Hayes's & Kitching's Lines

Hayes's soldiers tried to fight off Ramseur's attack near this present-day neighborhood.

NPS Photo

Quick Facts

Location:

Frederick County, Va.

Significance:

Part of Cedar Creek Battlefield

With their camps overrun, Hayes’s and Kitching’s Federals withdrew toward this ridge to fight back against Gen. Stephen D. Ramseur’s advancing Alabamians, Georgians, and North Carolinians. The 8th Vermont fought on Hayes’s far right, near the monument. Kitching’s “Provisional Division” lined up on Hayes’s left, extending toward Interstate 81. Three cannons of Capt. Frank Gibbs's Battery L of the 1st Ohio Light Artillery anchored the Federal left. 

Ramseur’s division of four brigades, close to 3,000 veteran soldiers, advanced on Hayes and Kitching. As the Confederates approached, Hayes rode over to Kitching and asked the young New Yorker if his men could hold. “This is a good position,” Kitching said, “and I can hold on here if you can hold on down there.” Perhaps offended by the younger man’s response, Hayes replied, “You need not feel afraid of my line... I will guarantee that my line will stand.”

Hayes had no sooner spoken than the Federal lines began to dissolve. Confederates outflanked Kitching to the north, and others were doing the same to Hayes’s right. Capt. Gibbs’s cannons fired, but it did no good. As he wrote later, with “my supports giving away...to the advance of the enemy, I immediately limbered up and got away just in time to save my guns.” Hayes also had a close call, as his horse was suddenly killed. Temporarily stunned by the fall, Hayes managed to “hobble” away to avoid being captured.

Kitching rode among his men, and tried to rally them, but to no avail. Maj. Edward Jones, commander of the 6th New York Heavy Artillery, was hit, and Kitching cried out: “Stop men, you will not let Jones be made a prisoner!” Some New Yorkers turned back to help save Jones. Shortly afterwards, Kitching was hit on the foot. He refused to leave the field of battle, however, until the loss of blood caused him to almost lose consciousness. In January 1865, Kitching would die of this wound.

Ramseur’s Confederates outflanked Hayes and Kitching, and their lines soon disintegrated. “A heavy column of the enemy could be seen marching as if to gain the pike between us and Winchester,” US Col. Hiram Devol wrote, “and the troops on our right had given way, exposing the brigade to a flank fire from that direction.” Their withdrawal across the Valley Pike, which Devol wrote “was done in some confusion,” doomed the fate of Thomas’s brigade further south.