The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  William Rosecrans, who had been sent to Washington by Governor Dennison to acquire pay and outfitting for the Ohio troops, wrote McClellan from there two days after the battle. The news from Philippi, he reported, “created a lively sensation of pleasure here.” It was welcome solace for a city then draped in mourning for McClellan’s old friend and Abraham Lincoln’s old rival, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who had died on the day of the Philippi Races.33

  It was not, however, welcome news in Richmond. It gave General Lee no lively sensation of pleasure. Control of western Virginia was too important, losing it more than he cared to concede. So he set in motion another attempt to hold it. This time he sent his own adjutant, forty-two-year-old Brigadier General Robert S. Garnett, into the mountains.

  Garnett was an officer of great skill and reputation, another of those scions of the southern aristocracy with a West Point education, class of 1841. His father had been a five-term U.S. congressman from Virginia and his mother was the daughter of a French general. In the war with Mexico Garnett had been Major General Zachary Taylor’s aide-de-camp. In the early 1850s he had returned to West Point as commandant of cadets and instructor of infantry tactics. Then tragedy struck. On the Northwestern frontier in 1857 he was away from his garrison on an expedition when bilious fever swept away his young wife and infant son.34

  He had been “proud, reserved, and morose” even before that, “cold as an icicle to all.” Now he became “more frozen and stern and isolated than ever”—and more single-minded.35 “In every one else,” a fellow Confederate officer wrote, “I have seen some mere human traits, but in Garnett every trait was purely military.”36

  This “dreary-hearted man” arrived in Huttonsville on June 14 to take over from the luckless Porterfield. By the next evening he had his inherited army on the move northward. His small force was being beefed up daily by volunteers from eastern Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee. But it still looked inadequate for the job at hand.

  Two turnpikes ran through the mountains in north central western Virginia. One curled out of Philippi south through Belington. The other swung through Buckhannon over the rugged pass at Rich Mountain. The two roads met at Beverly on the floor of the Tygart River valley and continued on as one into eastern Virginia. Garnett detached about a thousand of his troops to the western foot of Rich Mountain, and took the rest—about four thousand men—to Laurel Hill outside of Belington to face the federal army encamped at Philippi. At those two “gates to the northwestern country,” fifteen miles apart, he dug in.37

  The country he hoped to hold was stunningly scenic. It had been impressing people long before Garnett ever saw it. The earliest explorers who had to beat their roadless way over its rolling ranks of humped mountains, had grudgingly conceded its dramatic beauty. Robert Fallam, a member of the first expedition into the country in 1671, wrote of mountains so steep “that we could scarse keep ourselves from sliding down again.” From one such elevation he saw only other “very high mountains lying to the north and south as far as we could discern.” It was, he wrote, “a pleasing tho’ dreadful sight to see the mountains and hills as if piled one upon another.”38

  For Garnett there was nothing pleasing in it. It was all dreadful, alien, and hostile, an uncongenial land in which he could attract but a handful of local recruits against a well-endowed enemy. The roads on which to move an army were few, narrow, and difficult. The mountainsides, of which there were far too many, were blanketed by laurel brakes stretching “like inland seas, and with never-fading leaves and snake-like branches interlaced.”39 Its terrain was difficult even for skirmishers to penetrate, and positions suitable for placing and handling artillery were rare.40

  Garnett appealed to Lee for more men and arms, and Lee did his best. But as he moved into position at Laurel Hill, bountifully fragrant with the “cologne” of the western Virginia summer, Garnett felt doomed. The night before leaving Richmond he had said: “They have not given me an adequate force. I can do nothing. They have sent me to my death.”41

  Watching the joyless Garnett from Ohio, McClellan decided it was time for him to go personally to the front. On June 20 at about 11:30 in the morning he left Nelly, now six months pregnant, and caught a train into the mountains.

  The first thing the young general met on the way was adulation, a “continual ovation all along the road.” “At every station where we stopped,” he wrote Nelly, “crowds had assembled to see the ‘Young Napoleon.’ Gray-headed old men & women; mothers holding up their children to take my hand, girls, boys, all sorts, cheering and crying, God bless you! I never went thro’ such a scene in my life & never expect to go thro’ such another one.”42

  To this applause he passed over the Ohio River and into Virginia at Parkersburg. On June 23 he was in Grafton. From there he hailed his troops: “Soldiers! 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.”43

  McClellan had come into the mountains with more than neo-Napoleonic pronouncements. He also had a plan. He would move Morris down from Philippi to Laurel Hill to keep Garnett “amused.” He would place himself at the head of the larger force and personally lead the main attack at Rich Mountain. He would crush the rebel encampment there and sweep on into Beverly. Cut off and compromised in his rear, Garnett could only surrender, retreat, or be destroyed. The spine of Confederate strength in western Virginia would be snapped once and for all.

  McClellan expected “to thrash the infamous scamps before a week is over—all I fear is that I can’t catch them.” However, he was having some trouble fixing on the number of scamps this might involve. “It is very difficult to learn anything definite about our friends in front of us,” he confessed in his daily letter to Nelly. “Sometimes I am half inclined to doubt whether there are many of them; then again it looks as if there were a good many.” Before leaving Grafton at the end of June he was estimating enemy strength at six to seven thousand, most of it with Garnett at Laurel Hill.44

  Against this enemy, whatever its true size, McClellan could count on “some 18 rgts, 2 batteries, 2 co’s of cavalry at my disposal—enough to thrash anything I find. I think the danger has been greatly exaggerated & anticipate little or no chance of winning laurels.” He had a few organizational wrinkles to iron out. “Everything here needs the hand of the master,” he explained to Nelly, “& is getting it fast.”45

  By July 2 the master was camped fourteen miles south of Clarksburg en route to Buckhannon and writing home that “I doubt whether the rebels will fight—it is possible they may, but I begin to think that my successes will be due to manoeuvers, & that I shall have no brilliant victories to record.”46

  On Independence Day, one of the hottest in memory, McClellan was in Buckhannon, still glorying in “perfect ovations” and being looked on wherever he and his army went as the “deliverer from tyranny.”47 He stood bareheaded in the blazing sun on July 4 and watched his delivering army pass in review, eight thousand strong; he had left four thousand more with Morris on Garnett’s front. One western Virginian watched the soldiers march by and said, “Lordy, I didn’t know there were so many folkses in the world.”48

  On July 5 McClellan wrote Nelly that the enemy was in his front and that he would probably move forward the next day, and come in contact with them the day after. He promised her that “I shall feel my way & be very cautious, for I recognize the fact that everything requires success in my first operations. You need not be at all alarmed as to the result—God is on our side.” He confided to her that “I realize now the dreadful responsibility on me—the lives of my men—the reputation of the country & the success of our cause.”49

  On July 7 his army brushed aside a small Confederate detachment at the Middle Fork Bridge midway between Buckhannon and the rebel stronghold at the foot of Rich Mountain, now called Camp Garnett. Two days later his force pulled up warily at Roaring Creek two miles from th
e Confederate position. From that distance McClellan could not tell if the enemy had steel enough for his soldiers. But he believed there were more of them than he had originally thought. He now put the total Confederate force at 10,000—8,000 at Laurel Hill and 2,000 before him at Rich Mountain. That was about twice their actual numbers, in both cases.50

  Dug in at his front were but thirteen hundred Confederates, positioned there on June 14 by Garnett. They were now under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Pegram, a haughty West Pointer from the class of 1854, who had just arrived and whose familiarity with his surroundings was absolutely zero. Pegram had been among those who had first heard of this war in Dabney Maury’s living room in Santa Fe only three months before.51

  McClellan, whose acquaintance with the terrain was not much better than Pegram’s, lowered his binoculars and ordered an armed reconnaissance. He hoped to stage a brilliant turning movement at Rich Mountain patterned on General Scott’s much admired maneuver at Cerro Gordo in the Mexican War. But his reconnaissance soon told him it wouldn’t work. The thick laurel-studded wilderness on both sides of the road seemed impenetrable. There was no one at hand who knew the way through that maze to the Confederate rear. What he needed was what Scott had—Robert E. Lee to find a way. McClellan hated to do it, but he decided that a direct attack on the Confederate front was unavoidable. William Rosecrans, now a brigadier general and back from Washington, would lead the assault.

  On the eve of his first battle in the field McClellan was not happy with any of his top commanders. He complained to Nelly that he had “not a Brig Genl worth his salt.” He considered Morris a “timid old woman.” Newton Schleich “knows nothing.” Rosecrans was “a silly fussy goose.” McClellan had wanted an entirely different, personally hand-picked set of brigadiers. He hadn’t gotten them, so he was making do. He did have with him, however, one hand-picked officer he trusted implicitly: his father-in-law, Randolph B. Marcy, the legendary explorer, who was his inspector general.52

  Rosecrans, his leading brigadier, was forty-two, nearly six feet tall, lean and compact. He had an ample brow, a hawk nose, a well-trimmed beard, and penetrating, restless eyes. He had been converted to Catholicism at West Point, and was now an impassioned student of the Bible who loved to argue theology. He was also a workaholic, rarely retiring earlier than 2:00 in the morning, often not until 4:00, and sometimes not at all. He seemed to his bleary-eyed staff to have no need of sleep whatever.53

  He was sleepless as usual the night before the proposed assault at Rich Mountain—up fussing, as McClellan might have described it—when one of his lieutenants brought in David Hart. Rosecrans had been looking all over for Hart, a young twenty-three-year-old with Union sympathies and an intimate knowledge of the tangled terrain around them. His father lived in a house in the saddle of the mountain two miles in the Confederate rear. The young Hart had herded cattle all over the region. Now on the eve of the scheduled frontal attack, he told Rosecrans he could show him a trail through the laurel brakes around the Confederate left to the Hart house. Here was Cerro Gordo on a plate.

  Rosecrans took Hart to see McClellan. Presented unexpectedly at that late hour with the prospect of a turning movement after all, McClellan hesitated. For an hour they had to argue the plan’s merits before he would give it his blessing. It was finally agreed that the march would get underway the next morning before dawn. Rosecrans would lead it, keeping in touch hourly with his commander. When McClellan heard the sound of battle in the rebel rear, he would storm its front at Camp Garnett. The march to the Hart farm was expected to take three hours.

  Rosecrans set out before daybreak on July 11 with 1,917 Indianans and Ohioans. They filed into the underbrush in silence, under arms, without knapsacks, with one’s day’s rations, and their canteens filled with water.54

  They had no artillery; there was no way to get a cannon through the thick laurel brakes, over the hanging cliffs, and up and down the steep ravines. At the head of the column was Hart and, as had become virtually obligatory there in the mountains, Colonel Frederick West Lander. Also present was a pounding rain.

  About midmorning Pegram’s Confederates intercepted a Union courier and learned that a federal flanking movement was under way. Pegram, misreading the information, assumed the movement was going around his right, rather than his left. So he sent Captain Julius A. De Lagnel, Garnett’s chief of artillery, up the turnpike to the Hart house with 310 men. There De Lagnel hurriedly dug in on the road across from the two-story frame farmhouse. His men and their single cannon took up a position facing north, the expected direction of attack, and waited for it to come.

  Rosecrans was running dramatically behind schedule. The three hours had already stretched into ten. It wasn’t until 3:00 in the afternoon that Confederate pickets encountered his column approaching through the woods from the south. De Lagnel’s startled command scrambled to the other side of the road and swung its cannon around. As the Union troops swarmed out of the trees above the Hart house, De Lagnel opened fire. Rosecrans fell back under the cannon blast, regrouped and attacked again, fell back once more, and attacked a third time. It was not until about 6:00 in the evening and on the third try that the Union force finally overran the small rebel detachment and its one overworked gun.

  Aleck Hart, a civilian in Beverly five miles away, kept a running tally of the number of times he heard the cannon roar and counted 165. By then only one cannoneer was still manning the cannon—Captain De Lagnel himself. After firing the 165th round, just before the Yankees overran his position, he crawled away wounded and bleeding into a nearby thicket and hid himself.55

  Down the road to the east the little town of Beverly listened to the distant rattle of musketry, counted the cannon booms, and wondered what was happening. Two miles in the other direction, George McClellan wondered the same thing. It was obvious that a fight was going on. But what did it mean? Why was it all happening so late in the day? Why hadn’t he heard anything from Rosecrans? Why did it all seem so distant and stationary? Why wasn’t it approaching down the mountain as it ought to be?

  “With indecision stamped on every line of his countenance,” one soldier said, McClellan did nothing. He didn’t attack Camp Garnett as agreed, or make any attempt to divert the enemy in his front. At one point, he watched as a Confederate officer galloped into the enemy works and delivered a speech. The prolonged cheering that followed persuaded McClellan that Rosecrans had run into bad luck on the mountain and had been defeated.56

  Having worried the problem through all those uncertain hours, McClellan decided it was now too late and too dark to do anything. So he called it a day and withdrew to Roaring Creek for the night.

  At the top of the mountain, Rosecrans was in his own quandary. McClellan had not attacked from the front as agreed, so he assumed that the enemy, whose strength had been reported to him by this time as “probably from 5,000 to 8,000 men,” still lay in force between the two Union commands. Having endured since before dawn a pounding rain, an unkind mountain trail, a pitched battle with three charges, and no sleep, he also decided to call it a day. But it promised to be another long night. He expected a counterattack in force at any moment.57

  An attack, however, was the last thing on John Pegram’s mind. With Yankees in his front, in his rear, and for all he knew on his left, his only thought was to clear out through the forest to his right. After dark his small detachment began snaking up the steep hill to the north of the encampment. The head of the column was led by a mapmaker named Jedediah Hotchkiss, who knew where he was going. Hotchkiss steadily pulled away from that part of the column led by Pegram, who had no idea at all where he was going.

  Pushing on, Hotchkiss skirted Rosecrans at the summit of the mountain with about fifty men, slipped through Beverly, and escaped down the turnpike toward Huttonsville. Pegram, with 560 men and twenty-five officers, wandered to within sight of the turnpike north of Beverly, spotted troops on the road, and incorrectly assumed they belonged to McClellan. Disguste
d, disheartened, and still hurting from a recent fall from his horse, he turned back into the Stygian woods.

  McClellan awoke on the morning of July 12 and prepared to attack an enemy who was no longer there. Before he could order the assault, however, a messenger arrived from Rosecrans with news of yesterday’s victory. The fussy old goose had won the battle after all. And the enemy at Camp Garnett, lacking sufficient steel, had fled in the night. Surprised but delighted, McClellan started triumphantly, but still cautiously, up and over the mountain toward Beverly.

  By nightfall, with his men exhausted and hungry, Pegram called a conference of his officers at the Kittle house near the river. What should they do? His officers advised surrender, so Pegram sent a messenger to find McClellan, who was by now in Beverly. Happy to accommodate, McClellan sent a cavalry escort of twenty men and two officers to the Kittle house. In one of the war’s more bizarre surrenders, Pegram and his twenty-five officers and 560 men, still armed to the teeth, plodded in with McClellan’s twenty-two-man escort to give themselves up. Anything was better than another night and day in the western Virginia underbrush.

  Garnett, unlike McClellan, knew Rosecrans had won the battle of Rich Mountain soon after it was fought. There was nothing left for him to do, with a big army at his front and an even bigger one now occupying his rear, but to clear out. After dark he set his command in motion, leaving his tents standing, his campfires burning, and his guard posts mounted to deceive Morris. Only with daylight on the twelfth did Morris discover that the enemy, whom he thought he was keeping amused, had ungratefully walked out on him. He took up a belated pursuit. And as he did, it began to rain again.