Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (2 page)

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I see that region as a veritable realm of enchantment; the Alleghenies as the Delectable Mountains. I note again their dim, blue billows, ridge after ridge interminable, beyond purple valleys full of sleep, ‘in which it seemed always afternoon.’ Miles and miles away, where the lift of earth meets the stoop of sky, I discern an imperfection in the tint, a faint graying of the blue above the main range—the smoke of an enemy's camp.”

—Ambrose Bierce

At 4:30 A.M. on the morning of April 12, 1861, a single mortar shell arched through the night sky near Charleston, South Carolina, and burst into flames over the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter. It was the opening shot of an unparalleled war. Thousands of Americans would rush to arms in a dreadful clash of brothers. Few imagined the terrible cost of dividing a nation.

This is the story of the beginning of America's Civil War. The first battles of that war, after Fort Sumter's nearly bloodless fall, were fought on Virginia soil. Virginia was the pivotal state. A message from her borders caused the first gun to be fired at Fort Sumter, and it was a Virginian who declined the honor of igniting that first gun.

Virginia, the “Mother of Presidents,” home to the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, would be home to nearly 60 percent of the conflict. Four anguished years would pass before the war ended on her doorstep, at a rural courthouse called Appomattox.
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But Virginia was also divided. Her internal strife—the agrarian, slave-holding east versus an industrial, free-soil west—mirrored the epic struggle between North and South. Against this backdrop, in the year 1861, Union and Confederate troops waged the war's first campaign.

Embattled Virginia thus became a proving ground. Amid her rugged mountains, a Federal army, led by George B. McClellan, grappled with Confederates directed by Robert E. Lee. Here, in a campaign of notable “firsts,” McClellan won the Union's inaugural victories and rocketed to fame. Here armies and leaders were forged, and future battlefields were determined.

Virginia was a key battleground in 1861. Union forces wrested nearly one-third of her landmass from the Confederacy—along with control of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, a vital Northern link. The result was all-important. Union victories in the mountains of Virginia diverted war east to the Shenandoah Valley rather than to the upper Ohio Valley and Midwest. The first campaign profoundly shaped America's Civil War. Yet it was overshadowed by the cataclysmic battles to follow and has been nearly forgotten.

While the soldiers clashed, Virginia Unionists waged an extraordinary political fight, creating a loyal state government to oppose the Confederate one in Richmond. From that contest a new state was born—cleaved from Virginia in a defiant act to sustain the Union. West Virginia's name belies her ancient ties. In the following pages, her territory prior to statehood in 1863 is called by its historic name, “Western Virginia.”
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My involvement with this story began as a youth, fired by the discovery of a dirt-encrusted bullet on the crest of Rich Mountain, scene of a battle that propelled General McClellan to the national stage. A decades-long treasure hunt began as musty manuscripts, diaries, letters, and chronicles were uncovered. From the poignant words of soldiers and civilians, the drama unfolded.

Between the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and the Ohio River stands a chain of lofty sentinels known as the Allegheny Mountains. Stretching from Pennsylvania to Virginia, they are among the tallest mountains in the east. Capped by erosion-resistant sandstones, the Alleghenies rise to heights of nearly five thousand feet.

These mountains were sculpted by water, and storms regularly sweep their crests. Rains pelting the western slopes drain north or west into the Ohio River. Water on the eastern slopes—perhaps a few feet away—flows north into the Potomac, making the region a birthplace of rivers.

Along the eastern flank, long, linear peaks overlook the Shenandoah Valley. The Blue Ridge, Piedmont, and Tidewater sections lay farther east. To the west is the trans-Allegheny, a region of deeply eroded hills remarkably alike in elevation, part of an unglaciated plateau that stretches to the Ohio River.

The Alleghenies are a land of transition. Many plant and animal species found here reach their northern or southernmost limits of distribution. Climatically, the highest peaks are like northern New England or eastern Canada, their summits crowned by a remnant forest of spruce and fir, cranberry bogs, and varying or “snowshoe” hares (brown in summer, white in the winter).
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The Alleghenies have been a formidable barrier to human settlement. The name itself may derive from the Delaware Indian term
Eleuwi-guneu
, meaning “endless” mountains. Native Americans first traversed the region more than ten thousand years ago. They were semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, and the environment that met their eyes was dramatically unlike today: spruce and pine forests, tundra and grasslands—a legacy of receding glaciers. As the climate warmed, native peoples thrived amid rich hardwood forests, building cultures of increasing complexity. But contact with western explorers ultimately brought disease and warfare that decimated the native populations.

The first European to reach the Alleghenies is unknown. Englishmen Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam explored beyond the Virginia Piedmont in 1671, noting trees marked by earlier visitors. Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia glimpsed the Alleghenies during an expedition from Williamsburg to the Shenandoah Valley in 1716. Spotswood was joined by a band of cavaliers, slaves, Indian guides, and mules laden with casks of choice Virginia wine and champagne. His “Knights of the Golden
Horseshoe” merrily toasted their discoveries. The adventure enticed others to come west.

Early settlers breached the forbidding mountains by tracing the Potomac River and its tributaries. To encourage them and contest French expansion in the Ohio Valley, the Colony of Virginia offered one thousand acres to land speculators for each family placed west of the Blue Ridge. Those settlers were not to be resident Virginians; many came from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
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An English nobleman, Thomas, Sixth Lord Fairfax, influenced westward expansion. His claim, the Northern Neck Proprietary, encompassed all territory between the headsprings of the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers—more than five million acres. A survey by the Crown in 1746 established Lord Fairfax's southwestern boundary. The party labored over mountains and through nearly impenetrable swamps and laurel thickets to mark the Potomac headspring with the famous “Fairfax Stone.”

Thomas Lewis, chronicler of the expedition, reported that “Never was any poor Creaturs in Such a Condition as we were in nor Ever was a Criminal more glad By having made his Escape out of prison as we were to Get Rid of those Accursed Lorals…” But Lewis also wrote of fine grazing land and magnificent forests, “Exceding well timbred with Such as very Large Spruce pines great multituds of Each and Shugartrees Chery trees the most and finest I ever Saw Some three or four foot Diameter.” Reports like this sparked an influx of settlers to the eastern foot of the Alleghenies by the 1750s. Lord Fairfax began to issue leases; a young surveyor named George Washington laid out many of the tracts.
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As intrepid pioneers crossed the Alleghenies and established residence in fertile valleys to the west, the French—struggling with Britain for control of the Ohio Valley—exploited Indian fears. Vicious raids began to threaten settlements on the frontier. That violence, coupled with the defeat of British General Edward Braddock's army in 1755 near Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh), ignited the French and Indian War.

Young George Washington was placed in command of Virginia's militia as settlers fled back across the mountains. He called for a chain of forts along the eastern ramparts of the Alleghenies, defenses that often provided a false sense of security. Near one, a horrified visitor discovered the bodies of three massacre victims. He wrote that they had been “scalped, and after thrown into a fire, [their] bodies were not yet quite consumed, but the flesh on many part of them, we saw the clothes of these people yet bloody, and the stakes, the instruments of their death still bloody & their brains sticking on them.”
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British arms finally drove the French from their northern strongholds; war ended in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris. France ceded all Ohio Valley claims to the Crown. The Indians were not so pacified. Britain sought to appease the tribes with the Proclamation of 1763, forbidding settlement west of the Alleghenies. Land speculators balked, however, and treaties with the Iroquois and Cherokee reopened most of trans-Allegheny Virginia by 1770.

Settlers again pushed across the mountains. In a move foreshadowing events of 1861, the Grand Ohio Company pressed claims in 1769 to make the western settlements part of a proposed fourteenth colony. The new colony—to be named Vandalia in honor of Queen Charlotte, who claimed descent from the Vandals—was to include all of trans-Allegheny Virginia and a portion of western Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Impending conflict between England and her American colonies doomed the plan.
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Trans-Allegheny colonists on the front lines in the French and Indian War now fought as rearguard in the American Revolution. British troops disbanded garrisons in the Ohio Valley, leaving the frontier defenseless. By 1777, the British had pressured many Native American tribes to action, enticing them with payment for scalps. The “bloody year of the three 7s” was a period of unprecedented violence on the Allegheny frontier. Indian war parties from as far away as Detroit were dispatched in a murderous reign of terror.
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Atrocities were committed by both sides in that bloody year of sevens. The venerated Shawnee chief Cornstalk bravely entered a Virginia garrison at Point Pleasant on the Ohio River that spring to make peace. Cornstalk was imposing, a magnificent orator who spoke impeccable English. But when a militiaman's scalped corpse was found outside the fort, enraged soldiers murdered the noble chief.

The Revolutionary War ended with the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, yet bloodshed in the west continued as most of the Indians were driven out. A new wave of European immigrants swept across the Alleghenies. They came for reasons monetary and political, and by 1790 some fifty-five thousand of them lived in Western Virginia.
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The seven decades between this surge of immigration and the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter brought significant economic growth to the trans-Allegheny region. Settlers followed well-worn Indian trails through the mountains to build cabins and farms. In autumn, pack-horse caravans laden with pelts, tallow, ginseng, and home-brewed whiskey headed back across the mountains to trade. Grist mills and saw mills sprang from the wilderness as settlements grew into communities.

Fledgling industries in salt, iron, pottery, and glass required improved transportation. Goods could be floated to market on major rivers in the Ohio Valley, but trade across the mountains remained difficult. River communities such as Wheeling, Parkersburg, and Charleston grew in size and stature while isolated settlements within the interior changed slowly.
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Virginia's legislature addressed the problem in 1816 by creating a fund for internal improvements and a Board of Public Works. A surge of road building followed. Important routes were laid out by a talented French engineer named Claudius Crozet. These “turnpikes” were so named because a pike blocked the road at points for the collection of tolls and was “turned” upon payment.

The James River and Kanawha Turnpike, completed by 1830, traversed the southern Alleghenies, bearing west from Covington in the Valley of Virginia through Lewisburg, Gauley Bridge, and
Charleston to Guyandotte on the Ohio River. By 1838, the Northwestern Turnpike crossed the northern end of Virginia, connecting Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley with Parkersburg on the Ohio River. Its completion fostered the growth of towns such as Romney, Grafton, and Clarksburg. The Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, lying between the two earlier routes, was finished by 1847, winding over the mountains from Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley through Monterey, Beverly, and Weston to Parkersburg along the Ohio.