Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  The thirty-five counties of Virginia west of the Shenandoah Valley and north of the Kanawha River contained a quarter of Virginia's white population in 1860. Slaves and slaveowners were rare among these narrow valleys and steep mountainsides. The region's culture and economy

  31. Harold Hancock, "Civil War Comes to Delaware," CWH, 2 (1956), 29–56.

  were oriented to nearby Ohio and Pennsylvania rather than to the faraway lowlands of Virginia. The largest city, Wheeling, was only sixty miles from Pittsburgh but 330 miles from Richmond. For decades the plebeian mountaineers, underrepresented in a legislature dominated by slaveholders, had nursed grievances against the "tidewater aristocrats" who governed the state. Slaves were taxed at less than a third of their market value while other property was taxed at full value. The lion's share of state internal improvements went to the eastern counties, while the northwest cried out in vain for more roads and railroads. "Western Virginia," declared a Clarksburg newspaper during the secession winter of 1860–61, "has suffered more from . . . her eastern brethren than ever the Cotton States all put together have suffered from the North."32

  The events of 1861 brought to a head the longstanding western sentiment for separate statehood. Only five of the thirty-one delegates from northwest Virginia voted for the secession ordinance on April 17. Voters in this region rejected ratification by a three to one margin. Mass meetings of unionists all over the northwest coalesced into a convention at Wheeling on June 11. The main issue confronting this convention was immediate versus delayed steps toward separate statehood for western Virginia. The stumbling block to immediate action was Article IV, Section 3, of the U. S. Constitution, which requires the consent of the legislature to form a new state from the territory of an existing one. The Confederate legislature of Virginia would not consent to a separate state, of course, so the Wheeling convention formed its own "restored government" of Virginia. Branding the Confederate legislature in Richmond illegal, the convention declared all state offices vacant and on June 20 appointed new state officials, headed by Francis Pierpoint as governor. Lincoln recognized the Pierpoint administration as the de jure government of Virginia. A rump legislature, theoretically representing the whole state but in practice representing only the northwestern counties, thereupon elected two U. S. senators from Virginia, who were seated by the Senate on July 13, 1861. Three congressmen from western Virginia also took their seats in the House.

  When the Wheeling convention reconvened, in August 1861, a prolonged debate took place between separatists and conservatives. The latter found it difficult to swallow the idea that a legislature representing only one-fifth of Virginia's counties could act for the whole state. But the convention finally adopted an "ordinance of dismemberment" on

  32. Smith, Borderland in the Civil War, 105.

  August 20, subject to ratification by a referendum on October 24, 1861, at which the voters would also elect delegates to a constitutional convention for the new state of "Kanawha." All of these proceedings occurred against the backdrop of military operations in which a Union army invaded western Virginia and defeated a smaller Confederate army. This achievement was crucial to the success of the new-state movement; without the presence of victorious northern troops, the state of West Virginia could not have been born.

  Union forces moved into western Virginia for strategic as well as political reasons. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Ohio River ran through this region and along its border for two hundred miles. The most direct rail link between Washington and the Midwest, the B & O would play an important role in Civil War logistics. In May 1861 the Confederates at Harper's Ferry had already cut the railroad while rebel militia in northwest Virginia occupied the line at Grafton and burned bridges west of there. Western Virginia unionists pleaded with Washington for troops; preoccupied with defense of the capital, General Scott could offer little help. But across the Ohio River, Governor William Dennison of Ohio came to the rescue. Like many other states, Ohio raised more regiments than called for in Lincoln's April 15 proclamation. Dennison was particularly fortunate to have the assistance of George B. McClellan, William S. Rosecrans, and Jacob D. Cox, all of them destined for prominent Civil War commands. McClellan and Rosecrans had graduated near the top of their West Point classes and had gone on to successful civilian careers in business and engineering after resigning from successful careers in the army. Cox was an Oberlin graduate, an outstanding lawyer, a founder of the Republican party in Ohio, and a brigadier general of Ohio militia. These three men organized the regiments raised by Governor Dennison and his equally energetic neighbor, Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana. Taking command of these troops, McClellan sent a vanguard across the Ohio River on May 26 to link up with two unionist Virginia regiments.

  Their initial objective was the B & O junction at Grafton, sixty miles south of Wheeling. The colonel commanding the Confederate detachment at Grafton withdrew his outnumbered forces to Philippi, fifteen miles farther south. Three thousand Union soldiers, in service only five weeks, pursued with forced night marches through the rain over wretched roads at a pace that would have done credit to veteran troops. Although a planned pincers attack on the 1,500 Confederates at Philippi miscarried on June 3, the rebels fled twenty-five miles southward to Beverly with such haste that northern newspapers derisively labeled the affair "The Philippi Races."

  On June 21, McClellan arrived at Grafton to take personal command of the campaign. Thirty-four years old, possessing charm, culture, great ability and an even greater ego, McClellan exhibited in West Virginia a nascent Napoleonic complex that manifested itself in the writing of dispatches and proclamations, though not in the handling of troops in battle. "Soldiers!" he declaimed in an address to his troops at Grafton. "I have heard that there was danger here. I have come to place myself at your head and to share it with you. I fear now but one thing—that you will not find foemen worthy of your steel."33

  Robert E. Lee also hoped that McClellan's soldiers would meet worthy foemen. But Lee, functioning in Richmond as a sort of commander in chief of Virginia's armed forces, had few men and less steel to spare for faraway western Virginia. He scraped together a few thousand reinforcements and sent them to Beverly under the command of Robert S. Garnett. With 4,500 men "in a most miserable condition as to arms, clothing, equipment, and discipline," Garnett fortified the passes through which ran the main roads from the Shenandoah Valley to Wheeling and Parkersburg.34

  By the end of June, McClellan had 20,000 men in trans-Allegheny Virginia. Five or six thousand of them guarded the B & O, which had been reopened to Washington. McClellan sent another 2,500 men under Jacob Cox to move up the Kanawha River to Charleston. With the remaining twelve thousand, McClellan planned to encircle and trap Garnett's little army. Leaving four thousand men to make a feint against Laurel Mountain, McClellan took three brigades to launch the main attack at Rich Mountain eight miles to the south. Rather than assault the Confederate trenches head-on, McClellan accepted Rosecrans's plan for a flank attack by one brigade while McClellan with two others stood ready to exploit whatever successes Rosecrans achieved. Guided by a local unionist over a narrow mountain track, Rosecrans's Ohio and Indiana regiments rolled up the rebel flank on July 11 and killed, wounded, or captured 170 of the 1,300 Confederates at a cost of about sixty casualties to themselves. Misinterpreting the sounds of battle through the woods and laurel thickets, McClellan feared that Rosecrans was losing; he therefore failed to launch the follow-up attack, and allowed most of

  33. O.R., Ser. I. Vol. 2, p. 197.

  34. Ibid., 236.

  the rebels to escape. Jacob Cox, writing later as a historian of the campaign, pointed out that McClellan in West Virginia "showed the same characteristics which became well known later. There was the same overestimate of the enemy, the same tendency to interpret unfavorably the sights and sounds in front, the same hesitancy to throw in his whole force when he knew that his subordinate was engaged."35

  Despite McClellan's timidity
, Rosecrans's attack sent the Confederates into a pell-mell retreat. Five hundred of them were subsequently captured, while Garnett's main force of three thousand at Laurel Mountain, with the Federals now in their rear, fled over bad roads to the north and east. Union brigades pursued and on July 13 attacked Garnett's rear guard at Corrick's Ford, where Garnett lost his life—the first Civil War general killed in action. Although most of the rebels got away, the campaign cleared northwest Virginia of organized southern forces. Northern newspapers hailed this as a stunning success. McClellan did not hesitate to take the credit. On July 16 he issued another proclamation that read well in the press, which had begun to call him "The Young Napoleon": "Soldiers of the Army of the West! . . . You have annihilated two armies. . . . You have taken five guns, twelve colors, fifteen hundred stand of arms, one thousand prisoners . . . Soldiers! I have confidence in you, and I trust you have learned to confide in me."36

  McClellan's victories enabled the reconvened Wheeling convention to enact the separate statehood ordinance in August. Before the referendum on October 24 took place, however, the Confederates made a determined effort to recapture western Virginia. By August they had managed to get 20,000 troops into the trans-Allegheny region, outnumbering the Federals there for the only time in the war. But most of these men were untrained, many were armed with unreliable old smoothbore muskets or even with squirrel rifles and shotguns, and one-third of them were on the sick list—mostly with measles and mumps which struck down farm boys who had never before been exposed to these childhood diseases. Sick or well, five thousand of the Confederate troops served in two independent commands headed by John B. Floyd and Henry A. Wise, former governors of Virginia and eager secessionists who now thirsted after military glory. In July, Jacob Cox's Ohioans had maneuvered Wise's brigade all the way up the Kanawha River to White Sulphur

  35. Cox, "McClellan in West Virginia," Battles and Leaders, I, 137.

  36. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 2, p. 236.

  Springs, a hundred miles east of Charleston. Floyd's brigades reinforced Wise, but the two men cordially hated each other and spent more time feuding than planning a counterattack against Cox.37

  Meanwhile the government in Richmond sent Robert E. Lee to take overall command of Confederate forces in western Virginia. Lee went personally to Huntersville, where 10,000 wet, sick, hungry Confederate soldiers confronted 3,000 Union troops dug in on the high ground of Cheat Mountain, a few miles south of the Rich Mountain pass from which Rosecrans had driven the rebels in July. The southern people expected great things of Lee. But this time he disappointed them. His complicated plan for a convergence of five separate columns against two Union positions was frustrated by the difficult terrain, the inexperience of his officers, the fatigue and sickness of his men—and by the weather. Rain had been falling during most of the forty-five days before Lee's troops moved out on September 10. Mud slowed their movements to a crawl. After some skirmishing that cost each side fewer than a hundred casualties had eliminated all chance of surprise, Lee gave up and called off the operation on September 15. The Federals remained in control of the Allegheny passes. Supply problems prevented further Confederate operations in this area. With the typical tall-tale humor of soldiers, the men told stories of mules that died of exhaustion hauling wagons over muddy roads and sank into the mire until only their ears were showing. About this time Lee began to grow a beard, which came in gray.

  Lee took most of his troops south to the Kanawha Valley to reinforce Floyd and Wise, whose advance had been checked by Rosecrans at Carnifex Ferry on September 10. Jefferson Davis finally resolved the disputes between these two political generals by recalling Wise to Richmond. When Lee arrived in the Kanawha region his troops outnumbered the Federals, but once again rain, sickness, and terrain—plus Rose-crans's effective generalship—foiled a Confederate attempt to trap the enemy. Rosecrans pulled his forces back to a more defensible position on October 6. Seeing no chance to attack them successfully, Lee returned to Richmond at the end of October. He soon went to South Carolina to shore up Confederate coastal defenses, leaving behind a damaged reputation. In August, Richmond newspapers had predicted that he would drive the Yankees back to Ohio; in October they mocked him as "Granny Lee" and "Evacuating Lee." The acerbic Richmond

  37. John B. Floyd to Jefferson Davis, Aug. 16, 1861, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

  Examiner pronounced Lee "outwitted, outmaneuvered, and outgeneraled."38

  During the first half of November, Rosecrans resumed his offensive. With much maneuvering but little fighting, he forced Floyd to withdraw entirely from what is today West Virginia. The Kanawha Valley as well as northwest Virginia thereafter remained under Union military control—except for periodic rebel raids and constant guerrilla warfare. Most of the Kanawha Valley had voted for secession in the May 23 referendum; Confederate sentiment persisted there even after this region became part of the new state of West Virginia. Like Missouri and other parts of the border South, West Virginia suffered from a savage war within the larger war—neighbor against neighbor, bushwhacker against bushwhacker. Rebel guerrillas tied down thousands of Union troops, whose counterinsurgency efforts enjoyed little more success than similar efforts in recent wars. As the exasperated Union infantry commander Robert H. Milroy put it in October 1862: "We have now over 40,000 men in the service of the U. S. in Western Va. . . . [but] our large armies are useless here. They cannot catch guerrillas in the mountains any more than a cow can catch fleas. We must inaugurate a system of Union guerrillas to put down the rebel guerrillas."39 Milroy suited action to words. He carried out such ruthless counter-guerrilla warfare that the Confederates put a price on his head.

  Union military control of western Virginia was firm enough to permit the statehood referendum to take place as scheduled on October 24, 1861. The voters overwhelmingly endorsed a new state, but the turnout was small. Pro-Confederate voters in more than a dozen counties boycotted the election. Nevertheless, the constitutional convention in January 1862 established boundaries that included fifty counties, and the "restored state legislature of Virginia" sanctioned the creation of the new state of West Virginia on May 23, 1862. About 4 percent of the people in the proposed new state were slaves. Recognizing that a Republican Congress was unlikely to admit another slave state, the constitutional convention came within one vote of enacting gradual emancipation. Congress did indeed require emancipation as a condition of West Virginia's

  38. Quoted in William M. Lamers, The Edge of Glory: A Biography of General William S. Rosecrans (New York, 1961), 42.

  39. Milroy to Francis Pierpont, Oct. 27, 1862, quoted in Richard O. Curry, A House Divided: A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia (Pittsburgh, 1964), 75.

  statehood in a bill passed by the Senate in July 1862 and by the House in December. West Virginians accepted this condition. The new state came into the Union on June 20, 1863, with a constitution freeing the slaves born after July 4, 1863, and all others on their twenty-fifth birthday.

  Republicans in 1861 viewed events in western Virginia as a model for the reconstruction of Union governments in other parts of the upper South. East Tennessee seemed the most promising locale for this effort. Unionists there held two conventions in 1861, at Knoxville on May 30–31 and at Greeneville on June 17–20. Former Whigs and Democrats cooperated warily in this effort against the greater enemy. Their leaders were Andrew Johnson, a lifelong Democrat, and William G. Brown-low, a former Methodist clergyman turned fighting editor of the Knoxville Whig whose profane language toward secessionists belied his nickname of "Parson" Brownlow. Johnson was the only U.S. senator from a seceding state who remained loyal to the Union. Brownlow stayed at the helm of his newspaper, flew the American flag" over his home, and vowed to "fight the Secession leaders till Hell freezes over, and then fight them on the ice." Of plebeian origins, Johnson and Brownlow expressed the resentments of their nonslaveholding constituents against the secessionist gentry. "A cheap
purse-proud set they are," said Johnson, "not half as good as the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow." Brownlow insisted that east Tennessee yeomen "can never live in a Southern Confederacy and be made hewers of wood and drawers of water for a set of aristocrats and overbearing tyrants."40

  Unionists in east Tennessee could accomplish little without northern military support. Lincoln continually pressed his generals for action in this theater. But distance, logistical difficulties, and Kentucky stood in the way. So long as Lincoln was nursing unionism in Kentucky by respecting her neutrality, no northern troops could cross the state to reach east Tennessee. Even after Union forces moved into Kentucky in September 1861, the forbidding terrain and lack of transport facilities over the Cumberland Mountains made military operations difficult, especially in winter. While two railroads, a navigable river, and a macadamized turnpike carried troops and supplies from Ohio to the main

  40. Brownlow quoted in Foote, Civil War, I, 51; Johnson quoted in Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago, 1960), 87; Brownlow in Knoxville Whig, Jan. 13, 1861, quoted in James W. Patton, Unionism and Reconstruction in Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill, 1934), 57.

  theaters of operations in western Virginia, no such routes ran from Union bases in eastern Kentucky 150 miles over the mountains to Knoxville.

  In November, however, word of a northern invasion reached Union partisans in east Tennessee. With arms smuggled to them by northern agents they went into action, burning five railroad bridges and ambushing Confederate outposts. But the Yankees did not come. The reason was William Tecumseh Sherman. Commander of Union forces in Kentucky, the volatile, red-haired Sherman had not yet developed the sangfroid he displayed later in the war. Apprehensive about a buildup of Confederate forces in central Kentucky, Sherman called off the planned invasion of east Tennessee by a small army under General George H. Thomas, who had approached within forty miles of the Tennessee border. Sherman's inflated estimates of Confederate strength and his waspish comments to reporters caused hostile newspapers to call him insane. The administration relieved him of command and transferred him to an obscure post in Missouri. Sherman's career, like Robert E. Lee's, was almost eclipsed by failure before the war was seven months old.