During the Civil War the Shenandoah Valley was a natural pathway
for invasion for both of the contending armies; it was also vital
to the safety of Washington, D.C. On May 15, 1864 the South's
General J. C. Breckinridge defeated General Franz Sigel at New
Market, a victory in which the cadets of Virginia Military
Institute figured strongly. At the beginning of the war it was
Stonewall Jackson's valley, with a legend of inviolability, but
Jackson had died in '63. The valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. .
. was Paradise, a place of extraordinary romantic beauty. General
Sigel was a German with a terrible fighting record who had been
politically placed in charge of a tremendous backwoods area
including all of Maryland and West Virginia and parts of Virginia.
Breckinridge had run for the presidency in 1860 and placed second
to Lincoln; now Sigel's forces outnumbered him four to one and he
set about garnering new troops. Every tree in the valley was in
bloom when the battle began with preliminary skirmishes and
diversions to harass Sigel. A call for assistance went to the
V.M.I. cadets, mostly boys aged 18, some as young as 15, who went
wild with cheering: they were the most fiercely motivated soldiers
on either side, and proved magnificent. At the sleepy hamlet of New
Market, Breckinridge brilliantly outmaneuvered Sigel, first with an
artillery duel, then by retaining complete authority over the
terrain and placing his troops exactly where he wanted them,
despite a lightning storm that sprang up. Straightforward military
history in a lush setting. Civil War buffs will find Davis to be
more than competent. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this book, William C. Davis narrates one of the most
memorable and crucial of the engagements fought for control of the
strategically vital Shenandoah Valley -- a battle that centered on
the farming community of New Market. There, Confederate forces
under the command of General John C. Breckinridge defeated the
numerically superior army commanded by the Union's hapless General
Franz Sigel. Outnumbered by a margin of four to one at the
beginning of the conflict, Breckinridge was desperate for
additional men. He sent out a call for assistance to the Virginia
Military Institute, and the school responded by sending 258 members
of its Corps of Cadets into battle -- some of them as young as
fifteen years old. In the action that followed, 57 of them would be
killed or wounded.
In vivid detail, The Battle of New Market tells of
Breckinridge's audacious domination of the battlefield and of
Sigel's tragic ineptitude; of the opposing troops, both seasoned
and untried; of the fate of prisoners and of the wounded; and,
perhaps most memorably, of the gallantry of the cadets who marched
from the classrooms of VMI directly into the heat of battle.
General
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