TL;DR–By virtue of their loose formations and personal histories, Mosby’s Rangers potentially used creeks like roads.
There’s a great factoid from a lecture Steve Knott gave at the US Army War College in 2013. As he puts it, the second largest city in the Confederacy after New Orleans was wherever the United States Army of the Potomac was at any given time.1
This Civil War, the war as it was lived and experience in real time, was a teeming, rambunctious, lively, and crowded affair. Today, not so much.
Those of us who still visit or even live in the War Between the States one hundred and sixty years later know this hard truth: the Civil War can be a lonely place.
Most of the work I do involves interrogating the dead to represent a haunted landscape of long-forgotten memories. This is mostly a solitary pursuit, a one-way dialogue. With that in mind, it’s a great and rare pleasure to gab with anyone who is similarly captivated by the Civil War.
Recently, I was lucky to get in touch with Robert F. O’Neill, whose detailed monographs Chasing JEB Stuart and John Mosby: The Union Cavalry in Northern Virginia from Second Manassas to Gettysburg and Small but Important Riots: The Cavalry Battles of Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville have been essential sources for piecing together my work.
Besides being a valuable opportunity to compare notes on Fairfax Court House circa 1863, talking with Bob was a powerful incentive to distill and refocus a now sprawling body of local research into a single important idea.
For John Mosby and his men, creeks could be roads.
MOSBY on DIFFICULT RUN
Surviving Federal dispatches and a raft of Mosby lore that paints Yankees as categorically inept make more sense in this new context. The Federals tasked with running down John Mosby in Fairfax County, Virginia, were beholden to formal maps and the known roads they depicted. Local Confederates—many of whom were vital components of Mosby’s command—had mental maps of low profile routes directly between milling centers. As critical hubs of hyperlocal economies, these mills were connected in some way or another to every farm in the area. More importantly, what roads that did exist in 1863 had often been purpose-built to access these mills.
Such landmarks and their attendant infrastructure loomed large in the identity of Difficult Run boys that scouted and fought for John Mosby. In an area rife with mills, these all-important places have been conceptually neglected in studies of the Civil War.
They exerted a gravitational pull on the surrounding landscape and altered the ecological conditions in unpredictable ways. At Fox’s Mill, the upper gristing facility was known to harness every drop of Difficult Run when in operation. A quick close of the dam resulted in a bone dry creek bed and prodigious flooding of the marshy land above. A mile north at the lower Fox Mill, a dam of stone construction was reliably used to create a large and deep swimming hole as late as the 1930s.
Many century (or even millennia) old patterns of resource extraction along Difficult Run carved paths through the basin that oriented themselves along or across the creek. In a Civil War-era Northern Virginia renowned for poor road quality and steep turnpike tolls, these creek-centric bridle paths would have vital pieces of unmapped infrastructure.
Beyond the scope of the manmade, there were clear advantages to be found along creeks, especially in the Difficult Run basin. As Robert O’Neill writes in Chasing JEB Stuart and John Mosby, and as I can attest from a childhood spent on Difficult and Little Difficult Runs, these deep-sunk waterways were known to generate long-lasting inversion layer fogs that jacketed the already bank-cloaked creek beds in a thick haze.2
These factors are the foundation of my creek hypothesis. Raw place potentials and the opportunities for maneuver and concealment that they afforded can be overlaid with data about the economic interests and loyalties of local property owners, their support for and participation in Confederate service, and the values that shaped life in the basin to create a map of interconnected runs that were the functional equivalent of alternative roads for those with access and knowledge.
BIGGER THAN JOHN
This hyperlocal theory is part of a much larger reassessment. A body of work is emerging to broadly highlight how important creeks were to the Civil War.
In All Roads Led to Gettysburg—a book I heartily recommend to anyone interested in Civil War fighting tactics—historian Troy D. Harman inverts traditional narratives about the war’s most celebrated battle to foreground natural resources, landform, and powerful spatial arrangements as determinants in the outcome of Gettysburg.
Harman’s extensive interpretation of the battlefield reconfigures the fight’s history away from an accidental run-in towards a deliberate maneuver by both armies to secure and position= forces around valuable water sources. Like a negative topographic image, he flips the familiar story of struggles for crests of famous ridges to a keen focus on the valleys between these heights.
When addressing the way Cemetery and Seminary Ridges loom—literally and figuratively—over the historiography of Gettysburg, Harman writes, “Beyond the fight itself, these ridge lines are best understood as cover for water used to sponge artillery rounds approximately 25,000 times, to nourish 60,000 horses and mules pulling wagon trains in the rear, for hydrating 175,000 military personnel in front and rear, and for treating approximately 27,000 wounded.”3
This an exceptional insight. One that removes much of the mysticism surrounding the Civil War and replaces it with a wise, administrative psychology in keeping with the tenor of the West Point education that prepared so many officers in both armies.
Even as I celebrate this utterly reasonable position that creeks were objects of great interest and value to men who made conscious and rational decisions about orienting around them, I need to leave room for the very same irrationality that Harman demyths.
I contend that the true power of creeks in the Civil War was equally unconscious and instinctive.
Mind body circuits connecting fragile psyches with flagging physiologies exerted tremendous influence over conflicts like the Civil War where closed order linear tactics defined the dominant mode of fighting. Unit cohesion, fighting spirit, maneuverability, and resilience in the 1860s was inordinately dependent on the behavior of individuals who formed the unit’s literal connective tissue.
Fear, vulnerability, exhaustion, and confusion can ignite destructive behavioral feedback loops that undermine a unit’s ability to fight. This fear, vulnerability, exhaustion, and confusion can be mitigated or multiplied as a function of position and landform.
Like any other animal, humans arrayed in an organized herd that is enduring effective threats from a more concealed or better positioned opponent can experience deep-set emotional responses that override strategic evaluations in favor of brute kinetics.
Creeks and creek beds are critical factors in this equation.
It’s interesting that I cannot think of a single instance where Civil War units that were developed into battle lines traveled parallel to the course of a creek.
Invariably, companies, regiments, brigades, divisions, and corps shift to advance on a creek perpendicular to its flow so that the entire length of the unit (and hence its ability to concentrate firepower) fronts to the creek bed.
I’m open to being wrong, but it seems to be a rule that the presence of a creek bed either dictates initial deployment or bends units in its vicinity into its hydrology features in predictable ways.
There are some obvious facets of reasoning that could affect this phenomenon.
First, creeks make for excellent defensive lines. Readymade breastworks could be occupied by skirmishers and concentrated riflemen in a protective schema that served as a force multiplier against attackers.
Even if a creek wasn’t occupied, its very presence was an obstacle to unit cohesion. Irregular paths and non-standard depths merged with poor footing and loose soils to create a disastrous potential for dissolving massed formations. In linear tactics that depended on sheets of volley fire, fording or even negotiating a creek as a battle line equated to crucial moments of lost firepower mired in disorganization.
Still more dangerous was the danger a creek presented when its course forced a partial crossing or even split a battle line—one part on this side and the other part across the run. If one wing of a regiment proceeded at regular speed, while the other became embroiled with the dog leg of a creek, that regiment could effectively large proportions of its firepower in a lengthy and complicated attempt to realign troops that were suddenly in or across a body of water. Once split, it would be easy to get bogged down, bent or ambushed without support.
On a deeper and even less conscious level, the very fact that creeks represent the lowest point of a slope would have been a powerful incentive to face them head on. Basic Civil War tactics were based on a system of guides by which NCOs and officers struggled to maintain straight lines focused on single geographic objectives. Often, as was the case with wheel maneuvers, men of authority had little say. It was up to individual soldiers to maintain lines of sight with one end of their regiment while pushing their arms against the opposite side to maintain unit cohesion.
This type of unit is inherently sensitive to landform. Men who want to fight and obey orders will still succumb to the downward pull of a path of least resistance. At a quick time pace of 110 steps per minute, even a handful of unintentional missteps can compound into a divergence that pulls a fighting unit apart.
Excellent soldiers with elite NCOs and efficient officers could still be susceptible to these erroneous footfalls when under fire or exhausted from a long march. As one side of a regiment slipped towards a creek at the foot of the hill, it would be easy for the rest of the unit to simply align on the errant element. Thus, a formation of any size could find itself unwittingly oriented parallel to a creek and receiving concentrated rifle fire on one or more flanks.
The disparity between instinct and intent is difficult to evaluate. What was a command initiative and what was unconscious? How much did these patterned interactions with creeks owe to good military sense and how much was the natural consequence of unwieldy linear formations sloughing deeper into paths of least resistance?
Kenneth Noe hints at a similar phenomenon in his book on Civil War weather, The Howling Storm. He discusses a small reformation of the Federal line at the Battle of Logan’s Cross Roads in language that anticipates my quandary.
“As the Confederates extended their flanks, however, the Union defenders withdrew up the road through a ravine,” he writes. “They halted at a stout split-rail fence that ran along an intersecting country road. This fence line soon became the vortex of battle, drawing an increasing number of troops.”4
Though not a statement on creeks, Noe’s reflection is couched in terms of geographic fixations, battlefield gyres, and gravitational guides that pulled and drew troops against plan and best interest into unfortunate positions.
My mind can’t help but wander to James Longstreet’s assault on July 2 at Gettysburg, in which her divisions were supposed to attack en echelon northwards up the Emmitsburg Road, but wound up deploying to assault eastwards instead. Terrain and enemy dispositions obliterated orders and created conditions that led to individual initiative from the divisional level down. This found Confederate forces aligned on Plum Run and Houck’s Ridge—land features of tremendously magnetic importance to men accustomed to Civil War combat.
Tantalizing Implications
The creek hypothesis is particularly engaging not just because it identifies patterned use of creeks, but because it implicates broadly held psychological phenomena and the way these mentalities engage and shape instincts. Specific topographies encourage particular maneuvers that exist beyond the pale of the conscious. In many ways, our everyday conduct is unknowingly shaped by the places we inhabit. Geography inspires mental processes and triggers the body into familiar behaviors. In this way, orientation to landform could be an asset or a tremendous liability.
As a commander of atomized troops that never fought in an ordered line of battle, John Mosby did not have the same problems with creeks that vexed his colleagues in mainline Confederate formations. This cleavage from tradition into a dissolved fighting paradigm is a critical evolution in military technology and an important clue to the viability of creeks in Mosby’s successes.
A group of loosely assembled men on horseback would not suffer the potentially catastrophic consequences that required others to orient themselves to creeks in predictable ways. Mosby’s Rangers were free to improvise, innovate and channel their base instincts for protection and maneuverability into a symbiotic, not adversarial, relationship with creek formations.
Difficult Run emerges as an important laboratory of this greater creek hypothesis. At one level, standard linear tactics employed by Federal forces failed to effectively counter or even identify a Rebel force that mimicked the creek bodies in which it hid by dissolving prescribed linear form and achieving a loose, watery formation.
In this way, John Mosby flowed across the hillsides and passed up and down creek beds that themselves tied into pre-existing paths unknown to any map. This pragmatic place-negotiation has never really been addressed in the field of Mosbyana, but happens to explain the phantasmagoric effect with which John Mosby was able to maneuver and thrive when the roads of Fairfax County were choked with Yankee cavalry.
On a deeper and more philosophically satisfying level, a rigorous consideration of creek topographies and their role in the Civil War brings a complex and previously neglected alternate geography to the foreground. There are unseen axes and invisible intersections where people, their needs, and their social worlds laced into both built infrastructure and patterns of weathering that carved convenient footfalls into the earth.
These relationships are so pervasive as to become utterly unconscious. People of the Civil War era and modern humans share the common experience of being drawn ever downwards into comfortable dispositions with specific places. In these invisible relationships, a wellspring of possibilities rich in contingency trails off the shoulders of a robust geographic determinism.
Understanding the way cultured vision, landform weathering, and the overlay of geography intersect emerges as a holy grail in a field of study far broader than just the Civil War.
