Kilpatrick, meanwhile, with his Third division had not been idle. (When was he ever known to be idle, except when others held him in check, or ineffective except when some other than himself misdirected his dashing energy?) He had swept around to the left, nearly at the same time that Gregg made the detour to the right, and striking the Stevensburgh road advanced rapidly from the east towards Culpeper and the right of the enemy's position, which rested on Rawson's Cross-Roads, two miles south-east of the Court-House. The rebels here made a stubborn resistance, and steel met steel and pistol-shot replied to sabre-stroke as it had not before done that day; but the odds were a little against them; they were outflanked by that incarnate "raider" of the Sussex mountains of New Jersey, who no doubt could trace back some drop of his blood to Johnny Armstrong the riever of the Scottish border, or the moss troopers of the Bog of Allen in Ireland; and they fell back to the town and beyond it, taking up new positions which they were not destined to hold much longer than those they had abandoned.
But this brief shock of battle between the division of Kilpatrick and the rebels opposed to it, did not roll away from the little hamlet of Rawson's Cross-Roads without the enacting of one of those sad tragedies, in the shedding of the blood of non-combatants, which seem so much more painful than the wholesale but expected slaughter of the field. Near the crossing of the roads there stood one brick house, of two stories, the only one of that material in the vicinity. This house, when Kilpatrick came up, was occupied by the rebel sharp-shooters, partially sheltered by the thick walls and bringing down the federal cavalry from their saddles at every discharge of their deadly rifles. Such obstructions in the way of an advance, especially when they destroy as well as embarrass, are not apt to be treated with much toleration by those who have the power to sweep them away; and immediately when the imminence of the danger was discovered, one of the federal batteries was ordered up to dislodge the sharp-shooters. It dashed up with all the celerity that whipped and spurred and galloping horses could give it, halted within point-blank range, unlimbered, and sent shell, canister and case-shot into and through the obnoxious edifice in a manner and with a rapidity little calculated upon by the mason who quietly laid his courses of bricks for the front and side-walls, in the quiet years before Virginia secession. The sharp-shooters were soon silenced and dislodged—at least all of them who were left after the last deadly discharge of missiles had been poured in by the battery; and the house was at once occupied, when the firing ceased, by a detachment of Union cavalry dismounted for that service. When those men entered the half-ruined building they first became aware of this extraordinary and deplorable tragedy, in which a little blood went so far in awakening regret and horror. They heard cries of pain and shrieks of distress and fear, echoing through the building, in other accents than those which could belong to wounded soldiers—the tones of women! And in the cellar they found the painful solution of the mystery—more painful far, to them, than a hundred times the death and suffering under ordinary circumstances. In that cellar, among smoke, and blood and dust, were huddled twenty or thirty non-combatants, men, women and children; and in their midst lay an old man, quite dead and the upper part of his head half carried away by a portion of shell, while fallen partially across his legs was the body of his son of sixteen, his boyish features scarcely yet stilled in the repose of death from a ghastly hurt that had torn away the arm and a part of the shoulder. Two women lay near, one dying from a blow on the temple which had driven in the bones of the skull like the crushing of an egg-shell, and the other uttering the most heart-rending of the cries and groans under the agony of a crushed leg and a foot literally blown to atoms. A sad sight!—a harrowing spectacle, even for war-time! And how had it been occasioned?
It would seem that on the approach of the cavalry and the commencement of fighting in the neighborhood, this party of non-combatants had crowded into this house—no doubt long to be known in the local traditions of the place as that of James Inskip,—and taken refuge in the cellar, believing that in it, as the only brick house in the vicinity, they would be safest from the missiles of the opposing forces. And so they would have been, safe enough beyond a doubt, had not the rebel commander, unaware of the presence of non-combatants in the building, or heedless of the common law of humanity not to expose them to unnecessary danger in any military operation, recklessly placed his sharp-shooters in shelter there and thus drawn the fire of the fatal battery. Two or three of the shells, crashing through the house, had fallen into the cellar and exploded in the very midst of the trembling skulkers in their place of fancied security,—with the sad results that have been recorded, and which none more deeply deplored than the men who had unwittingly slaughtered the aged and the helpless. Some of the Richmond papers told harrowing stories, a few days after, of the "inhuman barbarity of the dastardly Yankees who wantonly butchered those inoffensive men and helpless women and children in James Inskip's house at Rawson's Cross-Roads"; but they forgot, as newspapers on both sides of the sad struggle have too often done during its continuance, to add one word of the explanatory and extenuating circumstances!
By the time that Kilpatrick, with the Third, had concluded the episode of Rawson's Cross-Roads and driven the opposing forces back upon the town, Buford, with the First, after chasing the rebel cavalry under Beale to moderate satisfaction, had come up from the south, and the junction of the three divisions was accomplished.
On the elevated site of Culpeper and in the uneven streets of that old town which bears, like so many of its compeers, shabby recollections of English aristocracy that for some cause seem to suit it better than the thin pretence of democratic government,—there Stuart, than whom the rebellion has developed no more restless or more active foe of the Union cause, appeared determined to make a last and effectual stand. With a celerity worthy of his past reputation he placed sharp-shooters in houses that commanded the Union advance, planted batteries at advantageous positions in the streets, and threw up barricades of all the unemployed carts and wagons and all the idle timber and loose fence-rails lying about the town, in a manner which would have endeared him to the Parisians of the time of Louis Philippe. Right and left and on every hand, defending these obstructions and supporting the batteries, dashed his mounted "Virginia gentlemen," once the very Paladins of their knightly class, when Fauquier and the White Sulphur saw the pleasant sport of tilting at the ring in the presence of the bright-eyed Queens of Beauty of the Old Dominion,—now brought down to the level and compelled to contest the fatal advance, of a "horde of Yankee tailors on horseback"!
General Pleasanton, the actual as well as nominal head of the Union advance, held his position on an eminence a short distance east of the town, from which an excellent view of the whole situation could be commanded, and whence he directed all the movements with the rapidity of a soldier and the coolness of a man thoroughly in confidence with himself and well assured of the material of his command. He had won with the same troops before, even when placed at disadvantage: that day he felt that the game was in his own hands and that he could play it rapidly and yet steadily. The thing which worst troubled him as from that little eminence he looked out from under his bent brows, over the scene which was to witness so short, sharp and decisive a conflict,—was the knowledge how seriously the stubborn resistance offered by the rebels was likely to peril the non-combatants in the town, and how inevitably, from the same cause, the old town itself, just tumble-down enough to be historical and picturesque, must suffer from the flying shot and shell that know so little mercy. He had hoped, the first surprise succeeding, to take Culpeper against but slight resistance; and it was no part of his plan (it never is part of the plan of any truly brave man!) to batter the town if that measure could be avoided; but the balances and compensations of war are appreciable if not gratifying, musketry on one side is nearly sure to be answered in kind by the other, and artillery (when there happens to be any, and wo to the party without the "big guns" when the other has them at command!)—artillery has a very natural habit of replying to the thunderous defiance sent out by its hostile kinsmen. Culpeper, too well defended, was not the less certain to be taken, while it was the more certain to bear marks of the conflict that only the demolition of half its buildings could erase.
God pity and help the residents of any town given up to the ruthless passions of a fierce soldiery—to plunder and rapine and murder,—after what is so inadequately described as "taking by storm"! When for the moment hell is let loose upon the earth, as if to teach us that if we have yet something of the god lingering in our fallen manhood, we have yet something of the arch-fiend remaining to show how we accompanied him in his fall. When roofs blaze because a reckless hand has dashed a torch therein in the very wantonness of destruction. When the golden vessels of the church service and the sacred little memorials of happy hours in boudoir and bed-room are alike torn from their places, dashed into pieces and ground under armed heels, as if the inanimate objects bore a share of the wrong of resistance and could feel a part of the suffering meted out to it. When murder is for the time licensed and the blood of the defender of his door-stone and his hearth dabbles his gray hair on one or the other of those sacred places, and there is no thought of punishment for the red hand, except as God may silently mete it in the years to come. When—saddest and worst of all,—the matron is outraged before the eyes of her bound and blaspheming husband; and young girls, the peach-bloom of maidenhood not yet brushed from the cheek, are torn shrieking from the arms that would shelter them, to be so polluted and dishonored by a ruffian touch that but yesterday would have seemed impossible to their dainty flesh as the rising up of a fiend from the lower pit to rend the white garments of one of the redeemed in heaven,—so polluted and dishonored that a prayer for the mercy of death bubbles up from the lips at the last word before resistance becomes insensibility.
This wreck of a "storm" of human license is terrible—so terrible that the effects of the convulsions of nature, the tempest, the tornado and even the earthquake, sink into insignificance beside them. Heaven be praised that during the War for the Union, called by our English cousins so "fratricidal," we have as yet known no Badajos or even a sacking of Pekin! But only second to such scenes in horror and scarcely second in terror, have been some of those supplied when the battle issue of the two armies was joined near some quiet country town before lying peaceful and inoffensive, or when military necessity has made its houses temporary fortifications and its streets the points of desperate attacks and as desperate defences. Then what crashing of shot and shell through houses; what demolition of all that had before been sacred; what huddling together of the frightened and the defenceless who never before dreamed that, though war was in the land, it would break so near to them; what mad gathering of valuables and impotent preparations for flight that would be more dangerous than remaining; what whistling of bullets that seemed each billeted for a defenceless breast; what thunderous discharges of cannon that made every non-combatant limb quiver and every delicate cheek grow bloodless; what shouts in the street and cries of terror and dismay within doors; what trembling peeps through half-closed shutters, with an imagined death even in every such momentary exposure; what cowerings in cellars and hidings beneath piles of old lumber in garrets; what reports of defeat or victory to the party that was feared or favored; what claspings of children and ungovernable weepings of hysteria; what prayers and what execrations; what breakings-up and destructions of all that had been, and what revelations of the desolation that is to be!
Such, since the breaking out of the rebellion, has been the situation of many a before-peaceful town, in many a State that once rested happily under the shadow of the Eagle's wing. And such was the situation of one fated old town that day, when Gregg from the north, Kilpatrick from the east and Buford from the south, came up almost simultaneously and their forces charged recklessly into the streets of Culpeper Court-House. The excitement and confusion in the town at once became all that we have so feebly endeavored to indicate—women shrieking in terror, soldiers groaning with their wounds, children crying from fright; and blended with these and a hundred other inharmonious sounds, the shouts in the street, the bugle calls, the hissing of bullets, the rumble of artillery wheels, the broken thunder of the feet of trampling horses, the occasional crash of half-demolished houses, and the hoarse roar of the batteries as they belched out their missiles of death and destruction. Culpeper, for a short period, was a veritable pandemonium in miniature; and no detail can add to the force of that brief but comprehensive description.
Near the railroad bridge spanning the little stream running nearly through the centre of the town, the rebels had discovered a strategic point of no little consequence, and they had posted there a battery of several pieces, well served and annoying the advance of the Third division very materially. The battery seemed to be placed there, not only to obstruct the advance but to protect a train of cars just then being loaded by the rebels above, with munitions and other articles of consequence, preparatory to a start down the railroad southward. Battery D., Second New York Artillery, ordered for that service, ran up its sections at a gallop, unlimbered and poured in shot and shell, grape and canister upon the train, in such disagreeable rapidity as sent the half loaded cars away towards the Rapidan with all the speed that could be suddenly mustered. Still the battery at the bridge remained, firing rapidly and cutting up the head of Kilpatrick's column in a manner calculated to make the General gnash his teeth in indignation. The space to the bridge was uphill, accordingly raked downward by the rebel fire; the bridge itself was narrow and the footing for horses seriously damaged by the railroad tracks that crossed it with their switches and lines of slippery iron. Still it was known that that bridge must be cleared, at any cost, or the advance through Culpeper would be a most bloody one if accomplished at all. Just as Kilpatrick was about to order a charge of cavalry to clear that bridge and if possible capture the pieces, his intention seemed to be anticipated and a squadron of Stuart's cavalry rode down and took post, dismounted, behind the battery, in position to support, while three or four companies of rebel riflemen followed, ready to do deadly execution with their pieces against any troops attempting to charge, and to fall upon that force with resistless fury at the moment of their weakness, if the guns should be ridden over! No pleasant prospect, as the Sussex raider thought, and for a moment he apparently wavered in intention, while the battery played heavily and every instant saw one or more of his best troopers biting the dust of the causeway below.