“‘Then,’ said Captain Worden, ‘I don’t care what becomes of me.’”
“Mr. President,” said Captain Fox, “not much of the history to which we have listened is new to me. I saw this battle from eight o’clock until mid-day. There was one marvel in it which has not been mentioned—the splendid handling of the Monitor throughout the battle. The first bold advance of this diminutive vessel against a giant like the Merrimac was superlatively grand. She seemed inspired by Nelson’s order at Trafalgar: ‘He will make no mistake who lays his vessel alongside the enemy.’ One would have thought the Monitor a living thing. No man was visible. You saw her moving around that circle, delivering her fire invariably at the point of contact, and heard the crash of the missile against her enemy’s armor above the thunder of her guns, on the bank where we stood. It was indescribably grand!
“Now,” he continued, “standing here on the deck of this battle-scarred vessel, the first genuine iron-clad—the victor in the first fight of iron-clads—let me make a confession, and perform an act of simple justice. I never fully believed in armored vessels until I saw this battle. I know all the facts which united to give us the Monitor. I withhold no credit from Captain Ericsson, her inventor, but I know that the country is principally indebted for the construction of this vessel to President Lincoln, and for the success of her trial to Captain Worden, her commander.”
XI
SHERIDAN’S RIDE
Told by his Aide
“When I heard this I took two of my aides-de-camp, Major George A. Forsyth and Captain Joseph O’Keeffe, and with twenty men from the escort started for the front.”—From the Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, vol. ii., chap, iii., page 80.
IN the summer of 1864 I was on detached duty as an acting aide on the staff of Major-General Philip H. Sheridan, then in command of the Army of the Shenandoah. I was one of two officers who rode to the front with him “from Winchester down” on October 19, 1864, the day of the battle of Cedar Creek.
It seemed as though the campaign in the valley of the Shenandoah in the year 1864 was practically over. Twice within four days General Sheridan had attacked and defeated the Confederate army under General Early: first, on September 19th, at the crossing of Opequon Creek, in front of Winchester, Virginia, and again at Fisher’s Hill, twenty-two miles farther up the valley, on the twenty-second day of the same month. Both victories had been wrung from the enemy by dint of hard fighting and good judgment on the part of the commanding general of the United States forces, and his reputation as the commander of an army was now seemingly as secure as the brilliant record he had already made as a brigade, division, and corps commander.
The Federal troops lay quietly in camp in fancied security near Strasburg, just in rear of Cedar Creek, one of the tributaries of the Shenandoah River, and the shattered forces of the enemy were supposed to be somewhere in the vicinity of Gordonsville, Virginia; but the Confederate general, Jubal A. Early, was a soldier unused to defeat, a bitter enemy and a desperate foe, and as later events went to show, an officer willing to risk his all on the mere possibility of regaining, by a sudden and unexpected blow, the lost prestige of himself and army. In my opinion, but for the opportune arrival of General Sheridan on the field of battle, there is no reasonable doubt that he would have succeeded in accomplishing his object.