weeks by the
time Early arrived. General Grant's
comprehensive plan to keep pressure up all
across the Confederacy's frontiers included
the dispatch of two tentacles toward the
valley. General William W. Averell led an
expedition in southwestern Virginia against
the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. He was
successful in a stubbornly contested action at
Cloyd's Mountain on 9 May 1864, but
Averell's mission did not have a major direct
impact on the war's main theater.
At the same time, General Franz Sigel
pushed a force of some 10,000 men south up
the valley (the rivers run nominally
northward, so south is 'up' the valley)
toward the vital Confederate depot and rail
junction at Staunton. The German-born Sigel
offered Grant and President Lincoln more
political energy than military prowess,
appealing as he did to the large population
of German-born immigrants living in the
North. A non-German in Sigel's army
described the men's 'most supreme contempt
for General Sigel and his crowd of foreign
adventurers.' Even Grant admitted that he
could not 'calculate on very great results' in
western Virginia.
Against Sigel the Confederates mustered
an army about half the size of their
adversary's, led by General John
C. Breckinridge, a former Vice-President of
the United States and a future Confederate
Secretary of War. The disparate fragments
that made up Breckinridge's army included a
detachment of boys who would become
famous in the impending fighting, the
teenaged cadets of the Virginia Military
Institute (VMI). On 15 May 1864 the two
small armies clashed at the crossroads village
of New Market, with control of the valley at
stake. A steady rain complicated the brutal
business of firing muskets and cannon,
holding the acrid gunsmoke close to the
ground and making the battlefield an eerie
stage. Men from Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Connecticut peered
down from a commanding crest on the
Virginians pressing toward them. Colonel
George S. Patton I commanded a key
Southern brigade; his grandson and
namesake would win fame 80 years later
in a very different war.
In the midst of the Confederate line
marched the 250 young cadets. Several had
just turned 15 years of age. 'They are only
children,' Breckinridge said worriedly to an
aide, 'and I cannot expose them to such fire.'
The exigencies of the moment left him no
choice, and the youngsters dashed forward
through sheets of lead so 'withering,' their
commander wrote, that 'it seemed impossible
that any living creature could escape.' The
boys charged in a torrential thunderstorm
across a fire-swept field so muddy that it
sucked some of their shoes from their feet,
then dashed into the midst of the Federal