Good's Farm: The Death of Turner Ashby

On June sixth, eighteen sixty-two, near Harrisonburg in the Shenandoah Valley, a skirmish at Good's Farm cost the Confederacy one of its most celebrated cavalry commanders. Colonel Turner Ashby had earned a near-mythic reputation as the daring horseman who screened Stonewall Jackson's brilliant Valley Campaign all spring, but on this afternoon his luck ran out.

Union cavalry from the First New Jersey Regiment charged his position and were ambushed by Confederate infantry hidden behind stone walls. The Confederates captured the Union commander, Colonel Percy Wyndham, and a follow-up infantry engagement sent Ashby charging forward on foot after his horse was shot beneath him. Within a few steps, he was shot through the heart. Stonewall Jackson wrote that as a partisan officer he never knew his superior. He was thirty-three years old. The loss of Ashby removed the eyes of Jackson's army at a critical moment, and the Valley Campaign reached its end at Cross Keys and Port Republic just days later.