Terrible Swift Sword (9 page)

In western Virginia the mountain folk
were trying to secede from secession, paying off old scores with the tidewater
aristocracy and bringing on a series of fights that went sputtering from farm
to farm and from town to town in the remotest highland valleys—mean little
fights, altogether unromantic, in which generals lost reputations while private
soldiers and assorted private citizens lost their lives. When Virginia left the
Union, a majority of her people west of the Alleghenies dissented vigorously.
Delegates from the western counties convened, orated, passed resolutions and,
on June 11, announced that they had nullified the ordinance of secession and
had established something which, they insisted, was henceforth the legal
government of the state, with one Francis Pierpoint as governor. This expedient
seemed useful, and Washington agreed to pretend—for a while, at any rate—that
this creation was indeed Virginia; and the westerners prepared to carry their
dissent to its logical if unconstitutional conclusion by wrenching the whole
mountain district away from the Old Dominion and creating an entirely new
state—a state which, they believed, might be called Kanawha, but which
eventually would enter the Union as West Virginia.
¹

So
Union and Confederacy fought for title to this land, believing that much was
at stake. A Confederacy which held western Virginia could squelch the
mountaineer Unionists and could also carry the war to the Ohio River;
furthermore, by seizing the western half of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
it could cut Washington's only direct railway line to the west. The Federals
for their part felt that western Virginia offered both a back-door approach to
Richmond and a prime chance to cut the line of the vital Virginia and Tennessee
Railroad, which connected Richmond with Memphis and the Mississippi Valley.
Eastern Tennessee, in addition, seemed to contain as many Unionists as western
Virginia, and Union victories in Virginia might lead them to rally around the
old flag to very good effect. Campaigning in the mountains was extraordinarily
difficult, but the winner stood to get great advantages.

Things went badly for the South from the
start. During the spring a remarkably brilliant and personable young major
general, a former West Pointer turned railroad man, George Brinton McClellan,
led a Federal Army of Middle Westerners in from Wheeling and Parkersburg,
clearing the line of the B & O and smashing a small Confederate Army which
guarded the mountain passes where the great turnpike from the Ohio River ran
southeast to Staunton, in the Shenandoah Valley. McClellan did this with a
flair and a competence which made him famous, and after the Federal disaster at
Bull Run he was called east to reorganize and lead the shattered Army of the
Potomac. He turned the mountain department over to his second-in-command,
Brigadier General William S. Rosecrans, and went where opportunity called him.
It was up to Rosecrans to hold what had been won and to add to it if possible.

Not much could be added. It seemed, just
at first, that a victorious Federal Army ought to be able to march straight
through to tidewater or to the deep South, attaining glory either way. This was
possible, according to the maps. But the maps did not show how terribly bad the
roads were, or how barren was much of the country they crossed; the central
mass of the Alleghenies was an impossible spot for a major offensive because
no army which made a really lengthy advance could supply itself.
²
Besides, in August the Confederates undertook a strong counteroffensive, and
Rosecrans found that simply to hold the line would keep him busy enough.

This
counteroffensive was conducted by General Robert E. Lee.

Lee
was already famous—General Scott had rated him the best man in the army, and
many of the Old Army crowd doubtless would have agreed—and he was on his way to
military immortality, but what happened in the Alleghenies gave no hint that
one of history's greatest soldiers was here commanding troops in action for
the first time. If he had disappeared from view at the end of 1861 he would
figure in today's footnotes as a promising officer who somehow did not live up
to expectations. His western Virginia campaign, in short, was a failure. Most
of the failure, to be sure, was due to circumstances over which Lee had no
control, but part of it was his own. In this, his first campaign, he was still
learning his trade.

He had spent the spring and summer in
Richmond, most of the time as President Davis's principal military adviser—an
important post, which he filled creditably, but devoid of real authority and,
to a man with Lee's taste for action, woefully unexciting. Mr. Davis sent him
to the mountains in the hope that "he would be able to retrieve the
disaster we had suffered . . . and, by combining all our forces in western
Virginia on one plan of operations, give protection to that portion of our country."
⁸
It was probably the most thankless assignment of Lee's career.

The Federals had about 11,000 soldiers in
western Virginia. Detachments held the Baltimore & Ohio line, in the north,
and some 2700 under Brigadier General Jacob Cox were off to the southwest in
the Kanawha Valley, apparently meditating an advance along the Lewisburg Pike
in the direction of Clifton Forge. The rest were in the center, in the general
vicinity of Cheat Mountain, on the road that led to Staunton, guarding the
country which McClellan's victories had won. The Confederates in western
Virginia could muster more men, but for a variety of reasons—ranging from the
bad health of the soldiers to the incompetence and jealousy of some of their
commanders—they would not be able to put all of them into action.
⁴

The principal
Confederate force was a loosely knit army of perhaps 10,000 stationed at the
town of Huntersville in the valley of the Greenbrier, south of the Staunton
turnpike. It was led by Brigadier General W. W. Loring, stiff, touchy and
experienced, a competent officer who unfortunately could never forget that he
had ranked Lee in the Old Army. He was clearly vexed at Lee's arrival, and Lee
carefully refrained from assuming direct command of the army; his own charter
of authority was a little vague, and he contented himself with setting up his
headquarters tent near Loring's, assuming apparently that the man was soldier
enough to accept a superior's guidance if he were allowed to save a little
face.
⁵
Farther south, theoretically operating against the Federal
General Cox but actually contending furiously with each other for authority
and public favor, were two politicians who had become brigadiers—Henry A. Wise,
former Governor of Virginia, who had been sent here with his "legion"
in the belief that his popularity with western Virginians would be an asset to
the cause, and former Secretary of War John B. Floyd, whose military
incompetence had not yet been made manifest.

Conditions for campaigning were bad. It
began to rain in mid-August and kept on raining for weeks, making the rough
mountain roads almost impassable; a supply wagon carrying six or eight barrels
of flour would be dragged along inches at a time, the wagon bed scraping the
ground, wheels axle-deep in mud. Typhoid fever, measles, and other diseases
went through the Confederate camps so that in a short time nearly a third of
the army was out of action; a North Carolina regiment, which came in with 1000
men, was down to a strength of 300 in a few weeks, although it had not been in
combat at all. One of Lee's staff officers, writing after the war, said that
although he saw the Army of Northern Virginia in all of its desperate trials he
never felt as heartsick "as when contemplating the wan faces and the
emaciated forms of those hungry, sickly, shivering men" whom Lee commanded
in western Virginia in the summer and fall of 1861. A weary private wrote,
"I am of opinion that we are near the jumping off place," and
concluded that people who talked ecstatically about the beautiful mountain
country "never had the extraordinary pleasure of wearing their feet out to
their ankles walking over the mountains to see the romantic scenery"; he
recalled "short rations, thin and ragged clothing, rain, mud, water and
measles, all mixed up together."
⁸

The
same rains fell on the Federals, who had to tramp the same roads and contend
with the same camp maladies; yet there seemed to be a difference. As sardonic
an individual as Ambrose Bierce, who served here with the 9th Indiana Volunteers,
wrote long afterward that he looked back on western Virginia "as a
veritable realm of enchantment" and said that boys raised in the flat
country of the Middle West found the mountains inspiring and picturesque.
"How romantic it all was!" he cried. 'The sunset valleys full of
visible sleep; the glades suffused and interpenetrated with moonlight; the long
valley of the Greenbrier stretching away to we knew not what silent
cities." He and his comrades, he recalled, still felt that early, innocent
patriotism "which never for a moment doubted that a rebel was a fiend
accursed of God and angels—one for whose extirpation by force and arms each
youth of us considered himself specially 'raised up.'"
⁷
Soldiers could stand almost anything, it seemed, when they knew they were
winning.

And the Federals were winning. Early in
September, Cox's column was endangered by the approach of wrangling Wise and
Floyd, and Floyd's men had routed an Ohio regiment on August 26 in a sharp
little fight at Cross Lanes, not far from the mouth of the Gauley River. But
Wise and Floyd just could not work together—Cox wrote that Wise "did me
royal service by preventing anything approaching unity of action between the
two principal Confederate columns"—and Rosecrans marched down to the
rescue, leaving a brigade under Brigadier General J. J. Reynolds at Cheat
Mountain and on September 10 attacking Floyd at Carnifix Ferry, on the Gauley
River, forcing that general to beat a speedy retreat. Wise and Floyd drew back
to the mountains west of Lewis-burg, each accusing the other of failing to come
to his aid; and Lee, seeing an opportunity in the weakening of the Cheat
Mountain contingent, moved up to attack Reynolds.
⁸

The
opportunity was there, if it could be grasped. Reynolds's Federals were spread
out over a wide area, with a force at Cheat Mountain pass, another on the
summit of the mountain, and the rest ranged along the valley of the Tygart
River all the way to the town of Elkwater. The Confederates had an advantage in
numbers; despite all the sickness, Lee probably had 6000 men ready for action.
On September 8, after a conference with General Loring, Lee drew up his battle
plan; in substance, it called for the convergence of several columns in Tygart
River valley, with one force striking for the top of the mountain in order to
turn the position in the pass. If all went well, Reynolds's whole force could
be hemmed in and destroyed.

Nothing
went well. The battle plan itself was far too elaborate, calling for
co-ordinated operations by five separate columns in a country so rough and
tangled that contact between the moving columns was impossible; even veterans
led by veteran generals would have had trouble with it, and later in the war
Lee rarely tried anything quite so intricate. The rains continued, completing
the ruination of roads which had been atrocious enough to begin with. Through
September 11 and 12 the soldiers floundered along, wet and tired, dimly aware
that things were going wrong. One detachment lost its sleep, on a night of
especially heavy rain, when a bear blundered into camp and set the men caroming
into one another in the dripping blackness. The detachment that was supposed to
carry the mountaintop—the movement on which all the other movements
hinged—found the place too strongly held and too well fortified to be carried;
the Federals were alerted, the surprise which Lee had counted on was gone for
good, the men ate the last of their food and could get no more without
returning to camp: and, all in all, the elaborate plan fizzled out in dismal
failure without ever producing a battle at all. Sensibly, Lee called everything
off and took the army back to its starting point.
⁹
Never again would
Confederates try to regain the Cheat Mountain fastness.

Lee had no leisure to brood over
misfortune. The mess that Wise and Floyd had concocted seemed likely to let
Rosecrans advance as far as his resources of supply would permit, and it was up
to Lee to provide a solution. Ordering Loring to leave enough men to watch
Reynolds's brigade and to bring the rest down to the Lewisburg Pike, Lee went
on in advance to see what could be done.

Having
retreated from Carnifix Ferry, Floyd had dug in, some twenty miles to the
southeast, at a spot called Meadow Bluff, and he had ordered Wise to join him.
Floyd had the rank, and was entitled to issue orders, but Wise refused to obey.
Instead, he built entrenchments ten miles nearer the enemy, on Little Sewell
Mountain, and demanded that Floyd come up to support him. The situation was
fantastic. Between them, Wise and Floyd had fewer than 4000 men, and the
advancing Rosecrans had substantially more than twice that many. Yet the two
Confederates were flatly refusing to join hands against him, each man staying
doggedly where he was and calling on the gods, the government, and General Lee
to witness how stiff-necked and perverse the other man was. The situation was
complicated, as Lee quickly discovered, by one final oddity. By military law
General Wise was as wrong as a man could be, but tactically he was dead right;
the position he had chosen was far better than the one Floyd had selected, and
if Rosecrans was to be stopped the place to stop him was obviously Little
Sewell Mountain. Lee ordered all hands to concentrate there, and quietly
notified Richmond that one of these two generals would have to be relieved. Mr.
Davis recalled Wise, and a semblance of harmony descended on the Confederate
camp while Lee got ready for the Federal assault.
¹⁰