The Blood-Tinted Waters of the Shenandoah

Decades after the Civil War’s end, Confederate veteran John Alexander Stikeleather reflected on his experiences as a soldier in the 4th North Carolina Infantry. He had served in many engagements during his four years of service, but there was one in particular that Stikeleather believed should “never be forgotten”: Cool Spring.

While largely overlooked or treated as a footnote to Gen. Jubal A. Early’s raid on Washington in the summer of 1864, the fight at Cool Spring, which one soldier characterized as “a sharp and obstinate affair,” proved critical to Washington’s immediate safety. The virtually unknown combat became a transformative moment for those who fought along the banks of the Shenandoah River in what ultimately became the war’s largest and bloodiest engagement in Clarke County, Virginia.
The Blood-Tinted Waters of the Shenandoah examines Gen. Horatio Wright’s pursuit of Jubal Early into the Shenandoah and the clash on July 17–18, 1864. It analyzes the decisions of leaders on both sides, explores the environment’s impact on the battle, and investigates how the combat impacted the soldiers and their families—in its immediate aftermath and for decades thereafter.

Years of archival research—including an investigation into the backgrounds of the Union and Confederate soldiers who perished in the fighting—coupled with intimate knowledge of the battlefield helps preserve the memory of the fight that should “never be forgotten.”

Author Jonathan Noyalas’s study offers not only a history of an overlooked engagement in the oft-contested Shenandoah Valley, but—as Pulitzer Prize finalist Brian Matthew Jordan notes in the book’s Foreword—“a keen reminder that Civil War battles are rich laboratories in which to observe the human experience in all its complexity.”