Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (36 page)

“Here,” said Brown's companion. “We can get a good shot.”

“Why, those are our own men,” replied Brown.

“No they ain't,” insisted the other. “If they were, their faces would be turned the other way.”

Brown then became suspicious. He slowly brought his gun to bear.

“What company do you belong to?” he asked.

” To Captain Taylor's.”

“What regiment?” queried Brown.

“Third Arkansas.”

Before the words were fairly uttered, Brown leveled his musket.

“Now,” said Brown, “lay down that gun or you are a dead rebel.”

“Well, you haven't a great deal the advantage of me any way,” huffed the Confederate as he surrendered, “for you were as much mistaken as myself.”
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“The ground is plowed up in every direction by our balls,” wrote a Georgian upon touring the battlefield. “The ground around where their cannon were placed is stained with blood; and in every fence corner and behind every bush were left caps, canteens, haversacks filled with provisions &c., showing the haste with which they took their departure.” The First Georgia Infantry had a grand time picking up souvenirs—ample revenge for their disastrous flight from Laurel Hill. Members of the regiment honored General Jackson with a large United States flag. That beautiful silk banner was not captured in battle. It had been found resting against a tree—much to the chagrin of members of the Seventh Indiana Infantry, who had forgotten it! The Seventh would redeem themselves
on other fields, but this embarrassing incident gave them a nickname—the “Banner Regiment.”
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A number of dead Federal soldiers were found “mutilated in the most awful kind of way. [G]rape & even the cannon balls had passed through cutting them clean in t[w]o.” Among the dead was James Abbott of the Ninth Indiana Infantry. “[T]here was something unusual in the manner of Abbott's taking off,” wrote Ambrose Bierce in later years. “He was lying flat upon his stomach and was killed by being struck in the side by a nearly spent cannon-shot that came rolling in among us.…It was a solid round-shot, evidently cast in some private foundry, whose proprietor, setting the laws of thrift above those of ballistics, had put his ‘imprint’ upon it: it bore, in slightly sunken letters, the name ‘Abbott.'”
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The Battle of Greenbrier River was a rare victory for Confederates in Western Virginia. But Union General Reynolds, declaring the effort an “armed reconnaissance,” also claimed success. Many of his troops called it a “farce.” A correspondent for the
Cincinnati Times
styled the affair “a touch of loyal thunder and lightning.…The idea occurs to me that if Gen. Reynolds deals such heavy blows in a mere reconnaissance, what will he do when he marches out for a full fight?”

“So now both armies occupy the same ground they did before,” mused another Union wag, “and with the exception of a good artillery practice, I can see no advantage gained by our forces. They say we would have won the fight but the ammunition gave out. I think the ammunition story about played out, and would respectfully urge the adoption of something new.”
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General Henry Jackson pointed to “four days’ cooked rations” in the haversacks of Yankee dead as evidence that Reynolds had hoped “to prosecute a rapid march either on Staunton or Huntersville.” Jackson issued a laudatory address to his troops and penned a lengthy official report. The Confederate War Department
joined General Loring in congratulating Jackson and his men for their “brilliant conduct.” In fact, the outpouring of praise for this little Confederate victory moved a skeptic at the
Richmond Examiner
to claim that there were “more casualties from overwork and exhaustion in setting up type” for the reports than from the shot and shell of battle.

General Jackson was unapologetic: “What would have been the results of our defeat who can fully estimate? And yet, because it was comparatively bloodless, for the achievement of the victory who will ever give us full credit?” Fate had “decreed a terrible antithesis” for troops in the Alleghenies, he bemoaned, “the misery and obscurity here, the sympathy and the glory elsewhere.”
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Pity the poor Yeagers of Travellers Repose! Shells had riddled their stately home. Soldiers had ransacked and wrecked their once-bucolic farmstead. All would soon be put to the torch, and the family driven from their ancestral land. Innkeeper Andrew Yeager's chilling prophecy of invading armies, doom, and destruction had been fulfilled.
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PART IV

THE RENDING
OF VIRGINIA

“
Nature has defeated both sides; these mountain barriers are far more potent than the sand batteries erected by military science.”

—Anonymous Confederate volunteer

A statehood referendum was put before the citizens of Western Virginia on October 24, 1861. Archibald W. Campbell, talented editor of the
Wheeling Daily Intelligencer
, played a unique role in the new-state movement. The twenty-eight-year-old Campbell was a pioneer Republican leader in Virginia. Schooled as an attorney, he was a disciple of Secretary of State William Seward, a confidant of President Lincoln, an unflinching Unionist, and an outspoken anti-slavery man.

Campbell's
Intelligencer
was the leading newspaper in Western Virginia. He had gained editorial control of the paper in 1856, and by 1861, his politics made it a relentless “organ of division.” Always faithful and authoritative, the
Intelligencer
became an anchor for new-state advocates. Governor Pierpont of the Restored Government called it “the right arm of our movement.”
⁵⁴⁵

Editor Campbell had predicted that an “overwhelming” majority of Western Virginians would approve statehood. The October 24 referendum mirrored his optimism. By a vote of 18,408 to 781,
Western Virginians desired a new state, but the landslide masked bitter division. No more than a third of the eligible voters in forty-one Virginia counties had spoken. Secessionists avoided the polls. Balloting was by voice at polling places and a vote against the ordinance in areas controlled by Federal soldiers might bring charges of disloyalty and subject dissenters to imprisonment.
⁵⁴⁶

Virginia Confederates also held elections. In early November, delegates to the state convention were picked to replace expelled Unionists. Virginia Congressional seats were filled. “The election fever has broken out,” wrote a Confederate diarist at Camp Bartow. “Candidates are getting plentiful & very sociable.” On November 6, ballots were cast for president and vice president of the Confederate States. “At the close of the day,” wrote Virginian John Worsham, “when it was announced the entire regiment had voted for Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens, there were loud and repeated cheers for them and the Confederacy.” It mattered not that Davis and Stephens ran unopposed.
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Autumn brought change to the armies. Union General Rosecrans now commanded the Department of Western Virginia, a military district that included all territory west of the Blue Ridge. Troops began to leave for other theaters of war. Few were more grateful than Colonel Kimball's Fourteenth Indiana Infantry. Recalled one of them, “No poor sinner, who having worked out his probation in purgatory, and…turns his back upon the scene of his late sufferings could feel more pleasure than did the boys of the Fourteenth Regiment…in turning their backs on the horrors of Cheat Mountain.”
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Those remaining settled into a routine. The boredom of camp life was periodically broken by clashes among the outposts and other minor affairs. Scouting parties combed the mountains for troublesome nests of bushwhackers. Western Virginia became a backwater of war.

On the eastern Virginia front, October 21 brought a stunning Federal defeat on the Potomac River at Ball's Bluff. That miscalculation sparked anguish in Washington. The intrepid Frederick
Lander—now a brigadier general in command of the Department of Harpers Ferry and Cumberland (Maryland)—had been wounded in a mop-up of the affair, and his command devolved upon General Ben Kelley of “Philippi Races” fame. Kelley promptly went on the offensive. Leading three thousand Federals south from the B&O Railroad at New Creek, Virginia, on October 26, he drove Confederate forces out of the strategic upper Potomac town of Romney.

By seizing Romney, Kelley controlled a sixty-mile arc of the vital railroad. The move placed him only forty miles west of Confederate forces under Stonewall Jackson at Winchester, a Shenandoah Valley railroad town about seventy-five miles west of Washington. If reinforced, Kelley might also threaten Rebels on the Monterey line, seventy miles south.
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