Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories

The Fighting Fifer

187 The Fighting Fifer “Fall in, Eighth Vermont!” shouted the regiment’s major minutes before waves of rebel infantrymen cut through the gray dawn and crashed into the New Englanders at Cedar Creek, Virginia, on October 19, 1864.295 The Confederates swarmed over them and demanded surrender in hoarse shouts, but the Vermont volunteers rallied around their flag and hollered back in defiant tones “Never! Never!”296 Enemy bullets dropped the corporal guarding the colors , and the standard was passed to others, amidst hand-to-hand combat with bayonets and clubbed muskets. Then the brigade flag became in imminent danger of capture, and a half-dozen men rushed to save it. Close by, 1st Lt. Nathan Cheney of Company K, who may have been moving in support of the colors,297 fell after a musket ball ripped into his back.298 Thirty-five-year-old Cheney, a Lunenburg, Vermont, farmer, had enrolled in the state’s Eighth Infantry as a fifer in the winter of 1861. His leadership abilities attracted the attention of the regiment’s top command; he rose steadily through the ranks and joined the officer’s corps as second lieutenant in the summer of 1863. A year later, the Eighth left Louisiana, where it had served the majority of its enlistment, for Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to pursue Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s299 Confederate army, which was menacing the region. At Cedar Creek, in the northern part of the valley near Winchester, Early’s force caught the Union army off guard, and most of it fled before the oncoming raiders. The Eighth was one of the few units not broken by the shock of the initial assault. With two other regiments in its brigade, it quickly filed into a forest through which Confederate soldiers were advancing, to slow the enemy juggernaut. The rebels overpowered the little 188 1st Lt. Nathan Cluff Cheney, Company K, Eighth Vermont Infantry Carte de visite by George Harper Houghton (d. 1870) of Brattleboro, Vermont, 1864 189 brigade and forced it to retire, leaving more than half of its number behind. As Cheney lay desperately wounded in the woods, the tide of battle turned; Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan300 rallied his demoralized command, went on the offensive, and destroyed the rebel raiders. The ground lost in the morning was retaken, and federal soldiers rescued Cheney that night, taking him to nearby Newtown for treatment.301 But his wound proved mortal, and he succumbed to his injury two days later. The regiment remembered him as a brave and capable officer who rose from the ranks by faithful and efficient service. His wife and three young children survived him. ...