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

by W Hunter Lesser

  A rump legislature, made up of loyal Unionists from the General Assembly, met in Wheeling on July 1 and elected new United States Senators—the statehood firebrand John Carlile and his law-and-order foe Waitman Willey. Virginia's “disloyal” senators, R.M.T. Hunter and James M. Mason, had vacated their seats in Washington by the time Carlile and Willey were confirmed. Three new Congressmen, William G. Brown, Kellian V. Whaley, and Jacob B. Blair, were elected to the House of Representatives.414

  The Restored Government offered a platform upon which Virginia Unionists could rally, but unqualified support came only from strongholds in the panhandle and a few Potomac River counties near Washington. Many county officials refused to swear an oath of loyalty. Local governments were thrown into chaos as “bogus” representatives clung to office by force. In fact, without the presence of Federal soldiers, the new government could hardly have existed. The Wheeling Intelligencer proclaimed on August 6, “The news comes in constantly that people by counties and by communities, wherever our victorious arms have spread, are gladly rallying to its support and defense.”415

  Virginia's Restored Government now became the catalyst for a new state. On August 6, the Second Wheeling Convention reassembled at the Custom House. “The members of this Convention are satisfied that a large majority of the good and loyal citizens of Western Virginia are in favor of a division of the State,” read its opening preamble. “Yet there seems to exist a difference of opinion as to the proper time, as well as the proper means to be used to effect the object.”

  Progress was stymied for three days until John Carlile, “loyal” Virginia's dapper new senator, arrived from Washington to energize the fight. Independent statehood was the only salvation for Western Virginia; Carlile termed it the “cherished object” of his life. He warned that procrastination might be “death.” Virginia must be cleft in two. “Cut the knot now!” he bellowed to loud applause. “Cut it now! Apply the knife!”416

  Opponents made strong arguments for delay. Their trump card was a letter from Edward Bates, venerable attorney general of the United States. “The formation of a new State out of Western Virginia is an original, independent act of Revolution,” Bates had written on August 12. “Any attempt to carry it out involves a plain breach of…the Constitution—of Virginia and the Nation. And hence it is plain that you cannot take that course without weakening, if not destroying, your claims upon the sympathy and support of the General Government.”

  Bates praised the Restored Government as a “legal, constitutional and safe refuge from revolution and anarchy,” a model for restoring other seceded states to the Union. “Must all this be undone,” the attorney general concluded, “and a new and hazardous experiment be ventured upon, at the moment when danger and difficulties are thickening around us? I hope not—for the sake of the nation and the State, I hope not.”417

  Critics viewed the statehood advocates as zealots, and their position as nothing more than “legal fiction.” Many vexing questions had been ignored: What would become of Virginia's debt? What would become of loyal Unionists in the eastern part of the state? And what would be done about the ticklish question of slavery? The treatment of slaves was certain to ignite controversy. It could hardly be ignored in the adoption of a state constitution. Abolition was not then an aim of the Union war effort. President Lincoln had pledged not “to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.”418

  But statehood advocates would not be silenced. Floor debate grew heated as John Carlile lurched up on the convention's tenth day: “Yes Sir, and you may say ‘down!’ ‘down!’ But, gentlemen, it will not go down. It will be agitated. It is a question…that has been looked to and expected from the foundation of our government…. Why, take the map of Virginia and look at it, and you will see at once, that this is an unnatural connection.”

  A committee of three statehood advocates and three opponents met on Monday, August 19, to break the deadlock. One day later they presented a dismemberment ordinance. The new “State of Kanawha” would consist of thirty-nine Virginia counties, with provision for the inclusion of Greenbrier, Pocahontas, Hampshire, Hardy, Morgan, Berkeley, and Jefferson if a majority of voters in each of those counties approved. This new state would assume a fair share of Virginia's debt and safeguard property rights. Any Virginia counties not included in the new state boundary would remain under jurisdiction of the Restored Government.419

  On August 20, Wheeling delegates passed the dismemberment ordinance by a vote of fifty to twenty-eight. Residents of “Kanawha” would put the ordinance to a vote in October. In a bold stroke, Western Virginia had nearly severed her ties to the Old Dominion—and to the Confederacy. The war for her borders was about to take on a new urgency.420

  CHAPTER 16

  THE PERFECT ROLL DOWN

  “Now we are sure of a fight, the result of which we little doubt will favor us.”

  —George P. Morgan, Thirty-first Virginia Infantry

  September greeted the Confederates on Valley Mountain with blue skies, the first in nearly a month. The army's mood seemed to lift with the storm clouds. Sugar maples began to turn; fall warblers sang from their branches with robust cheer. General Lee marveled at the transformation. “The glorious sun has been shining these four days,” he wrote on September 3. “The drowned earth is warming. The sick are improving, and the spirits of all are rising…. I feel stronger, we are stronger…. Now…a battle must come off, and I am anxious to begin it.”

  The roads dried out, allowing wagons to bring up supplies. Upon Lee's urging, General Loring organized the Army of the Northwest into six brigades of Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, and North Carolina troops. The Huntersville Division, commanded by General Loring and the Monterey Division, under General Henry Jackson, gave the Confederates a total force of nearly eleven thousand, but their effective strength was much reduced by sickness. Union General Reynolds, commanding the Cheat Mountain District, had fewer than nine thousand defenders.421

  The Confederates girded for battle. Soldiers filled cartridge boxes and burnished steel. They eyed the Union defenses on Cheat Mountain, blocking the vital Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike pass. To Federals, the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike was a portal to the Shenandoah Valley and railroads leading to Richmond. For Confederates, the turnpike led northwest to the B&O Railroad and Parkersburg, on the Ohio River. “The enemy holds Cheat Mountain,” wrote a Georgian to his mother, “and to undertake to drive them off…by attacking them in front, we might as well try to take Gibraltar.”422

  To get around that fortress, the Confederates needed maps. No detailed chart of the region was at hand; therefore, engineer Jed Hotchkiss set to work once again. As he drew maps upon a barrelhead at Valley Mountain, Hotchkiss noted with approval Lee's energy and persistence. The general had refused to allow the weather to be a deterrent, in marked contrast to General Loring, whom Hotchkiss found unduly negative and too often “filling himself with brandy.”423

  While General Lee studied routes for infantry, couriers reported the discovery of an unguarded path to the crest of Cheat Mountain. A civilian surveyor named John Yeager had clambered through the wilderness to gain an unobstructed view of the Federal fortress on the summit. To prove his story, Yeager made a second reconnaissance with Colonel Albert Rust of the Third Arkansas Infantry. Rust inspected the enemy fortifications with a spyglass, then spurred his horse for Lee's camp.424

  Albert Rust was a towering, black-bearded giant, well over six feet tall and broad of physique. Virginia-born in 1818, he had immigrated to Arkansas as a youth, studied law, and served in the Congress. He was bold, energetic, and domineering. When newsman Horace Greeley criticized the fiery Razorback Congressman for his pro-slavery acts in 1855, Rust brutally skulled with a cane.

  Now the impetuous colonel glowered over General Lee. Rust was emphatic. The Yankee right flank on Cheat Mountain was exposed; a force slipping around that flank could take the fort. Rust was certain of it—he had seen the vulnerable flank with
his own eyes. If Lee was to seize this opportunity, Rust requested the honor to lead the attack.425

  It was an awkward petition. Rust had scant military experience. Had he not led an aborted reconnaissance of Cheat Mountain just two weeks prior—a strange effort in which his command got lost and wandered about in “reckless folly”? Yet Lee admired Rust's initiative. He also knew that the big Arkansas colonel was a friend of President Davis. Rust's zeal and commanding presence won out; he was directed to lead the assault.426

  For the first time as a commanding general, Lee prepared to give battle. On September 8, a crisply worded “Special Order No. 28” directed five independent columns through the mountains to surround Cheat Fort. The plan, issued in General Loring's name, was crafted by Lee. It called for Colonel Rust to lead a brigade to the unguarded ridge behind the Federal fortress, while General Henry Jackson's column marched up the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike to create a diversion in front. From Valley Mountain, two brigades of Tennessee Confederates would move by footpaths to support Rust. The first, General Samuel Anderson's brigade, was to gain the Staunton-Parkersburg pike west of the fort. The second, General Daniel Donelson's brigade, would seize bridle paths east of Tygart Valley River to protect General Loring's column as it advanced down the Huttonsville road on Camp Elkwater.

  Rust would launch the attack—surprising the entrenched Federals on Cheat Mountain at dawn on September 12. Upon carrying the works, Confederates would sweep down the turnpike to Huttonsville, trapping the enemy at Camp Elkwater. Federal defenses in the Alleghenies would drop like a house of cards. The victorious Confederates might then reclaim Western Virginia.

  It was daring strategy, requiring secrecy and coordination. Artillery and supply wagons could follow Generals Loring and Jackson along the turnpikes, but the other Confederate brigades had to traverse miles of rugged wilderness without support. All would slip into position, awaiting Colonel Rust's assault.427

  In a supplementary order, General Lee urged the troops to “keep steadily in view the great principles” they fought for. “The eyes of the country are upon you,” he admonished. “The safety of your homes, and the lives of all you hold dear, depend upon your courage and exertions. Let each man resolve to be victorious, and that the right of self-government, liberty and peace, shall in him find a defender. The progress of this army must be forward.”428

  Each Confederate wore a “badge” of white cloth on his cap to distinguish the various columns from Federal troops. Nervous soldiers affixed the cloth patches, a grim reminder of what lay ahead. James Hall of the Thirty-first Virginia dreaded the assault of Cheat Mountain, “where there are Yankees, rattlesnakes and bears. A onme id genus” (All of a kind).429

  Confederate preparations at Valley Mountain did not escape the notice of the enemy at Elkwater, fifteen miles north. Federal scouts probed eleven miles south along the Huntersville pike on September 9, stumbling upon the foe near Marshall's store before falling back. On Cheat Mountain, Colonel Nathan Kimball strengthened his guard, removed the planking of the bridge over Shavers Fork, and built wings of logs on each side for sharpshooters. His sentinels literally danced at their posts in anticipation of a Confederate sortie. They had not long to wait.430

  On September 9, Colonel Rust's sixteen-hundred-man brigade, consisting of the Third Arkansas, Twenty-third, Thirty-first, and Thirty-seventh Virginia Regiments, and Hansbrough's battalion, began the march to Kimball's fort. The Confederates left Camp Bartow on the Greenbrier River with four days' rations, followed the Staunton-Parkersburg pike for several miles, and then began a rugged ascent of Cheat Mountain, 4,600 feet high. Their route lay through an unbroken wilderness.

  A chilling rain set in as Rust's soldiers labored to the summit and descended upon Shavers Fork. Forced into the rocky riverbed by laurel thickets, they waded the ice-cold waters for miles. Each man clung to the jacket or belt of his file leader on the final leg of the journey in darkness. “Many slipped and fell and some were right much hurt,” wrote John Cammack of the miserable march. Despite great hardship, Rust's brigade reached the designated ridge on the evening of September 11, little more than a mile from Cheat Fort. “[W]e lay there all night, without fire, in a drenching rain,” recalled a member of the Thirty-seventh Virginia, “many of our men chilled almost to insensibility.”431

  Two Confederate brigades marched from the vicinity of Valley Mountain on the morning of September 10. A dense fog enveloped the Tygart Valley below, swirling uniformly along the slopes and circumscribing ridge tops to give the appearance of tiny islands on a vast inland sea. Beyond that surreal landscape laid the enemy to be dislodged.

  General Daniel Smith Donelson's brigade was made up of the Eighth and Sixteenth Tennessee Regiments, more than sixteen hundred strong. Donelson was something of an antique: gray, sixty years of age, a West Pointer, former speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, and a nephew of Andrew Jackson. Each member of his brigade carried antiques as well—flintlock or percussion smoothbore muskets weighing close to ten pounds, old-fashioned cartridge boxes stuffed with forty rounds, a bayonet and scabbard, a blanket or quilt rolled up and tied over the shoulder, a canteen filled with water, and an empty haversack—thanks to a cooking detail that failed to show up with rations.432

  General Donelson's route led more than twenty miles across rugged mountain spurs. There was no road, often not even a path. Fortunately, the general had local guides, including a mysterious old character known by his surname, Samuel. One member of the Eighth Tennessee thought Samuel looked “just out of some dark cavern or hollow tree, and was a second cousin to the ground squirrel family. He wore an old-fashioned bee-gum hat, and there was fully as much of the hat as there was of the guide, and each was about the same age, both relics of the Revolutionary war…. Around this old hat was tied a white rag, which could be seen through the dense timber and huge mountain cliffs, bobbing along like an old crippled ghost…bell-wether of the flock.”433

  A detail of pioneers roughed out the trail. The soldiers joined hands to climb perpendicular ridges and descend into frightful chasms. Field officers weaved their horses tediously along the slopes as if following an imaginary worm fence. One sheer precipice caused many to speculate how the animals could follow at all. It was said the old guide Samuel possessed mystical powers—that he took the horses apart and carried them piece by piece up the slope, laid them in a heap, and commanded “Horses come forth” to reassemble the parts. No one was inclined to question the old guide's magic.

  On the morning of September 11, the hungry brigade descended a gorge into Stewart Run. Confederates bowed under a steady rain as the little watercourse was followed downstream. A meager ration of bread or hardtack was shared among the troops. One swore that a pickaxe or bayonet was needed to work it into fragments, for no man in the army could chew it.

  Musket blasts snapped every head to attention. Four “well dressed fat looking Yankees” were soon paraded to the rear. Quite a curiosity, they were the first enemy soldiers the Confederates had ever seen.434

  Leading Donelson's brigade were two companies of the Sixteenth Tennessee Infantry, commanded by Colonel John Savage, a Tennessee Congressman and Mexican War veteran. As the column marched down Stewart Run, more Yankee pickets were encountered. All were captured or shot down before they could escape. Most had been lounging or blissfully fishing, astonished to find an entire Confederate brigade in their midst.435

  From the prisoners, Colonel Savage learned that a company of Federals occupied the Simmons house, masked by an angle of woods just below. Ordering his men forward at “double-quick” time, Savage spurred his mount over a fence and landed in the midst of the startled Yankees. “Down with your arms or you die!” he cried, flourishing a huge pistol. Confederate troops swarmed into the yard to confirm his threat. The entire Federal company—fifty members of the Sixth Ohio Infantry—surrendered without a shot.

  With the captured Yankees in tow, Donelson's Confederates followed a rough path from the Simmo
ns house over the ridge to Becky Creek. As troops filed over that ridge, a bundle of Union dispatches were uncovered in the leaves. Addressed to the commander of the pickets, they warned of the danger of surprise—a bit too late.436

  Donelson's brigade continued down Becky Creek. As darkness fell, the men bivouacked on a high ridge overlooking the Federals at Elkwater. Hundreds of enemy campfires flickered below. The night was one of “Egyptian” darkness—so thick that some Tennesseans swore they cut it into pieces and others, equally as serious, claimed they tried to eat it. Rain descended in “perfect torrents.” Not a gun would have fired in the downpour. The Confederates hunkered against trees, punished by the howling storm. Adding to their misery, a bear wandered through camp near midnight, throwing the brigade into terror. During that fracas, the prisoners made an aborted effort to escape. Donelson's men endured a horrible night, christening the place “Flood Mountain.”437

  Confederate General Samuel R. Anderson's brigade also left camp near Valley Mountain on the morning of September 10. Anderson, a Mexican War veteran, directed the First, Seventh, and Fourteenth Tennessee Regiments along a path that led to the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, two miles west of Cheat Fort. Commencing the march from Mingo Flats, members of the First Tennessee spied a “comely Virginia lass” at her cabin window. As admiring regiments filed past, each gave her a tremendous Rebel yell. The boys hoped it was an omen of success.