Five Confederate deserters appeared in Milroy's camp. They reported a weak and badly demoralized force at Camp Allegheny. Those defectors offered to serve as guides if Milroy attacked. They assured him that the Rebels were in no mood to fight. Laughed a Confederate in retrospect, it was the “biggest lie that ever tickled the ear of the devil.”584
Armed with this startling news, General Milroy resolved to strike. The Confederates on that mountain looked to be easy prey. Milroy would “clean out” their camp and earn his first victory. Not prone to being superstitious, he picked the day of reckoning—Friday, the thirteenth of December.
Milroy had plenty of guides; a cunning local Unionist named John Slayton was already employed. Finding enough troops for an assault was another matter. Many Federal officers were on leave—so many soldiers were sick or absent from their regiments that the general was forced to solicit volunteers.585
By December 12, Milroy had gathered elements of the Ninth and Thirteenth Indiana, Twenty-fifth and Thirty-second Ohio Infantry regiments, the Second (U.S.) Virginia Infantry, and a detachment of Bracken's Indiana cavalry at Cheat Fort—almost nineteen hundred men in all. The column was hastily underway. Those Federals were so confident of victory that seventy-five members of Rigby's Indiana artillery went along without cannons, fully expecting to capture and work the Rebel guns!586
At the head of Milroy's advance that day was a slight, baby-faced youth named Joseph R.T. Gordon. Just seventeen years old, “Josie” was the son of Major Jonathan W. Gordon, caretaker of General Garnett's body at Corricks Ford. The little private had enlisted in the Ninth Indiana Infantry that summer—after his father's departure to join the Eleventh United States regulars.
Major Gordon was horrified to learn of his tender son's enlistment. He feared that Josie had “thrown away” his life. A stern letter was addressed to the boy. “You need not be afraid that I shall interfere with your choice,” wrote the Major. “I would…sooner die than you should do any unworthy act in your new vocation to bring reproach upon yourself or family. Remember your mother. Do not forget that you were among her last thoughts…. Write to me often, obey your officers, and die sooner than be a calf or a coward.”
Josie Gordon was so fragile in appearance that General Milroy took him in as an orderly. But the boy gravitated to danger, proving himself quick-witted and fearless. The amiable Josie soon became the “pet of the regiment.” He was “brave as a lion,” it was said, “and as gentle as a lamb.”
Young Gordon narrowly escaped death when hidden Confederates shot into Milroy's advance guard two miles west of old Camp Bartow. The main Federal column reached that point some hours after it was cleared. Curious soldiers peered at the yellow-clad faces of their dead. “How repulsive they looked,” recalled Ambrose Bierce, “with their blood-smears, their blank, staring eyes, their teeth uncovered by contraction of the lips! The frost had begun already to whiten their deranged clothing. We were as patriotic as ever, but we did not wish to be that way. For an hour afterward the injunction of silence in the ranks was needless.”587
That night, the Federals gathered near old Camp Bartow, kindling fires to ward off the cold. General Milroy summoned the officers to his campfire and unfolded a plan. Proposing to split his force in two, the general would send each column, about nine hundred strong, to pounce upon the Confederates from opposite flanks at dawn.
Colonel Gideon Moody, with his Ninth Indiana and the Second (U.S.) Virginia detachment, would march by the Green Bank road, climb Buffalo Ridge, and strike the left flank of Camp Allegheny. General Milroy's column, led by Colonel James Jones's Twenty-fifth Ohio and detachments of the Thirteenth Indiana and Thirty-second Ohio Regiments, would ascend the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike to storm the Confederate right. The attacks were to begin at daybreak on December 13.588
Colonel Moody's march began at 11 P.M. on December 12, under a brilliant star-lit sky. “How romantic it all was,” recalled Ambrose Bierce, “the glades suffused and interpenetrated with moonlight; the long valley of the Greenbrier stretching away…the river itself unseen under its ‘astral body’ of mist!”
General Milroy's column started up the frozen turnpike at midnight. Within a mile of the enemy camp, Confederate pickets opened fire. A wounded Federal, moaning piteously and covered with blood, was carried through the ranks. Trying to ignore the grim scene, Milroy's troops filed off at a sharp curve and began to scramble up the mountainside.589
The Confederates at Camp Allegheny were aroused. Drums beat the call to arms as Colonel Ed Johnson stormed from hut to hut. Clad in his nightclothes and slippers, the colonel was a sight to behold. He donned a teamster's overcoat but had not retrieved his sword. Grabbing a crooked piece of oak root, Johnson waved it menacingly at his men. There was no time for formalities—the Yankees had come calling! “I am of the opinion to this day,” John Robson of the Fifty-second Virginia later wrote, “that nobody had to waste time hunting up a fight around old Ed Johnson without getting as much as was good for them before night.”590
The colonel had only twelve hundred men to cover his mile-long defenses. Lt. Colonel George Hansbrough's Ninth Virginia battalion, Major Albert Reger's Virginia battalion, and the Thirty-first Virginia Infantry occupied the heights on his right, protected only by some felled timber at the edge of a large field. On the Confederate left flank, south of the turnpike, were crude earthworks. Behind them Johnson placed his own Twelfth Georgia, the Fifty-second Virginia Infantry, and Lieutenant C.E. Dabney's Pittsylvania Cavalry. Covering the road from those works were two four-gun batteries, Captain Pierce Anderson's trusty Lee Battery, and the new guns of Captain John Miller, a Presbyterian minister. Miller's Second Rockbridge Artillery had drilled for weeks on the mountain with a makeshift pair of wooden “cannons” until their guns arrived.591
On the right flank, Confederates braced against a piercing wind as the sky began to glow. From the dark woods came Federal troops, “six files deep at double quick.” Lt. Col. Hansbrough's battalion knelt in line at the brow of the mountain and gave them a volley of musketry. Hansbrough's men, badly outnumbered, scattered like a covey of “chased partridges.” The Thirty-first Virginia Infantry promptly came to their aid. Rallying, the Confederates broke into a charge.592
The battle was on. “The balls flew thick and fast—I really believe that one thousand passed around me, playing all sorts of music,” recalled a Confederate. “ We could scarcely see them for the smoke,” wrote a Federal officer. “The fight here was almost hand to hand,” Lt. Col. Hansbrough declared. “The men fought on their own hook, each loading and firing as fast as possible.” Hansbrough fell wounded and was carried from the field. “The roar of the musketry was terrible,” wrote an Ohio captain, “and the shouts of the men was like the yelling of fiends.”593
Colonel Johnson brought up five companies of the Twelfth Georgia Infantry and pitched into the fray. Swinging his oak bludgeon, Johnson led a charge. “Give ‘em Hell boys,” he roared. “Give ‘em Hell.” Milroy's Federals melted to the rear. The din of battle overwhelmed sensibilities, shocked mortal flesh. “Stick to the timber, boys, and stand firm,” cried a Federal captain attempting to rally his men, “our side is making half that noise.”594
“Here began a most determined struggle,” recalled an Ohio Federal. “They to gain control of the timber, we to keep them out.” Bluecoats seized the upper hand. “We suffered much,” admitted James Hall, “the enemy having decidedly the advantage, being in the woods,—with us in the open field, and having the sun shining full in our faces.” Prostrate forms soon dotted the field. “I fought for more than an hour within a [rod] of two [of ] my cabbin mates who lay weltering in their blood,” related a member of the Thirty-first Virginia. “It being a very cold frosty morning a fog kept raising from their blood.”595
Members of the Yeager family were ushered from their home as bullets pattered on the roof like hail. The struggle became desperate. Confederates were driven to their cabins, only to be led back up the slop
e by the fiery Ed Johnson. “Our boys fought bravely repulsing the enemy three…times,” wrote a Federal, “running them at the point of the bayonet…but each time they rallied and drove our boys back.” Troops seasoned on the mountain crests now battled like veterans. The Western Virginians under Johnson's command fought with unusual tenacity, for the Federals stood between them and their homes.596
“[I]…had my gun shot & dented so that I could scarcely get a load down her & finally threw it down & picked up another,” recalled a wounded Virginia Confederate. The battle lines mixed in such confusion that Southern artillerists found it difficult to engage without killing their own men. Muskets were discharged in the very faces of the foe. “I never witnessed harder fighting,” avowed Ed Johnson, that veteran of three wars.
The disappearance of skulkers and those aiding the wounded badly thinned Milroy's lines. Federal troops, now low on ammunition, dug frantically through the cartridge boxes of the fallen. Listening in vain for Colonel Moody's attack on the opposite flank, Milroy's remaining troops shot their last rounds and gathered up the wounded. Nearly three hours after the attack commenced, they retreated back down the mountainside.597
Just about then, Colonel Moody's column appeared on the Confederate left. Moody's lengthy and difficult circuit had upset the Federal timetable. Worse, his men had tarried at a local mill, guzzling hard apple cider and filling their canteens. Upon climbing the steep mountainside, they found scowling earthworks and acres of slashed timber, “impenetrable to a cat.” It did not look like the haunt of a demoralized foe.598
Turning from the wreck of Milroy's detachment on the right, Colonel Johnson now joined his men on the left. Captain Pierce Anderson's Lee Battery anchored the Confederate works on that flank. The venerable Anderson saw men in gray jackets clambering through the fallen timber. “Don't shoot,” they cried out. “We are your pickets coming in!” Anderson, on horseback a few paces in advance, called out for them to enter the works. He was instantly shot down. Deceiving Federal skirmishers had killed the grizzled veteran of fifty-eight battles!599
Colonel Moody's Federals—the Ninth Indiana and Second (U.S.) Virginia Regiments—charged up the slope, “whooping like devils.” As they closed, Confederates rose from the ditch and poured in a “murderous fire.” The charge stalled in a tangle of logs and brush fronting the enemy works. “It was a horrible sight indeed,” avowed one Federal. “The balls flew around thick as hail…. I felt that I would fall when we were advancing, for I did not see how I could escape their balls….[H]ad we not fell down we would undoubtedly have been killed.”600
Federals nestled into the slashed timber. “We took cover in it and pot-shotted the fellows behind the parapet,” Ambrose Bierce recollected. By slinking through the fallen trees under fire, some drew within twenty yards of the Confederate works. Among them was little Josie Gordon, that darling of the Ninth Indiana Infantry. Tiring of the stalemate, he gathered a storming party, determined to renew the charge. Josie leaped upon a log, boldly exposed to the guns. Comrades watched in horror as the little hero fell, his tender voice still ringing through the timber for them to “Come on!”601
The attack devolved into a contest of sharpshooters. Enemy soldiers taunted and cursed—daring each other to hold up their heads! Each man let slip a bullet at anything exposed. “In this position we kept up a regular Indian fight for over four hours,” wrote a member of the Second (U.S.) Virginia. “Toward the last the firing became so accurate, that if an inch of one's person was exposed, he was sure to catch it.”602
Confederate artillerists splintered the fallen timber with round shot and canister to drive out the attackers. Reverend Captain Miller's cannons—no longer the wooden variety—did fine execution. Colonel Moody's brushy nest became too hot to hold. By 2 P.M., nearly seven hours after General Milroy's first shots, the exhausted Federals withdrew. The battle was over.603
Colonel Moody's troops rejoined Milroy at the base of the ridge, using swords and bayonets to chisel out graves for the dead. Licking their wounds, the Federals turned back for Cheat Mountain. Large wagons carried off the injured. “This was the saddest trip I ever made,” an Ohio captain later mused. “The mountain road was rocky and rough. The moaning of the wounded men and their continual plea for water made the night dismal.” Ice in the wagon ruts was often broken for water to quench their thirst.
Upon repassing their unburied dead near Camp Bartow, some Federals noted that the gruesome forms had changed position. “They appeared also to have thrown off some of their clothing,” Ambrose Bierce recalled, “which lay near by, in disorder. Their expression too, had an added blankness—they had no faces.”
“As soon as the head of our straggling column had reached the spot a desultory firing had begun,” Bierce wrote. “One might have thought the living paid honors to the dead. No; the firing was a military execution; the condemned, a herd of galloping swine. They had eaten our fallen, but—touching magnanimity!—we did not eat theirs.”604
The Federals had been “most gloriously” thrashed. “Our men discovered at the first fire that a great mistake had been made,” editorialized the Wheeling Intelligencer. “They had been led to expect a different meeting.—Scouts had reported the enemy only about a thousand strong, and in a place where they could easily be taken. Our men were all eagerness to bag them.” Declared a bitter Hoosier, “I think Gen. Milroy placed to[o] much confidence in them damned rebel deserters.”605
During the fight, Confederates distinctly overheard Federal soldiers grumbling that they had been deceived. General Milroy blamed defeat on a deserter from his own camp, along with the “many base cowards” who left the fight prematurely. But the Gray Eagle had lost his first battle; he alone was to blame. Ironically, had the attack been delayed only two days, Milroy would have found the Confederate camp abandoned.606
A War Department commendation praised the Confederates for victory in “combat as obstinate and as hard fought as any that has occurred during the war.” Ghastly corpses littered Camp Allegheny's bloodstained crest. “Our victory has been complete but dearly bought,” wrote Colonel Johnson of the nearly seven-hour struggle. “I have seen enough of war,” wept James Hall. “O my God, how forcibly it illustrates the folly and depravity of the human heart.”
The wounded suffered intensely. “Many were groaning from extreme pain,” wrote Hall, “with the cold, clammy sweat of death upon their brows.” Left in a hospital on the dreary summit, some later died of exposure. The Confederates lost more than 150 men—killed, wounded, or missing in action. Casualties on the Federal side numbered about 140. Bodies turned up in the woods around Camp Allegheny for weeks. “Six were found yesterday,” wrote a correspondent on December 21, “with their eyes picked out by the crows.”607
John Cammack's company of the Thirty-first Virginia Infantry lost eighteen of forty-two men in the fight. “Out of our commissioned and non-commissioned officers,” he wrote, “everyone but myself was killed, wounded or missing. I was a corporal at the time and the command of the company devolved on me…. We buried six of our men in one grave, and I commanded the firing party.”
The clash had truly been a fraternal one. Virginia Confederates recognized some of the Union dead as old neighbors. A Federal captain was said to have drawn a bead on his own brother in the Confederate trenches during that battle.608
Little Josie Gordon was greatly mourned. Earlier, in a premonition of death, Josie had asked comrades of the Indiana Ninth to send his body home to Indianapolis. His father, Major Jonathan Gordon, would make a heart-rending discovery upon securing those remains. Found inside the breast pocket of the coat in which Josie fell was an unfinished letter, stained with his blood. The father's trembling hand unfolded a final testament from his son:
You seem to be at a loss, my dear Father, to understand my motive for volunteering, but I think, if you will remember the lessons which for years you have endeavored to impress upon my mind, that all will be explained. When you have endeavored ever sinc
e I was able to understand you, to instruct me…that I was to prefer Freedom to every thing else in this world, and that I should not hesitate to sacrifice anything, even life itself, upon the altar of my country when required, you surely should not be surprised that I should, in this hour of extreme peril to my country, offer her my feeble aid.
Josie Gordon was laid to rest with military honors in one of the most imposing funeral ceremonies Indianapolis residents could remember.609
Of the many heroes at Camp Allegheny, none stood taller than Colonel Ed Johnson. His stubborn defense allowed the Confederates to claim an unlikely victory, despite being almost twice outnumbered. “The old fellow will die in his tracks before he will consent to a retreat,” wrote a Virginian of the colonel, “and the confidence which the troops entertain in his skill and gallantry is worth a thousand men to us.”
“My recollections of Col. Edward Johnson, as he appeared that day, is very distinct,” wrote John Robson after the war, “because he acted so differently from all my preconceived ideas of how a commander should act on the field of battle.” He was “always in the thickest of the fight,” marveled a Confederate officer of the musket-toting colonel who could “load and shoot faster than any man he saw.” Ed Johnson led the fierce charges in person, infusing his men with courage as he swore defiantly at the bluecoats. His clothes were riddled with bullet holes, yet he came out of the fight without a scratch. With bulldog obstinacy, he drew a line atop the Allegheny that the enemy could not cross.610
Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided Page 26