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

by W Hunter Lesser

  There was always the lucrative art of foraging. “Our Indiana friends are providing for the winter by laying in a stock of household furniture at very much less than its original cost, and without even consulting the owners,” wrote John Beatty from Camp Elkwater. Enterprising country folk extracted revenge by selling the troops eggs, butter, and other scarce items at greatly inflated prices. “Sometimes we give them a cursing and march them out of camp at double-quick,” admitted James Hall from Camp Bartow, “and then half starve for the fun!”559

  Africans—enslaved and free—served the armies. Body servants like Shepherd Pryor's “Henry” performed domestic chores in the Confederate camps. Free blacks like John Beatty's “Willis” cooked, washed, and played fiddle or banjo music for the Federals. A self-described “gemman ob culler” tried to enter battle with the Fourteenth Indiana more than once during 1861, but nearly two years would pass before men of his race could legally fight for the Union.560

  In late October, a runaway slave named Ben approached the Federal pickets on Cheat Mountain. Displaying a white flag, he offered information about the enemy in exchange for freedom. Ben was a powerfully built mulatto of noted bearing and intellect. Newly minted Brigadier General Robert Milroy, a strident abolitionist, readily took him in. Christened “Benjamin Summit” by Milroy, he worked at headquarters and served as a guide for the Federals.561

  The abolitionists in Federal arms were a distinct minority in 1861, and mostly of the closet variety. “Slavery always has been and always will be a source of strife as long as it exists,” penned a member of the Thirteenth Indiana from Beverly that fall, “and although I hope and believe the present war will be the cause of its extinction, I do not believe the time has arrived at which such an opinion should be expressed publicly.”

  Even Northern newspapers railed “Against a War for Emancipation.” An October 1861 editorial in the Boston Advertiser claimed “that neither man nor money will be forthcoming for this war if…the people are impressed with the belief that the abolition of slavery and not the defense of the Union is its object.” Romantic visions of war were gone. In the Alleghenies, soldiers were jaded and anxious to return home.562

  Miserable camp conditions fueled dissatisfaction. Body lice were a constant nuisance, infesting the garments of lowly privates and officers alike—literally eating them up. Despondent men scrubbed in frigid streams or buried underclothes to rid themselves of the vermin.563

  It became increasingly difficult to supply troops in the mountains. “The roads are awful,” wrote a member of the Fourteenth Indiana, “and when our train returns from Huttonsville it is hard to tell whether our teams are horses and men or statues of mud.” Another noted that “a single cold night will freeze the top of this mud, and then no team can pass at all, unless the freezing should continue till the ice will bear a team; and at the first thaw the road will again be impassible.” Shortages of all types ensued, which bred further discontent.564

  As winter neared, the troops were destitute of blankets and clothing. “I state by personal investigation when I say there is not a regiment in this command that can muster over twenty five pair of pantaloons, twenty shirts or thirty blankets,” wrote a correspondent from Cheat Mountain in October. “All the men are without socks, and many barefooted.” Governors of the home states responded by sending clothes to the soldiers. The Confederates received badly needed garments from families and soldiers' “relief societies” in the South.565

  Accidents were commonplace. A shell from Greenbrier River was thoughtlessly tossed into a campfire, where it exploded, killing a man and wounding others. “[F]rom accidental discharges of their guns many have lost their fingers; some have shot themselves in different parts of their bodies. Some have died from these wounds,” a member of the Cheat Mountain garrison related. Another soldier confessed, “I am not half as fearful of being shot by the rebels as I am by some of our own men.”566

  Disease was a grim companion. “There is scarcely a man you meet that can speak plainly, in consequence of colds,” wrote a Confederate correspondent, “and the frequent barking of nights would remind one of a pack of hounds in full chase.” A virulent form of typhoid fever struck the camps. Men died with heart-wrenching suddenness. “Imagine yourself in the midst of more than five hundred sick and dying comrades, with scorching fevers and parched lips, far away from all that is near and dear to them,” intoned a sad commentary from Camp Bartow. “The hospital arrangements are insufficient,” complained a Georgian. “We are without nurses, and nothing for the sick fit for diet. The rooms are filthy, loathsome, and some actually full of lice.”567

  Spirits reached low ebb. “Nothing going on…Mud knee deep, no news from home, no papers, all we can do is sit in our tents and brood over our gloomy situation,” wrote an Indiana soldier. The army was “such a wicked place” to Georgian Shepherd Pryor, “so much profanity in camp life, though there isent a day passes over my head but that I think of death and its consequences.” “Western Virginia has no charm for me,” declared another. “It is the most God forsaken Country I ever laid eyes upon that is certain.”568

  Arrival of the paymaster jolted the camps to life. He had been long awaited; many of the troops had not received a penny during five months of service. The soldiers took their pay (eleven to thirteen dollars a month for privates of both armies) in silver, gold, or more dubious paper notes. “[I]t was truly diverting to see them seated on the grass, and counting it out in different piles,” wrote one observer, “each pile having its particular object, or destination, those of home and the girls being much the largest.” Some paid off debts owed to the sutlers. Others went straight to gambling and in search of a bottle of old “tangle-leg.”569

  General Reynolds may have been a teetotaler, but his army imbibed freely. Sutlers smuggled whiskey in boxes of “Palm Soap” and “Pearl Starch.” Local mountaineers hawked potent home brew. “They have been forbidden to sell to soldiers but they still do it slyly,” wrote a Federal. “The consequence is the Col sends out every day or two and hunts them up, destroys the liquor and puts them in jail.”

  Whiskey was rife in the Confederate camps, often sparking fights. “The boys are on a general drunk today & the guard house is full,” noted a bemused Southerner. “I feel more like throwing down my gun and cursing the hour I was born,” a demoralized James Hall jotted in his diary, “I wonder if they at home ever think about us. But I wonder more, what they would think if they were to see me with my large vial filled with whiskey!” Enormous flakes of snow drifted to the ground outside his tent as Hall concluded, “Not to save the life of Gen. Loring, and all the sons of bitches in the Confederate Army, would I volunteer again!”570

  On November 16, the year's first major snowstorm hit the Alleghenies. Members of the First Georgia Regiment at Camp Bartow were sheltered only by blankets, having lost their tents in the retreat from Laurel Hill. “The snow had fallen during the night to the depth of eight inches,” wrote Isaac Hermann. “Not a man was to be seen, the hillocks of snow, however, showed where they lay, so I hollowed, ‘look at the snow.’ Like jumping out of the graves, the men pounced up in a jiffy, they were wrestling and snowballing and rubbing each other in it.”

  Many of the Georgians had never seen the stuff. That afternoon, a great snowball “battle” commenced. Members of Hermann's regiment charged the Twelfth Georgia camp with all the fury of a real engagement, pelting their kinsmen with a barrage of icy missiles.571

  The snow revived debate about a “great question” in the ranks—where would troops spend the winter? In an ominous development, parties had been detailed to erect wooden shanties on the mountain crests. A thousand clanking axe men felled the huge spruces on Cheat Mountain and cut them up in a portable steam saw mill. “Here we slew the forest and builded us giant habitations,” boasted Ambrose Bierce, “commodious to lodge an army and fitly loopholed for discomfiture of the adversary.” Each company built its cabins just inside the breastworks, forming a ring of houses
with stone chimneys at each end. The Confederates built cabins as well; soldiers of both armies winterized their tents. “We took out two widths of the wall of our tent,” wrote one, “and have built a fire place of sod with a barrel for a chimney.”572

  The flurry of construction only heightened debate about the great question. “The probable where abouts of our winter quarters is becoming a vital question to us,” admitted Billy Davis of the Seventh Indiana. “The great question” wrote a Georgia Confederate, “is what is to become of the remnant of our forces this winter! It is impossible, in my judgment, for the enemy to advance further into Virginia in this direction, this winter; nor can our army move Northward.”

  Would troops be condemned to a winter in the mountains? An anxious Federal soldier wrote: “The weather being extremely cold, our tents being extremely thin, and our own love for the beauties of this delectable country extremely thinner, it is extremely impossible, I think, for us to winter here.” Some feared they might remain “till the snow gets so deep we can't get out, and then we will be content to stay here and starve to death.”573

  A Virginia colonel admonished the Confederate Secretary of War that the weather on Allegheny Mountain was already severe enough “to freeze the tents of my regiment solid.” Politicians lobbied to bring the Georgians—so unaccustomed to those latitudes—home for the winter. “Now do, if there is any chance,” pleaded one of those Georgians, “try to get us away from these parts, for if we are not moved, we will all die here.”

  “This country is not worth fighting for,” penned a disgruntled Confederate, warning of the “great horror” Southern troops felt at the prospect of remaining in that “bleak, inhospitable climate.” When General Loring predicted that the army would remain in those mountains until spring, a tidewater Virginian flatly declared, “Heaven or Hell will have the greater portion.”574

  Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, commander of the newly formed Valley District at Winchester, sought Loring's army for a winter offensive. “I have frequently traveled over the road from Staunton to Cheat Mountain,” Jackson wrote Secretary of War Judah Benjamin on the fifth of November, “and I hope that you will pardon me for saying that if the withdrawal of the Confederate forces from the Cheat Mountain region shall induce the enemy to advance on Staunton it will be his ruin.”

  Loring demurred; his intention was to defend the Monterey and Huntersville lines. Secretary Benjamin left the question of retreat to his own discretion. But Stonewall was persistent. Loring had nearly eleven thousand troops, and by his own account needed only forty-five hundred to hold the mountain passes. By late November, more than six thousand members of Loring's Army of the Northwest began to march east.575

  In the wee hours of November 22, General Henry Jackson's troops abandoned Camp Bartow. Their retreat was a poorly managed thing. Anticipating a return to warmer climes, the Confederates burned clothing and blankets to lighten their load. Wagon teams churned deep mud in climbing the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, overworked horses dropped dead in their harnesses and were shoved over the bank. A tortuous, nine-mile march led to the windswept summit of Allegheny Mountain. There, many were curtly ordered into winter quarters.

  The great question had been answered at last! Angry Georgians swore and fumed at their fate. “It seemed unjust to place us, some of whom are from a climate, almost tropical, upon these bleak, snow-clad mountains, and send Virginia troops, whose homes are here…into other portions of the service,” growled a member of the Twelfth Georgia Infantry. Bitterly they pitched tents at Camp Allegheny, in the midst of a driving snowstorm.576

  General Loring departed for Staunton, leaving a brigade at Huntersville under General Anderson and the brigade at Camp Allegheny under Colonel Ed Johnson. General Henry Jackson left to command state troops in his native Georgia. That reluctant warrior must have been dreaming of home when he encountered a soldier along the road, tinkering with his disassembled musket.

  “Who are you?” Jackson inquired sternly.

  “I am sort of a sentinel & who are you?” countered the soldier.

  “I am sort of a General,” replied Jackson.

  “Well, Gen.,” retorted the sentinel, “if youl wait until I get my old gun together I'll give you a sort of salute?”

  The general shook his head and rode on.577

  By early December, Federal troops also left the mountains in great numbers. General Reynolds resigned his commission and went home to Indiana. General Rosecrans moved department headquarters to Wheeling. Many of the departing troops were bound for Kentucky; all were delirious with excitement. “Virginia, farewell!” became their cry. “[H]ad it rained bullets upon them they would have pushed on,” wrote an observer, “so eager were they to get out.”578

  CHAPTER 22

  NIGHT CLOTHES

  AND A WAR CLUB

  “[O]h, it was heart rending to hear the death shrieking of the dieing, the groans of the wounded and to behold the mangled corpses of the slain.”

  —Neil Cameron, Twenty-fifth Ohio Infantry

  A storm was brewing on Allegheny Mountain. Strong winds lashed across the crest. Whistling out of the northwest, they heralded the arrival of intense cold.

  Camp Allegheny, a Confederate stronghold, lay upon that crest. From its windswept meadows, nearly 4,400 feet high, Colonel Edward Johnson stirred a tempest of his own. Tossing boxes from a poorly loaded wagon, Johnson unleashed a torrent of profanity. The cranky colonel was unrivaled in his swearing. On that blustery December day, he turned the air blue. Johnson cursed cowering soldiers, he spat oaths at teamsters and quartermasters, but loudest of all, he damned the Confederate War Department.579

  Orders to withdraw, dated December 10, had triggered Johnson's ire. While his thin-blooded Georgians were delighted to leave that blustery camp, the colonel was not. His mandate had been to keep Federals out of the Shenandoah Valley, away from vital railroads leading to Richmond. The enemy was active in his front. If the Richmond authorities thought bad roads and severe weather would keep the Yankees from advancing that winter, Ed Johnson swore they had made a “grave mistake.”580

  From the haunting heights of Camp Allegheny, Colonel Johnson overlooked that portal to the Shenandoah, the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, winding through a gap beneath his works. Nearby was the home of John Yeager, the surveyor who had led Colonel Rust to Cheat Mountain. The Confederates had entrenched at Yeager's farm on Buffalo Ridge, just as they had on his brother's property at Travellers Repose, nine miles below. But defensive labors at Camp Allegheny ceased with the order to retreat.

  For many days Colonel Johnson had studied the western horizon from his lofty post. The enemy camp on Cheat Mountain was in plain view. Although more than twenty miles distant by road, Johnson could make out details of the fortress with a powerful glass—even to the tents and campfires of his foe.581

  Johnson's Confederate lair was also under scrutiny. From the distant horizon, Union General Robert Huston Milroy had watched the faint blue smoke of that camp for long, weary days of his own. Milroy was a newly minted brigadier, commanding the Cheat Mountain District. He was a forty-five-year-old judge from Rensselaer, Indiana, with a restless soul. Prior to leading the Ninth Indiana Infantry in 1861, he had attended a Vermont military academy, held a captaincy in the Mexican War, and toured New England as a fencing instructor. Squinting through a telescope from the parapet of Cheat Fort, General Milroy cut a striking figure.

  He was tall and lithe with the look of a biblical prophet. He was stern and deeply religious to match. His thick mane of gray hair rose like the fretted quills of an angry porcupine. His black eyes were piercing and impatient, his nose was aquiline, his bearded countenance swiveled back and forth over the horizon like some gigantic bird of prey.

  Milroy was impulsive. His voice broke into a stutter when excited, but his courage and daring were already well established. “No braver warrior than Gen. Milroy ever buckled on a sword,” one of his soldiers would declare. The genera
l's wild locks and impetuous character had coined a nickname.582

  Once, thinking his men were too long in repairing a bridge, Milroy had plunged into waist-deep water to hoist some logs. As he worked, a teamster appeared and began to curse the men for their delay.

  The general, shorn of his insignia, gazed up and said, “You look pretty stout; suppose you give us a lift.”

  “See you damned first!” was the teamster's surly reply.

  “Look here,” snapped Milroy, “if you give us any more of your abuse, I'll come up there and pummel your head with a stone.”

  The teamster backed off, stopping to inquire of an acquaintance nearby, “Who is that gray-headed cuss back there at the bridge? He's mighty sassy.”

  “Why,” exclaimed the man, “that's our Old Gray Eagle!”583

  The Gray Eagle yearned for battle. Anxious to win distinction, he clashed with Colonel Johnson's outposts and probed his flanks. The crisp blue skies of early December begged for action. Milroy grew increasingly restless on his mountain perch. And then, by a miracle, his prayers were answered.