by Bruce Catton
Foemen worthy of their steel the Union troops would eventually find—no Federal army invading Virginia was ever disappointed in that respect—but the Confederates were under profound handicaps. General Garnett, taking over his command at Huttonsville, forty miles south of Philippi, found that he had twenty-three companies of infantry, “in a miserable condition as to arms, clothing, equipments, instruction and discipline.” He considered this command “wholly incapable, in my judgment, of rendering anything like efficient service,” but he would do his best. Two turnpikes came down from Federal territory, crossing through passes in Rich and Laurel mountains, a few miles north and west of his camp. If the Federals occupied these, Garnett would be locked out of the action completely; wondering why the invader had overlooked these points, he moved up to hold the places himself, and did his best to get reinforcements and supplies and to give his men the rudiments of military training and discipline. He was inclined to believe that he would not be attacked, simply because the enemy “has as much of the northwestern country as he probably wants,” but Lee warned him not to take too much for granted, suspecting that McClellan planned a major invasion. Garnett would continue to be outnumbered, but Lee hoped that he could hold the invaders in check “by skill and boldness.”5
By the beginning of July, McClellan commanded an imposing force. All in all, he had perhaps 20,000 men—new troops, all of them, but further along in their training and infinitely better equipped than the men who would oppose them. About 5000 of his men McClellan had strung out over a 200-mile stretch of back country, guarding roads and bridges and supply dumps. General Morris, moving down from Philippi, had between 4000 and 5000; he thought he ought to have more, but McClellan rebuked him sternly: “Do not ask for further reinforcements. If you do I shall take it as a request to be relieved from your command and return to Indiana. I speak officially. The crisis is a grave one, and I must have generals under me who are willing to risk as much as I am, and to be content to risk their lives and reputations with such means as I can give them. Let this be the last of it.” McClellan and his principal lieutenant, a tough ex-regular, Brigadier General William S. Rosecrans, moving in separate but co-ordinated columns, had about 10,000 men. To oppose these numbers, Garnett had been able to assemble no more than 5000 men, posted at the passes in Rich and Laurel mountains.6
It took McClellan longer to get this host moving than he had anticipated, and on July 5 he wrote the War Department that “the delays that I have met with have been irksome to me in the extreme, but I feel that it would be exceedingly foolish to give way to impatience and advance before everything was prepared.” Everything considered—the newness of his troops, the difficulty of the country, the inexperience of everybody who had anything to do with supply and transportation—McClellan actually got ready fast. His machine began to roll twenty-four hours after he sent this dispatch, and by July 10 his men were in contact with the Confederate outposts. The next day, after conferring with McClellan, Rosecrans led his column off to a bold flanking move up the difficult slopes of Rich Mountain; got to the top after hard climbing but no fighting, struck the Confederate rear, and drove the defenders off helter-skelter, taking prisoners, seizing guns and camp supplies, and effectively cracking General Garnett’s defensive line. Garnett pulled his right wing back from Laurel Mountain; McClellan’s troops followed, overtook Garnett’s rear guard July 13 at Corrick’s ford, on a branch of the Cheat River, smashed the rear guard, and killed Garnett himself. The Federals moved on and occupied the town of Beverly, and McClellan reflected that with a little help he might go slicing all the way down to the Virginia-Tennessee border, seizing the Confederacy’s vital lead mines at Wytheville, Virginia, breaking the railroad that ran from Richmond all the way through Tennessee, and in general inflicting a grievous wound on the Confederacy. He reflected also that eastern Tennessee, like western Virginia, contained a great many good Unionists, and he wrote enthusiastically to the War Department: “With the means at my disposal, and such resources as I command in Virginia, if the Government will give me ten thousand arms for distribution in Eastern Tennessee I think I can break the backbone of secession. Please instruct whether to move on to Staunton or on to Wytheville.”7
Washington did not want him to be too hasty, but it was most happy with what he had done. General Scott sent hearty congratulations: “The general-in-chief, and what is more, the Cabinet, including the President, are charmed with your activity, valor and consequent successes.… We do not doubt that you will in due time sweep the rebels from Western Virginia, but we do not mean to precipitate you, as you are fast enough.” (If McClellan had had the gift of second sight he would have taken the last twelve words of that dispatch, had them engraved in bronze, and hung them in his tent; never again would the War Department talk to him that way.) While he waited to see what would be wanted of him next, McClellan congratulated his soldiers on what they had done. On July 16, in orders sent to all his regiments, he let them have it: “Soldiers of the Army of the West! I am more than satisfied with you. You have annihilated two armies, commanded by educated and experienced soldiers, intrenched in mountain fastnesses fortified at their leisure.… You have proved that Union men, fighting for the preservation of our Government, are more than a match for our misguided and erring brethren.… In the future I may still have greater demands to make upon you, and still greater sacrifices for you to offer. It shall be my care to provide for you to the extent of my ability; but I know now that by your valor and endurance you will accomplish all that is asked.”8
The soldiers took this at face value. Most of them had not actually fought at all, and the ones who did fight had everything their own way, and a young Ohio officer wrote that “our boys look forward … to a day of battle as one of rare sport.” The local secessionists, he said, had taken to the hills, the Union troops looked and felt like conquerors, and the retreating Confederates scared the mountain people by assuring them that the Federals shot civilians, ravished women, and burned barns. To boys from the flat Ohio and Indiana country, the mountain scenery was magnificent; there were “ravines so dark that one could not guess their depth; openings, the ends of which seemed lost in a blue mist; others so steep a squirrel could hardly climb them … mountain streams, sparkling now in the sunlight, then dashing down into apparently fathomless abysses.” Shortly before the affair at Rich Mountain, McClellan had written to his wife that his successes would probably be due to maneuvers, and that “I shall have no brilliant victories to record.” He added that he would be glad “to clear them out of West Virginia and liberate the country without bloodshed, if possible.” A body calling itself the Virginia legislature, composed of representatives from the western Unionist counties, met in Wheeling, voted funds to carry on the war for the Union, and named two men as United States Senators—apparently on the theory that the only part of Virginia which now had legal existence was the part west of the mountains, the part which had been wrested away from the Confederacy. Washington would approve of this action, recognizing Governor Pierpont, seating the new Senators; later on, when western Virginia declared itself a separate state and sought admission to the Union, that action would be recognized. Virginia’s loss would be made permanent.9
In this, the Federal government’s insistence that states’ rights meant nothing whatever when opposed to the rights of the nation was carried a long step further. In Maryland the government had choked off secession by sending in troops, by suspending civil rights, and by standing ready to imprison the state legislature if necessary. In Missouri it had made war on the troops of a state which had not seceded and had driven the legal governor off in desperate flight. Now it would calmly break a state in half, turning to its own advantage a hump-backed act of secession which was even more irregular than the original act of secession which Washington was fighting to suppress. It was giving the war a shape—this early, with serious fighting not yet begun—which would make a compromise peace, a settlement by negotiation, all but impossible.
That the Confederate cause had had a serious set-back was quickly recognized in Richmond. Hurried efforts were made to get more troops over into the Kanawha Valley, where the city of Charleston was occupied by the Federals on July 25; if the invaders could not be driven out, they must at least be kept from coming any farther. (Before long, Lee himself would be sent over the mountains to take charge of things.) Jedediah Hotchkiss, a talented Confederate engineer who would become one of Stonewall Jackson’s most trusted aides, wrote after the war that this West Virginia campaign gave the Federals lasting advantages. Washington now controlled navigation in all the headwaters of the Ohio, had control of valuable coal and salt mines, and could establish advance military posts which would be a problem to the Confederacy throughout the war. From these posts, said Hotchkiss, the Federals were constantly threatening “Virginia’s interior lines of communication through the Great Valley and the lead mines, salt works, coal mines, blast furnaces, foundries and other important industrial establishments in and near the grand source of military supplies, thus requiring the detaching of large numbers of troops to watch these Federal movements.” In addition, Virginia had lost much territory, important revenues, and a good recruiting ground for troops; and, finally, the “bogus government” at Wheeling was strengthened and made permanent.10
A collateral gain was that the North now had an authentic military hero in General McClellan. Good stay-at-home patriots who had been uneasy because the war seemed to be going so slowly had something to cheer about, and they dazzled themselves by the tributes they paid. The Louisville Journal probably spoke for most Unionists when it published a breathless, starry-eyed tribute, saying that McClellan’s victory was like a perfect work of art that left nothing to be desired in conception or in execution. “McClellan set out to accomplish a certain definite object,” said the Journal. “With that precise object in view he gathers his forces and plans his campaign. Onward he moves, and neither wood, mountain nor stream checks his march. He presses forward from skirmish to skirmish, but nothing decoys or diverts or forces him from the trail of the enemy.… There is something extremely satisfactory in contemplating what might be called a piece of finished military workmanship by a master hand.”11 Many others were singing the same song. Whatever else might happen, General McClellan was obviously destined for a higher command.
Federal officers began to understand that being part of an army of occupation brings subsidiary problems. During their stay in the mountain valleys the Confederate troops had impressed supplies with a free hand, doing it all the more roughly because the farmers they were despoiling were arrant Unionists. Now those who had been despoiled were coming to the Federal authorities demanding justice and compensation; they came, as one quartermaster officer wrote, “like so many hungry wolves, with a pertinacity that knew no bounds.” As a sample, this officer mentioned a claim for $625.15 presented by one Lewis Stoops, from the town of Jackson. Stoops claimed damages for the loss of his house, five apple trees, two plum trees, and two peach trees, along with “bedsteds, chears & table, and other Furniture,” various tools, a clock, a brass kettle, a set of harness, and the loss of his crop, and he set forth his grievance breathlessly: “Sir, the within account is the amt of Damages I sustained by the infernal secession outbrake at Jackson, and would be glad if you can intersead in refunding back my losses, the Rebles called on me to fight for the South, as I was a Southern man, I told them Nay, they made me leave my home, then I enlisted. They then burnt my House and I am now in the service of the United States service.”12
The Federals also began to learn about bushwhackers—Southern-minded residents who took to the woods with rifle and ammunition, sometimes organizing into bands that broke telegraph lines, tore up railway tracks, burned bridges, and ambushed supply wagons, sometimes operating alone, shooting straggling soldiers or Unionist civilians impartially and in general making life a burden for everyone. An indignant Federal officer, somewhat biased, wrote that the average bushwhacker “kills for the sake of killing and plunders for the love of gain,” and said that “parties of these ferocious beasts, under cover of darkness, frequently steal into a neighborhood, burn the residences of loyal citizens, rob stores, tan yards, and farmhouses of everything they can put to use, especially arms, ammunition, leather, clothing, bedding and salt.”13 West Virginia was in fact learning what Missouri was learning, what Kentucky and Tennessee would learn a bit later—that the fabled war between brothers could take a very ugly turn when it was brought down to isolated neighborhoods where people had divided minds and quick tempers.
Among the officers to whom the Confederate government gave the task of repairing the damage west of the mountains was the former governor of Virginia, Henry A. Wise. Wise was a brigadier general now, he was popular in the western part of the state, he had been raising a body of troops known as Wise’s Legion, and he was sent west to make war. He would find himself, before long, in bitter rivalry with John B. Floyd, the former Secretary of War, who was also a brigadier general, who was also raising troops and making war west of the mountains, and who out-ranked General Wise; and the sharp antagonism between these two ardent patriots would create a problem that would add gray hairs to the head of General Lee, who presently was given the almost impossible task of trying to get the two men to work in double harness.
General Wise was all for the war, but he could see that terrible times lay just ahead. Shortly before he went west he addressed an audience in Richmond in strange, impassioned words touched with a grim prophetic fury. He rejoiced that the war had come, he said, because it would be a war of purification.
“You want war, fire, blood to purify you,” he cried, “and the Lord of Hosts has demanded that you should walk through fire and blood. You are called to the fiery baptism, and I call upon you to come up to the altar.”14
Wise had been governor of Virginia when old John Brown made his terrifying descent on Harper’s Ferry. Wise had gone to the scene, had talked to the wolf-like prisoner, had seen to it that he was tried, convicted and hanged; and in what he said now there was the strongest echo of John Brown’s last words. Facing the scaffold, Brown wrote a hard warning: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” John Brown had seen it; now Henry Wise was seeing the same thing. All men would see it, as they took the road toward the fiery altar.
2: The Laws of War
The first session of the thirty-seventh Congress of the United States met in Washington on July 4. This Congress had been called in haste to convene at leisure. President Lincoln had ordered a special session immediately after the surrender of Fort Sumter, but he had given it eighty days to assemble. These days having passed, the Congress finally was meeting, and Cincinnati Editor Murat Halstead wrote moodily that neither Congress nor the capital city looked quite as it had when the last session ended.
Washington itself was so full of soldiers that the uniformed crowds, the dusty lines of military wagons, the hurrying officious colonels and couriers, had ceased to be a novelty. The bright new uniforms were beginning to be stained with sweat and dirt, gilt shoulder straps were becoming tarnished, the baggy red pants of the Zouaves “look as if they had been used to swab the guns at the Navy yard”; there had been no military action here, no advance, nothing to stir the blood and create excitement, and Washington had concluded that “masses of soldiers, in a state of stagnation, are not especially interesting.”
Congress had lost something, too, legislators in the mass being, basically, no more interesting than soldiers. Specifically, Congress had lost its fire-eaters: the cotton-belt statesmen, the picturesque and aggressive Southerners who had dominated the scene for so long. Even their opponents would miss these men. “What,” asked Halstead, “will our New England brethren do without an opportunity of denouncing the peculiar institution in the presence of its devotees?”1 As it happened, the brethren would make out fairly well, for slavery still had defenders here; among
them John C. Breckinridge, still a Senator from Kentucky, which was as much a part of the Union as Ohio or Massachusetts. Yet something had come to an end. This Congress was new, and different, and what was said in it about slavery would be said in a different way, with different results.
The attack on slavery was no longer a mere exercise in forensics. Men who had recently been colleagues, joining in that exercise, giving and taking blows in hot debate without arousing deep personal antagonisms, had at last become avowed enemies. It was beginning to be hard for Unionists who distrusted slavery all along to escape the feeling that the argument over slavery touched something so fundamental and dangerous that it must eventually create a deadly and permanent hostility. A debate on slavery now must, inevitably, be in one way or another a debate on the way in which the Union itself could be saved. The old days were gone forever. Never again could the fight about slavery be carried on as it had been carried on in the days before slavery’s principal spokesmen had abandoned the arena.
There still were optimists; men who had hopes, not merely for the Congress of the United States, but for the national peace itself, for the restoration of good feeling and the dissolution of destructive angers. Among these was the chaplain of the House of Representatives, the Reverend Mr. T. H. Stockton, who offered prayer as the new session opened.
“Oh Lord our God,” he intoned, “if there must be war—oh, that there might be peace!—but if there must be war, if Thou dost indeed ordain and sanction war, may it not be a bloody and ruinous war. May it rather be an armed, mighty, irresistible migration—a migration of true love …”2
It was a vain hope. The immense enthusiasm that had swept across both North and South after the Fort Sumter bombardment was at bottom a demand for action. The armies must meet, head-on, to fight it out. A Washington reporter who was passing advice along to Samuel L. M. Barlow, the New York Democratic leader and man of affairs, was writing this spring that the Lincoln administration could not conceivably resist the public pressure for a vast military campaign; if it tried to resist, he believed, there would be a military dictatorship. The people of the North, in short, wanted a fight; the National Intelligencer, a pro-Union paper, long established, was losing so many subscribers because of its moderate position that its proprietor felt he must change his editorial policy or go out of business. “They who labor for a peaceful adjustment,” warned Barlow’s correspondent, “must calmly await the ebb of the Deluge.… Reason & moral courage must remain as yet in abeyance if they would render politic & efficient service.”3