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

by W Hunter Lesser

  Dinner—12:00

  Battalion drill—2:00 P.M.

  Recall—4:00

  Dress parade (inspection of arms)—5:00

  Supper—6:00

  Tattoo—8:30

  Taps—9:00 P.M.331

  The troops breakfasted on huge stacks of well-greased flapjacks. Hardtack or “sheet iron crackers,” pork, beef, beans, or rice made up the daily ration. Blackberries were ripening, and the boys spent hours picking them for pies and cobbler. At night, they gathered around campfires on the mountaintop, singing “Yankee Doodle,” “Hail Columbia,” and even “Dixie Land” with a roar that seemed to shake old Cheat to its very foundation.

  When Colonel Kimball decided their amusement made too much noise, prayer meetings and debating societies filled the void. “How is the United States bounded?” might be the question posed to a geography class. A swaggering private would answer: “It is bounded on the South-East by Cheat Mountain and the Fourteenth Regiment of Indiana Volunteers; on the South and West by several regiments from the same State, and we defy all creation to get into them.”332

  To keep all creation out, Kimball's Hoosiers cut down the trees around their encampment to give cannons fair play on the turnpike. Tall spruces were felled and lobbed with the tops outward, presenting an “abatis” of sharp points. Then began the construction of an “immense” fort. Logs were stacked in crib fashion above the road and covered with rocks and dirt to form an embankment. “The walls were fourteen feet high,” reckoned one soldier, “eight feet through at the base, narrowing to four feet at the top.”

  Breastworks of great strength were laid out across the road, and a blockhouse was erected. After weeks of toil, a massive fortress glowered from the gap. To the soldiers who built it, Cheat Summit Fort seemed impregnable. That fort “surpassed anything of the kind I have since seen,” gloated a veteran of the Fourteenth Indiana, “and with our regiment to garrison it, we felt entirely secure.”333

  On July 30, a second fortification was begun along the Tygart Valley River, eight miles south of Huttonsville. Here defensive works were erected across the narrow valley floor to block the Huntersville Turnpike, at a place known as Elkwater. Colonel George D. Wagner of the Fifteenth Indiana Infantry led more than one thousand Federals in plying axe and spade. “Our fortifications are progressing slowly,” John Beatty jotted from his tent at Elkwater on August 8. “If the enemy intends to attack at all he will probably do so before they are complete; and if he does not, the fortifications will be of no use to us.”334

  The Federal defenses formed the points of a triangle. At least one thousand men occupied each point. The supply depot at Cheat Pass was the triangle's apex, fourteen miles south of Beverly.

  Cheat Summit Fort was nine miles southeast of the pass on the Staunton-Parkersburg pike; Camp Elkwater was nearly as far south on the Huntersville Turnpike. These fortifications blocked the two major roads leading across the mountains to railroads in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. No road traversed the seven miles of ground between them.

  From the B&O Railroad, seventy miles north, supplies for the Federals came along the turnpikes. Their grades had been designed for civilian traffic, not the tread of armies. The roads were soon cut up by heavy army wagons until routine travel became difficult. It was necessary to lay out bridle paths between the camps for infantry. These rough paths wound up steep slopes and twisted over narrow mountain crags. Squads might be seen on them at any time of day, guiding mounts along precipices more suited to billy goats.

  Telegraph lines also connected the Federal camps. On Cheat Mountain, telegrapher E.B. Bryant found old Mathias White taking an interest in his new-fangled device. The rustic mountaineer figured that a paper message could be strung along the wire, but was puzzled how it got past each pole without being ripped to shreds. When Bryant sent a query to Huttonsville and received his answer in fifteen minutes, White was dumbfounded. He looked upon the whole contraption as witchcraft, and on Bryant as one who colluded with the devil.335

  The legendary Cheat Mountain weather also took a devilish turn. Nights on the summit were surprisingly cool. Soldiers slept under two or more blankets, requiring large fires and overcoats even on July mornings. By early August, sunny skies that had enamored the Hoosiers to their camp gave way to dark, angry clouds. Cold rains fell, and fog settled in. The slightest breeze caused the tall spruces to give forth “a most melancholy dirge.” When it stormed they howled “as if all the demons of the mountains had congregated to frighten off the intruders who had dared to set foot on their domain.”336

  More unpleasantries were revealed in the valley below. Directly behind General Reynolds' camp at Cheat Pass was an immense blackberry patch that proved to be thick with rattlesnakes. There was no escaping the venomous vipers; they seemed particularly fond of crawling inside the tents and bedding. Snakes were also troublesome at Camp Elkwater. “To-day one of the choppers made a sudden grab for his trouser leg;” recorded John Beatty, “a snake was crawling up. He held the loathsome creature tightly by the head and body, and was fearfully agitated. A comrade slit down the leg of the pantaloon with a knife, when lo! An innocent little roll of red flannel was discovered.” “[I]n short,” declared Beatty, “the boys have snake on the brain.”337

  Confederate authorities found the developments in those mountains to be equally repugnant. Virginia Governor John Letcher had crossed the Alleghenies in haste, directing Southern soldiers to rendezvous at Monterey, a Highland County village forty-seven miles west of the Shenandoah Valley railroad town of Staunton. General Henry Rootes Jackson temporarily took command of the Army of the Northwest at Monterey. Jackson must have seemed out of place in those mountains. A Georgian by birth, he was forty-one years old, gifted and refined, a distinguished graduate of Yale, and a lover of fine art and poetry. Jackson had already been a Superior Court judge and U.S. Minister to Austria. He had also been elected to the Confederate Congress, but experience as a colonel of volunteers in the Mexican War prompted him to enter the service with a brigadier's commission.338

  Even the diplomatic Jackson was stunned by the wreck of Garnett's army limping into Monterey. The once finely adorned First Georgia Infantry appeared without their drums and fifes, without their fancy regalia, without their guns or even their shoes. “[T]he annals of warfare might be searched in vain to find a more pitiable picture of suffering, destitution, and demoralization than they presented at the close of their memorable retreat,” Jackson reported sadly.

  General Jackson's command could hardly fight. Ammunition and supplies intended for him had been sent to “Stonewall” Jackson by mistake. But General Henry Jackson did not panic. He sent troops to Huntersville to block the unguarded road that led across the mountains from the enemy camp at Elkwater to Millboro station on the Virginia Central Railroad. With the remainder of his depleted command, Jackson held the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike near Monterey. A detachment on Allegheny Mountain, fifteen miles west, constituted his front. Thus positioned, he awaited reinforcements.339

  The weakened condition of Jackson's force conspired against him. Measles and typhoid fever swept the Confederate camps. Of Garnett's old command, only the Thirty-first and Thirty-seventh Virginia regiments were fit for duty. Nearly half of the newly arrived Third Arkansas Infantry reported sick. “Monterey! What sad recollections cluster around the name!” recalled a Virginian. “For a time the entire town was a hospital.”340

  Still, there was hope. On the afternoon of July 21, Confederate outposts on the heights above Monterey reported strange sounds emanating from the east. Puzzled pickets listened for hours to the faint, protracted “rumble.” A veteran officer was finally summoned who recognized that noise. It was the muffled din of cannon fire—more than one hundred twenty miles distant as the crow flies—at the great Battle of Manassas.

  “Everyone was wild, nay, frenzied with the excitement of victory,” recalled Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee Infantry upon learning the results. “We felt that the war wa
s over, and we would have to return home without even seeing a Yankee soldier. Ah, how we envied those that were wounded. We thought at that time that we would have given a thousand dollars to have been in the battle, and to have had our arm shot off, so we could have returned home with an empty sleeve.”341

  Private Watkins and the First Tennessee Infantry were bound for Jackson's camps, among reinforcements sent by General Lee to “drive back the invaders.” Leaving the train at Millboro Station, they began to climb the mountains under a sweltering sun. Sam Watkins called it the hardest march of the war. “It seemed that mountain was piled upon mountain. No sooner would we arrive at a place that seemed to be the top than another view of a higher, and yet higher mountain would rise before us.” Most were overburdened for the march. “First one blanket was thrown away, and then another,” recalled Watkins, “now and then a good pair of pants, old boots and shoes, Sunday hats, pistols and Bowie knives strewed the road.” Panting Confederates fell by the wayside in droves. Some pitched into healing mineral springs, only to come out “limp as dishrags,” unable to march.342

  Yet these Southerners were unlike the earliest recruits. They had drilled for many weeks in camps of instruction. They hailed from states like Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia. They were tolerably armed and equipped—ready and able to fight. And they came in high spirits. “ We may be killed,” pledged one to his gal, “but never will be whipped.”343

  Their new commander was also a fighter. General William Wing Loring, age forty-two, was entering upon his third war. A brusque, goateed, sleepy-eyed bachelor, Loring had first battled Seminole Indians as a boy soldier of sixteen. He had fought in Mexico as a captain of mounted riflemen, won two brevets, and then was struck down at the Battle of Chapultepec. When told that his mangled left arm needed amputation, Loring coolly laid aside a cigar and sat quietly while the arm was cut off—without anesthetic relief. His men buried that limb on the battlefield with the hand pointed toward their goal, Mexico City. Loring called it the proudest moment of his life.

  Loring had been the youngest line colonel in the U.S. Army prior to his resignation. Now he rode into the Alleghenies as a Confederate brigadier general, stunned to find members of the Army of the Northwest—his soldiers—filling every farmhouse and outbuilding on the road from Staunton. It would not do. Loring gruffly cancelled all furloughs and dispatched officers to round up the men.

  He reached Monterey on July 24 and assumed command from General Jackson. Upon reviewing the smartly dressed Twenty-first Virginia Infantry, Loring remarked that they were fine-looking men, but “Until they are able to sleep in winter amidst the snow and ice without tents, they are not soldiers!” John Worsham and his comrades angrily put their one-armed general down as “an officer who knew nothing.” Worsham wrote in retrospect: “Alas for our judgment! It was not many months before we were of the same opinion as General Loring.”344

  Loring saw that the best hope for an offensive lay on the Huntersville Road—a dash to Huttonsville that would cut off the Cheat Mountain fortress, turning it completely. Directing Jackson to seize a point on the Staunton-Parkersburg pike at Greenbrier River, twelve miles from the Federals on Cheat Mountain, Loring left him with about five thousand men on the Monterey line and departed for Huntersville.

  Huntersville was a tiny crossroads hamlet about fifty miles south of Huttonsville. Originally a wilderness outpost where eastern merchants bartered with trappers and hunters, it was the seat of Pocahontas County and General Loring's new headquarters. The general's talented staff converted Huntersville into a large army depot. Columns of infantry, cavalry, and artillery rolled into the town. Tents steadily filled the fields and slopes. General Loring would soon have nearly eighty-five hundred men on the Huntersville line.345

  North Carolina Confederates recalled their campground at Huntersville as “one of the most eligible” of the war. A beautiful maple grove shaded tents along the banks of a cool mountain stream. Pointing to the spearmint-fringed margin, one impish company officer declared, “[H]ere [is] the water, here is the mint; if anyone can furnish the sugar and some one the spirits, we'll have the best mint julep you ever tasted.” The ingredients were discreetly secured, and soldiers huddled behind a fence to enjoy their “jolly, jolly grog.”346

  There was more reason for good cheer. Even as Washington, D.C., hailed McClellan as the “Young Napoleon,” General Robert E. Lee was riding west into the mountains.

  CHAPTER 13

  SCOUTS, SPIES, AND

  BUSHWHACKERS

  “Like the country, may we not find the people, unpolished, rugged and uneven, capable of noble heroism or villainy?”

  —Lt. Colonel John Beatty

  Only the hoofbeats of horses and creaking saddle leather were discernable as eight finely mounted troopers of Burdsall's First Ohio Cavalry wound cautiously down the mountainside. Their orders were to scout east on the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike. It was a dangerous task. Many points between the friendly outposts on Cheat Mountain and the Greenbrier Valley below offered ground where horsemen might be attacked and left powerless to resist.

  On this pleasant morning in July 1861, the scouts expected trouble. Each man scanned the roadside for signs of the enemy as their mounts trod down the grade. Near the base of the mountain, the turnpike descended precipitously to the West Fork of Greenbrier River. A small bridge and an old ford crossed the river there. Directly above that crossing was a sinister, laurel-crowned precipice known as the “hanging rock.”

  It was a prime spot for ambush. As those silent Federal horsemen neared the bridge, they paused to scrutinize the ground. There was not a hint of danger; in fact, the atmosphere was disarming. Soft rays of sunlight danced across the fern-covered banks of the stream. A gentle, rippling current soothed jittery nerves. Satisfied, the horsemen rode on.

  Late that afternoon, the merry riders returned, wheeled directly into the ford, and began to water their mounts. But this time, they were not alone.

  A band of mountaineers had gathered at the home of a Mr. Gum on Back Allegheny to go hunting that day. Headed by a local gunsmith, each of the nine men was a practiced slayer of deer and bear. Armed with trusty rifles, they had stalked through dark woods to the hanging rock. The hunters were after big game, but today their quarry would be different.

  The stealthy woodsmen chose positions overlooking the crossing and settled in. They were aware that a squad of Yankee cavalry was on the prowl; their plan was to reserve fire until assured of numbers, and then to “let them have it in the back.”

  The eight riders soon galloped into view. By crossing at the ford rather than the bridge, they might discover the nimrods' hideout if allowed to continue. Hunting rifles slowly came to bear as the cavalry reined in at midstream. The riders conversed in soft tones as their horses drank. Overhead, the hidden marksmen each selected a man. One of the troopers finally drew his reins to start across—the signal those woodsmen had been awaiting.

  Rifles cracked. Helpless Federals toppled from their saddles into the cool stream. The mountaineers watched them thrash in mortal agony. One dying trooper grasped a horse's mane to stay above the water. Another reeled forward when shot, desperately hugging his mount. A comrade reached for him just as a fatal bullet likewise struck him. The two handsome cavaliers died arm in arm, their blood mingling in the current. A lone survivor frantically whipped his horse across the river and dashed away.

  The woodsmen had already vanished, disbanding by mutual consent. There would be more hunting in the days ahead. Guerrilla warfare had come to the Alleghenies.347

  Despite the danger, scouting was a passion for the Federals. Many an outpost picket was infatuated with the idea of scaling the rugged peaks on every side, of exploring deep and mysterious valleys and ravines. The regular scouts were looked on in reverence. It was little wonder that rumors of an expedition would crowd headquarters with anxious volunteers.

  A few hard crackers and a slice of ham or bacon were all
the provision needed for these details. Receiving their instructions, scouts plunged into the wilderness, singly or in small groups. Their orders were usually to avoid human contact. Some doubtlessly sought a cozy retreat to pass the time, but the majority were anxious to win distinction. They scaled moss-covered peaks by day and slept under the stars at night, enduring great privation in hope of a simple reward—the sight of an enemy camp, or the discovery of an unguarded path. Nothing would be heard of them for days, until, one by one, they emerged from the thickets to relate their discoveries to the commandant.

  Federal soldiers were not alone in their wanderings. Both armies played a deadly game of hide and seek in those mountains. Confederate General Henry Jackson hand picked a rifle corps of eighty men from the local militia as scouts. This band was ordered to watch the turnpikes and to “annoy the enemy from the hills and bushes.” Jackson informed the Confederate War Department of his plan: “ To me, it is altogether obvious that the only way to hold this country at all is by adopting the guerrilla system.” It was strange candor from a diplomat. No reply was forthcoming from General Lee, a man known to have a “pious horror of guerrillas.” Jackson would regret the decision.348