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

by W Hunter Lesser

  “I had never before received a letter of that kind,” Billy confessed to his journal, “but I became deeply interested at once; and fully responsive in sentiment.” Billy's heart raced as he read her dazzling confession over and over. Ten days of “delightful dreams” and “puzzling questions” passed before he mustered the courage to respond. Once more, Billy savored the magical line of Miss Jennie's letter: “But I must close lest I love you to[o] much.” Then he stopped cold—for the word viewed so many times as “love” properly leaped from the page as…“bore”! “I sat dumb,” recalled Billy, “while the air castles which I had built, tumbled into one heap and vanished.”651

  An Ohio soldier in Western Virginia mailed the following verse to his distant “Valentine”:

  O, Suzie, don't get married to those that stay at home; But rather take a soldier, just wait till I get home… So keep your spirits up, and don't you be afraid, Because I'm in the army, that you'll be an old maid. But if you will get married, you needn't wait for me; There's just as good fish swimming as ever swam the sea.652

  A Union telegraph operator named George W. Printz found himself badly smitten by Cupid's arrow. The subject was a Beverly lass named Harriett Crawford. Miss Harriett was fetching and high-spirited. Unfortunately for Printz, she was also a die-hard Rebel.

  Printz was hopelessly in love, but Harriett could not bring herself to marry a “Yankee.” Inspired by the “mightiest power under heaven,” Printz deserted to the Confederate army and returned after the war to marry Miss Harriett.653

  One day in June of 1861, mail for the Seventh Ohio Infantry arrived in the village of Weston, Lewis County, Virginia. Soldiers crowded around to take in all the news.

  “My folks are sending me some shoes,” declared one Charles Johns as he slipped an envelope into his pocket. “They think we are in for a first-class war.”

  Turning, he saw John Wood, the regiment's normally cheerful orderly, holding a letter of his own. Wood's look was tense; his face was pale and drawn.

  “What's wrong, fellow? Sick?”

  “Nothing at all,” snapped Wood, as he disappeared into a tent.

  The guard was ordered to be on full alert that night. There were rumors of Confederates about. No one was to pass, not even those Weston girls riding out for social calls.

  Guard number ten paced his beat near a covered bridge outside of town. Nothing unusual was observed as night came on. All was peaceful and quiet.

  Suddenly, a figure appeared in the gloomy approach to the bridge.

  “Halt! Who goes there?”

  No answer, only the thump of feet upon wood. A second challenge was offered. No response. And then the sentinel's gun flashed.

  A shrill cry, “You can't shoot a rebel,” another flash, and all was still.

  The anxious sentinel explained the situation to his relief. Fashioning a searchlight, they moved cautiously toward the bridge. Nothing was found.

  “Yes, he is seriously wounded. I wish you would send for Dr. Camden,” said the physician as he examined John Wood, who lay unconscious at headquarters. Turning to the commanding officer, the physician held up a shattered daguerreotype image. He had found it in a pocket of the wounded man's clothing.

  “This no doubt saved his life, if he lives; I wonder who it is. On the back it says ‘ To John from Evelyn.’ But tell me what happened.”

  “Well, it was like this, replied the officer; the sentry was ordered to shoot and he shot. The second guard after search thought him joking, but when morning came they found blood on the east end of the flooring of the bridge. Further examination showed smears on the top beams of the upper side. All along the great roof beam could be seen the imprint of human hands as though dipped in paint. Lying on it in a precarious situation, fifteen feet above the floor, at the end toward town, was Wood. A detachment of the guard got him down and here he is. I don't know why he did it, for of all persons he knew the orders and that it meant death.”

  “Well, some things are beyond me,” said the physician as he fingered Wood's clothing. “Look, here is a letter. Perhaps it will shed some light on it.” Unfolding the paper he read:

  Elmira, Ohio, June 23, 1861

  Dear John: You know all my people are down in Virginia. I simply cannot let you go on making war against many of my loved ones. You have made your choice and I have made mine. Our engagement is to be considered ended.

  Evelyn

  “That explains it all, but I hope he will get well anyway. Let Dr. Camden examine him when he comes and leave Johns with him.” The physician shook his head and departed.

  Wood soon regained consciousness. A few days of careful nursing assured his recovery.

  Once again, a courier rode up with the mail. “A letter for you, Wood,” he exclaimed. “Brace up, boy, I'll bet its good news.”

  “Well, give it to Johns and let him read it to me.”

  With mixed feelings, the letter was opened and its contents read aloud:

  Elmira, Ohio, June 27, 1861

  Dear John: No one will ever know the agony I have gone through since writing a note a few days ago. I know now you were only doing your duty. If you still care and feel unworthy I will be waiting for you. Every day I shall pray that God will spare you, and every moment now I shall look forward to your reply.

  Your own ungrateful, Evelyn654

  Time has not revealed their fate.

  CHAPTER 25

  LINCOLN'S ODD TRICK

  “With our people the Union and the New State are

  convertible terms. Crush the one and you, as certain

  as death, in my opinion, crush the other.”

  —Archibald Campbell

  Spring comes slowly to the Alleghenies. The year 1862 was no exception; snows lingered on the mountain crests even as flowers blossomed in sequestered coves. The season for active campaigning was at hand.

  On March 11 of that year, President Lincoln included Western Virginia, parts of Kentucky, and Tennessee in a new “Mountain Department.” General Rosecrans, politically out of favor in Washington because of a sharp tongue and blunt honesty, was relieved of command. His replacement was Major General John Charles Frémont, “the Pathfinder,” a flamboyant explorer, and the 1856 Republican candidate for president. On March 29, 1862, Frémont took command at Wheeling.655

  General Robert Milroy, commanding the Cheat Mountain District, promptly begged him for orders to march on Staunton. Developments in the lower Shenandoah Valley left the Confederates at Camp Allegheny exposed. On the second of April 1862, General “Allegheny” Johnson reluctantly abandoned that mountaintop post. “All the soldiers are in good spirits,” reported native son James Hall as the Confederates marched east, “but Western Virginians think it looks but little like getting home.”

  At long last, on April 6, General Milroy planted his banner upon the breastworks of Camp Allegheny. Ed Johnson was gone, but the Storm King remained defiant—pummeling Milroy's brigade with a tempest of rain and sleet. Federal soldiers packed into the former Confederate cabins. “But for the shelter they gave us,” swore one grateful Unionist, “many would have perished in the storm that prevailed all night.”

  Dawn unveiled an extraordinary scene. Every surface was coated with a thick layer of glassy ice. As clouds dispersed, the rising sun glittered off millions of frozen crystals—sparkling like the waves of a dazzling silver sea. One of Milroy's soldiers wrote, “The turnpike, after leaving the camp, passed through a dense mountain forest, and as the rain fell upon the trees, freezing as it fell, the tall pines had become freighted with their load of crystal ice, the weight of which inclined them together, forming an arch of fantastic design, under which for miles and miles we marched.” Haunting winds emitted “flute-like sounds that contained every note in the scale.” Swaying trees creaked and groaned, snapping with a loud report. The percussive crash of falling timber accompanied a “weird, awe-inspiring” serenade to the departing Federals. Ahead lay the Shenandoah Valley and General Stonewall Jackson.65
6

  On April 3, the date General Milroy received orders to advance, citizens of the proposed State of West Virginia ratified their new constitution. Governor Frank Pierpont reconvened the General Assembly on May 6 at Wheeling. Pierpont instructed the delegates: “The Constitution of the United States provides that no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State, without the consent of the Legislature of the State concerned, as well as of the Congress.” Pierpont's Restored Government of Virginia consummated its role on May 13 by including forty-eight counties within the new state border. Certified copies of the West Virginia statehood act and constitution were proudly forwarded to Washington.657

  Congress was then preoccupied with General McClellan's Army of the Potomac. The general's 135,000-man force had been shipped to the Virginia Peninsula by April 4, but its overland march to Richmond was delayed. The advance had barely commenced when McClellan's juggernaut stalled before an inferior Rebel force at Yorktown. Once again, the general vastly overestimated enemy numbers—thanks in part to Confederate troops that repeatedly marched in circles before his eyes. Badly fooled, the wary McClellan prepared to lay siege. General Joseph Johnston's outmanned Confederates then drew back to within seven miles of Richmond. Again McClellan followed and cautiously laid siege. He was close enough to hear church bells in the Southern capital—bells that might have tolled a death knell for the Confederacy.

  As McClellan dallied before Richmond, General Lee saw opportunity. Winning President Davis's distracted approval, Lee encouraged the little army of Stonewall Jackson to launch a counteroffensive from the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson's brilliantly executed “Valley Campaign” appeared to threaten Washington itself, thereby freezing forty thousand Union troops in middle Virginia who were to have joined McClellan for the deathblow at Richmond.

  On May 31, a fateful wound at Seven Pines near Richmond knocked Confederate General Joe Johnston out of action and put General Lee in command. Lee promptly reorganized the Army of Northern Virginia and launched a counterattack. Seven days of brutal fighting turned the Federal advance into a humiliating retreat. McClellan's huge army soon cowered under the protection of armored gunboats on the James River. In a matter of weeks, Lee had transformed the war.658

  While Lee pressed McClellan, the Thirty-seventh Congress debated Senate Bill No. 365, “An Act for the Admission of the State of ‘West Virginia’ into the Union.” On May 29, Waitman Willey presented the formal petition for statehood in the Senate. Privately, he was not optimistic. The Border States were opposed, Senator Willey wrote, because they considered West Virginia statehood “an abolition scheme.” Likewise, he feared, “the abolitionists oppose us because they say it is a proslavery scheme.”659

  Willey defended West Virginia statehood in the well of the Senate: “It seems to be supposed that this movement for a new State has been conceived since the breaking out of the rebellion, and was a consequence of it—that it grew alone out of the abhorrence with which the loyal citizens of West Virginia regarded the traitorous proceedings of the conspirators east of the Alleghenies, and that the effort was prompted simply by a desire to dissolve the connection between the loyal and disloyal sections of the State. Not so sir. The question of dividing the State of Virginia…has been mooted for fifty years. It has frequently been agitated with such vehemence as to threaten seriously the public peace.…The animosity existing at this time between the North and South is hardly greater than what has at times distinguished the relations between East and West Virginia.”660

  The Committee on Territories, chaired by Benjamin Wade of Ohio, took up the statehood petition. Bullish and bluff in his sixty-second year, Ben Wade was a steadfast anti-slavery man—among the most trenchant of the Radical Republicans. Senator John Carlile was a member of his committee, and so West Virginia's fate appeared to be in able hands.

  Nearly a month passed before Senate Bill 365 was reported. Statehood advocates were astonished by its content. The bill added fifteen Valley counties to West Virginia's original forty-eight, called for a new state constitutional convention, and contained a provision for the emancipation of all slave children born after July 4, 1863. Citizens of the newly added counties, many with significant numbers of slaves, would never approve such a measure—the bill was a sham!

  Angry statehood leaders descended on Washington in protest. “I never saw any question that excited a whole community with the intensity that this question does,” marveled chairman Wade. “Perhaps no question of greater importance has ever been presented to the Senate,” added Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a leading Radical. “It concerns the whole question of slavery; it concerns also the question of States rights; it concerns also the results of this war.”

  On July 14, the West Virginia statehood bill was called up again. Senator Waitman Willey offered an amendment to the bill that omitted the suspect counties and included a constitutional clause for gradual emancipation. The Radicals expanded this “Willey Amendment” to free children of slaves at birth after July 4, 1863, to provide a schedule of gradual emancipation for those less than twenty-one years of age, and to prohibit slaves from entering the state for permanent residence. Upon ratification of the Willey Amendment by the residents of West Virginia, President Lincoln would issue a proclamation, to be enacted sixty days later, inaugurating the new state.661

  Senator Carlile now entered the fray. Angrily seizing the floor, he laid bare the skeletons of the new state movement. Carlile decried the Wheeling conventions as “bogus” affairs. “[T]he people of West Virginia,” he alleged, “not only desire an admission to the Union; but they wish to preserve their liberties under the Constitution of the United States, and I shall be mistaken if they surrender the high privilege of freemen, that of forming for themselves, free and untrammeled, their own organic law. They shall never consent that this Congress shall prescribe for them a form of government.” The author of the “Trojan Horse” bill was unmasked. John Carlile—the linchpin of West Virginia statehood—had shockingly become its “Judas!”662

  Carlile's theatrics stunned his colleagues in the Senate. It was the first inkling to many that West Virginia's constitutional convention had not been entirely representative. Chairman Ben Wade called Carlile's behavior “very extraordinary” and concluded there was “something wrong in the matter.”

  “That there is to be a separation is a foregone conclusion,” Wade exclaimed, “and no man has urged it upon the committee more strongly than the Senator who now opposes immediate action. He, of all men in the committee, is the man who penned all these bills…. He is the man who has investigated all the precedents…. He submitted to the labor; he did it cheerfully; he did it backed by the best men of his State…. He is the gentleman who impressed their opinions upon the committee as strongly as anybody else; and what change has come over the spirit of his dream I know not. His conversion is greater than that of St. Paul.”663

  Senator Waitman Willey also denounced his traitorous colleague. “I stand here, where my colleague does not stand,” thundered Willey, “representing the voice of the people of [West] Virginia, who ask for freedom, who ask severance from the eastern section of the State.…The Almighty, with his own eternal hand, has marked the boundary between us.”

  Despite John Carlile's “nay” ballot, the West Virginia statehood bill passed the Senate on July 14 by a vote of 23–17.664

  Carlile had fallen in with the “Copperheads,” a movement arising from Northern opposition to President Lincoln's war policy. These conservative Democrats saw the war's object as restoration of the Union. Many became alarmed as the conflict evolved into a crusade to destroy Southern institutions, namely slavery. Their slogan was “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Negroes where they are.” Abolitionists compared them to venomous snakes, and the “Copperheads” bore that name with pride, displaying the heads of liberty on copper pennies as their badge. Their leader was a seditiously flamboyant Ohio Congressman named Clement Vallandig
ham. Banished to the Confederacy by Lincoln and later ejected by Davis, he would become the “man without a country.”665

  Senator Carlile joined Copperheads in loathing the Willey Amendment's emancipation clause, assailing “congressional dictation” and “Abolition influences.” Editor Archibald Campbell, in turn, ridiculed Carlile from the pages of the Wheeling Intelligencer, charging the impulsive senator with “black hearted” treason.666

  Against the backdrop of this vitriol, the House of Representatives took fall recess without passing the West Virginia statehood bill. On September 22, following the costly Federal victory at Antietam, President Lincoln unveiled an Emancipation Proclamation, formally announcing his intention to free slaves in the Confederate states on New Year's Day, 1863. That act changed the war. The term “abolitionist,” confessed one moderate statehood leader a few weeks later, has lost “all its terrors to me.”667

  On December 9, the House of Representatives again took up the statehood bill. Congressman John Bingham of Ohio spoke eloquently for the bill as “an inroad…into that ancient Bastille of slavery, out of which has come this wild, horrid conflict of arms.” Yet the issue was warmly contested. Even Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, leader of Radical Republicans in the House, questioned the act's legality. “I say then that we may admit West Virginia as a new state,” Stevens declared, “not by virtue of any provision of the Constitution but under the absolute power which the laws of war give us.” One day later, the House passed the West Virginia statehood bill by a vote of 96–55.