The Fatal Halt: Why Early Stopped at Cedar Creek

10:30 a.m. at the Battle of Cedar Creek — part of the Park Service series A Victory Turned From Disaster.

General John Gordon (left) urges Jubal Early to keep pursuing the retreating Union army. Sketch by James E. Taylor, an artist for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1864.

By late morning about 14,000 Confederates had driven about 32,000 Union soldiers from their positions and sent them retreating through Middletown and almost a mile beyond. General John Gordon and his commander, General Jubal Early, met to take stock. Gordon wanted to keep up the pursuit. Early thought the battle was already won: some of his troops had been moving for more than 12 hours and needed rest and food, and he was wary of the strong Union cavalry. He ordered a halt near Miller's Mill.

The decision would haunt both men — and military historians — for years.

Gordon's account

Gordon had led most of the Confederate infantry on the night march that drove the Union 8th and 19th Corps from their lines. By his account he was then organising an infantry and artillery assault on what was left of the 6th Corps on Cemetery Hill when Early reached the field.

None of Gordon's reports from just after the battle survive. In his memoir, published in 1904, he called this moment the "Fatal Halt":

"My heart went into my boots… that the fatal halting, the hesitation, the spasmodic firing, and the isolated movements in the face of the sullen, slow, and orderly retreat of this superb Federal corps, lost us the great opportunity, and converted the brilliant victory of the morning into disastrous defeat in the evening."

"The concentration was stopped; the blow was not delivered," he wrote. "We halted, we hesitated, we dallied."

Early's account

Two days after the battle Early wrote to General Robert E. Lee in Richmond. The 6th Corps, he reported, had had time to form and made "considerable resistance" on a ridge west of the pike, then fell back north of Middletown to another commanding ridge. Meanwhile

"so many of our men had stopped in the camp to plunder (in which I am sorry to say that officers participated), the country was so open and the enemy s cavalry so strong, that I did not deem it prudent to press farther."

He decided to hold what he had gained until all his troops came up and the captured property was secured.

Early believed he faced the whole 6th Corps at the cemetery — as many as 8,500 disciplined troops — when only one division of 2,500 remained. He also feared the Union cavalry, 5,000 to 6,000 troopers drawn up on open ground north of Middletown. Armed with breech-loading carbines, they outgunned his men, and they had beaten him twice in the past month, at Third Winchester and Tom's Brook.

In his memoir of 1867 Early blamed his troops' lack of discipline and their plundering of the Union camps. Neither Kershaw's nor Gordon's division was ready to attack; both were scattered and needed time to re-form. After advancing beyond Middletown that afternoon, he wrote, it was clear he could not push his men further: they had been up all night, rough ground had broken their ranks, and many were missing, off plundering the enemy's camps. For Early, the morning attack was over because of the 6th Corps at the cemetery, the powerful Union cavalry, and the disorder in his own army.

Who named it?

The phrase was in circulation in post-war letters before Gordon's Reminiscences. In his History of Kershaw's Brigade (1899), Captain Augustus Dickert of the 3rd South Carolina described the advance stopping at a road lined with stone fences to re-form the columns:

"But the halt was fatal— fatal to our great victory, fatal to our army, and who can say not fatal to our cause. Such a planned battle, such complete success, such a total rout of the enemy was never before experienced— all to be lost either by a fatal blunder or the greed of the soldier for spoils."

Only a fairly small share of the men were plundering, he added, but enough to thin the ranks.

A series of stoppages

The historian Theodore Mahr argued in 1992 that the Fatal Halt was not one moment but a string of delays with different causes. The first came at the cemetery, roughly between 9:30 and 10:00 a.m., mainly so that Pegram's and Ramseur's division could re-form and units could shift southeast of Middletown against the Union cavalry Early feared. The second, at the Old Forge Road between about 11:00 and 11:30, began as a pause for Kershaw and Gordon to come up on the left, and lasted until about 12:30 p.m., apparently to give units time to round up stragglers in the rear. That, in Mahr's view, was the first real stoppage — and the point where the loss of momentum began to prove fatal.

After Cedar Creek

The argument over Cedar Creek ran for nearly 50 years, into the early 1900s. Lee backed Early, but others blamed him — among them Virginia's Confederate governor, William "Extra Billy" Smith, who thought Early a poor commander all autumn and asked Lee to remove him.

Lee kept Early in command but recalled most of his army to Petersburg under Gordon, leaving Early in the Valley with about 1,000 men. Gordon led the Second Corps through the Siege of Petersburg and the Appomattox Campaign, including the final Confederate assault at Fort Stedman and the last attack on the morning of Appomattox, and was chosen to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia formally on April 12, 1865.

After the war Early lived in Mexico, Cuba and Canada before returning to Virginia an "unreconstructed rebel," and after Lee's death in 1870 became his passionate defender. Gordon was elected to the U.S. Senate from Georgia and as its governor, and led the United Confederate Veterans as commander-in-chief from 1890 until his death in 1904.

A Victory Turned From Disaster

The series continues: previous, Defense in the Cemetery; next, Sheridan Arrives. See also John B. Gordon and Miller's Mill, where Early formed his line along Miller Lane, today's Cougill Road — the farthest Confederate advance.

Sources

• National Park Service, Cedar Creek & Belle Grove National Historical Park, The Fatal Halt.
• Augustus Dickert, History of Kershaw's Brigade; John Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War; Jubal Early, letter to Robert E. Lee and Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence; Theodore Mahr, The Battle of Cedar Creek (paraphrased); rewritten in hubnx's own words.