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

by W Hunter Lesser

  Colonel Johnson became a bonafide Southern hero. The “immense war club” he carried in the fight appeared on display at the State Library in Richmond. The colonel was awarded a brigadier general's star, to date from the day of battle—Friday the thirteenth! One thing more was earned. The club-wielding defender of those bleak, windswept heights became forever known as “Allegheny” Johnson.611

  CHAPTER 23

  COLD AS THE NORTH POLE

  “Of all the places on this earth, there's none I do declare, That can surpass Cheat mountain top for misery and despair.”

  —“Colonel” Coe, Thirty-second Ohio Infantry

  The Confederate victory at Camp Allegheny doomed soldiers to a winter in the mountains. Southerners under “Allegheny” Johnson were ordered to hold their icy perch, while General Robert Milroy's Federals huddled on Cheat Mountain twenty miles northwest. Deep snow and subzero temperatures could be expected. “Some of the boys are pretty badly scared about it,” acknowledged a member of the Thirty-second Ohio Infantry. “They think if [we] stay here the whole regiment will freeze to death.” A pragmatic Confederate accepted the inevitable. “[T]here will be no hope of any service,” he wrote. “Will lie up and try to keep warm.”612

  Log shanties became their homes. “Well sis we are into winter quarters at last,” grumbled a Georgian at Camp Allegheny. “16 men crowded into one little hut—16 ft by 16 ft—one small fireplace to cook, eat, and warm around, and the weather cold, bitter cold, snow all over the ground, and a difficult matter to get wood.”613

  Others were not so fortunate. “ We are still living in our tents,” Virginian James Hall addressed his diary in late December, “but we make them tolerably comfortable by constructing rude fireplaces to them. At night we do not fare so well. Some mornings when we awaken our blankets are wet…and the inside of our tent lined with hoar frost. Many times our hair is frozen stiff by congealed respiration, and our floor is covered with snow. This is a pleasant life, sure.”614

  Soldiers made desperate pleas for more congenial assignments. “We are…suffering the hardest of all hardships…upon the frigid top of the hateful Alleghany,” wrote a shivering captain to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens. Indiana Congressman Schuyler Colfax lobbied General McClellan on behalf of the Ninth Indiana Regiment at Cheat Mountain: “I now beg and earnestly entreat you to relieve them…from that Siberia to fields where they will have a chance to fight instead of to freeze.”615

  Political intrigue was also rife in the city of Wheeling. Sixty-one delegates had gathered at the Wheeling Custom House since November 26 to frame a constitution for the new “State of Kanawha.” The convention opened with acrimonious debate. “Kanawha” proved to be an unpopular name—a county and two rivers within the proposed state already held that title. Many had urged that the name “Virginia” somehow be retained. A poll of members chose the name “West Virginia” for their new state.616

  Delegates next wrangled over a “proper boundary.” A nine-member committee stunned the convention on December 5 by adding thirty-two counties to the thirty-nine included in the original statehood ordinance. The proposal would have pushed the new state's reach to the Blue Ridge Mountains, inflated its slave population, and resulted in a voting majority loyal to the Confederacy! Delegate Gordon Battelle of Ohio County rightfully called it a “delusion and a snare” to defeat the new-state movement.

  On December 13, while battle raged at Camp Allegheny, the territorial limits of West Virginia were fixed. Forty-four counties were included unconditionally. The counties of Pendleton, Hardy, Hampshire, Morgan, Berkeley, Jefferson, and Frederick were to be added if their voters ratified the new constitution. Those counties (all but Frederick would ultimately be included), formed a new panhandle—created to place the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in Union hands. “[It] is the great artery that feeds our country,” spoke delegate Waitman Willey. “We cannot do without it.”617

  Little mention had been made of slavery. Anti-slavery feelings pulsed strong in trans-Allegheny Virginia, yet there were influential slaveholders. Few delegates wished to take up the “vexed question”—it might endanger their whole movement. On the morning of December 14, however, Methodist minister Gordon Battelle rose and called for a gradual emancipation clause in the state's new constitution. Most of the delegates were thunderstruck. Exclaimed one, “I discovered on that occasion, as I never had before, the mysterious and over-powering influence ‘the peculiar institution’ had on men otherwise sane and reliable. Why, when Mr. Battelle submitted his resolutions, a kind of tremor—a holy horror, was visible throughout the house!”

  Those vexing resolutions were tabled, but Archibald Campbell's Wheeling Intelligencer took the cause public. “ We should esteem it far better that the Convention had never assembled that than it should omit to take action of this character,” proclaimed the Intelligencer. “Congress will hesitate long before it will consent to the subdivision of a slave State simply that two slave States may be made out of it.” Anxious to be rid of the subject, delegates voted to exclude slaves or any “free person of color” from taking up permanent residence in the new state following ratification. Most hoped that would be enough to secure Congressional approval. The issue of slavery continued to fester.618

  The convention approved West Virginia's new constitution by unanimous vote. A public referendum was slated for the first Thursday in April 1862. “[W]inter closes in on the Union people of Western Virginia,” noted President Abraham Lincoln in his message to Congress, “leaving them masters of their own country.”619

  Christmas 1861 was unique in America. Troops in the snow-clad Alleghenies spent the day without families or loved ones. There was little holiday cheer. “ We are amusing ourselves hovering around a fire in our tent,” Confederate James Hall wrote from Camp Allegheny. “Though last night was Christmas Eve, I did not sleighride much! Instead of that, we were marched out with the Regt. on the mountain, to guard the batteries and artillery. We spent our Christmas…very gaily, sure.”620

  The new year brought a reprieve from the cold. To celebrate, the armies launched raids. On New Year's Eve, more than seven hundred Federal troops under Major George Webster of the Twenty-fifth Ohio Infantry left Camp Elkwater for Huntersville, nearly forty-five miles south. They drove two hundred and fifty mounted Confederates from the town on January 3, 1862, and captured nearly thirty thousand dollars worth of military provisions. Unable to transport the windfall, Webster consigned it to the flames and nailed a Union flag to the courthouse as his calling card.621

  From the Shenandoah Valley, Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson countered with a march on General Kelley's force at Romney, part of his grand strategy to reclaim Western Virginia. Jackson would first march north to strike the B&O Railroad and Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, disrupting Federal supply lines and preventing a junction of United States forces under Generals Frederick Lander and Nathaniel Banks that threatened his base at Winchester, Virginia. Jackson would then turn west for Romney. By claiming the town, he hoped to stack the deck for a spring offensive.

  But Jackson needed the Army of the Northwest to strike that blow, and General Loring was slow in coming. His inertia angered the impatient Jackson. When the Army of the Northwest finally slid out of the Alleghenies on roads of mud and snow, they were in no mood to fight. Loring's men had seen enough of war. Veterans of the army intended to seize the pleasures of the holiday season—eggnog, home-cooked meals, and the company of Shenandoah Valley women.622

  General Jackson was not pleased by what he saw. Nor were Loring's men inspired by their first sight of Stonewall. They laughed at how his mount “looked more like a plow horse than a war steed.” Sam Watkins of Tennessee observed Jackson “riding upon his old sorrel horse, his feet drawn up as if his stirrups were much too short for him, and his old dingy military cap hanging well forward over his head, and his nose erected in the air, his old rusty sabre rattling by his side.” General Loring was certainly not impressed, and pro
mptly locked horns with Jackson. Loring, six years Jackson's senior, had anticipated a role in planning the offensive, but was told nothing by the secretive Stonewall.623

  Jackson's mysterious offensive began on New Year's Day under warm and breezy skies. The balmy weather tricked Confederates into dumping their heavy coats and blankets in supply wagons. As the army marched north on Bath (Berkeley Springs), temperatures plummeted. Soft rains turned to driving snow—Old Man Winter was back with a vengeance. The supply wagons were nowhere to be seen. Thinly clad soldiers were punished by the elements. When Loring ordered his suffering men to bivouac after covering eight miles, he was handed a dispatch from Jackson to march on. “By God, sir,” the one-armed general exploded, “this is the damnedest outrage ever perpetrated in the annals of history, keeping my men out here in the cold without food.”

  Loring's pace exasperated Jackson, but the Army of the Northwest showed fight. The First Georgia Regiment stormed into Bath on January 4 with cries of “Remember Laurel Hill!” Detachments under Colonel Rust burned an important railroad bridge over Big Cacapon River and tore up miles of B&O track and telegraph wire.

  Following a standoff with troops under General Lander at Hancock, Maryland, Jackson withdrew from the banks of the Potomac and turned on Romney. Severe weather now became his greatest foe. One fierce snowstorm opened with a bizarre thunder and lightning show—“sheet after sheet of wild flames” hissed from the sky. It was said that temperatures plunged to sixteen degrees below zero. Roads turned to solid ice; the wagons lagged far behind as shivering troops again bivouacked without food or shelter. Suffering Confederates robbed parched corn from the horses to ward off death.

  Tennessean Marcus Toney watched men drop into “that stupor which precedes death by freezing, and we would have to seize them roughly and keep them moving.” Piercing winds chilled the very marrow of their bones. Sam Watkins swore he found eleven pickets who had frozen to death on post—a horrifying “Death Watch!”624

  As the Confederate offensive ground to a shivering halt, word came that the Yankees under General Kelley had vacated Romney. Jackson gladly took the prize by forfeit and watched Loring's command straggle in on January 17, “very much demoralized.”

  Romney, a filthy, disgusting place from occupation, now became Confederate winter quarters. Loring's Northwesterners could see little accomplishment for all the suffering. They mistook Stonewall's resolve for insanity. The men became insolent, cursing and abusing him. “They blamed him for the cold weather,” wrote Sam Watkins. “They blamed him for everything, and when he would ride by a regiment they would…call him ‘Fool To m Jackson,’ and loud enough for him to hear.”625

  When Jackson and his old “Stonewall Brigade” departed for Winchester—a far more desirable post—Loring's troops howled with resentment. On January 23, Colonel Samuel Fulkerson of the Thirty-seventh Virginia Infantry wrote a friend in the Confederate Congress on behalf of Loring's command:

  This part of the army, during the last summer and fall, passed through a campaign in Northwestern Virginia, the character of which in point of suffering, toil, exposure, and deprivations has no parallel in this war…. After all this hardship and exposure, and many, with much labor, had built winter huts, a call was made upon them to march some 150 miles to [Jackson's aid]…. This was also cheerfully undertaken by the men…with the expectation on every side that after the object of the expedition was accomplished, this force, which had passed through eight months of incessant toil, would be permitted to retire to some convenient point and enjoy a short respite, preparatory to the spring campaign, rendered the more necessary by the terrible exposure since leaving Winchester, which has emaciated the force almost to a skeleton.

  “The best army I ever saw of its strength has been destroyed by bad marches and bad management,” added Colonel Taliaferro by endorsement. “It is ridiculous to hold this place; it can do no good, and will subject our troops to great annoyance and exposed picket duty, which will destroy them. No one will re-enlist, not one of the whole army. It will be suicidal [for] the Government to keep this command here.”

  Eleven top-ranking officers of the Army of the Northwest condemned the Romney occupation in similar terms. General Loring endorsed their petition as “expressing the united feeling of the army.” He forwarded it to Secretary of War Benjamin with Stonewall's blunt postscript: “Respectfully forwarded, but disapproved.”626

  However, there were potent political forces at work. On January 30, Secretary Benjamin abruptly ordered the Northwestern Army back to Winchester. The move wiped out months of Stonewall Jackson's labor. Infuriated, Jackson submitted his resignation the next day.

  Virginia Governor John Letcher and other influential friends scrambled to his support. When the dust settled, Jackson remained in command of the Valley District. He promptly filed court-martial charges against General Loring for “Neglect of duty” and “Conduct subversive of good order and military discipline.” The patrician Lee might suffer Loring's agonizing machinations, but the rigid disciplinarian Jackson would not.627

  Stonewall's charges were never brought to trial. Loring was given a major general's commission and ushered to southwestern Virginia. His Virginia units joined Jackson's Valley Army; most of the other troops were reassigned. All that remained of the original Army of the Northwest was General Ed Johnson's shivering command at Camp Allegheny.628

  The winter of 1861–1862 was one of the worst old Virginians could remember. The troops suffered terribly in their elevated posts. Weather-beaten cheeks bowed to the howling mountain storms. “Winter is now coming in earnest,” wrote Confederate James Hall on January 7. “I never experienced colder weather.”

  Fierce winds drove blizzards of snow; a bitter chill locked the mountains in its grasp. “[It is] cold, cold, very cold,” groaned a Georgia Confederate. A soldier correspondent reported to the Richmond Daily Dispatch, “It is snowing; the wind is blowing a hurricane; it is as cold as the North Pole.”

  Hundreds were victimized by frostbite. The frozen skin of their hands and feet peeled off like onions. “Our suffering was severe from the intense cold,” admitted Georgian Parson Parker. “I have seen ice on the barrels of our guns one forth of an inch thick; I have seen the stoutest men of our regiment wrenching their hands and shedding tears from cold, in short, it's almost a matter of impossibility to describe the sufferings of the soldiers on the Alleghany Mountain.”629

  Even when huddled around fires in their makeshift cabins, men could not escape the arctic blasts. Furious winds drove smoke down the rude chimneys and sifted snow through cracks and clap-board roofs. To avoid the miserably crowded huts, some rode out the storms in their tents. “The fireplaces we have constructed do tolerably well while the fire lasts,” James Hall wrote, “but at night we suffer considerably, until the snow blows over us enough to cover us, when we sleep quite well.” Old Man Winter assailed the Federals on Cheat Mountain with such fury that huge snowdrifts locked the soldiers in their huts.

  Just when it appeared that the armies would be sealed in an icy tomb, temperatures spiked, shrouding the mountains in fog. “Dame nature is growing freakish,” wrote a Confederate in late January. Black clouds poured rain for days, then sleet, and then snow once more. Rain froze on every surface, rendering the turnpikes impassible and causing overcoats to “rattle like tin.”630

  Long days and nights in the shanties were passed with music and preaching—or with smuggled whiskey and gambling. Whiskey and crowded quarters did not mix. “Men are drunk as usual,” wrote a disgusted Confederate from Camp Allegheny. “Decent men must endure it—there is no escape. A feud…found vent this evening…. Men were throwing and flourishing knives, bleeding and swearing. It was with difficulty that quiet was restored.”

  The soldiers learned to cope with winter's onslaught, as they had with previous trials. Pickets stacked rails in tipi fashion, creating elaborate wigwams to keep from freezing at their posts. On Cheat Mountain, tender flapjacks, mess pork, and coffee
boosted spirits; interludes of violin and flute music, with homemade tambourines or a crooked bayonet as triangle, revived the soul. Yet every false alarm brought the armies out to mark time in snow-filled trenches, the wind “singing like minie balls” around their ears. “What a life,” declared one quaking Confederate. “Would give all I have to be rid of this miserable bargain.”631

  Across the mountains in Washington, General George McClellan also felt an oppressive chill. The weather was far milder there, but McClellan's huge Army of the Potomac remained idle, and the Radical Republicans—those anti-slavery zealots in Congress—grew impatient. Restless newspaper editors joined the politicians in a call for action. McClellan's once-reassuring bulletins of “All quiet on the Potomac” were now mocked by his critics.

  President Lincoln stood behind his young general-in-chief. Lincoln had known McClellan from their old railroad days, as an attorney for the Illinois Central. More than once the two had spent long nights at lonely county seats during litigation, where Lincoln spun his many anecdotes. McClellan, however, did not reciprocate the president's support. With each passing day, he became more certain that the Radical leaders sought his ruin. They labored tirelessly, he believed, “sowing the seeds of distrust in Mr. Lincoln's mind.” The young general did his best to keep clear of all the “wretched politicians.”