SQUIRE E. HOWARD AWOKE before dawn on October 19, 1864, to what he thought was thunder. The clamor, though, wasn’t coming from the clouds but from the fog enveloping the left flank of the Union Army of the Shenandoah at Cedar Creek—and the sounds accompanied a raging band of Confederate soldiers. “It was like the howls of the wolves around the wagon train in the early days of the great prairies,” he would write.
Captain Howard and his comrades in the 8th Vermont Infantry had anticipated another fight at some point, just not in the dead of night. Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal Early, however, wasn’t known to readily accommodate his opponents.
The Rebels’ initial fog-shrouded thrust that morning was chaotic, as the sleeping Union troops were quickly overwhelmed, many choosing to flee half-clothed rather than put up a fight. The retreat, recalled Captain D. Augustus Dickert of the 3rd South Carolina, was “a living sea of men and horses.”
When the attack began, the Union army’s colorful commander, Phil Sheridan, was resting 12 miles away in Winchester. His subordinates on site scrambled to respond, fortunate
