After the surrender, Lee’s Inspector General said to Ord,
“To the sharpness of that fight, the cutting off of Lee’s army at Appomattox was probably owing. So fierce were the charges of Colonel Washburn and his men, and so determined their fighting, that General Lee received the impression that they must be supported by a large part of the army, and that his retreat was cut off.”
Lee consequently halted and began to intrench; and this delay gave time for Ord to come up, and enabled Sheridan to intercept the enemy at Sailor’s Creek.
The Confederate General Rosser said to a member of the regiment whom he met after the war:
“You belonged to the Fourth Massachusetts Cavalry? Give me your hand! I have been many a day in hot fights. I never saw anything approaching that at High Bridge. While your colonel kept his saddle, everything went down before him!”
The Confederate troops at High Bridge were Rosser’s and a part of Fitz Hugh Lee’s divisions.
“Was your colonel drunk or crazy this morning, that he attacked with less than one hundred men the best fighting division of the Confederate cavalry?” asked a rebel officer of a wounded captain of the Fourth; “We have seen hard fighting, but we never heard of anything like this before!”
The Confederate officers had at first utterly refused to credit the stories of their prisoners, insisting that the small force would never have fought so fiercely unless it had been the advance of a strong column.
Grant says in his memoirs.
“The Confederates took this to be only the advance of a larger column which had headed them off, and so stopped to intrench; so that this gallant band had checked the progress of a strong detachment of the Confederate army. This stoppage of Lee’s column no doubt saved to us the trains following.”