Blood Image: Turner Ashby in the Civil War and the Southern Mind

2 A Day of Long Knives

2 A DAY OF LONG KNIVES T ombstones measure life with time, usually locking birth and death in two inseparable dates. A third over Ashby’s stone, carved to show June 26, 1861, would be an equally significant mark of life for his image and maybe even more compelling than the others, since it would not be coupled with the closure of any graveyard ending. On June 26—fully two months into the Civil War but a month before it progressed from excitable skirmishing into stand-up battle and bloodshed —Ashby and the Valley cavalry were stationed along the upper Potomac River near Romney. Orders arrived to arrest a Union sympathizer suspected of passing secrets to Federal forces posted across the river in Cumberland, Maryland. James Battle Avirett’s 1867 account has been a standard ever since. ‘‘[T]his was a duty fraught with peculiar peril,’’ as Avirett remembered, ‘‘for the territory between [the opposing forces was] full of mountain gorges, with lines of march to and fro easily flanked.’’ Ashby passed the task to his brother Richard, who in the morning set out with ten troopers. The spy was not at his home. Richard Ashby pushed A Day of Long Knives 69 on along the bed of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and, as he came nearer the enemy outpost at Cumberland, fell into an ambush. The next few moments sped by like gunshots. The Confederates galloped off, hoping to find a defensible position somewhere near the tracks. The panting horses rushed upon a cattleguard. The other men jumped easily, Avirett wrote. Richard Ashby reached the barrier at full speed and spurred to leap, but his horse bucked. The sudden jolt threw Richard to the ground. Surrender either was not offered or not considered when the Federals descended on him. Alone, Dick Ashby fought but was overcome. His enemies rifled his pockets, stole his spurs, and left him on the ground to die. Back toward Romney, ‘‘a friendly mountain girl’’ told Turner Ashby about gunfire in the area of Richard Ashby’s scout. Ashby gathered ten men immediately and raced that way. ‘‘Arriving at the spot, he was not slow to see that hot work had been going on,’’ Avirett wrote. ‘‘[B]ut not meeting any one from whom to learn definitely what had taken place other than that a desperate fight had occurred, he pushed madly on the line of retreat taken by the enemy.’’ He did not see his brother, who had crawled away to escape the sun. Near Kelly’s Island, a long, wooded spot in the Potomac about halfway between Romney and Cumberland, Ashby found the Unionists. He could see them on the island, and, as he plunged into the river, he could hear them—a volley killed two riders behind him. No matter. ‘‘At them with your knives, men,’’ Ashby shouted. ‘‘Charge them, boys, charge them!’’ The two forces collided. Ashby lost his horse and was slightly wounded in the leg, but his charge drove off the Federals. A Confederate trooper, Avirett wrote in closing the scene, rode up to Ashby and presented two omens: Richard Ashby’s spurs and the horse that would not jump the cattleguard.1 Ashby searched for several hours before he found his brother underneath some bushes, blood spattered, ‘‘mangled,’’ and short of breath. But Dick Ashby was alive. For seven days he held on—Turner at one point ‘‘thought him improving’’—but death came July 3 from ‘‘sheer exhaus1 . Avirett, Memoirs, 111–3 (quotes 106, 111); William McDonald, Laurel Brigade, 22–4. 70 Blood Image tion.’’ Ashby somberly dispatched a note home. ‘‘It is with great pain that I announce to you the death of Poor Dick who has just died from the wounds received in the fight with the enemy,’’ he wrote. ‘‘[I]f he could have been spared a little longer to aid me in a war like this what a comfort and what a strength to me.’’ Sunken in grief, he nevertheless told his family two weeks later to accept Richard’s death as a sacrifice. ‘‘You must all not forget that we have a duty to our country as well as our own feelings, and must not weigh [our feelings] in comparison to the former.’’ And somewhere in the mixture of sorrow and counsel, he admired the manner of his brother’s fall. Though the enemy ‘‘cut...