Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided
Page 12
General Rosecrans learned of the evacuation of Camp Garnett from a prisoner brought in during the night. At daybreak on July 12, Rosecrans led his brigade warily down the turnpike into the enemy camp, taking charge of nearly seventy sick and wounded Confederates. Also seized were two additional cannons, four caissons and ammunition, nineteen thousand cartridges, two stands of colors, a large quantity of clothing, tents, camp equipment, wagons, teams, and personal items.
One of the captured Rebels weighed more than three hundred pounds. The portly officer, captain of the “Hardy Blues,” directed his men from the seat of a buggy. He was still on that perch as Federal troops circled round. “I am forced to surrender,” he boomed, “because the d____d fools took a bridle path across the mountains. Had they gone by the road, sir, like gentlemen, so I could have used my buggy, I should have accompanied them.” A waggish Federal retorted, “Boys, this is old ‘Secesh’ himself.”265
A messenger was sent through the abandoned works to notify General McClellan. The general had directed pioneers to cut a road for artillery up the ridge south of Camp Garnett. He was making ready to shell the Rebels when Rosecrans's messenger informed him that they were already gone. A look of amazement came over McClellan's face. It had been nearly fifteen hours since the battle ended.266
The news sent cheers roaring down the valley. Bands struck up “Yankee Doodle.” McClellan's order to the troops was, “Up tents and after them.” The general and his staff rode through the deserted works in a “dazzling display.” General Rosecrans received a hero's welcome. His displeasure with the commanding general was only later expressed officially: “General McClellan, contrary to agreement and military prudence, did not attack.”267
Soon the battlefield was reached. “It is horrible to review the carnage,” wrote one Hoosier. The ground was covered with “a large number of horses, cattle, hogs, &c. Trees, stumps and rocks are shattered with bullets. Some cannon balls are sticking in the trees.” Broken weapons, clothing, and personal items lay scattered about.268
To raw recruits, the toll was shocking. Fellow Americans had suddenly become mortal foes. “It was a bloody affair when we consider the number engaged,” wrote Lt. Orlando Poe. “I don't want to witness the effect of another battle.” By later standards, the casualties were minor. More than twenty-two thousand Americans would be lost on a single day at Antietam in 1862, almost five thousand in barely half an hour at Cold Harbor in 1864. Yet at Rich Mountain in 1861, the twelve Federal soldiers killed and sixty-two wounded, along with the loss of more than eighty Confederates, were no less powerful.
One of every four Confederates at the Hart farm had been killed or wounded. Among them was Private Henry Clay Jackson, a member of the Upshur Grays. Before the fight, young Jackson had boasted that he would “kill a damn Yankee and cut out his heart and roast it.” The action had just commenced when he was struck in the throat by a ball and killed, never firing a shot. Captain John Higginbotham, the “lead magnet,” escaped with a flesh wound, but field commander Julius DeLagnel was missing and presumed dead.269
The dead of both armies were buried on the field. A large trench—reportedly dug before the fight and labeled “For Union men”—was filled with Confederates instead. “The dead presented a ghastly spectacle. I never conceived anything half so hideous. No power of expression is adequate to describe it,” wrote William D. Bickham, reporting for the Cincinnati Daily Commercial. “They had about twenty five thrown into a ditch,” affirmed an Ohio corporal, “and of all the hor[r]id sights I ever looked upon this was the most hor[r]id. They were thrown in without any regard to order or the usual rites of scripture, some with shattered skulls, mangled limbs or ghastly bayonet wounds.” A few were naked, recalled a Hoosier sergeant, all “blackened with smoke.” Newsman Bickham blanched at the “fearful orifices perforating their heads, through which the brains oozed in sickening clots…Oh horrible! Most horrible!”270
The Hart house became a makeshift hospital, filled with “convulsive and quivering” bodies. Wounded Confederates were placed under guard on an upper porch to protect them from the curious. The “bloody-handed surgeons,” wrote one observer, “with lint, chords, bandages, saws, scalpels, probes, and bullet forceps, were busy bandaging and dressing what could be saved, and amputating hopelessly shattered and lacerated limbs.”
Heartrending groans filled the air. A dying sixteen-year-old boy begged piteously for his mother. General McClellan stepped in to inquire of the wounded, and exited with tears in his eyes. Newsman Bickham wrote, “I shall not attempt to depict the ghastly pictures of horrid wounds and shuddering forms of poor victims, to whom it would have been merciful if they could have died…and yet could not eke out a last suffering gasp.”271
A divergent scene laid mere steps away. From the brow of Rich Mountain, Federal soldiers beheld a stunning landscape of verdant forests, fields, and ridges. The mountains were “piled peak above peak,” marveled one, “like the congealed bellows of a mighty ocean covered with their thousand shaded mantle of emerald leaves.” The contrast was breathtaking. “We had just passed through some of the works of sinful man,” he wrote, “and we now had an untarnished view of the works of Almighty God. You can better imagine than describe my feelings at this moment.”272
CHAPTER 10
DEATH ON JORDAN'S
STORMY BANKS
“Cheat River ran red with their blood.”
—James E. Hall, Thirty-first Virginia Infantry
While battle raged at Rich Mountain on the afternoon of July 11, 1861, Confederate General Robert Garnett took supper in front of his tent, sixteen miles north at Laurel Hill. Garnett's camp was under a desultory bombardment, yet he seemed oblivious to the bursting shells. The Confederates at Laurel Hill marveled at his “cool and undisturbed manner.” When an exploding round showered Garnett with dirt, he calmly emptied his cup, beckoned to a servant for more coffee, and went on with his meal.273
The general soon faced a sterner test. Later that night, word arrived of Pegram's defeat. Now the Federal troops at Rich Mountain could march unimpeded into Beverly—square across Garnett's line of retreat. With General Morris testing his front, and McClellan threatening his rear, Garnett had no choice but to evacuate. Leaving tents in place and campfires burning to deceive Morris, Garnett's army slipped away under cover of darkness.274
Heavily laden Confederate wagons creaked over Laurel Mountain, bearing south. As the column neared Beverly at daybreak on July 12, Garnett received more bad news. His scouts—mistaking Confederate soldiers in town for the enemy—reported that the road ahead was blocked. It was almost a death-knell. Garnett's last avenue of escape was a rough wagon grade leading northeast through the mountains. Backtracking a few miles, the general led his army along the Leading Creek road toward the Cheat River valley, bound for the Northwestern Turnpike at Red House, Maryland. From there, he hoped to cross the Alleghenies by a circuitous route, regaining the Staunton-Parkersburg pike near Monterey, Virginia—a rugged detour of nearly one hundred fifty miles. The alternative was surrender.275
The sun was high at Laurel Hill on July 12 before General Morris learned of Garnett's departure. Morris patched together a strike force to give chase, placing a forty-eight-year-old Connecticut Yankee named Henry Washington Benham in command. Benham was an officer of experience. Stout, red-faced, blustering, and dictatorial, he was a veteran of the Mexican War and a crack engineer—having graduated first in his 1837 West Point class. A captain in the regular army, he outranked the militia colonels of Morris's command.276
Captain Benham's troops, 1,840 in number, were eager “as bloodhounds for the chase.” The Confederates held a twelve-hour lead when they took up the trail. Garnett's army was easily tracked. Deep mud, worked into a jelly by the active feet of men and horses, marked the line of retreat. The route was littered with abandoned equipment, cast off to lighten the wagons. At one place, discarded playing cards shingled the road, prompting a wag to remark that the Rebels must be trumped�
��they had “thrown down their hands.”
Slowed by barricades, intense darkness, and a pelting rain, Benham's bloodhounds halted on the Leading Creek road late that evening. Billy Davis of the Seventh Indiana wrote that “fires were built and we stood around them trying to warm our chilled bodies, looking and longing for the first peep of day.” Early on July 13, Colonel Steedman's Fourteenth Ohio Infantry picked up the trail, followed by two guns of Barnett's Cleveland Artillery, Colonel Dumont's Seventh Indiana, and Colonel Milroy's Ninth Indiana Infantry regiments. The main column under General Morris followed at some distance. Although drenched by mountain storms, these bloodhounds set a furious pace.277
At the village of New Interest (present-day Kerens), the track of fleeing Rebels turned east on a rude mountain trace. “That road defies description,” reported Cincinnati newsman Whitelaw Reid, hot in pursuit. “Part of the time it ran through lanes so narrow that a horseman could not pass on either side of the wagon train; then it wound through mountain gullies where the wheels of the wagon would be on the sides of the opposite hills, while beneath rushed a stream of water.” At every step, the mud grew deeper. Benhams's men slipped and staggered, plunging into knee-deep pools, then “reeling like drunken men in the mire.” Kneaded by the feet of thousands, liquid mud “flowed down the mountain road like thick tar.”
Discarded equipment again cluttered the way. Roadside thickets were strewn with Confederate officers' baggage; fine camp-stools with General Garnett's mark lay in the muck. Wrecked wagons hung upside-down in the trees over dizzying precipices. “It was no longer the retreat of an army,” thought Reid. “It appeared the pell mell rout of a mob. The destruction of property was enormous. Fine, heavy duck tents, and elegant blankets, far better than the best of ours lay in the road and were trampled by the infantry and ground into the mud by the wagons…. Pouring rain soaked elegant clothing till it was almost utterly destroyed. And everytime one of their wagons was upset, the crash of its contents in rolling down the hillside ruined the whole.”278
The road grew worse by the mile. Benham's pioneers chopped their way through barricades of timber, sometimes with the very axes left in the trees by fleeing Confederates. The race became a test of endurance. “And still it rained!” marveled Whitelaw Reid. “Weary and hungry, our soldiers could hardly have pushed along, but every fresh sight of deserted baggage seemed to convince them that they must be on the very heels of the rebels.”279
By noon of July 13, Benham's force neared the rocky banks of Shavers Fork, a tributary of Cheat River. The river's name was said to come from the deceptive depth of its waters—a trait that had “cheated” many lives. Dark and turbulent from the rains, this river of death slowed the Confederate retreat. General Garnett's two-mile-long column of wagons and infantry had taken most of the morning to cross the swollen stream at Kalars Ford.
As he reached that crossing, Captain Benham spied the Confederate baggage train at rest in a long meadow on the opposite bank. A straggler's musket shot put the train to flight. Benham's Federals plunged into the river. Grateful as the cold waters purged them of mud, they broke into a chorus of the hymn “On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand.”280
At the second ford, three quarters of a mile downstream, the First Georgia Infantry crouched in ambush. That regiment, the Twenty-third Virginia Infantry, and a section of the Danville Artillery had been detached as a rearguard to delay pursuit. Meanwhile, the remainder of Garnett's 3,500-man force—the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-first Virginia Regiments, Hansbrough's battalion, a section of the Danville Artillery, and a cavalry squadron, followed by the wagons—continued downstream. The delaying strategy might have worked, had not several companies of the Georgians failed to hear an order to retreat and been cut off at the second ford.
The chase now became a running fight. Garnett's Confederates clipped downstream with Benham's bloodhounds at their heels. The Federals pulled a beautiful Georgia banner from a jettisoned wagon and waved it to speed their weary, mud-spattered comrades. Stragglers filled the roadside. General Morris sent orders for Captain Benham to “stop at once,” unless he was ready to strike. Now almost three miles below Kalars Ford, Benham replied, “Wait five minutes!”281
He approached a dismal crossing, known as Corricks Ford. The current ran deep there, and Garnett's wagons had stalled in the rocky riverbed. The scene was chaotic. Frantic drivers whipped and cursed their teams. Drowning horses thrashed in the swollen stream. The rain hammered down.282
Here the Confederates made a stand. Colonel Taliaferro's Twenty-third Virginia Regiment and three guns of the Danville Artillery occupied a steep, eighty-foot bluff on the far bank. Fringed by laurel thickets with a clearing on the crest, that bluff perfectly commanded the ford. Captain Benham, the crack engineer, called it “one of the best natural defensive sites I ever saw.”283
Dressed in captured gray Confederate coats, skirmishers of the Fourteenth Ohio Infantry charged the riverbank. “Don't shoot!” cried teamsters trying to free wagons in the stream. “We are going to surrender.” A mighty “rebel yell”—perhaps the first of the war—rolled across the ford. In that instant a deadly blaze of light flashed from the bluff as Colonel Taliaferro's men opened fire on the Federals below.284
On the opposite bank, members of the Fourteenth Ohio leapt behind a rail fence. The Seventh Indiana filed in on their right; the Ninth Indiana crowded on the left, their ranks more than thirty deep as men jostled to get a shot. Barnett's Cleveland Artillery snapped into action. “A terrible fire ensued,” wrote James Hall. Cannonballs shrieked across the swollen river. Bullets filled the air, “hissing like venomous serpents.”
Most shot high, showering each other with tree boughs. On the riverbank stood Sergeant Copp, “fighting parson” of the Ninth Indiana Infantry. “He fired carefully,” Whitelaw Reid reported, “with perfect coolness, and always after a steady aim, and the boys declare that every time, as he took down his gun, after firing, he added, ‘And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!'”
The angry skirmish lasted nearly thirty minutes. Colonel Dumont's Seventh Indiana Infantry crossed upstream to take the Rebels in flank, but found a brush-choked ravine impractical to scale. The Seventh was soon back in the river, wading downstream beneath the Confederates, guns and cartridge boxes held high above the current as shot and shell roared overhead. Not a man was lost as they neared Colonel Taliaferro's right flank. Nearly out of ammunition, Taliaferro was forced to retreat. A fine rifled cannon remained on the bluff, its gun carriage shattered by the fall of wounded battery horses. Most of the Confederate wagon train lay abandoned in the road below.285
At the sound of battle, General Garnett rode back toward Corricks Ford, finding chaos at every turn. Unable to locate his rearguard, Garnett confronted Colonel Ramsey of the First Georgia Infantry and demanded, “Where is your regiment?” Ramsey's forlorn reply was, “I don't know.”
Corricks Ford was actually two river crossings, one at each end of a large island, a half mile apart. The log home of William Corrick overlooked the lower ford. Here General Garnett met Colonel Taliaferro, pointed to a large pile of driftwood on the far bank, and remarked that it would “form capital shelter for skirmishers.” Garnett picked ten good riflemen from the Twenty-third Virginia's “Richmond Sharpshooters” and placed them behind the driftwood.
Shots rang out nearby. Colonel Taliaferro urged the general to fall back. “The post of danger is now my post of duty,” was Garnett's stiff reply. Taliaferro was ordered to join the retreat. Garnett lingered at the river's edge on horseback, prominently exposed. A young aide named Sam Gaines remained by his side. Federal skirmishers raced toward the crossing. From the driftwood, Garnett's riflemen opened fire. The fragrant cologne of wildflowers along Shavers Fork mixed with the acrid smell of gunpowder.
Bullets hissed across the ford. Gaines ducked as he felt the wind of a ball pass his face. In fatherly tones, Garnett lectured him on the proper bearing for a soldier. The general showed no fear of death.286
Garnett turned in the saddle and ordered his skirmishers to withdraw. In that instant, a ball struck him squarely in the back. He toppled to the riverbank. Federal riflemen splashed across the ford and found him among the wildflowers a few paces from the stream. He lay headfirst, on his back, uttering not a groan. Major Gordon reached Garnett scarcely a moment later, just as his muscles made “their last convulsive twitch.”287
The fallen general was dressed in a black overcoat and a uniform of handsome blue broadcloth. His identity was unknown—word was sent to the rear that an officer had been killed with “stars on his shoulders.” In one of the Civil War's many ironies, a Federal aide, Major John Love, arrived on the scene and grimly identified the dead man as Robert Garnett, his old West Point roommate.