Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (33 page)

Privately, Wise claimed he had relinquished command only in deference to Lee's judgment, rather than in compliance with the order. Defiant as ever, he called on President Davis upon arriving in Richmond.

“General Wise, I think I will have to shoot you,” said the president, not entirely in jest.

“Mr. President, shoot me,” Wise replied. “That is all right, but for God's sake let me see you hang that d___ rascal Floyd first.”
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“
The enemy is in our presence & testing the strength of our position. What may be the result…cannot now be foreseen.”

—Robert E. Lee

As September closed, the army of Union General Rosecrans confronted that of Lee. Rosecrans had 5,300 troops at Sewell Mountain, and a total force of 8,500 upon linking up with General Cox. The arrival of General Loring's division swelled Lee's own force to nearly 9,000 men. The armies scowled at each other across a deep canyon as they fortified opposite spurs of Sewell Mountain. “If they would attack us,” wrote a Confederate correspondent, “we could whip them without, perhaps, the loss of a man; but, if we have to attack them, the thing will be different.”
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The commanding generals agreed. “We have been threatened with an attack every day, but it has yet been suspended,” wrote Lee. By September 30, he acknowledged, “I begin to fear the enemy will not attack us. We shall therefore have to attack him.”

But the army could not move forward. A fierce storm had rendered the James River and Kanawha Turnpike nearly impassible—General Floyd now declared it “the worst road in Virginia.” The Confederates were seventy mountainous miles west of Shenandoah
Valley railroads. Staggering teams labored to bring up supplies. “ We can only get up provisions from day to day, which paralyses our operations,” Lee admitted. Unable to sustain an advance, the Confederates were resigned to wait.
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While they waited, rain and bitter winds whipped across the peaks of Sewell Mountain. “One very cold night,” recalled aide Walter Taylor, “as we drew close to our camp fire, General Lee suggested that it was advisable to make one bed, put our blankets together in order to have sufficient covering to make us comfortable, and so it happened that it was vouchsafed for me to occupy very close relations with my old commander, and to be able to testify to his self-denial.”
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Lee watched the Federals as the first days of October slipped by. On October 5, renewed activity could be seen in the enemy camps. An assault seemed imminent. Lee's decision to await Rosecrans was about to be rewarded. Throughout the night, Confederate pickets heard the rumble of wheels and concluded that the enemy was moving up guns in preparation for an attack.

The predawn hours of October 6 found General Lee expectant. Atonement was at hand. His troops were to give battle at last. Rosecrans would assail Lee's strong defenses and be repulsed with fearful loss. But dawn revealed only silence. No movement could be seen across the great chasm on Sewell Mountain. Not a single Federal soldier remained in the trenches. Rosecrans had vanished!

Lee was bitterly disappointed. The rumble of wheels by night had not been those of advancing artillery, but of departing wagons. Rosecrans had arrived at the same conclusion as Lee—it was far better to receive an assault in that rugged terrain than to deliver one. Failing to draw Lee out, Rosecrans had ordered his brigades back to the navigable Kanawha River near Gauley Bridge, prudently shortening his supply line for the approaching winter.
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It was Cheat Mountain all over again. After great toil and expectation, Lee had failed to fight. Rosecrans escaped without the loss of a man. The Southern press was not reticent in pointing out that a “more adventurous policy” was needed in Western Virginia. Lee
was painfully aware of the criticism. “I am sorry, as you say, that the movements of the armies cannot keep pace with the expectations of the editors of papers,” he wrote Mary after the failure. “I know they can regulate matters satisfactorily to themselves on paper. I wish they could do so in the field. No one wishes them more success than I do & would be happy to see them have full swing.”
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Lee pondered an offensive, but it was little more than a pipe dream. The turnpike remained in miserable shape. The hospitals in the rear were overflowing with sick soldiers. Adding insult, Richmond newspapers were printing details of what Lee had intended as a secret move!
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The Confederates withdrew from Sewell Mountain. General Loring's division returned to the Huntersville line. Lee's effort to reclaim Western Virginia was over.

Lee announced his impending departure and directed that future operations be governed by General Floyd's own “good judgment.” But Floyd's judgment was clouded by politics. Hoping to bolster his reputation, Floyd marched on the Federals at Gauley Bridge with about four thousand men. By the first of November, he had placed light artillery on an eminence known as Cotton Hill and began annoying Rosecrans's camps below. The demonstration proved far “more noisy than dangerous.” Learning that Rosecrans had sent detachments to entrap him, Floyd decamped on November 12 and fled back across the Alleghenies.
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General Robert E. Lee left the mountains on October 30, 1861. His failure was complete; six days prior, the people of Western Virginia had approved an ordinance to form a new state, one loyal to the Union. Accompanying Lee on the ride east was Walter Taylor, his lone surviving aide. A new beard framed Lee's tired face. The arduous days of reconnaissance and nights away from headquarters had caused him to give up shaving. Appropriately, his beard came out Confederate gray. To the
youthful troops, it gave Lee the look of a patriarch. He would retain it for life, a memento of opportunity lost.
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Lee's musings on that lonely ride must have turned to a new warhorse. Neither of the mounts he rode in Western Virginia, “Richmond,” a bay stallion, nor another called the “Brown Roan,” suited him completely. But on Sewell Mountain, a striking four-year-old thoroughbred had caught Lee's eye. The general, a lover of horses, marveled at its proportions. Sixteen hands high, it was iron gray in color with a black mane and tail. Strong, spirited, and bold of carriage, this horse required neither whip nor spur to maintain a rapid “buck-trot.” Lee was instantly taken in. “Such a picture would inspire a poet,” he trilled.

The horse, originally named “Jeff Davis,” came from a farm near Blue Sulphur Springs and had garnered two first prizes at the Greenbrier County fair. Major Thomas Broun of the Wise Legion had purchased him in the fall of 1861. General Lee encountered Broun's brother Joseph on the horse at Sewell Mountain, often stopping to admire the animal. Lee began to call him “my colt,” hinting that he would be needed before the war was over. Four months later, near Pocataligo, South Carolina, he secured Broun's horse for $200. Impressed by the handsome thoroughbred's ability to cover long distances, Lee gave him the name “Traveller.”
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Lee left Western Virginia under a shadow of disgrace, his military reputation badly tarnished. Critics pronounced him outwitted and outgeneraled. They failed to understand the difficulties, the measles and mud, or the recalcitrant commanders. Learned men shook their heads and said that Lee had been overrated as a soldier, that he relied on a showy presence and an historic name, that he was “too tender of blood.” Lee erred on the “engineer side of a military question,” they feared, “preferring rather to dig entrenchments than to fight.”
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“Poor Lee!” railed a columnist in the
Charleston Mercury
. “Rosecrans has fooled him again…. The people are getting mighty sick of this dilly-dally, dirt digging, scientific warfare; so much so that they will demand that the Great Entrencher be brought back and permitted to pay court to the ladies.” They called him “Granny Lee.”
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Lee did not respond to the critics. Upon his return to Richmond, President Davis received him warmly, one of the few who retained full confidence in his ability. “He came back,” Davis recalled, “carrying the heavy weight of defeat, and unappreciated by the people whom he served, for they could not know, as I knew, that, if his plans and orders had been carried out, the result would have been victory rather than defeat.”
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Before the general could reunite with Mary and the girls, he received a new assignment. A fleet of Federal warships threatened the southeastern states; Lee was to supervise coastal defenses in South Carolina, Georgia, and east Florida. His reputation had suffered so that President Davis was forced to send a letter to the governor of South Carolina on Lee's departure, informing him “what manner of man he was.”
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Nature bathed the Allegheny Mountains in a spectacular display of autumn hues in 1861. “The beech and maples…touched by the heavy frosts shone with their gold and scarlet, rendering the landscape a scene of most perfect beauty,” wrote a member of the Fourteenth Indiana during the month of October. Another spellbound soldier declared, “The surrounding mountains, always a grand and imposing sight, are now picturesque in the extreme.”
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That panoply of colors proved bittersweet for the Union spies Fletcher and Clark. The two had offered scant information to their Confederate captors. Imprisoned in a tent at Huntersville, they received little food or water, and no blankets or straw for bedding.
Each night they were tied snugly to prevent escape. Both suffered miserably from “camp diarrhea.”

One day, a Confederate chaplain appeared at the tent to inquire on the prisoners' spiritual state. He asked if they were “prepared to die.” Fletcher was then led away and grilled by Squire Skeen, a local prosecutor. Two men wrote down his answers. Most of the questions concerned Clark, a native Virginian whom it was feared could do great harm to the Confederate cause.

Night came on before Fletcher returned to the tent. Clark listened anxiously to his description of the examination. The two men stared out as a full moon rolled over the mountains, bathing the valley in a mournful glow.

“They are going to kill us, Fletcher—me, at any rate.”