although the sun shone bright on the cliffs below, was shrouded in haze, completely forbidding all observation; and it was not till near noon, after a march of seven miles, which began at dawn and was practically unopposed, that Fremont reached the Shenandoah.  There, in the charred and smoking timbers of the bridge, the groups of Federal prisoners on the plain, the Confederates gathering the wounded, and the faint rattle of musketry far down the Luray Valley, he saw the result of his timidity.

Massing his batteries on the western bluffs, and turning his guns in impotent wrath upon the plain, he drove the ambulances and their escort from the field.  But the Confederate dead and wounded had already been removed, and the only effect of his spiteful salvoes was that his suffering comrades lay under a drenching rain until he retired to Harrisonburg.  By that time many, whom their enemies would have rescued, had perished miserably, and “not a few of the dead, with some perchance of the mangled living, were partially devoured by swine before their burial."* (* Dabney volume 2.)

The pursuit of Tyler was pressed for nine miles down the river.  The Ohio regiments, dispersed at first by the Confederate artillery, gathered gradually together, and held the cavalry in check.  Near Conrad’s Store, where Shields, marching in desperate haste to the sound of the cannonade, had put his two remaining brigades in position across the road, the chase was stayed.  The Federal commander admits that he was only just in time.  Jackson’s horsemen, he says, were enveloping the column; a crowd of fugitives was rushing to the rear, and his own cavalry had dispersed.  The Confederate army, of which some of the brigades and nearly the whole artillery had been halted far in rear, was now withdrawn; but, compelled to move by circuitous paths in order to avoid the fire of Fremont’s batteries, it was after midnight before the whole had assembled in Brown’s Gap.  More than one of the regiments had marched over twenty miles and had been heavily engaged.

Port Republic was the battle most costly to the Army of the Valley during the whole campaign.  Out of 5900 Confederates engaged 804 were disabled.*

(* The troops actually engaged were as follows:—­

4 Regiments of Winder’s Brigade 1200

The Louisiana Brigade, 5 regiments 2500

Scott’s Brigade, 3 regiments 900

31st Virginia

40th Virginia } 600

Artillery (5 batteries) 300

Cavalry 400

5,900)

The Federal losses were heavier.  The killed, wounded, and missing (including 450 captured) amounted to 1001, or one-fourth of Tyler’s strength.