by John Waugh
The past three months had been fast-moving for George McClellan. The bombardment of Fort Sumter and President Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand state militia to put down the rebellion had turned West Pointers overnight into hot national commodities. The states of the North urgently needed experienced military talent to train and command the raw volunteers streaming to their standards.
No West Pointer was hotter than McClellan. Three states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York—all sought the confident, talented young former captain, who seemed to know all about how war worked. It was McClellan who had written the exemplary study of the Crimean War in the mid-fifties. It was McClellan who knew as much as anybody in the country about strategy on a grand scale, and who had since become a happily married man and a railroad president in Cincinnati.
McClellan wanted to fight for his native state. He wrote his friend Major Fitz John Porter on April 18 that he would take the Pennsylvania command if it was offered. He wrote his wife, Nelly: “I feel that I owe much to my state. I am proud of it & would like to make it proud of me.”5
But by April 23, the expected call had not yet arrived from Pennsylvania. So McClellan boarded a train in Cincinnati and headed for Harrisburg to speak personally with Governor Andrew G. Curtin. However, since Ohio’s governor had asked him for an assessment of the military situation in the Ohio Valley, he agreed to stop over in Columbus on the way to Harrisburg.
Ohio Governor William Dennison was a Republican lawyer-businessman who lacked the politician’s charisma and was therefore not very popular with the electorate. But he knew how to run large operations, and he was skillful and persuasive.6 He sent Jacob D. Cox, a fellow lawyer-politician and new brigadier general of the Ohio militia, out to meet McClellan at the station.
The railroad executive who stepped down from the train to greet Cox still had his boyish looks, although his waistline was beginning to crowd his belt. Cox found him “muscularly formed, with broad shoulders and a well-poised head”—“a good head firmly planted by a neck of bovine force upon ample shoulders,” as a reporter from the Washington Evening Star put it. He moved quickly and gracefully on slightly bowed legs. His brow was small, contracted, and furrowed, suggesting some distant disquietude. His hair was dark auburn and his moustache short, thick, and reddish. He wore plain traveling attire and a narrow-brimmed soft felt hat. He seemed to Cox to be what he was, “a railway superintendent in his business clothes.”7
However, as Cox listened to McClellan and the governor talk, he was impressed. The West Pointer’s appearance was quiet and modest, but when drawn out he showed no lack of confidence in himself. Dennison outlined the problems that the new war presented. The state was expected to raise thirteen regiments, about ten thousand troops, one of every seven called for by the president. Organizing that rabble would require extraordinary leadership. Having carefully explained the setup, the governor offered McClellan the job on the spot, and he accepted. Pennsylvania was too late. New York was out of the running. McClellan’s employers at the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad would simply have to understand. Even Nelly, “you, who share all my thoughts,” would have to be told later.8
Dennison rammed a special bill through the Ohio legislature that same day. By evening McClellan had rocketed from a retired captain in the regular army to major general of volunteers and commander of all Ohio troops. The next day the offer of the Pennsylvania command arrived, twenty-four hours too late. It had preceded Ohio’s bid, but had been sent by mistake to Chicago.9
Out at the armory in Columbus the next morning, McClellan began to see the dimensions of his problem. He and Cox found only a few cases of smooth-bore muskets, without belts, cartridge boxes, or other essentials. There were two or three worn-out smooth-bore six-pounder field pieces, and a tangled heap of mildewed harnesses. That was all.
“A fine stock of munitions on which to begin a great war,” McClellan muttered.10
He immediately shot off requisitions to Washington for arms and equipment and issued his first general order to his undrilled troops. “Discipline and instruction,” he lectured them, “are of as much importance in war as mere courage.” Indeed, he said, discipline and efficiency were “the surest guarantees of success.”11
William S. Rosecrans, a volunteer colonel from the West Point class of 1842 who had left the presidency of an unsuccessful kerosene refinery in Cincinnati to answer the call, laid out a training camp seventeen miles east of Cincinnati on the Little Miami Railroad. They called it Camp Dennison and McClellan took his raw volunteers there and began hammering them into an army on his anvil of discipline.
The war department in Washington watched McClellan with a smile of satisfaction. Within the month it elevated him to command of the entire Department of the Ohio, including Indiana, Illinois, western Pennsylvania, western Virginia, and Missouri. It then promoted him to major general in the regular army—an instant catapult through five permanent ranks. A month into the war and not yet thirty-five years old, McClellan commanded all of the region west of the Alleghenies. He outranked everybody in the army except Winfield Scott, the general in chief himself, who antedated him by four decades.
The caldron in the new major general’s expanding command was already seething. To the east across the Ohio River, western Virginia was in turmoil. The government in Richmond had taken the state out of the Union. But mountain Virginia, the two-fifths west of the Alleghenies, was balking. It was pro-Union, wanting nothing to do with secession.
This troubled Major General Robert E. Lee, the brilliant former captain of engineers and lieutenant colonel of the Second Cavalry, who now commanded Virginia’s armed forces. In late April Lee had sent McClellan’s classmate, Tom Jackson, to Harpers Ferry to harass the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s top management. Now Lee ordered Colonel George A. Porterfield, another Mexican War veteran, to the western Virginia rail town of Grafton. Porterfield’s orders were to “select a position … for the protection and defense of that part of the country.” Lee told him he must hold both branches of the B&O to the Ohio River.12
When Porterfield reached Grafton in mid-May, he found himself a man without much of an army; recruits to the Confederate cause were hard to come by. And in Wheeling, a hundred miles to the northwest, a B&O freight agent named Benjamin Franklin Kelley had already cobbled together an opposing regiment. Kelley was a transplanted Yankee, who had migrated to Virginia from New Hampshire as a youth and brought his pro-Union convictions with him. He began organizing the first Union regiment south of the Mason-Dixon Line after the fall of Fort Sumter.13
McClellan was at Camp Dennison on Sunday afternoon, May 26, when word came in from over the river that Porterfield had just burned two rail bridges near Grafton. McClellan hurried back to Cincinnati and began sending telegrams. One went to Kelley with orders to set his First Virginia Volunteers in motion toward the destroyed bridges. Another launched supporting regiments out of Ohio and Indiana over the river and into the mountains.
From his dining room, in the utmost haste, with the ladies of his family conversing all about him, and without consulting anyone, McClellan sent messages of inspiration and reassurance to his army and to the people of western Virginia. His army was coming, he told the Virginians. But they shouldn’t be alarmed. It meant them no harm; it was coming only to rid them of “armed traitors.”14
As Kelley hurried toward the burned bridges, Porterfield backed out of Grafton. He moved his modest force of 600 Confederate infantry and 175 cavalry fifteen miles south, to Philippi on the Tygart Valley River. Clattering over a new covered toll bridge called the Monarch of the River, the Confederates filed into the sleepy little Barbour County seat and bivouacked. Philippi, where the only thing exciting that ever happened was a minor stir over a lawsuit at the courthouse, snapped awake. Suddenly it was occupied by one army and threatened by yet another.15
McClellan’s advance under Colonel Kelley pulled into Grafton on Porterfield’s trail Thursday, May 30. Big “Ben” Kelley wore a go
atee, and a brocaded vest under a semimilitary coat, the coat being the only genuine piece of military clothing in the entire regiment. His men had come to the war wearing an irregular assortment of jeans and work clothes, and armed with knives and clubs of their own devising and rifles imported from Massachusetts. What ammunition they had they carried in their pockets.16 But they were ready for a fight even if they didn’t look it, and were being augmented hourly by the better-dressed, better-armed Ohioans and Indianans that McClellan was sending from over the river. With this force Kelley proposed to attack the Confederates at Philippi on Sunday, June 2.
The Confederate troops waiting there were even less prepared for war than their Union counterparts. Arms that Porterfield requested hadn’t arrived. Such firepower as his small command possessed came down to assorted pistols, shotguns, and old flintlock muskets for which there were no cartridges, only loose powder and shot.17
Before Kelley could hurl his growing command against Porterfield’s inadequate one, Brigadier General Thomas A. Morris of the Indiana volunteers arrived in Grafton. Morris was Indiana’s first brigadier, a no-small-talk professional, another of those West Point engineers, class of 1834, who had planned and built the new Union rail depot at Indianapolis. A fellow Indianan saw him as “a man so quiet, so grave, so almost stolid in countenance and demeanor, with features so blunt, and coloring so dark and dead.”18
Whatever he may have looked like, he outranked Kelley. Assuming command, he postponed the attack on Philippi by one day—from Sunday to Monday. Then he complicated it with a plan calling for pinpoint coordination. Two columns were to loop toward Philippi during the night. At precisely 4:00 in the morning on June 3 they were to arrive together from separate directions, cannonade, seize, and occupy the town.
Ebenezer Dumont, an Indiana colonel, would lead the first column. Dumont was a politician-soldier, a former two-term U.S. congressman and veteran of the Mexican War. He was said to be sallow, lean, irascible, and given to occasional attacks of devoutness.19 He was to arrive in Philippi at 4:00 A.M., occupy the heights above the town, and at a prearranged signal bombard the Confederates with his two six-pounders.
Kelley would lead the second column. He was to feint a move against Harpers Ferry and then make for Philippi from the east. His orders were to attack in consort with Dumont’s cannonade and cut off any attempted Confederate retreat down the turnpike. The plan looked good on paper; it all depended on the timing.
Porterfield waited at Philippi with a troubled mind. Reports were arriving hourly warning of an imminent attack. Two comely young Confederate sympathizers from Fairmont, the Misses Mary McLeod and Abbie Kerr, rode half the day on Sunday to warn him that five thousand Yankees had passed through their town with plans to attack him either that night or the next morning. Porterfield ordered his little army to be ready to march.
Then it began to rain, a pitiless, pounding rain, a downpour that drenched everything—Morris’s two columns now on the march, the Confederate pickets on watch, and everybody’s spirits generally. As the night wore on and the rain poured down, the pickets came to believe that nobody, least of all Yankees, would be out on such a night. They therefore headed for cover, and the rest of the Confederate encampment went to bed. Porterfield’s plan was to get out of town early the next morning.20
On through the pitch of night, through the driving rain, through mud “deep in the ravines, slippery on the hill-sides,” the Union columns slogged toward Philippi. At 3:00 in the morning Dumont found himself still five miles out and ordered his troops into double time, cajoling them as they ran: “Close up, boys! Close up! If the enemy were to fire now, they couldn’t hit one of you.”21
Out ahead of Dumont’s column ranged a thoroughgoing extrovert named Frederick West Lander, a volunteer colonel and aide-de-camp to McClellan. Staying closed up behind the athletic Lander was not easy for any army. At age thirty-nine, Lander was already a nationally acclaimed transcontinental explorer. He had played a hand in five major pathfinding surveys on the western frontier in the 1850s, including one in the Pacific Northwest in 1853 with then Lieutenant George McClellan. Lander was born in Salem, Massachusetts, with the middle name of William, but had since changed it legally to West, more appropriate to his calling. Lander was of commanding stature and great physical strength, who in his spare time wrote stirringly patriotic poetry and lectured women’s groups on the fine arts. Only eighteen months before in San Francisco he had topped even himself by marrying Jean Margaret Davenport, the Shirley Temple of her time. A famous and beautiful stage actress whose small voice chimed like a silver bell, Miss Davenport, now thirty-two, had dazzled audiences on two continents since her days as a child prodigy in England. On this wet, early summer night, her dashing new husband was hurrying toward Philippi to dazzle the rebels in western Virginia.22
With this restless romantic reconnoitering in front and Dumont shouting for his men to close up behind, the column arrived on Talbott Hill above the town miraculously on time. But Kelley had not yet arrived, and nobody had taken Mrs. Thomas Humphreys into account.
The sound of tramping feet outside her house on Talbott Hill in the early predawn had awakened Mrs. Humphreys, a Philippi housewife, mother, and Confederate sympathizer. She watched with ascending indignation as Dumont’s troops deployed outside, and the two brass six-pounders were rolled into place under Lander’s supervision and pointed toward the town. Everything was soon ready. They had only to await Colonel Kelley’s arrival and the pistol shot that was to signal the six-pounders to open fire. As the moments ticked by and Kelley still didn’t arrive, Lander’s cannoneers grew ever more itchy-fingered.
Into this tense tableau Mrs. Humphreys unexpectedly injected herself, her strong Confederate sympathies, and her young son Oliver. She put Oliver on a horse with directions to hie into town and warn Colonel Porterfield. He got only as far as the first Union soldiers, who dragged him from his mount. Mrs. Humphreys rushed from the house, beat off the soldiers, and put Oliver back in the saddle. The soldiers pulled him down again. Then Mrs. Humphreys drew a pistol from her bodice and fired.23
It wasn’t the signal Lander’s light-fingered cannoneers had been waiting for, but it would do. They opened up with their two field pieces. A cannonball shrieked into town, jolting Porterfield’s sleeping Confederates awake, making Oliver’s trip unnecessary, and persuading them that their contemplated departure had been delayed long enough.
What followed has come down to us as the “Philippi Races,” a genuine shirttail skedaddle. The Confederates leaped from their bedrolls and “pell-mell, helter-skelter, without boots, without hats, without coats, without pantaloons, through the town, up the southern road, over the wall of hills, away they fled, incontinently, ingloriously, ignominiously.” They were soon well ahead of Porterfield’s more orderly anticipated withdrawal scheduled for later that morning.24
Some eyewitnesses believed that the rebels were “in too great a hurry about taking to their heels to wait for any such perilous ceremony as putting on their clothes.” Colonel Dumont reined up to watch the departure and muttered that they were “great on a run, if not much for a fight.”25
As this juncture Kelley arrived, fifteen minutes late. Seeing the Confederates leaving without his input, he plunged into town in headlong pursuit. Careening into the streets about the same time was the unsinkable Colonel Lander, no longer able to restrain himself on Talbott Hill. Mounted on his “gallant gray,” and looking “more like a demon than a man,” he exploded off the hill at a breakneck gallop, leaped a fence, thundered through the bridge hard on the heels of the charging infantry, and dashed through the streets in advance of the column.26
While Lander was rocketing down the hill, over the bridge, and through the town, Kelley was getting shot. Who shot him is a matter of some debate. The hyperactive Colonel Lander, easily the busiest man on the battlefield, is said in one account to have captured the suspect. In this version Kelley was shot in the right breast with an old-fashioned horse pisto
l by an eastern Virginian named Simms from down around Richmond.27
A second version had him shot in the right breast by a green mountain boy named John W. Sheffee. Young Sheffee, this account has it, “took dead aim at Colonel Kelly, and when the gun cracked he, with great glee, came jumping forward to his companions, and exclaimed, ‘Sergeant, I have done it!’ ‘Done what?’ ‘I flopped that big fellow from his horse that was coming after us so savage.’ ”28
Whoever shot him, the big fellow thought himself done for. “I expect I shall have to die,” he murmured. “I would be glad to live, if it might be, that I might do something for my country; but if it cannot be, I shall have at least the consolation of knowing that I fell in a just cause.”29
McClellan, monitoring the action closely from Cincinnati, wired condolences through General Morris: “Say to Colonel Kelley that I cannot believe it possible that one who has opened his course so brilliantly can be mortally wounded.… If it can cheer him in his last moments tell him I cannot repair his loss and I only regret that I cannot be by his side to thank him in person. God bless him”30
For McClellan, Kelley’s anticipated death was the only stain on an otherwise perfect morning. For the next two days the Confederates continued to put distance between themselves and the Monarch of the River. They didn’t finally stop until they reached Huttonsville thirty miles to the south with absolutely nobody still in pursuit, not even Lander. They were not to be blamed for running, one critic said. That was understandable under the circumstances. What he blamed them for was that they hadn’t stopped running when the Yankees stopped, which had been two days earlier.31
As the rebels fled south they gradually became more presentable. Farmers living a half-dozen miles or more from Philippi testified “that the brave cavaliers came up to their doors begging for pairs of breeches to cover their nakedness.”32
Philippi was the first land engagement of the Civil War and George McClellan’s first victory. Although he was in Cincinnati 250 miles away, he was getting the credit. It had been relatively bloodless. Only five Union soldiers were wounded. Even Kelley, who was thought surely dying, lived to be thanked personally by McClellan, to be promoted to brigadier general, and to fight throughout the war. Owing perhaps to the nimbleness of the retreat, only two Confederates were shot at all. Each lost a leg, one of them to a random cannonball. Nobody died.