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

by W Hunter Lesser

  McClellan returned home one night and was told that the president awaited, yet he passed the parlor without acknowledgment and retired to bed! Lincoln appeared to ignore the snub. “I will hold McClellan's horse,” the president said, “if he will only bring us success.”632

  Lincoln watched as McClellan's Army of the Potomac—the largest and best-equipped fighting force ever assembled on the continent—did nothing. As the clamor for action reached a crescendo at year's end, General McClellan came down with typhoid fever. By January 12, he had recovered enough to attend a council of war at the White House, but would not reveal his plans to subdue the Rebels. McClellan grumbled that neither army generals nor cabinet members could keep a secret, charging that Lincoln even shared them with Tad, his eight-year-old son.

  A congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War fueled discontent with General McClellan. Radical Republicans questioned his courage and made subtle allegations of “treason.” Newsmen wondered aloud if political ambition clouded McClellan's military sense—that perhaps his heart was not in the war. Critics demanded his resignation.

  Still, the Army of the Potomac army did not move. Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's newly appointed Secretary of War, insisted it was time for McClellan and his elegantly furnished troops to “fight or run away.” Even the president was heard to remark that if General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to borrow it.633

  Lincoln urged McClellan to move against the Confederates at Centreville and Manassas Junction, only twenty-five miles southwest of Washington on the road to Richmond. Week by week, the critics grew louder. Frustrated beyond measure by McClellan's failure to act, the President finally gave February 22—Washington's birthday—as the ultimatum for an advance. But the young general urged another way. To avoid the huge Rebel force he imagined in Northern Virginia, McClellan proposed to ship his vast army down Chesapeake Bay to Urbanna, near the mouth of the Rappahannock River, and from there march west to Richmond before the Confederates could react.

  Lincoln was troubled by the plan. If the Potomac Army sailed away, Washington would be left open to attack. When McClellan gave assurances that ample troops would be left to guard the capital, the president acquiesced. But on March 9, news of the withdrawal of Confederates from Centreville and Manassas—just a day's march from Washington—changed everything. General Joseph Johnston's Rebel army had quietly fallen back to new positions behind the Rappahannock River, ruining McClellan's carefully scripted plan to get to Richmond before the enemy did. Left behind for all to see were defenses not so strong as McClellan had feared. Some Confederate works had been armed only with logs painted black to look like cannons—harmless “Quaker guns.”

  More unpleasant news arrived on March 11. The president had removed McClellan from the post of general-in-chief, ostensibly to focus his attention on the push to Richmond. For the time being, Lincoln and Secretary Stanton would run the war.

  Revising his plan to claim Richmond, McClellan proposed to sail to the tip of the Peninsula, a prominent finger of Virginia real estate dividing the James and York Rivers. It had been the scene of the climactic victory at Yorktown in the American Revolution. Landing his army at Union-held Fort Monroe, McClellan would strike overland for Richmond.

  The Army of the Potomac was moving at last. From Alexandria, a huge armada set sail: four hundred ships, more than 121,000 men, forty-four batteries of artillery, and all the implements of war. The date was March 17, 1862. McClellan departed with his typical Napoleonic flair. He was thankful to be leaving Washington and his enemies in the rear.634

  Meanwhile, General Robert E. Lee confronted another fleet of Union invaders in his new assignment along the south Atlantic coast. Lee was charged with the defense of nearly three hundred miles of vulnerable South Carolina and Georgia coastline, including the ports of Charleston and Savannah. There were batteries to fortify and waterways to obstruct. It was an unromantic duty of dirt and drudgery. Lee's own competence was in doubt.635

  In January and February 1862, disaster stalked the Confederacy. General Felix Zollicoffer was killed and his defenses broken at Mill Springs, Kentucky. The irascible Henry Wise lost two-thirds of an army and his own son in defeat at Roanoke Island, North Carolina. On the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in Tennessee, Forts Henry and Donelson fell to Union General U.S. Grant. Wise's old antagonist John Floyd had abandoned the latter post, fearing execution as a traitor if captured. The Confederacy lost much of Kentucky and west Tennessee as a result. Southern defenses on the upper Mississippi were crumbling. Confederate hopes of foreign intervention were dashed.

  On March 2, President Davis summoned General Lee back to Richmond. Once again, Lee was placed under direction of the Confederate president, serving as liaison with the military authorities. “I do not see either advantage or pleasure in my duties,” he admitted to Mary.636 The Charleston Mercury charged that Lee had been reduced “from a commanding general to an orderly sergeant.”

  The military situation in Richmond was critical. Badly needed shipments of ordnance had been chocked off by the Union blockade. Neither powder nor muskets were available to soldiers in the field. So desperate was the Confederacy that preparations were made to arm the troops with long-handled pikes!637 The news from every front was chilling in the winter of 1861–1862.

  CHAPTER 24

  ALL'S FAIR IN

  LOVE AND WAR

  “[I] could take care of the wounded Federals as fast as brother Thomas could wound them.”

  —attributed to Laura Jackson Arnold

  A traveler halted for wagon repairs along the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, eight miles south of Beverly. While he waited, an elderly man appeared at the door of a log cabin opposite. The old fellow, a soldier in the War of 1812, was so crippled by rheumatism that he could scarcely walk.

  “They took my two boys from me for the Southern army,” he said, “an me an’ the old woman are all alone. They promised the boys to take care of me an’ the old woman, but they haint done it. We're now livin’ on charity. I told the boys not to go an’ fight agin the Government.”

  “Where are they now?” inquired the traveler.

  “God only knows, sir,” choked the aged cripple, his eyes welling with tears.

  “I don't know what's to become of me an’ the old woman,” he stammered. “We'll never see our boys, an’ we can do nothin’ for ourselves. I wish I could get clear of this plaguy rheumatiz. I was a mighty good man afore I had this rheumatiz. But no boys, sick, and no money—good God, what'll become of [us]!”638

  Cruel were the fortunes of war. Many able-bodied men took up arms, leaving women to care for their families. “We meet very few men; the poor women excite our sympathy constantly,” wrote Major Rutherford B. Hayes of the Twenty-third Ohio Infantry from the mountains of Western Virginia. “A great share of the calamities of war fall on the women.”639

  Virginia Confederates marching along a road one day happened upon a forlorn family of refugees. The grim-faced matron, her five children, and all of their remaining possessions were strapped aboard a single, jaded horse. “A child's head was looking out each side,” recalled one amazed soldier. “Two children were on the horse behind her, and she held a baby in her arms. When she came into our midst…she broke down and commenced to cry.”

  For civilians, the trials were severe. Andrew Yeager and his son, refugees from Travellers Repose, died from “camp fever” before the close of 1861. John Yeager of Allegheny Mountain was said to have died from being poisoned. Yeager's sons left home in early 1862 to join the Confederate army, but the women of his family remained. To survive, they concealed livestock in the mountains and buried meat, cakes, and jugs of syrup to keep them away from prowling soldiers.640

  A once-fertile land was devastated by war. “Virginia has suffered more than you could have any idea,” wrote an Indiana soldier from the town of Beverly. “Everywhere the army has gone it has been encamped upon the ground of some wealthy secessionist, and wheneve
r it leaves a farm there is scarcely a fence rail upon it, every stalk of Wheat, Corn, Oats, Grass and everything else is completely trodden down or eaten up. We are at present encamped in an Oat field and our horses are grazing in a very large cornfield; and it has been thus all the way.”

  “Our people will never feel the horrors of war until they have the enemy in their midst,” remarked a Confederate of conditions in the upper Greenbrier Valley near Camp Bartow. “When we first passed here…the people of this valley were well fixed, joyful and contented. Now not one of them is to be seen, and their once happy homes are desolate wastes—Poor people!”641

  Isolated dwellings that escaped the torch were often turned into makeshift hospitals. Such was the mind-numbing scene at a lonely cabin on the slopes of Cheat Mountain: “Lying upon the floor of the only room in the cabin were seven wounded rebels, left there by their fleeing comrades,” recalled an Ohio soldier in the aftermath of Lee's attack. “Two sick men had been left to care for them, which they were either not able or unwilling to do, so that the whole burden fell upon a poor woman, who, with her five children, were tenants of the hut. Her husband, a zealous secessionist, had been taken prisoner. He was punished, and properly enough, but what crime had the innocent children committed, and the poor mother, in that lonely mountain glen? She moved about in that quiet noiseless step so peculiar to intense sorrow, handing this one water, bathing that one's aching temples, and attending to her household duties. The children stood about the horrid scene—the elder ones in mute despair, the younger prattling away unconscious of the terrors of bellum, horridum bellum!”642

  Not everyone played the role of victim. In searching a house along the road to Rich Mountain, Federal troops found an indignant old woman, armed with no less than three loaded hunting pieces. She proudly displayed a secession flag, made, as she very frankly told the soldiers, from the tail of an old shirt. Upon it were the letters “J.D.” and “S.C.,” standing for “Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy.”643

  Soon after the outbreak of hostilities, Union leader Frank Pierpont was absent from his Fairmont home when two gaily-uniformed Confederate officers confronted his beautiful wife, Julia. They sought to claim the state musket issued to Charley Scott, ward of the family and a member of the militia.

  Julia Pierpont met them at the door with a gracious smile. In response to their polite inquiry for Mr. Scott, she suavely replied, “Mr. Scott does not wish to see you.” The fact was put mildly, for Mr. Scott cowered in the room just behind her.

  “We have a message for him,” answered one of the officers. “Will you ask him to step to the door?”

  “No Sir, you cannot see him here. If you wish to see him, you must seek him elsewhere.”

  The young officers hesitated. They were obviously chivalrous gentlemen, and Julia Pierpont played them to the hilt.

  “Of course,” she waxed, “you will not intrude upon a lady?”

  They hastened to assure her that nothing was further from their thoughts. And yet there was the matter of that musket, and their orders to retrieve it.

  “Will you be kind enough to tell Mr. Scott that Captain Thompson's orders are, that he must deliver up the musket which he received and holds from the state, and if he does not do so by twelve o'clock today he will be arrested.”

  The gentle play of courtesy was over. Julia Pierpont's defenseless blue eyes now burned with fire. “I understand that matter perfectly well, and young gentlemen,” she fended, “we don't care anything about it, we are not to be intimidated.”

  The two officers were speechless. A flash of crimson spread over the elder's face as they bowed and swiftly walked away. Julia strode to the front room, flung open a window and sang after them in a triumphant voice, “Hail Columbia Happy Land.”644

  Two “rabid” secessionists, known as the Hilleary sisters, resided in a log house at the foot of Rich Mountain. The younger had come from eastern Virginia with her children to escape impending war. Imagine the consternation when General McClellan's army marched up to her front door.

  “Surely,” she exclaimed to one of the Yankees, “I never imagined men would come to the mountains to fight.” Confronting the invader, she rattled vivaciously, “[W]hat do you want to kill us all for?”

  “But we don't, Madame!” he replied.

  “Well, any how, the Southern men say so, and they are our friends, and we'll have to believe them.”

  “Well, do you believe them, madame?”

  “Why I don't know. They said you'd all abuse us women, kill our children, and burn our houses, and they told dreadful stories until we thought all you Yankees were devils. When you all marched into Roaring Creek we'd a been right down glad to see you all shot down in your tracks.”

  “Well what do you think of us now?”

  “Oh, they lied about you some I ‘spose. Your common soldiers even seem gentlemen, and your officers, most of them are mighty agreeable. [I]f the people of Virginia could see us all, they wouldn't want to fight.”645

  Laura Jackson Arnold of Beverly was a woman of conviction—the sister of Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson. But this determined Jackson pledged allegiance to the Union cause. Upon the outbreak of hostilities, she rarely spoke of her famous brother—except to voice regret that he had taken up arms against his country. When war came to her town, Laura served as a nurse. Her graceful form was ever active in the hospitals; her tender hands soothed the aching temples of many a dying soldier far from the loved ones at home.

  A Federal surgeon recalled numerous incidents of her loyalty and courage: “Almost alone, amidst a disloyal community, she unflinchingly declared her devotion.…Her house was an asylum for the sick soldier, and faithfully she ministered to his wants. Her resources were often taxed to their utmost, and many were her regrets that she was unable to do greater good.…We have never heard that she received one farthing from the government, for her generous and loyal outlay, and have reason to believe that she never made application; but if there is one deserving soul in the great army of patriots that merits special recognition…it is Mrs. [Laura] Arnold.”646

  A few women actually marched off to war. Betsy Sullivan followed her husband through the Alleghenies with the First Tennessee Infantry in 1861. While serving the Confederacy, she cared for sick and wounded soldiers, mended, washed, and darned. No trial was too severe, no sacrifice too great on behalf of her “boys.” Adored by the regiment as “Mother Sullivan,” she marched with a knapsack on her back and slept on the frozen ground with only a blanket—just like the men.647

  Mother Sullivan was not alone. Nancy Hare campaigned “in real soldier style” with her husband in the Eighth Tennessee Infantry. She could “walk equal to any soldier,” recalled a Confederate, and became a leading member of Company K, cooking and washing for the troops. Mary Van Pelt, a “neat, graceful, quiet little woman,” accompanied her husband—a sergeant in the Federal army—on active duty with Loomis's Michigan Artillery in Western Virginia. Others intended to fight. A woman named Ann Watson surreptitiously enlisted in a Federal company at Wheeling in 1861 before she was discovered in men's clothing and removed.648

  Some had less wholesome motives. A wide-eyed Confederate wrote of one beguiling female who slinked around camp, “searching for her lover.” She made quite an impression until sent home as an “abandoned woman.”

  As Federal soldiers crossed the Ohio River into Western Virginia, the Wheeling Intelligencer moralized:

  Another Runaway—One would think that, in these times of war and excitement, that wives would behave themselves, so as not to occasion their husbands any unnecessary trouble. But this is not altogether the case, for yesterday, the wife of a farmer in Belmont County (Ohio), passed through the city with a volunteer, with whom she was running away. She had on a Zouave jacket, and her intoxication was barely perceptible to a stranger. For further particulars, the husband will please enquire at Grafton.649

  Attractive women were such a curiosity that the arriv
al of a Federal officer's wife at Elkwater brought out the entire camp. “That there are good-looking women in Virginia I am confident,” wrote a Union soldier from the Tygart Valley, “but they are mighty scarce ‘round here, and as a general thing chew snuff and smoke, and are as ignorant as the devil.” At least one Ohio foot soldier found the gals more to his liking. “I tell you,” wrote that boastful Buckeye, “the fair ones of Virginia are neither slow or scarce. The effect of them upon a soldier is miraculous.”650

  “Some of our boys goes a sparking,” wrote another, “married or not.” Love was in the air. Fearing that hometown sweethearts would marry someone else while they were away, heartsick soldiers carried on pen-pal courtships. Little Billy Davis, for one, had his eye on a certain Miss Jennie of Hopewell, Indiana. It started innocently with the trading of letters—until the last line of Miss Jennie's latest offered a shocking confession.