Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (10 page)

Confederate soldiers closed in on the Fairmont home of Frank Pierpont as he, too, hopped a train for Wheeling. There, members
of the Central Committee chided him for missing the vote. “The time for voting is past,” snapped Pierpont. “I move that Mr. Carlile be sent, at once, to Washington, to demand troops to drive the Rebels out of Western Virginia.”

Carlile did just that, taking a train through Pennsylvania and Maryland to avoid trouble. He arrived at the White House late on May 24, left his card, and was soon called in to see the president.

“Well,” Lincoln said, “Mr. Carlile, what is the best news in Western Virginia?”

“Sir, we want to fight. We have one regiment ready, and if the Federal Government is going to assist us we want it at once.”

Lincoln replied softly, “You shall have assistance.”
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Winfield Scott cabled General McClellan on May 24: “We have certain intelligence that at least two companies of Virginia troops have reached Grafton, evidently with the purpose of overawing the friends of the Union in Western Virginia. Can you counteract the influence of that detachment?” From a military conference in Indiana, McClellan replied, “Will do what you want. Make it a clean sweep if you say so.”
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Federal troops were loaded aboard railcars and dispatched to points on the Ohio River opposite Wheeling and Parkersburg. Spies kept the Confederates well informed of McClellan's movements. To contest the advance, Colonel Porterfield burned some railroad bridges. Under his orders, a squad of Confederates moved by rail on the night of May 25 to fire two wooden spans on the B&O Railroad between Mannington and Farmington, about thirty-five miles northwest of Grafton. Colonel William J. Willey led the bridge-burners. Confederate Colonel Willey's surname was no coincidence—he was the half-brother of staunch Unionist Waitman Willey.
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General McClellan was “maturing plans” at Camp Dennison on May 26 when he learned of the bridge burnings. Destruction of the railroad was an overt act of war. The vandals must be
stopped, and loyal Unionists rescued from tyranny. McClellan's duty was clear—his army would invade Virginia.

Loyal Virginia regiments led the invasion. McClellan wired orders for Colonel Ben Kelley's First Virginia Infantry and Company A of the Second Virginia Infantry at Wheeling to move on Grafton. Kelley's objective was to restore damaged bridges and prevent further destruction of the railroad. He was to await reinforcements if substantial resistance was met. McClellan cautioned him to “run no unnecessary risk, for it is absolutely necessary that we should not meet even with a partial check at the onset.” The Sixteenth Ohio Infantry, Colonel James Irvine commanding at Bellaire, Ohio, crossed the river as Kelley's support.

In concert with Kelley's advance from Wheeling, Colonel James Steedman's Fourteenth Ohio Infantry crossed the Ohio River at Parkersburg and boarded the Northwestern Virginia Railroad, bound east for Grafton. The Eighteenth Ohio Infantry and two guns of the First Ohio Light Artillery followed.
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To clarify the purpose of his invasion, General McClellan crafted an address to the troops. From the dining-room table of his Cincinnati home, with ladies chatting in the background, McClellan assumed the bombastic style of Napoleon:
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Soldiers!—You are ordered to cross the frontier and enter upon the soil of Virginia. Your mission is to restore peace and confidence, to protect the majesty of the law, and to rescue our brethren from the grasp of armed traitors. You are to act in concert with Virginia troops and to support their advance. I place under the safeguard of your honor, the persons and property of the Virginians…. If you are called upon to overcome armed opposition, I know that your courage is equal to the task;—but remember that your only foes are the armed traitors…. When, under your protection, the loyal men of Western Virginia have been enabled to organize and arm, they can protect themselves, and you can then return to your homes with the proud satisfaction of having saved a gallant people from destruction.
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He also issued a proclamation to the people of Western Virginia:

Virginians!—The General Government has long enough endured the machinations of a few factious rebels in your midst. Armed traitors have in vain endeavored to deter you from expressing your loyalty at the polls…they now seek to inaugurate a rein of terror, and thus force you to yield to their schemes, and submit to the yoke of the traitorous conspiracy, dignified by the name of the Southern Confederacy. They are destroying the property of citizens of your State and ruining your magnificent railways…. The General Government cannot close its ears to the demand you have made for assistance. I have ordered troops to cross the Ohio River. They come as your friends and brothers,—as enemies only to the armed rebels who are preying upon you…. Now, that we are in your midst, I call upon you to fly to arms and support the general government. Sever the connection that binds you to traitors; proclaim to the world that the faith and loyalty as long boasted by the Old Dominion, are still preserved in Western Virginia, and that you remain true to the stars and stripes.
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In his proclamation, McClellan assured slaveholders that any insurrection by their slaves would be crushed “with an iron hand.” By those words, he publicly committed a Union army to protect slavery. No comment was forthcoming from Lincoln or his administration.
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The departure of Colonel Kelley's First (U.S.) Virginia Infantry in the early morning hours of May 27 brought out hundreds of Wheeling residents. The soldiers wore blue jeans and work clothes—Kelley's coat may have been the only piece of military garb in the regiment. In lieu of cartridge boxes, ammunition was stuffed into pockets. When the colonel ordered an inspection of arms, he was dismayed to learn that many had loaded their pieces backwards—placing the ball in the muzzle and ramming it down with the powder charge on top! The charges were carefully withdrawn, and the men instructed in the proper way to load and fire.
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Kelley commandeered the railroad telegraph office to preserve secrecy, but crowds of waving Virginians along the tracks proved there was little deception. Pressing on to the burned bridges over Buffalo Creek, Kelley's Federals were greeted by armed citizens who exposed a number of secessionists for arrest. The vandalized bridges proved to be of iron; flames had destroyed only the wooden sills and crossties. Repair crews set to work with a vengeance. Within forty-eight hours of departure, Kelley's men had secured the tracks to Fairmont.
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The Confederates at Grafton were thrown into a dither—the enemy was collecting in force on the railroad not twenty miles away. On May 28, with no hope of reinforcement, Colonel Porterfield ordered his 550 men to withdraw. News of the evacuation spurred Colonel Kelley forward. With a full brigade behind him, Kelley steamed into Grafton on the afternoon of May 30 without firing a shot.
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The advance from Parkersburg did not match Kelley's pace. Colonel Steedman's Fourteenth Ohio Infantry moved with all the caution McClellan had ordered. The Northwestern Virginia Railroad led them through a maze of wooded hills, deep cuts, and tunnels by the score—every turn a likely point of ambush. Vandalized bridges caused further delay. Steedman's force took four days to make the eighty-mile trip by rail, not reaching Clarksburg until the afternoon of May 30. The advance would have taken longer had not a dashing volunteer
aide-de-camp
named Frederick Lander intervened. When an Indiana colonel at Parkersburg refused to move his regiment for fear of a collision, Lander boarded the engine himself and reached Grafton on June 2 without incident.
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Cheered by the news, General McClellan cabled the War Department from his Cincinnati headquarters: “It is a source of very great satisfaction to me that we have occupied Grafton without the sacrifice of a single life.” Next was to drive Rebel forces across the Alleghenies, freeing Western Virginia of their influence. McClellan fixed his gaze on Colonel Porterfield's Confederates, at a place called Philippi.
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PART II

FIRST CLASH
OF ARMIES

“
And boom went the cannon balls, crashing through the huts and stirring out the rebels like a stick thrust into a hornet's nest.”

—Whitelaw Reid,
Cincinnati Daily Gazette

Philippi was a town with passionate ties to the Confederacy. It was located just fifteen miles south of the railroad at Grafton, on the Beverly-Fairmont Road, leading toward the heart of Virginia. Philippi was the Barbour County seat. Nestled in a romantic little valley, it was ordinarily a quiet place. But Colonel Porterfield's beleaguered Confederates made the town their headquarters, and General McClellan's army had come to drive them out. If Federal troops were to reclaim Western Virginia and rally her loyal Unionists, the Rebels at Philippi must go. By fate, Philippi was about to host the first land battle of the Civil War.
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A tedious ferry crossed the Tygart Valley River at Philippi until 1852, with construction of the Monarch of the River. The Monarch was a huge covered bridge. It was more than three hundred feet long, double-spanned, and fashioned almost entirely of wood—framed by massive, rough-hewn logs fitted and pegged in a sturdy arch pattern. A Beverly carpenter named Lemuel Chenoweth had erected the Monarch. He was a man with little formal education, but
a natural genius in architecture. Chenoweth reportedly won his first bridge-building contract in a novel way. When the Virginia Board of Public Works invited engineers to submit plans for bridges on the Beverly-Fairmont Road, he journeyed nearly two hundred miles on horseback to Richmond. Packed in his saddlebags was a scale-model bridge of hickory wood.

At Richmond, Chenoweth watched elegant presentations by experts of the day, with sophisticated bridge models of cables and cantilevers. When finally called, the long-haired country carpenter rose and assembled his plain wooden model. He placed the completed little span between two chairs, stood on top, and walked its length. “Gentlemen, this is all I have to say,” Chenoweth declared. It was enough to win the contract.