The Battle of Cedar Creek not only decided final control of the Shenandoah Valley, the "breadbasket" of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, in the waning months of the Civil War, but it was also in microcosm a vivid example of the nearly four years of fighting that preceded it. Certainly it included a fascinating cast of characters and more than its share of enduring poignancy. Especially moving were the deaths of two of the best and the brightest on both sides, Stephen Dodsen Ramseur of North Carolina, a Major General at 27, and the brilliant and revered 29-year-old Charles Russell Lowell of Massachusetts. Among others who met on that field were the two rival commanders, tiny Phil Sheridan and blasphemous Jubal Early; George Armstrong Custer; John Gordon; George Crook; Tom Rosser; two future presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley; and many more. In thoroughly exploring their lives and prior experiences in the war the narrative includes descriptions of 1st and 2nd Manassas, Seven Pines, Gaines' Mill, Antietam (Sharpsburg), Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, and Gettysburg. No more dramatic battle could be imagined than what occurred that October day at Cedar Creek. It began with a pre-dawn assault by the Confederates that drove the Federal left wing back, followed by Sheridan's famous 14-mile ride on his legendary horse, Rienzi, to rally his retreating army, and ended in growing darkness as the victorious Federals drove the Confederates from the field. The book closes with an account of the subsequent fates of the main figures of Cedar Creek, which included for some participation in the surrender of Appomattox barely six months later, and ranged from fighting Indians in the West to politics and building railroads. none of them, the author points out, ever forgot Cedar Creek or ceased to write or talk about it, whether with generosity or bitterness toward former comrades and foes.
Author
Thomas A. Lewis is a veteran journalist (National Wildlife, Smithsonian magazines) and broadcaster (Voice of America) who has written six non-fiction books, two of which received favorable critical attention nationwide. He became alarmed about the state of the environment while working as the executive editor of the Time-Life Books 16-volume series on the earth sciences, “Planet Earth,” and later when, as roving editor for National Wildlife Magazine, he traveled from Alaska to Costa Rica to chronicle the distress of animals and their ecosystems. It was while writing “EQ Index,” an annual assessment of the state of the US environment for National Wildlife and The World Almanac, that he began to suspect that pollution and exploitation of natural resources had reached a point of no return. That conviction led to his latest non-fiction work, Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age—and to the present work of fiction, which imagines how that crash might happen, and how an American family might deal with it. He lives on a “sustainable-ready” farm in West Virginia where he has learned, he says, that “if my life depended on sustainable living I’d be dead now.”
