Coming Fury, Volume 1 (66 page)

Born in Pennsylvania, McClellan was thirty-five when the war began. He had been graduated from West Point in 1846, number two in his class, a magnetic and brilliant young man; he won three brevets for gallant and meritorious conduct in the Mexican War, served as War Department observer in the Crimea in the middle fifties, and then resigned from the army, as a captain, to go into business. In business he did well, had been successful as vice-president of the growing Illinois Central Railroad, and in the spring of 1861 was president of the Eastern Division of the Ohio & Mississippi. He found himself, in the middle of May, major general of volunteers (and, a short time afterward, major general of regulars as well) commanding the Department of the Ohio—the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, along with a part of western Pennsylvania and the dissident
section of western Virginia. It was up to him to organize and then to use the troops raised in this area, and he did these things with smooth competence.
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McClellan had an observant gaze, and at the end of May there was much for him to look at. Across the Ohio River, going eastward from Kentucky, was Virginia. Virginia was basically a tradition and a state of mind, but it was also a vast geographical expanse, running from the Atlantic beaches and the Chesapeake capes west beyond the Blue Ridge and along the Ohio River; a huge territory of immense strategic importance, offering to the young general and to the national authority both a threat and an opportunity.

The threat was self-evident. To get west from Washington it was necessary to use the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and this road lay almost completely at Virginia’s mercy. It entered Virginia at Harper’s Ferry, followed the Potomac past Cumberland, Maryland, and at last plunged into Virginia’s western mountains on its way to the Ohio Valley. At the town of Grafton, Virginia, the railroad forked, sending one branch northwest to the Ohio at Wheeling and the other, almost due west, to the same river at Parkersburg. Thus it ran through secession territory, and was subject to interruption; was totally interrupted, in fact, at the end of May, with armed Confederates holding the line from Harper’s Ferry to Cumberland, and with the prospect that everything west of Cumberland would also be lost just as soon as the Richmond government could get a substantial force over into the Alleghenies. The section east of Cumberland would of course be regained by the Union forces, sooner or later, in the natural course of things; it was close to the capital, and if the Federal armies could do anything at all, they could eventually make this part of the line tolerably secure. But this would do the Union cause no good if the Confederates continued to hold western Virginia, and to the people of Ohio this was a matter of great importance. They not only wanted direct communication with the national capital; even more they wanted to be able to send their produce to the eastern market at Baltimore. Since Ohio was the most populous state in the West, and had furnished most of McClellan’s troops, Ohio could make its wishes felt.

But although western Virginia menaced the Federal cause, it also promised it substantial gains. Its people were largely Unionist.
For years they had felt like Virginia’s stepchildren, believing that the state was run by tidewater folk for tidewater’s benefit; a great many of them had ceased to identify themselves strongly with Virginia, precisely as Virginia itself had lost its feeling of identity with the Federal Union, and they had voted against secession. Now they were planning a secession of their own; they would break away from Virginia and become either a brand-new state or, if the war lasted, the legally dominant section of the old one. Either way they mean trouble for Jefferson Davis, and the Lincoln administration would help them if it could.

All of this was as clear to McClellan as anything needed to be. He got, in addition, a slight nudge from General Scott. Late in May a detachment of Confederate infantry moved into the railroad junction town of Grafton, and Scott telegraphed McClellan to do something about this, if he could—to protect the railroad and also to “support the Union sentiment in western Virginia.” McClellan got under way without lost motion. From his headquarters in Cincinnati on May 26 he issued a proclamation, inviting mountaineer Virginians to “sever the connection that binds you to traitors” and to show the world that “the faith and loyalty so long boasted by the Old Dominion are still preserved in western Virginia.”
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He got a good response. The Wheeling
Intelligencer
, strong for the Union, reported that the arrival of the first Federal troops “has been one continued ovation” and said that people in every house greeted the soldiers by cheering and by waving hats and handkerchiefs, women who could do nothing better waving sun bonnets and aprons. The Federal soldiers who made up the advance responded with cheers and hat-wavings of their own, and concluded that this was going to be a fine war—an innocent conclusion which they modified later. By May 30 they had occupied Grafton, and four days later, led by an Indiana volunteer, Brigadier General T. A. Morris, they attacked and routed a small Confederate force at Philippi, fifteen miles south.

The fight at Philippi was a very small thing, as battles went—no Unionists were killed, and hardly any Confederates—but it was a propaganda victory of some magnitude. The western Virginia Unionists were so encouraged that they held a convention at Wheeling on June 11, voted to nullify the ordinance of secession, declared
that the offices of the state government at Richmond were vacated, and named Francis H. Pierpont governor of the “restored” government of Virginia. To the Confederates the fight was a combination of tragedy and abysmal farce. Their untrained troops at Philippi had been caught entirely by surprise and fled in utter disorder, leaving behind almost all of their equipment and, in some cases, their very pants, and a cold rain came down to complete the dampening of their spirits. The Federals referred exultantly to the affair as “the Philippi races”; the Confederate government sent in a new commander, Brigadier General Robert S. Garnett, and ordered a court of inquiry, which found that the surprise that had been suffered was inexcusable. General Lee wrote that he hoped the thing “will be a lesson to be remembered by the army through the war.”
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McClellan wanted to keep moving. In a broad way he had two objectives—to protect the Unionists and the railroad in western Virginia, and to drive a column across the Alleghenies and into tidewater Virginia by the back door—and he would use two principal columns of attack. One would go on from Philippi, and this column he himself would accompany. The other would leave the Ohio River farther south, moving up the valley of the Great Kanawha River and aiming, ultimately, at the town of Staunton, at the upper end of the Shenandoah Valley. On the map, this latter route looked like a promising avenue of invasion; actually the difficulties of moving across a thinly settled mountainous country were so great that to the end of the war the Federals were not able to make effective use of it. This column he entrusted to a new brigadier, an Ohio-born politician who would display some talent for military affairs, Jacob D. Cox.

McClellan himself joined the northern column late in June. He had a knack, common among generals on both sides in the early days of the war, for issuing inspiring proclamations, and he unloaded one now: “Soldiers! I have heard that there was danger here. I have come to place myself at your head and to share it with you. I fear now but one thing—that you will not find foemen worthy of your steel. I know that I can rely upon you.” He went on, more soberly, to warn his men that they were not to make war on civilians, announcing that looters and marauders “will be dealt with in their
persons and property according to the severest rules of military law.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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