A Thousand Words a Battle: Fisher’s Hill
Fisher’s Hill
September 22, 1864
The flanks of Maj. Gen. Jubal Early’s Confederate defenses atop Fisher’s Hill were within shouting distance of each other. The Tar Heels under Brig. Gen. Robert Johnson controlled the left, and beyond them, Southern horsemen patrolled. Being isolated was nothing new to the men of Johnson’s brigade; in fact, in the previous engagement, they had made a lone stand along the Berryville Turnpike, slowing the advance of Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan’s entire Union army in the opening stages of the battle of Third Winchester.
Unlike that successful retrograde movement, though, the action at Fisher’s Hill would be a catastrophe for Johnson, the North Carolinians, and Early’s entire army. Beginning at approximately 4:00 p.m., screaming, blue-coated soldiers burst up the wooded hillside athwart the left flank of Johnson’s Brigade. These were the men of Col. Joseph Thoburn’s Division in the Army of West Virginia under Brig. Gen. George Crook, aptly nicknamed the “Mountain Creepers”—and they had just crept up the hill to surprise Johnson.
The volleys that erupted showered the Tar Heels with lead. One of those rounds struck the right leg of 23-year-old Catawba County native George Raab. The bone shattered below the knee, the “ball ranged down the leg bone, around the marrow, and came out at my heel.”[1] The war was over for this three-year veteran of the Confederacy.
That ending, though, bespoke of a new beginning, a relationship that would culminate four decades later with marriage.
After a harrowing trip to Woodstock, Virginia, Raab rallied from the amputation and a gangrene infection in time to meet a resident of the town “fourteen years of age, red-headed curls hanging down her back,” Miss Sallie Cullers.[2] What started with visits every day from Sallie led to the involvement of her entire family, which assisting with Raab’s recovery. Sallie’s mother helped make poultices and her father constructed Raab’s first crutches.
Their marriage came late in life. Raab had been married before, but his first wife passed away numerous years earlier. However, as the report in the Confederate Veteran aptly stated, “The memory of her soldier boy [Raab] never faded, and she married him in her old age. . . . She was true to the Confederacy.”[3]
[1] George Raab, George Raab: The Civil War Memoir of a Catawba County Tar Heel, Rebecca I. Alghrany, editor (Goosepen Studio & Press, Conover, NC, 1994), 56.
[2] Ibid 59.
[3] Ibid, 65.
