The Battle of Tom's Brook, recalled one Confederate soldier, was "the
greatest disaster that ever befell our cavalry during the whole war."
The fight took place during the last autumn of the Civil War, when the
Union General Phil Sheridan vowed to turn the crop-rich Shenandoah
Valley into "a desert." Farms and homes were burned, livestock
slaughtered, and Southern families suffered.
The story of the Tom's Brook cavalry affair centers on two young men who
had risen to
prominence as soldiers: George A. Custer and Thomas L. Rosser. They had
been friends since their teenage days at West Point, but the war sent
them down separate paths--Custer to the Union army and Rosser to the
Confederacy. Each was a born warrior who took obvious joy in the
exhilaration of battle. Each possessed almost all of the traits of the
ideal cavalryman--courage, intelligence, physical strength, inner fire.
Only their judgment was questionable.
Their separate paths converged in the Shenandoah Valley in the autumn of
1864, when Custer was ordered to destroy, and Rosser was ordered to stop
him. For three days, Rosser's gray troopers pursued and attacked the
Federals. On the fourth day, October 9, the tables turned in the open
fields above Tom's Brook, where each ambitious friend sought his own
advancement at the expense of the other. One capitalized upon every
advantage fate threw before him, while the other, sure of his abilities
in battle and eager to fight, tried to impose his will on unfavorable
circumstances and tempted fate by inviting catastrophe. This
long-overlooked cavalry action had a lasting effect on mounted
operations and influenced the balance of the campaign in the Valley.
Based upon extensive research in primary documents and gracefully
written, award-winning author William J. Miller's Decision at Tom's
Brook presents significant new material on Thomas Rosser and argues that
his character was his destiny. Rosser's decisions that day changed his
life and the lives of hundreds of other men. Miller's new study is Civil
War history and high personal drama at its finest.
