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

by W Hunter Lesser

  William S. Rosecrans was appointed a major general to date from March 1862, took command of the Army of the Cumberland that fall, and repulsed the Confederates at Stones River, Tennessee. In 1863, he inaugurated a brilliant campaign to force the Rebels from Chattanooga. However, in September of that year, Rosecrans suffered a crushing defeat at Chickamauga, Georgia, which virtually ended his military career. “Old Rosey” earned a reputation as one of the North's great strategists, but made political enemies he could not overcome. Rosecrans entered business pursuits in California and was elected to Congress before his death in 1898.690

  Henry W. Benham was arrested for “neglect of duty” while commanding a brigade under Rosecrans during the fall of 1861, but the charges were dropped. Failure at Secessionville, South Carolina in June 1862 caused Benham's removal. Lincoln reinstated his commission in 1863 and Benham went on to lead the engineer brigade of the Army of the Potomac with great skill. He was awarded the brevet of major general, remained in the Corps of Engineers until 1882, and died in New York City two years later.691

  John Pegram, a prisoner since the battle of Rich Mountain, gained release in 1862 and fought as a brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia. On January 19, 1865, Pegram married Hetty Cary, the “Belle of Richmond.” Their wedding was marred by omens. First, Hetty broke a mirror; then horses leading a coach sent by President Davis bucked and refused to move. Three weeks later, General Pegram returned to the church where he was married—in a casket. He had been killed in action at Hatcher's Run, Virginia.692

  David Hart, the Rich Mountain guide, found his life changed by that battle. Feeling unsafe at home, young Hart followed the Tenth Indiana Infantry, a three-month unit, back to Indianapolis for reenlistment. He served as commissary sergeant of that regiment until illness claimed his life near Nashville, Tennessee, in March 1862. His father Joseph served as a delegate in nominating the first state officials of West Virginia.693

  Charles “Lab” Cox, the wounded Confederate left on Rich Mountain by fleeing comrades, was never seen again. Decades later, a hunter stumbled upon a human skull in the woods about one mile east of the battlefield. Nearby were a rusted musket barrel, bayonet, and enough buttons to identify the remains as those of a Southern soldier.694

  Benjamin F. Kelley spent the bulk of his war service protecting the vital Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Brevetted a Federal major general in 1864, he was captured with General George Crook in a brilliant raid by McNeill's Partisan Rangers at Cumberland, Maryland, in February 1865. After the war, Kelley held a number of government positions until his death in 1891.

  Confederate Colonel George A. Porterfield never escaped his role in the “Philippi Races.” He served on General Loring's staff for a time, then retired from the army in 1862 and resumed civilian life as a banker in Charles Town, West Virginia.695

  James E. Hanger, the Confederate who lost a leg in the war's first amputation, went on to perfect an artificial limb that he manufactured for other veterans. After the war, Hanger appeared at reunions displaying the cannonball that struck him at Philippi, along with his patented “Hanger Limb.” J.E. Hanger, Inc. became one of the largest manufacturers of artificial limbs in the world and remains so to this day.

  Philippi's covered bridge, the Monarch of the River, still stands, having defied the ravages of war, floods, ice jams, and fire. The bridge has been lovingly restored, and remains the only two-lane covered span in America serving a Federal highway.696

  German soldiers of the Ninth Ohio Infantry went on to serve with great distinction. Their dramatic bayonet charge at Mill Springs, Kentucky, in 1862 won the field. In 1863, tenacious fighting by the “Bloody Dutch” at Chickamauga, Georgia, and Missionary Ridge, Tennessee, resulted in the loss of more than half of the regiment. The venerable survivors were mustered out of Federal service in 1864.697

  Whitelaw Reid, one of the first young newsmen to bring the human tragedy of civil war to northern doorsteps, continued his “Agate” dispatches for the Cincinnati Gazette. In 1872, he became principal owner of the New York Tribune. Reid was the Republican vice-presidential candidate on the Harrison ticket in 1892, and served as ambassador to England from 1905 until his death in 1912.698

  Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson became a Confederate lieutenant general in 1862 and went on to immortality as the “right arm” of Lee. On the night of a dramatic flank attack at Chancellorsville, May 2, 1863, Jackson was accidentally shot by his own troops. He died eight days later. Jackson's last words, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” likely referred to his boyhood home, Jackson's Mill, West Virginia. His estranged sister, Laura Jackson Arnold, remained a Unionist until her death in 1911. She was one of two women given honorary membership in a Federal veterans' group, the Grand Army of the Republic.699

  Mapmaker Jedediah Hotchkiss fell victim to typhoid fever at Valley Mountain, but returned to Confederate service in 1862. Valuable contacts made during the first campaign enabled him to secure an appointment with Stonewall Jackson, beginning an association that made Hotchkiss the foremost mapmaker of the Civil War.

  Frederick W. Lander was the only unranked and unpaid Union volunteer to receive a general's star. Despite ill health stemming from his Potomac River wound, the intrepid warrior continued to lead with flair. While suffering from “congestive chills” at Paw Paw, Western Virginia, in March 1862, Lander lapsed into a coma and died. Trotting behind the hearse at his Washington funeral was the same gray charger that had carried him on “Lander's Ride” at Philippi and to the battle of Rich Mountain.700

  Robert H. Milroy, the “Gray Eagle,” went on to lock horns with Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. Milroy's suppression of guerrillas in the Alleghenies proved so onerous that the Confederates put a price on his head. As a major general in June 1863, his seven-thousand-man force was virtually “gobbled up” by Lee's army at Winchester, Virginia. Exonerated by a court of inquiry, he commanded defenses of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad until the end of the war. Until his death in 1890, Milroy remained a strident abolitionist. The people of Rensselaer, Indiana, later erected a statue of heroic size to his memory.701

  Ben “Summit,” the runaway slave taken in by General Milroy on Cheat Mountain, was freed and sent to the Milroy home in Indiana where he learned to read and write. In 1864, Ben volunteered in a regiment of United States Colored Troops and became a private in the fight for liberty.

  Richard “Old Dick” Green, the faithful Tygart Valley slave, remained loyal to the Confederacy. Throughout the war, he piloted gray jackets across the mountains and looked after defenseless neighbors. Years later, a visitor to Green's home was startled to see memorials to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on the mantelpiece.702

  John Elwood of the Ringgold Cavalry (Twenty-second Pennsylvania Cavalry, U.S.A.) eventually traded in his old horse pistol for a new Colt revolver. He also carried a copy of the New Testament in his breast pocket. That testament was later struck by a bullet, saving his life.

  John Higginbotham, “lead magnet” of the Twenty-fifth Virginia Infantry, C.S.A., took additional wounds on the Virginia battlefields of McDowell, Cedar Mountain, and Second Manassas. At the tender age of twenty, he was promoted to the rank of colonel for gallantry. Higginbotham was wounded for a seventh time at Gettysburg and carried from the field. He returned to lead a brigade at Spotsylvania in 1864, but was killed by a shot through the heart before his commission as brigadier general arrived.703

  William W. Loring became a Confederate major general in 1862. Assigned to the Army of Mississippi, he escaped capture at Vicksburg, and was a division and corps commander during the Atlanta campaign and at Franklin and Nashville. After the war, Loring went abroad to fight under the Khedive of Egypt. At his 1886 Florida funeral, the body was borne to the grave by three Federal and three ex-Confederate soldiers.704

  Joseph J. Reynolds returned to active duty as a major general of U.S. volunteers in 1862. He served as chief of staff to George
H. Thomas and led U.S. forces in the Department of the Gulf and the Department of Arkansas through the war's end. Remaining in the army, he attacked Crazy Horse's winter hideout in 1876, but withdrew prematurely, thereby contributing to Custer's defeat at Little Bighorn. Reynolds resigned after a court martial and died in 1899.705

  After besting Lee at Cheat Mountain, Nathan Kimball went on to defeat Stonewall Jackson at Kernstown, Virginia, in 1862. For those exploits, he became a brigadier general. Kimball led desperate fighting at Antietam, where more than half of his old Fourteenth Indiana Regiment were casualties. He was badly wounded at Fredericksburg, fought at Vicksburg, Atlanta, Franklin, and Nashville, and was brevetted a major general in 1865. Kimball entered political life and remained there until his death in 1898.706

  Billy Davis of the Seventh Indiana Infantry—once nearly expelled from the army for his diminutive size—was cited for personal valor at Port Republic, Virginia. Permanently crippled by wounds received at the Wilderness, Billy limped home on July 4, 1864, to discover his family in mourning. He had been reported dead!707

  On more than one occasion, John H. Cammack of the Thirty-first Virginia Infantry faced old neighbors on the battlefield. After the war, he became a leading member of the Garnett Camp, United Confederate Veterans. When citizens of Philippi invited him to an observance of the first land battle, Cammack wrote, “I like a celebration as well as anybody, but as I reviewed the events which transpired…when I went away from Philippi in something of a hurry, leaving a nicely cooked breakfast for some Yankee to eat, I was unable to think of any reason why I should go back to Philippi and celebrate, so I did not go.”708

  Henry R. Jackson, the scholar and diplomat, was recommissioned a brigadier in Confederate service in 1863, saw duty in the Atlanta campaign, and was captured at Nashville. Released in July 1865, Jackson was appointed Minister to Mexico and served as president of the Georgia Historical Society until his death in 1898.

  Edward “Allegheny” Johnson had the pleasure of whipping Robert Milroy on two more Virginia battlefields. Severely wounded at McDowell in 1862, Johnson recovered to lead Stonewall Jackson's old division at Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania until his capture at the “Bloody Angle.” Upon exchange, he was captured once again at Nashville. Johnson went back to farming in Virginia after the war and died in 1873, a life-long bachelor.709

  George R. Latham, supporter of the West Virginia statehood movement with pen and sword, commanded the Second (U.S.) Virginia Infantry (later the Fifth West Virginia Cavalry). He was elected to Congress in 1864, and mustered out of service in 1865 as a brevetted brigadier general of volunteers. Latham served as United States Consul to Australia before his death in 1917. He was said to be the last surviving member of the 1861 Wheeling conventions.710

  Governor Francis H. Pierpont's Restored Government of Virginia moved from Alexandria to Richmond on May 25, 1865. After his term expired in 1868, Pierpont was elected to the West Virginia legislature. He died in 1899 and is honored with a place in the United States Capitol's Statuary Hall. Pierpont is often known as the “Father of West Virginia,” yet he was never governor of the state.711

  Upon the expiration of his term as United States Senator, Waitman T. Willey was reelected and served until 1871. The “Grand Old Man” never relinquished his legendary power of speech. At the funeral of Governor Pierpont, he needed assistance to mount the platform, but delivered a magical requiem for his old friend. Willey died in 1900. His half-brother, Confederate Colonel William J. Willey, was jailed in 1861 on a charge of treason, but later won parole. “Bridge Burner” Willey was indicted by a Marion County grand jury in 1865 for his part in the railroad vandalism that launched the first campaign. The indictment was dropped and Colonel Willey moved to Missouri, where he died in 1868.712

  Senator John S. Carlile's star glowed brilliantly in 1861, but disdain for the abolition of slavery wrecked his political career. Ignoring calls from the West Virginia legislature to resign, Carlile served out his term and took up residence in Maryland by 1865. He later returned to practice law in Clarksburg and died there in 1878. Carlile's stunning reversal on West Virginia statehood is still debated.713

  The lady guerrilla Nancy Hart was arrested by Federal troops in 1862. While in custody, she fashioned a dress from calico, needle, and thread. The jailer was so enchanted by Nancy's new look that he asked her to sit for a photograph. Nervously eying a camera for the first time, she feared it was an execution. As the jailer reassured her, Nancy charmed him out of his gun, shot him down, and rode off into legend. She died in 1902.

  Mary Van Pelt campaigned with Loomis's First Michigan Light Artillery beside her soldier husband until removed by military order. Upon learning of her spouse's battlefield death in 1863, Mary volunteered as a nurse. The pallbearers at her Michigan funeral in 1906 were veterans of her husband's battery.714

  After serving time in Richmond prisons, Dr. William B. Fletcher—the Union spy given reprieve by a drunk's penmanship—was exchanged for a Confederate doctor in January 1862. He visited the family of spy Leonard Clark, then returned to Indianapolis and took charge of a hospital serving Confederate prisoners. Fletcher went on to become a leading Indiana physician and humanitarian before his death in 1907.

  Fletcher's companion Leonard Clark endured nine months of solitary confinement in a Fincastle, Virginia, jail. Only the interposition of old friends in the Confederate army spared his life. Clark spent another year in the notorious Belle Isle prison before he was exchanged in 1863, looking, it was said, “like a man who had come out of the grave.” Unbroken in spirit, he joined the Third West Virginia Cavalry and was killed in action at Moorefield, West Virginia, in 1864.715

  Confederate General John B. Floyd was removed from command in 1862 after his humiliating flight from Fort Donelson. He subsequently became a major general of “Virginia State Line” troops, but failing health resulted in his death at home near Abingdon in 1863.

  Floyd's old nemesis, General Henry A. Wise, later served under P.G.T. Beauregard in South Carolina. Returning to Virginia in 1864, he fought gallantly in the battles around Richmond, Petersburg, and Appomattox. Wise practiced law in Richmond after the war and died there in 1876. He stubbornly refused to seek amnesty. “I never fought under the Confederate flag,” Wise claimed, only under the flag of Virginia—and proudly displayed his state buttons to make the point. Defiant as ever, Wise called the new state of West Virginia “the bastard offspring of a political rape.”716

  John Beatty led the Third Ohio Infantry, became a brigadier general in November 1862, and fought courageously at Stones River, Tennessee. He resigned in 1864 and returned to the family bank so that his brother could enter the army. Beatty was later elected to Congress. His splendid diary was published in 1879 as The Citizen-Soldier.

  Rutherford B. Hayes of the Twenty-third Ohio Infantry rose to the rank of brevet major general, served in the Congress, and became governor of Ohio and president of the United States. From his regiment came William McKinley, another U.S. president, and Stanley Matthews, a justice of the Supreme Court.717

  General Lee's famous warhorse Traveller developed lockjaw and died soon after the passing of his master. He is buried near the general's tomb in Lexington, Virginia. It is said that Traveller's ghost haunts his native Greenbrier County, West Virginia. Stories by old Confederate veterans of an equine apparition or the mysterious sounds of a galloping thoroughbred near Lee's old camp on Sewell Mountain are still told.718

  Marcus Toney, of the First Tennessee Infantry C.S.A., fought in both major theaters of conflict. He was captured at Spotsylvania in 1864 and spent the rest of the war in Union prisons. Of his original company, Toney later asked, “Where are the one hundred and four who marched out so gaily from the old Academy in 1861, when the bands were playing ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me?'” Seventy-two of that number had filled soldiers' graves. Toney returned to Tennessee and slept under a quilt in the front yard of his home for nearly a month before he could get used to
a bed.719

  Loyal West Virginia Regiments, twenty-nine in number, bore arms in defense of liberty, homeland, and the United States government. Proportionate to their strength in the field, it was said they captured a greater number of enemy battle flags than the troops of any other state.720

  The Thirty-first Virginia Infantry, C.S.A., made up predominately of West Virginians, had mustered eight hundred and fifty men in 1861, but only about fifty-seven remained to answer the roll for their surrender at Appomattox Court House. “On the morning of [April 12, 1865] we were marched out into a large field and heard bands playing on both sides,” wrote a member of the regiment. “We saw a large white flag…and knew then that the end had come. The Thirty-first, with its colors, was marched up in front to the New York Zouaves, noted for their blue jackets, red trousers and cap. They saluted at a distance of about 30 feet, sank on their left knee, remaining in this position until we stacked arms. Not a jeer or taunt was heard.”721

  Among the survivors of the Thirty-first Virginia was James E. Hall. During the surrender, he recognized several neighbors in the Yankee army. Hall kept up his pocket diary throughout the war. After his long walk home to Barbour County from Appomattox, the last entry, April 28, 1865, reads “Went fishing.”722

  Veterans of the armies returned to the scene of their first campaign. “In the summer of 1885,” recalled one former Union soldier, “I made a visit to the Tygart's Valley, where we spent so many months during the summer and fall of 1861 and winter of 1862. Then desolation marked the path of war.…The condition of the people was pitiable, and their future seemed hopeless. Twenty…years of peace and plenty have worked a marvelous change.