Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (40 page)

The attack devolved into a contest of sharpshooters. Enemy soldiers taunted and cursed—daring each other to hold up their heads! Each man let slip a bullet at anything exposed. “In this position we kept up a regular Indian fight for over four hours,” wrote a member of the Second (U.S.) Virginia. “Toward the last the firing became so accurate, that if an inch of one's person was exposed, he was sure to catch it.”
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Confederate artillerists splintered the fallen timber with round shot and canister to drive out the attackers. Reverend Captain Miller's cannons—no longer the wooden variety—did fine execution. Colonel Moody's brushy nest became too hot to hold. By 2 P.M., nearly seven hours after General Milroy's first shots, the exhausted Federals withdrew. The battle was over.
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Colonel Moody's troops rejoined Milroy at the base of the ridge, using swords and bayonets to chisel out graves for the dead. Licking their wounds, the Federals turned back for Cheat Mountain. Large wagons carried off the injured. “This was the saddest trip I ever made,” an Ohio captain later mused. “The mountain road was rocky and rough. The moaning of the wounded men and their continual plea for water made the night dismal.” Ice in the wagon ruts was often broken for water to quench their thirst.

Upon repassing their unburied dead near Camp Bartow, some Federals noted that the gruesome forms had changed position. “They appeared also to have thrown off some of their clothing,”
Ambrose Bierce recalled, “which lay near by, in disorder. Their expression too, had an added blankness—they had no faces.”

“As soon as the head of our straggling column had reached the spot a desultory firing had begun,” Bierce wrote. “One might have thought the living paid honors to the dead. No; the firing was a military execution; the condemned, a herd of galloping swine. They had eaten our fallen, but—touching magnanimity!—we did not eat theirs.”
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The Federals had been “most gloriously” thrashed. “Our men discovered at the first fire that a great mistake had been made,” editorialized the
Wheeling Intelligencer. “
They had been led to expect a different meeting.—Scouts had reported the enemy only about a thousand strong, and in a place where they could easily be taken. Our men were all eagerness to bag them.” Declared a bitter Hoosier, “I think Gen. Milroy placed to[o] much confidence in them damned rebel deserters.”
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During the fight, Confederates distinctly overheard Federal soldiers grumbling that they had been deceived. General Milroy blamed defeat on a deserter from his own camp, along with the “many base cowards” who left the fight prematurely. But the Gray Eagle had lost his first battle; he alone was to blame. Ironically, had the attack been delayed only two days, Milroy would have found the Confederate camp abandoned.
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A War Department commendation praised the Confederates for victory in “combat as obstinate and as hard fought as any that has occurred during the war.” Ghastly corpses littered Camp Allegheny's bloodstained crest. “Our victory has been complete but dearly bought,” wrote Colonel Johnson of the nearly seven-hour struggle. “I have seen enough of war,” wept James Hall. “O my God, how forcibly it illustrates the folly and depravity of the human heart.”

The wounded suffered intensely. “Many were groaning from extreme pain,” wrote Hall, “with the cold, clammy sweat of death
upon their brows.” Left in a hospital on the dreary summit, some later died of exposure. The Confederates lost more than 150 men—killed, wounded, or missing in action. Casualties on the Federal side numbered about 140. Bodies turned up in the woods around Camp Allegheny for weeks. “Six were found yesterday,” wrote a correspondent on December 21, “with their eyes picked out by the crows.”
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John Cammack's company of the Thirty-first Virginia Infantry lost eighteen of forty-two men in the fight. “Out of our commissioned and non-commissioned officers,” he wrote, “everyone but myself was killed, wounded or missing. I was a corporal at the time and the command of the company devolved on me…. We buried six of our men in one grave, and I commanded the firing party.”

The clash had truly been a fraternal one. Virginia Confederates recognized some of the Union dead as old neighbors. A Federal captain was said to have drawn a bead on his own brother in the Confederate trenches during that battle.
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Little Josie Gordon was greatly mourned. Earlier, in a premonition of death, Josie had asked comrades of the Indiana Ninth to send his body home to Indianapolis. His father, Major Jonathan Gordon, would make a heart-rending discovery upon securing those remains. Found inside the breast pocket of the coat in which Josie fell was an unfinished letter, stained with his blood. The father's trembling hand unfolded a final testament from his son:

You seem to be at a loss, my dear Father, to understand my motive for volunteering, but I think, if you will remember the lessons which for years you have endeavored to impress upon my mind, that all will be explained. When you have endeavored ever since I was able to understand you, to instruct me…that I was to prefer Freedom to every thing else in this world, and that I should not hesitate to sacrifice anything, even life itself, upon the altar of my country when required, you surely should not be surprised that I should, in this hour of extreme peril to my country, offer her my feeble aid.

Josie Gordon was laid to rest with military honors in one of the most imposing funeral ceremonies Indianapolis residents could remember.
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Of the many heroes at Camp Allegheny, none stood taller than Colonel Ed Johnson. His stubborn defense allowed the Confederates to claim an unlikely victory, despite being almost twice outnumbered. “The old fellow will die in his tracks before he will consent to a retreat,” wrote a Virginian of the colonel, “and the confidence which the troops entertain in his skill and gallantry is worth a thousand men to us.”

“My recollections of Col. Edward Johnson, as he appeared that day, is very distinct,” wrote John Robson after the war, “because he acted so differently from all my preconceived ideas of how a commander should act on the field of battle.” He was “always in the thickest of the fight,” marveled a Confederate officer of the musket-toting colonel who could “load and shoot faster than any man he saw.” Ed Johnson led the fierce charges in person, infusing his men with courage as he swore defiantly at the bluecoats. His clothes were riddled with bullet holes, yet he came out of the fight without a scratch. With bulldog obstinacy, he drew a line atop the Allegheny that the enemy could not cross.
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Colonel Johnson became a bonafide Southern hero. The “immense war club” he carried in the fight appeared on display at the State Library in Richmond. The colonel was awarded a brigadier general's star, to date from the day of battle—Friday the thirteenth! One thing more was earned. The club-wielding defender of those bleak, windswept heights became forever known as “Allegheny” Johnson.
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“
Of all the places on this earth, there's none I do declare, That can surpass Cheat mountain top for misery and despair.”

—“Colonel” Coe, Thirty-second Ohio Infantry

The Confederate victory at Camp Allegheny doomed soldiers to a winter in the mountains. Southerners under “Allegheny” Johnson were ordered to hold their icy perch, while General Robert Milroy's Federals huddled on Cheat Mountain twenty miles northwest. Deep snow and subzero temperatures could be expected. “Some of the boys are pretty badly scared about it,” acknowledged a member of the Thirty-second Ohio Infantry. “They think if [we] stay here the whole regiment will freeze to death.” A pragmatic Confederate accepted the inevitable. “[T]here will be no hope of any service,” he wrote. “Will lie up and try to keep warm.”
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Log shanties became their homes. “Well sis we are into winter quarters at last,” grumbled a Georgian at Camp Allegheny. “16 men crowded into one little hut—16 ft by 16 ft—one small fireplace to cook, eat, and warm around, and the weather cold, bitter cold, snow all over the ground, and a difficult matter to get wood.”
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Others were not so fortunate. “ We are still living in our tents,” Virginian James Hall addressed his diary in late December, “but we make them tolerably comfortable by constructing rude fireplaces to them. At night we do not fare so well. Some mornings when we awaken our blankets are wet…and the inside of our tent lined with hoar frost. Many times our hair is frozen stiff by congealed respiration, and our floor is covered with snow. This is a pleasant life, sure.”
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Soldiers made desperate pleas for more congenial assignments. “We are…suffering the hardest of all hardships…upon the frigid top of the hateful Alleghany,” wrote a shivering captain to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens. Indiana Congressman Schuyler Colfax lobbied General McClellan on behalf of the Ninth Indiana Regiment at Cheat Mountain: “I now beg and earnestly entreat you to relieve them…from that Siberia to fields where they will have a chance to fight instead of to freeze.”
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Political intrigue was also rife in the city of Wheeling. Sixty-one delegates had gathered at the Wheeling Custom House since November 26 to frame a constitution for the new “State of Kanawha.” The convention opened with acrimonious debate. “Kanawha” proved to be an unpopular name—a county and two rivers within the proposed state already held that title. Many had urged that the name “Virginia” somehow be retained. A poll of members chose the name “West Virginia” for their new state.
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Delegates next wrangled over a “proper boundary.” A nine-member committee stunned the convention on December 5 by adding thirty-two counties to the thirty-nine included in the original statehood ordinance. The proposal would have pushed the new state's reach to the Blue Ridge Mountains, inflated its slave population, and resulted in a voting majority loyal to the Confederacy! Delegate Gordon Battelle of Ohio County rightfully
called it a “delusion and a snare” to defeat the new-state movement.

On December 13, while battle raged at Camp Allegheny, the territorial limits of West Virginia were fixed. Forty-four counties were included unconditionally. The counties of Pendleton, Hardy, Hampshire, Morgan, Berkeley, Jefferson, and Frederick were to be added if their voters ratified the new constitution. Those counties (all but Frederick would ultimately be included), formed a new panhandle—created to place the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in Union hands. “[It] is the great artery that feeds our country,” spoke delegate Waitman Willey. “We cannot do without it.”
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