Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided

by W Hunter Lesser

  The Louisville Journal called McClellan's campaign “a piece of finished military workmanship by a master hand.” The Rebels in Western Virginia hadn't a chance—they had been “McClellanized.”

  “We like the works and ways of Gen. McClellan,” wrote Horace Greeley. “May his shadow never be less!” “Glorious isn't it!” exalted the New York Times; “We feel very proud of our wise and brave young Major-General. There is a future before him, if his life be spared, which he will make illustrious.” Banner columns hailed “Gen. McClellan, the Napoleon of the Present War.”

  News of McClellan's deeds sparked “the wildest enthusiasm” in army camps around Washington. Congress passed a joint resolution praising the young major general for his “brilliant” victories. “You have the applause of all who are high in authority here,” confirmed Winfield Scott. Almost overnight, George McClellan became the North's first battlefield hero.310

  Taking the home of a Beverly secessionist as headquarters, the “Young Napoleon” surveyed his domain. “Beverly is a quiet, old fashioned town in a lovely valley,” he informed Nelly, “a beautiful stream running by it. A perfectly pastoral scene such as the old painters dreamed of, but never realized. I half think I should be King of it.”311

  A congratulatory address was published for the troops. It was vintage McClellan, straight from the master's gilded pen:

  Soldiers of the Army of the West! I am more than satisfied with you. You have annihilated two armies, commanded by educated and experienced soldiers, intrenched in mountain fastness fortified at their leisure. You have taken five guns, twelve colors, fifteen hundred stand of arms, one thousand prisoners, including more than forty officers—one of the two commanders of the rebels is a prisoner, the other lost his life on the field of battle.…You have proved that Union men, fighting for the preservation of our Government, are more than a match for our misguided and erring brethren; more than this, you have shown mercy to the vanquished.…

  Soldiers! I have confidence in you, and I trust you have learned to confide in me…. I am proud to say that you have gained the highest reward that American troops can receive—the thanks of Congress and the applause of your fellow citizens.312

  The troops were jubilant. “[W]e felt ready to meet all Secessia,” boasted an Ohio infantryman. “We have met the enemy and they are ours, except those that ran.” But the ninety-day volunteers, nearing the end of their enlistments, were determined to go home. Instructed to fill in Garnett's Laurel Hill earthworks before marching for the railroad, they leveled them like molehills. McClellan could not hide his disappointment. “I lose about 14 rgts now whose term of service is about expiring,” he wrote Nelly. The young general assured his wife that he was out of danger. “No possible chance of further fighting here at present,” he told her, “no one left to fight with.”313

  The only action left in McClellan's department was on the Kanawha Valley front, more than 150 miles southwest. There, on July 11, Union General Jacob Cox had crossed the Ohio River at Point Pleasant and launched an invasion with three thousand troops. Stern-wheel steamers ferried much of Cox's army up the Kanawha River toward Charleston, sixty miles southeast. Bands struck up patriotic tunes as the paddle boats chugged upstream. Each new bend of the river opened a picturesque vista. Cox, perched atop the pilothouse of his lead boat, called it “the very romance of campaigning.”

  But the romance was short-lived. On July 17, outgunned Confederates under ex-Virginia governor Henry Wise battled Cox to a standoff at the mouth of Scary Creek. In the confusion, four high-ranking Federal officers fell into enemy hands. McClellan was infuriated at the news. “Cox checked on the Kanawha,” he wired the general-in-chief on July 19. “Has fought something between a victory & a defeat…. In heaven's name give me some General Officers who understand their profession…. Unless I command every picket & lead every column I cannot be sure of success.”314

  “Cox lost more men in getting a detachment thrashed than I did in routing two armies,” McClellan informed Nelly. “The consequence is I shall move down with a heavy column to take Mr. Wise in rear & hope either to drive him out without a battle or to catch him with his whole force. It is absolutely necessary for me to go in person…. I don't feel sure that the men will fight very well under anyone but myself.”315

  But developments back east intervened. A large Confederate army under General P.G.T. Beauregard had gathered at Manassas Junction, Virginia, just twenty-five miles southwest of Washington. That army now taunted the capital itself.

  Northern politicians clamored for action, and the dramatic news from Western Virginia only increased their fervor. The daily masthead of Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune screamed, FORWARD TO RICHMOND! FORWARD TO RICHMOND!

  Facing pressure from President Lincoln and his own deadline of ninety-day enlistments, General Irvin McDowell led thirty-five thousand Federal troops toward the plains of Manassas. A throng of politicians and prominent citizens followed in carriages, loaded for a monster picnic. Everyone anticipated a grand spectacle—the battle to end the war.

  McDowell's snail-like pace allowed General Joseph Johnston to rush nine thousand Confederate reinforcements from the Shenandoah Valley, swelling the Southern ranks to more than thirty thousand. McDowell finally struck on July 21, and the two great armies dueled along a torpid little stream known as Bull Run. Just when Union victory appeared certain, a gallant stand on Henry Hill by McClellan's old classmate Tom Jackson turned the tide of battle. The Confederates won a great victory, and Jackson earned a nickname—“Stonewall.” By nightfall, panic-stricken Federal troops and picnickers scurried to the rear. Washington was in an uproar.316

  The events at Manassas dashed expectations of a short, bloodless conflict. President Lincoln spent a nervous night at the White House listening to accounts of the disaster. At 1 A.M. on July 22, General-in-Chief Scott wired McClellan that McDowell's army was in full retreat. “A most unaccountable transformation into a mob of a finely-appointed and admirably-led army,” the elderly general reported grimly.

  Washington seemed to be in peril. President Lincoln and his Cabinet members sought a new commander. At once, their heads cast to the Alleghenies and that “very God of war,” George Brinton McClellan. Who else could save the country now?

  It was he who had rescued Western Virginia—bursting over the mountains like a comet, dazzling all with his brilliance. George McClellan had won the first Union victories of the war! True, those victories were small affairs, but embraced by the fates and McClellan's magic telegraph key, they would prove momentous. It was McClellan's destiny, after all—great deeds were expected of him.

  On July 22, a message from Washington tapped over the telegraph receiver at McClellan's Beverly headquarters: “Circumstances make your presence here necessary. Charge Rosecrans or some other general with your present department and come hither without delay.”317

  George McClellan was called to save the Union.

  PART III

  TEMPEST

  ON THE

  MOUNTAINTOPS

  CHAPTER 12

  A FORTRESS

  IN THE CLOUDS

  “Fine place for an observatory, this Cheat Mountain summit.”

  —“Prock,” Fourteenth Indiana Infantry

  General McClellan's train to Washington became the chariot of a conquering hero. At Wheeling, he was reunited with Nelly and fêted by the Restored Government. A huge crowd serenaded him and cheered his every word. More than twenty thousand admirers hailed McClellan at Pittsburgh in “one of the grandest receptions ever given in the city.” Stops at Philadelphia and Baltimore brought more of the same—too much for the pregnant Nelly, who returned to Cincinnati.

  On July 27, President Lincoln cheerfully received McClellan in Washington. “I find myself in a new & strange position here,” McClellan wrote Nelly that evening, “Presdt, Cabinet, Genl Scott & all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land.” Noted Whitelaw R
eid of all the fuss: “Never was a General more completely master of the situation.”318

  McClellan left General William Rosecrans in charge of Western Virginia, with headquarters on the railroad at Clarksburg. Rosecrans had no easy task. The three-month volunteers were on their way home. Most of the veteran staff officers had followed their victorious chief to Washington. Only about half of McClellan's original force remained, some eleven thousand men.

  Rumors abounded that the Rebels intended to reclaim Western Virginia. McClellan and General-in-Chief Scott cautioned Rosecrans that the threat was real. The Federals went on defense. Rosecrans was directed to fortify the turnpikes leading east.

  Key to his defense was the important pass over Cheat Mountain, on the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike. From that pass, the turnpike wound across the Alleghenies more than eighty miles southeast to Staunton and the Virginia Central Railroad, a main line to Richmond. Cheat Mountain Pass was, in effect, a gateway to the Shenandoah Valley, its agricultural bounty and railroads leading to the capital of the Confederacy. But the pass was also a gateway for the enemy. An incursion by the Rebels could be expected there. Rosecrans ordered General Joseph Reynolds, new commander of the First Brigade, “Army of Occupation,” to guard that vital crossing.319

  Joseph Jones Reynolds was a thirty-nine-year-old Hoosier, lanky, pale, and unassuming. A sworn teetotaler, he had curiously befriended U.S. Grant at West Point. Graduating from the academy in 1843, he returned to teach there under Robert E. Lee. Reynolds quit the army in 1857 to join his brother in the grocery business, but impending war brought him back as a brigadier general of U.S. volunteers. John Beatty fairly described the soft-spoken Reynolds as “an untried quantity.”320

  General Reynolds made headquarters under canvas about two miles south of Huttonsville, on a rocky little stream at the foot of Cheat Mountain. “Cheat Pass” was the name given his camp, often confused with the strategic gap in the mountain above. Indiana and Ohio regiments pitched rows of white tents at Reynolds's encampment. A steep wooded ridge fronted headquarters; from its crest waved a large American flag, visible for miles in every direction. Federal troops and supplies moved from this camp to the front.321

  Meanwhile, loyal Virginia troops patrolled the countryside. Guards or pickets occupied every road and bridle path, for it was impossible to maintain a chain of sentinels in that rugged terrain. Day and night the pickets paced their lonely beat. Large squads might remain on watch at distant outposts for days without relief, but the camp guard was changed six times nightly.

  “Halt! Who comes there?” rang the sentinel as an intruder approached. The ominous click of a musket lock punctuated the call.

  “Sergeant of the Guard,” was the prompt reply.

  “Advance, Sergeant of the Guard, and give the counter sign.”

  The watchful sentinel received his visitor with bayonet at the ready. Failure of either party to strictly follow this procedure could mean death. “A cowardly sentinel is more likely to shoot at you than a brave one,” wrote Lt. Colonel John Beatty from hard experience.322

  Pickets fired their guns to warn of danger—an act repeated by every sentinel along the line. Shots in the night jolted slumbering camps to life. “Many men, half asleep, rushed from their tents and fired off their guns in their company grounds,” recalled John Beatty of the first night alarm at Cheat Pass. “Others, supposing the enemy near, became excited and discharged theirs also. The tents were struck, Loomis' First Michigan Battery manned, and we awaited the attack, but none was made. It was a false alarm. Some sentinel probably halted a stump and fired, thus rousing a thousand men from their warm beds.”323

  Leaving the pass, the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike climbed the western slope of Cheat Mountain. There was an air of mystery to the ascent. Enormous moss-covered rocks and huge overhanging trees cast dark shadows on the roadway. Boundless springs gushed forth and plunged across the grade into deep ravines. For nine interminable miles, the turnpike spiraled upward. “So tortuous is its course,” recalled a soldier, “that you may travel for miles without gaining in actual distance more than a few hundred yards, and sometimes the extremes of our column, stretching out a mile or nearly so in length, would be within a stone's throw of each other.” The steep march tended to dampen military ardor, but “like the man who carried the calf until it grew to be an ox,” the troops got accustomed to it.

  As the turnpike climbed, its surroundings began to change. Towering spruces lined the roadway. Gnarled thickets of “laurel” or rhododendron blanketed the slopes. At the mountain crest, weary soldiers fell out to catch their breath and marvel.324

  Cheat Mountain was an authentic wilderness. A traveler in 1861 regarded it “as savage as the unexplored [wilds] of Oregon.” The “growl of the bear, the cry of the panther, and the bark of the wolf are sometimes still heard…. Laurel-brakes stretch out like inland seas, and with never-fading leaves and snake-like branches interlaced, forbid a passage to even the light-footed deer; blackberry bushes extend miles in compact masses; superb firs lift up their crowned heads to the height of a hundred and fifty feet; and silvery cascades never cease their solitary murmur.”325

  Few had ventured into that wilderness until the turnpike crossed Cheat Mountain in the 1840s. Famed Harvard botanist Asa Gray used the new road to explore, and was rewarded with some of “the choicest botanical treasures which the country affords.” Gray found Cheat Mountain to be a most remarkable place. Along its lonely crest he discovered plants unknown to science. Another curiosity was the Shavers Fork of Cheat River, a stream of considerable size that glides on top of the mountain. One amazed visitor insisted it had been “placed there by a mistake of nature.”326

  The weather on Cheat Mountain was also quite remarkable. Rain and snow fell in prodigious quantities. During the winter of 1855, the Trotter brothers had a contract to carry mail over the turnpike between Staunton and Huttonsville, a distance of more than ninety miles. At one point, a severe snowstorm brought delivery to a halt. When complaints reached authorities in Washington, the brothers dispatched a terse letter to the postmaster general. “Sir,” it read, “If you knock the gable end out of Hell and back it up against Cheat Mountain and rain fire and brimstone on it for forty days and forty nights, it won't melt the snow enough to get your d___ mail through on time.”327

  Military strategists eyed Cheat Mountain's defensive qualities. The mountain was a formidable barrier. The Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike crossed its summit in a gap nearly four thousand feet high. On the afternoon of July 16, 1861, six companies of the Fourteenth Indiana Infantry under Colonel Nathan Kimball commandeered that gap. Kimball, a robust, curly-haired, thirty-nine-year-old medical doctor and Mexican War veteran from Loogootee, Indiana, was the only member of his regiment with military experience. “Our tents were pitched on a rocky point,” wrote a member of the Fourteenth in his diary that first night, “with a fine forest on every side and a magnificent view of the Alleghenies in front of us, a beautiful romantic, though desolate looking spot.”328

  One of the few signs of habitation on Cheat Mountain was here—a hardscrabble farmstead scratched out twenty-two years earlier by an old mountaineer named Mathias White. Regimental historian J.T. Pool called it a “splendid farm of twenty acres on which were about ten rocks to one blade of grass.” Pool described White as a “gaunt, lean, half starved devil,” who “looked as though he had sucked his last meal from the spout of a bellows, and was none the better for it.” He had never been inside a schoolhouse or heard a sermon; his piety was said to consist of “playing jigs and hoe downs on an old fiddle, and shooting mountain hawks on Sunday.”

  White was a crude blacksmith, and when unfinished Bowie knife blades were found in his shop, the “old sinner” was placed under arrest—suspected of making cutlery for the Rebels. His home was converted to a hospital, his barn into quartermaster and commissary quarters, and his forge put to shoeing Union horses. Any lingering doubt as to the loyalty of his clan was dispelled when a dau
ghter, known by soldiers as the “Maid of the Mist,” made it clear that bestowal of her heart and hand should only be in exchange for “Linken's Skaalp.”329

  Colonel Kimball seized a covered bridge over Shavers Fork, one half mile beyond the gap, and sent out patrols to display a bold front. The Hoosiers delighted in their novel assignment. “ To one who loves the wildly picturesque in nature,” wrote a member of the Fourteenth, “this region could not fail to awe, to please, to fascinate.” They scaled the mountain peaks and mailed fragrant spruce-gum to their sweethearts in letters. Cheat Mountain “was an enchanted land,” declared Ambrose Bierce. “How we reveled in its savage beauties!”330

  A typical Federal soldier's day on the summit followed this schedule:

  Reveille—5:30 A.M.

  Wood and water call—6:00

  Sick call—6:30

  Breakfast—7:00

  Guard-mounting—8:30

  Company drill—9:00

  Recall—11:00

  Wood and water call—11:30