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 10 Catch Those Fellows With the weather improving and roads again passable, Grant launched his expected spring offensive. The main advance in Virginia was by the Army of the Potomac. In a series of battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania , and Cold Harbor, Grant drove the Confederates back to Richmond, and the middle of June found both armies entrenched around Petersburg. In the Shenandoah Valley, Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel advanced with 6,500 men. The intent was to capture the town of Staunton, but Sigel never made it that far. A 5,000man Confederate army turned Sigel back at New Market on 15 May 1864 in a battle that immortalized the young cadets of the Virginia Military Institute.1 The rangers harried Sigel as he advanced up the Shenandoah Valley. Mosby took 10 men across the Blue Ridge Mountains, struck a supply train near Bunker Hill on 1 May, and then proceeded on with 20 men to Martinsburg for another raid. While Mosby next turned his attention toward the Rappahannock River to raid wagon trains in the wake of Grant’s advance, Dolly Richards and Chapman took 15–20 men each into the Shenandoah Valley to operate in the rear of Sigel’s army. Richards crossed the Shenandoah River and killed or wounded several Federals in a skirmish near Winchester on the ninth.2 Chapman, too, found successes in the Shenandoah Valley. Accompanied by his brother, he crossed the Shenandoah River with Richards’s men. The two groups parted, and Chapman attacked a detachment of the 1st New York Cavalry near Berryville. His rangers killed 2 men and captured several others in a brisk skirmish. The approach of the full regiment forced the rangers to retire from the field, but not before Sam Chapman inflicted 3 more casualties in an impetuous charge on the advance guard. He came away from this encounter unscathed, though his horse was shot.3 Chapman returned to the Shenandoah Valley on 11 May and scouted along the Valley turnpike north of Strasburg with 20 men. Late in the day, the rangers captured a 5-man cavalry patrol coming from Strasburg. Early the next morning, the rangers moved off toward the town. Soon, they came across a large supply train guarded by 300 infantry and 80 cavalry traveling along the turnpike from Winchester. It was raining that morning, and the Confederates catch those fellows  wore dark overcoats to stay dry. None of the guards were concerned as Chapman and his men fell in and followed the rear of the train.4 A few miles south of Strasburg, along the banks of the Shenandoah River, the road climbed sharply up a steep hill before crossing a bridge over the river. There, as the wagons ascended Fisher’s Hill and the accompanying guard was strewn out along the narrow road, Chapman attacked the rear. Details of the clash are vague. Mosby reported that Chapman captured about 30 prisoners and a like number of horses. John Scott, in his history of Mosby’s command, wrote that the rangers killed or wounded 12 men, captured 19, and escaped with 23 horses. Another history put the Federal losses at but 2 killed, 4 prisoners, and a number of horses captured. The rangers escaped unscathed to Luray, abetted by a local woman who convinced the pursuing cavalrymen that they had little chance of overtaking the fleet partisans. Chapman turned his prisoners over to the provost marshal at Luray and dismissed the command.5 After the defeat at New Market, Maj. Gen. David Hunter replaced Sigel as leader of the Federal army in the Shenandoah Valley. He assumed command on the evening of Saturday, 21 May, and Mosby quickly initiated him to the nature of partisan warfare. The day before, Mosby and 103 rangers had assembled at Paris and dropped into the Shenandoah Valley through Ashby’s Gap. They reached the Shenandoah River at nightfall but found the river swollen with floodwaters and too dangerous to cross in the dark, so the rangers made camp for the night. They crossed the river Saturday morning in boats, driving their reluctant horses across or tying them to the crafts and towing them. The rangers continued on toward Front Royal, where at a point on the turnpike from Front Royal to Winchester, along a prominent ridge known as Guard Hill on the north bank of the Shenandoah River, 150 troopers of the 15th New York Cavalry garrisoned an outpost. Thirty men led by Capt. Michael...

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