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

Prologue: Child of Victory

PROLOGUE Child of Victory H e lay now as they had known he would lie. Disarmed, the bloodlust in him stilled (yes, the bloodlust they admired now quiet), they moved to him and then past in a long black line. ‘‘You have heard before this of the death of Colonel Ashby,’’ one woman wrote to another in the late spring of 1862, and the truth was not long going South and North. This Virginian they knew as Ashby, this man they called Turner Ashby, whose star had been ascendant from the moment he rode into the Confederate cavalry, who rose from captain to colonel to general in the year between the first time he drew revolver and bowie knife and the last, was legendary already—a man of ‘‘great personal courage and consequent popularity,’’ as the Philadelphia newspapermen wrote it; ‘‘famous’’ as the New York Times boldface announced in his obituary.1 Stories had been told about this horseman, and poems written. Babes 1. Mary Jane Hughes Lucas to Anne V. Ashley, June 11, 1862, Lucas-Ashley Papers, PL; Baltimore Sun, June 12, 1862; New York Times, June 11, 1862. See also Francis William Jones to Madison Pendleton, June 8, 1862, Beverley Randolph Wellford Papers, VHS. 2 Blood Image born and yet to be born were christened in his name. From southern parlors and pianos had come the sheet music and the bounce and swing of the ‘‘Ashby Galop.’’ His powers were mythic.2 He raced the length of the Shenandoah Valley and beyond in search of the enemy. They said he fought hand to hand with privates and generals. They said he disguised himself in a borrowed suit of homespun and rode a plow horse through Federal camps unnoticed, impersonating a ‘‘rustic horse-doctor.’’ They said Ashby once had the misfortune of being captured but by a remarkable ‘‘sleight of horse’’ disappeared—he just rode off—leaving enemies dazed and paralyzed. By some strange and legendary magic, Union sharpshooters were powerless when aiming at him. He attacked an entire regiment : ‘‘alone, he charged five hundred of them—dashed through their line, firing his pistols right and left as he did so—then wheeling about he again charged through them and summoned them to surrender. All who heard his voice at once obeyed, threw down their arms, dismounted, and, at the word, squatted meekly as so many mice upon the ground, until some of our men came up and took charge of them.’’3 And those were just the tales of friends. ‘‘As for his personal courage,’’ wrote a Union man who claimed to know, ‘‘it is enough to say that the very morning [the Federal army] entered Winchester, Ashby went to [our] headquarters disguised as a market man, and in reply to questions from staff officers, described his rebel self. The day before the battle of Winchester he rode through the streets of that town, with one of his captains, in Union uniform.’’ Said another: ‘‘He is a strange man. Regards nothing. 2. Ironically, the story most often dismissed as utterly fanciful may contain the most truth. Ashby’s ‘‘Adventure at Winchester,’’ popularized after the war by John Esten Cooke, has it that Ashby miraculously dispatched two enemy soldiers who surprised and cornered him in Winchester on March 12, 1862. Kate Sperry of Winchester recorded the episode’s outlines in her diary on March 14, and the story was in the press a month later. See Kate S. Sperry diary (typescript as ‘‘Surrender, Never Surrender!’’), 145, HL; Richmond Dispatch, April 15, 1862. C. Orloff, ‘‘Ashby Galop’’ (Baltimore: Miller and Beacham, 1862), PL. 3. John D. Imboden, ‘‘Stonewall Jackson at Harper’s Ferry in 1861,’’ in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, ed. Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, 4 vols. (New York, 1884–87), 1:124; Charles D. Rhodes, ‘‘Confederate Partisan Rangers,’’ in The Photographic History of the Civil War, ed. Francis Trevelyan Miller, 10 vols. (New York, 1911), 4:168–74; Charleston Daily Courier, June 9, 1862. See also William Granville Gray to William Gray, April 11, 1862, William Gray Papers, VHS. Prologue 3 Shot, shell, rain, hail, snow . . . all are apparently the same to him. He will quit a meal at anytime for a chance at a Yankee.’’4 A northern newspaper, which praised Ashby’s ‘‘admirable skill and audacity,’’ calculated his worth at five thousand ordinary lives. A soldier with the...