Decision at Toms Brook: George Custer, Thomas Rosser, and the Joy of the Fight [Hardcover]

The Battle of Toms 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 Toms Brook cavalry affair centers on two young men who had risen toprominence 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 pathsCuster 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 cavalrymancourage, 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, Rossers gray troopers pursued and attacked the Federals. On the fourth day, October 9, the tables turned in the open fields above Toms 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 mountedoperations 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. Millers Decision at Toms Brook presents significant new material on Thomas Rosser and argues that his character was his destiny. Rossers decisions that day changed his life and the lives of hundreds of other menlcó