Robert Rhodes resigned from the faculty of the Virginia Military Institute in 1849 after his colleague Thomas Jackson received a promotion that Rhodes believed should have gone to him. The two men parted ways, and for twelve years their lives ran on separate tracks. But the Civil War brought them back together, and history would tie their names in a bond neither could have foreseen. By 1861, Jackson had become one of the Confederacy’s most feared commanders, and Rhodes, now a brigadier general, served under him.
It was Rhodes’s division that spearheaded Jackson’s famous flank attack at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. That attack crushed the Union Eleventh Corps and secured one of the Confederacy’s most brilliant victories. But the triumph turned to tragedy when Jackson was mortally wounded by friendly fire on the night of the attack. From his deathbed, the dying general recommended that Rhodes be promoted to major general, a final act of trust from the man who had once been his rival.
The promotion came through in time for the Gettysburg campaign. On July 1, 1863, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia collided with Union forces west of Gettysburg. Rhodes commanded a division in Lieutenant General Richard Ewell’s Second Corps, and his men were ordered into the fight as the battle unfolded in the fields and ridges north of town. Rhodes launched his assault from Oak Hill against the right flank of the Union First Corps.
The attack was poorly coordinated at first. His brigades went in piecemeal, and the cost was heavy. The Union infantry, dug in along the ridges, met the Confederates with stubborn fire. Casualties mounted on both sides.
But Rhodes kept pressing, and eventually the weight of his division broke through. He routed the division of Major General John C. Robinson and drove the Federals back through the town of Gettysburg itself. It was a significant achievement, one of the key breakthroughs on that first day’s fighting.
Yet the victory came at a heavy price. Hundreds of his men were dead or wounded, and the division had been badly mauled. For the next two days, as the battle raged at Little Round Top, the Peach Orchard, and Cemetery Ridge, Rhodes’s division sat idle. The fighting had shifted south of town, and his men, exhausted and bloodied from the first day, were not committed to the attacks on July 2 or the climactic assault on July 3, known forever after as Pickett’s Charge.
Rhodes watched the final Confederate offensive fail from a distance. Gettysburg ended in a Confederate retreat, and the Army of Northern Virginia limped back across the Potomac. Rhodes had done his part on the first day, but the battle as a whole was lost, and the war was turning against the South. Like his old commander Stonewall Jackson, Robert Rhodes would not live to see the end of the conflict.
The war ground on through 1864, and the Union army under General Philip Sheridan pushed into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. On September 19, 1864, the two armies met at the Battle of Third Winchester. Rhodes, now thirty-five years old, commanded a division in the Confederate force attempting to stop Sheridan’s advance. The fighting was fierce and confused, with the Confederates repeatedly counterattacking to hold their ground.
In the early afternoon, as the Confederate line began to buckle under overwhelming Union pressure, Rhodes led his division in a counterattack to steady the position. It was in this moment that a Federal artillery shell struck him down. He fell mortally wounded on the field, just as Jackson had fallen at Chancellorsville. Rhodes was carried from the battlefield, but his wound was fatal.
He died that evening. His body was taken to Lynchburg, Virginia, the town where he had been born, and he was buried in a Presbyterian cemetery there. He left behind a pregnant widow and a one-year-old son. His daughter was born a few months after his death, a child who would never know her father.
The war continued for another six months, but for the Rhodes family, it had already exacted its final cost. The man who had once resigned over a slight from Thomas Jackson had risen to become one of Jackson’s most trusted subordinates, and like Jackson, he gave his life for the Confederacy in the autumn of the war. His name, tied to Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, would be remembered among the South’s fallen generals, but the personal story behind it ended in a Lynchburg cemetery, with a widow and two young children left to carry on without him. The battle at Winchester sealed the outcome of the Shenandoah campaign.
Sheridan’s victory there opened the valley to Union control and deprived the Confederacy of one of its last supply sources. Rhodes’s death, coming at that critical moment, removed one of the army’s most capable division commanders. The war had already taken Stonewall Jackson.
Now it had taken the man Jackson had recommended to succeed him in rank, and the Confederate army, shrinking and exhausted, had that much less to hold onto as the final months approached.