The Field of Lost Shoes: VMI Cadets at New Market
Virginia
On a rainy Sunday in May of eighteen sixty-four, something happened on the fields outside New Market, Virginia that has no real parallel in American military history. About two hundred fifty cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, some as young as fifteen years old, charged into a gap in the Confederate battle line and helped turn the tide of a battle they had no business being in.
The Confederate commander at New Market was General John C. Breckinridge, the former Vice President of the United States, who had watched his line buckle under heavy Union artillery on Bushong's Hill. His aide urged him to send in the VMI Corps of Cadets, who had marched about eighty miles from Lexington to join the fight. Breckinridge refused, saying, this will not do. I cannot expose them to such a fire as our center will receive. Then he looked at the gap again and said, put the boys in.
The cadets crossed a rain-soaked cornfield under rifle and cannon fire. The freshly plowed ground sucked the shoes off their feet in the mud. That stretch of ground is still called the Field of Lost Shoes. They reached the Union artillery, helped overrun two cannon, and Breckinridge's full Confederate force swept forward. The Union commander, General Franz Sigel, a German-born immigrant who had once commanded revolutionary forces in Baden, broke and fled north. His men were across the Potomac by nightfall.
Ten cadets were killed outright or died of wounds. Forty-seven more were wounded. The youngest was fifteen. The Virginia Military Institute still observes a Roll of Honor ceremony each May fifteenth, calling the names of the fallen cadets, to which each class answers, died on the field of honor.
The battlefield is preserved at New Market Battlefield State Historical Park. The Bushong farmhouse, which served as a field hospital during the fighting, still stands on the grounds, essentially unchanged from the day the boys marched past it.
