XXXVI. — YELLOW TAVERN, MAY 11, 1864.
Yellow Tavern! At the mention of that name, a sort of tremor agitates me even to-day, when nearly four years have passed.
In my eyes, the locality is cursed. A gloomy cloud seems ever hanging over it. No birds sing in the trees. The very sunshine of the summer days is sad there.
But I pass to my brief description of the place, and the event which made it one of the black names in Southern history.
Yellow Tavern is an old dismantled hostelry, on the Brook road, about six miles from Richmond. Nothing more dreary than this desolate wayside inn can be imagined. Its doors stand open, its windows are gone, the rotting floor crumbles beneath the heel, and the winds moan through the paneless sashes, like invisible spirits hovering near and muttering some lugubrious secret. “This is the scene of some deed of darkness!” you are tempted to mutter, as you place your feet upon the threshold. When you leave the spot behind you, a weight seems lifted from your breast—you breathe freer.
Such was the Yellow Tavern when I went there in the spring of 1864. Is it different to-day? Do human beings laugh there? I know not; but I know that nothing could make it cheerful in my eyes. It was, and is, and ever will be, a thing accursed!
For the military reader, however, a few words in reference to the topographical features of the locality are necessary.
Yellow Tavern is at the forks of the Telegraph and Mountain roads, six miles from Richmond. The Telegraph road runs north and south—over this road Stuart marched. The Mountain road comes into it from the northwest. By this road Sheridan was coming.