29 November 2009
The Buckland Races
(Stuart's HQ, then Custer's, then Stuart's, again.)
I wound have to chalk this holiday up as marginal. Not bad, but it sort of sucked.
I got caught up captive so one of those proposal drills yesterday, and working on Friday to conserve vacation time against the coming visit to reinforce the folks over Christmas.
I had meant to spend two days down in Brandy Station over this long weekend, but it turned out to be neither, really. I finished doing whatever it was I had promised to do at one on Saturday, and was a little dazed, as he consant toggling between Proposed Work Statement, Air Force Doctrine and old scraps of personal history are wont to leave me.
Missed the trip to the dry cleaners altogether, and the prospect of setting up shop on the farm, starting the heat pump only to clean up and come north again in the morning left me cold. I thought instead I would blast down, check the mail, haul a load of crap from the storage locker and turn around and come back to sleep in the northern of my two large beds as long as I could in the morning and then just plain screw off all day.
I filled up the trunk of the Bluesmobile with crap from the storage locker, and tossed the Model 28 in the trunk, just in case plans changed.
I am slowly managing to sort out the events that happened along the road I drive so often these days. it is hard, since the years get all mixed up.
As it turns out, I-66 follows the strange course that it does because it follows the route of the old W.O. &D railroad, whose last trains ran from Alexandria to Bluemont in 1968. It was useful in the Civil War, but could not survive the transition to the personal automobile that followed WW II.
Normally I follow the big slab out to Rt 15, and take that south for a couple miles to intersect Rt 29, which is the successor to the Warrenton Turnpike of earlier days. It is a state road, but it is smooth and four-lane, and traffic moves with lunatic fury this close to the capital; as fast as the interstate, almost, except that there are periodic stop-lights.
They are developing the corner of Rt 15 and 29, and that complicates things, but turning right onto Warrenton Pike you very quickly cross Broad Run, and there are some marvelous stone houses down the roads that dump onto 29. I have marveled at them before, the placidity of the brown water and the dignity of the vertical stonework, and there is one of the gray metal Virginia Historical markers in front of one singular house that is far closer to the big highway than one would have intended in any rational time.
The sign says ‘Buckland," which I was able to read yesterday due to a particularly slow-moving truck and trailer combination ahead of me.
I dug out my copy of the worn manual of all the historic signs in the state when I got down to the farm and the bottom of the trunk, respectively. I found the full text, and was moderately surprised to discover that George Washington had known the place, and Lafayette had stayed there on his triumphant return to the former Colonies.
I resolved to stop and look more carefully, if I could do so without being rear-ended.
That is the problem with the marker across the four lanes, accessible only when coming north again on 29. The sun was bright, the light thin and the air bracingly cool on the drive down, where I passed the scene of the great review of troops conducted by Little Mac when he was relieved by General Burnside in 1862; they say the parade was three miles long, or much longer than the five stoplights that constitute that part of the Warrenton Bypass these days.
Anyway, I was thinking about Buckland as I came north again, thinking maybe I had got over the reaction to being overstuffed with turkey and might be able to do the leftovers for dinner. Traffic had a break, and glancing in the rearview, I swerved over to look at the interpretive marker on the other side of the highway from the Buckland sign.
This is just on the cusp of development; gentle green rolling hills still and almost too far for a rational commute, hamstrung by the bursting of the house bubble, you can still see the tendrils of development and growth flowing over Gainesville and headed west and south to run over the military base at Vint Hill, which you will remember as an Army-run NSA outpost closed under the provisions of BRAC 1993.
I really regret that decision. They had a commissary here and everything. it would have made life soooo convenient.
You will have to forgive me if my eyes widened in amazement when I looked at the sign. This was no marker to the historic mill and stagecoach town; this marker celebrated Custer’s First Stand, or the last victory of J.E. B. Stuart, depending on how you wish to interpret it.
It is after Gettysburg, where I stand, transfixed in time. The armies have swept north to Pennsylvania over the course of the summer, and the defeat and strategic withdrawal back to Virginia have left the Confederates on the defensive until the ending of it all.
For Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, stung by Lee’s criticism of his mad ride around the Union Army, victory is harder and harder to achieve. The enemy is numerous, and well equipped. At least until this day, which I find is late in the Bristoe Station Campaign, on October 19, 1863.
I was standing on Chestnut Hill, where Stuart has set a trap for Gen. Judson Kilpatrick’s Union cavalry division. A Division is two or more brigades; a brigade is at least two regiments of 1,200 troopers. I have no idea how many Federals there are on this field, and there is no one to ask. Call it five or eight thousand.
Using Gen. Wade Hampton’s cavalry division as bait, Stuart lured one of Kilpatrick’s brigades under General Davies here by retreating from Buckland Mill along the Warrenton Turnpike. The jaw of the trap was Confederate Gen. Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry division moving north, toward Buckland Mill from the east of here to cut off Kilpatrick’s line of retreat.
It is almost the same time that I have pulled over. By 3:30 that afternoon the light is lowering, Stuart’s gray clad troopers were coiled to strike unwitting Federals approached, when suddenly cannon fire erupted from the east. Fitzhugh Lee’s Confederates had struck the Union rear guard at Buckland, where Custer was nervous and alert.
Hearing the guns behind him, and being charged by North Carolina horsemen, Davies ordered a withdrawal that began in orderly fashion for more than a mile, even wheeling to fire on occasion. Stuart directed his forces to press harder and the Federals lost their heads and began to run. 1st Lt. William H.H. Cowles, of the 1st North Carolina Cavalry reported them “fleeing in great confusion, and pursued for several miles with unrelenting fury.”
The Confederates pushed their horses hard, passing riderless horses and running, dismounted blue troopers. Fitz Lee's Brigade chased the enemy more to the right, toward Gainesville. Back through New Baltimore, where the industrial park now sits, toward Buckland and Haymarket. Stuart’s men captured 250 Union troops, Custer's headquarters baggage and papers, two ambulances and discarded weapons in the vicinity of the new Harris Teeter supermarket and the faux colonial Chevy Chase Bank.
The victorious pursuit did not stop until it confronted the lines of Meade's I Corps, which were near the new freeway expansion at Haymarket..
So the Bristoe Campaign ended for the cavalry. From the infantry camps along the Rapidan to Stuart's bivouacs, Confederates began buzzing about the Buckland fight. Wags of the day called the affair the "Buckland Races," and the name stuck.
"It certainly stands alone," wrote Lieutenant Cowles later. “It was the steeple chase of the war."
The Buckland Races was also another milestone of sorts: nobody knew it then, but it marked Stuart's last victory over the Federal cavalry.
Of course, I knew it, and I knew that Stuart had seven months left to ride and see the stars. The first of those were just coming out as I slid the Bluesmobile across the crest of what had been the Union's Arlington Line, and into the garage beneath Big Pink.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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