Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman / With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War

by James Harvey Kidd

Four confederate cavalrymen undertook the duty of escorting myself and a young Sixth cavalryman who had been trapped in the same way to the rear through the woods. Anticipating that our attack would be followed up, we managed to delay our guards as much as possible, and had gone not more than a hundred yards when a yelling in the road proclaimed that the curtain had risen on the second scene of our little drama. Custer had ordered Birge to charge. Birge's advance put the confederates to flight, what there were left of them. The noise of the pursuit disconcerted our captors so that we took the chances and made our escape under cover of the thick undergrowth. They fired at us as we ran but did not succeed in making a hit. Fortunately Birge directed his course through the woods out of which the enemy had come and into which they had gone in their flight. In a minute we met him coming with a squad of men. He was greatly rejoiced to find that he had rescued me from my disagreeable predicament and, looking back across the years, I can see and freely acknowledge that to no man on this earth am I under greater obligations than to Manning D. Birge. But for his approach it might not have been possible for us to successfully make our break for freedom. That was the only time I ever was a prisoner of war and then only for about ten minutes. Custer, referring to my capture, says that I was rescued by a charge of my own regiment led by Captain Birge.

MANNING D. BIRGE

Bidding Birge to follow my late captors I hurried out to the road and thence to the crossroads from which we had started so short a time before. Custer was still there. His battery was there. Most of the Sixth was halted there. My recollection is that the First and Seventh about that time joined Custer, after finding that Fitzhugh Lee had withdrawn from their front looking toward Louisa Courthouse. Birge's charge had cleared the road of the enemy, for the time being. Custer ordered that a rail barricade be thrown up across the road leading to the right, from which direction the attacks had been made on him. Putting the men of Vinton's and Birge's squadrons who were available at work, Lovell's squadron of four troops which was intact and well in hand under as good an officer as there was in the brigade, was posted in line mounted, parallel with the road, and behind a screen of timber, in readiness to repel any further attack.

In a few minutes Sergeant Avery, one of the men who had gone with Birge in pursuit of the enemy from whom I had escaped, came in with a confederate prisoner splendidly mounted. Avery with cocked revolver was making his prisoner ride ahead of him and thus brought him in. Receiving orders to dismount, the man gave the horse a caress and with something very like a tear in his eye said:

"That is the best horse in the Seventh Georgia cavalry."

The horse, with Avery's consent was turned over to me to take the place of the captured black. He proved to be a prize. Handsome as a picture, kind and well broken, sound, spirited but tractable, with a glossy coat of silky luster, he was a mount that a real cavalryman would become attached to and be proud of. I rode him and he had the best of care until he succumbed to the cold weather and exposure near Winchester in the winter following. He was a finely bred southern horse and could not endure the climate.

Birge was not so fortunate. When he went after his prisoners he caught a Tartar, or came very near it. The barricade was only partially completed, when yelling in front,—that is in the road leading to the right,—caused every one to look in that direction. Birge and a few of his men were seen coming at full speed with what looked like a good big squadron of the enemy at their heels. Mounting the Seventh Georgia horse, I rode around the barricade and into the field where Lovell was with his battalion. He had been placed there for just such an emergency. Birge did not stop until he had leaped his mare over the barricade. When the confederate column came up, Lovell surprised them with a volley right in their teeth, which sent them "whirling" back into the woods out of which they had come.

This was the end of the fighting at that point. Taking with him the Seventh, under Lieutenant Colonel Brewer, and the battery Custer then moved on toward Trevilian Station, leaving the First under Lieutenant Colonel Stagg and the Sixth to bring up and look out for the rear. The affray at the crossroads had occupied less time than it takes to tell it. In giving the story it has been difficult to steer into the middle course between a seeming desire to give undue prominence to one's own part in the action, on one hand, and affectation of undue modesty, on the other. The only course appeared to be to narrate the incidents as they befell and leave it to the kind reader to judge the matter on its apparent merits.