Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (22 page)

Telegraph lines also connected the Federal camps. On Cheat Mountain, telegrapher E.B. Bryant found old Mathias White taking an interest in his new-fangled device. The rustic mountaineer figured that a paper message could be strung along the wire, but was puzzled how it got past each pole without being ripped to shreds. When Bryant sent a query to Huttonsville and received his answer in fifteen minutes, White was dumbfounded. He looked upon the whole contraption as witchcraft, and on Bryant as one who colluded with the devil.
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The legendary Cheat Mountain weather also took a devilish turn. Nights on the summit were surprisingly cool. Soldiers slept under two or more blankets, requiring large fires and overcoats even on July mornings. By early August, sunny skies that had enamored the Hoosiers to their camp gave way to dark, angry clouds. Cold rains fell, and fog settled in. The slightest breeze caused the tall spruces to give forth “a most melancholy dirge.” When it stormed they howled “as if all the demons of the
mountains had congregated to frighten off the intruders who had dared to set foot on their domain.”
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More unpleasantries were revealed in the valley below. Directly behind General Reynolds' camp at Cheat Pass was an immense blackberry patch that proved to be thick with rattlesnakes. There was no escaping the venomous vipers; they seemed particularly fond of crawling inside the tents and bedding. Snakes were also troublesome at Camp Elkwater. “To-day one of the choppers made a sudden grab for his trouser leg;” recorded John Beatty, “a snake was crawling up. He held the loathsome creature tightly by the head and body, and was fearfully agitated. A comrade slit down the leg of the pantaloon with a knife, when lo! An innocent little roll of red flannel was discovered.” “[I]n short,” declared Beatty, “the boys have snake on the brain.”
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Confederate authorities found the developments in those mountains to be equally repugnant. Virginia Governor John Letcher had crossed the Alleghenies in haste, directing Southern soldiers to rendezvous at Monterey, a Highland County village forty-seven miles west of the Shenandoah Valley railroad town of Staunton. General Henry Rootes Jackson temporarily took command of the Army of the Northwest at Monterey. Jackson must have seemed out of place in those mountains. A Georgian by birth, he was forty-one years old, gifted and refined, a distinguished graduate of Yale, and a lover of fine art and poetry. Jackson had already been a Superior Court judge and U.S. Minister to Austria. He had also been elected to the Confederate Congress, but experience as a colonel of volunteers in the Mexican War prompted him to enter the service with a brigadier's commission.
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Even the diplomatic Jackson was stunned by the wreck of Garnett's army limping into Monterey. The once finely adorned First Georgia Infantry appeared without their drums and fifes,
without their fancy regalia, without their guns or even their shoes. “[T]he annals of warfare might be searched in vain to find a more pitiable picture of suffering, destitution, and demoralization than they presented at the close of their memorable retreat,” Jackson reported sadly.

General Jackson's command could hardly fight. Ammunition and supplies intended for him had been sent to “Stonewall” Jackson by mistake. But General Henry Jackson did not panic. He sent troops to Huntersville to block the unguarded road that led across the mountains from the enemy camp at Elkwater to Millboro station on the Virginia Central Railroad. With the remainder of his depleted command, Jackson held the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike near Monterey. A detachment on Allegheny Mountain, fifteen miles west, constituted his front. Thus positioned, he awaited reinforcements.
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The weakened condition of Jackson's force conspired against him. Measles and typhoid fever swept the Confederate camps. Of Garnett's old command, only the Thirty-first and Thirty-seventh Virginia regiments were fit for duty. Nearly half of the newly arrived Third Arkansas Infantry reported sick. “Monterey! What sad recollections cluster around the name!” recalled a Virginian. “For a time the entire town was a hospital.”
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Still, there was hope. On the afternoon of July 21, Confederate outposts on the heights above Monterey reported strange sounds emanating from the east. Puzzled pickets listened for hours to the faint, protracted “rumble.” A veteran officer was finally summoned who recognized that noise. It was the muffled din of cannon fire—more than one hundred twenty miles distant as the crow flies—at the great Battle of Manassas.

“Everyone was wild, nay, frenzied with the excitement of victory,” recalled Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee Infantry upon learning the results. “We felt that the war was over, and we would have to return home without even seeing a Yankee soldier. Ah, how we envied those that were wounded. We thought at that time that we would have given a thousand dollars to have been in the
battle, and to have had our arm shot off, so we could have returned home with an empty sleeve.”
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Private Watkins and the First Tennessee Infantry were bound for Jackson's camps, among reinforcements sent by General Lee to “drive back the invaders.” Leaving the train at Millboro Station, they began to climb the mountains under a sweltering sun. Sam Watkins called it the hardest march of the war. “It seemed that mountain was piled upon mountain. No sooner would we arrive at a place that seemed to be the top than another view of a higher, and yet higher mountain would rise before us.” Most were overburdened for the march. “First one blanket was thrown away, and then another,” recalled Watkins, “now and then a good pair of pants, old boots and shoes, Sunday hats, pistols and Bowie knives strewed the road.” Panting Confederates fell by the wayside in droves. Some pitched into healing mineral springs, only to come out “limp as dishrags,” unable to march.
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Yet these Southerners were unlike the earliest recruits. They had drilled for many weeks in camps of instruction. They hailed from states like Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia. They were tolerably armed and equipped—ready and able to fight. And they came in high spirits. “ We may be killed,” pledged one to his gal, “but never will be whipped.”
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Their new commander was also a fighter. General William Wing Loring, age forty-two, was entering upon his third war. A brusque, goateed, sleepy-eyed bachelor, Loring had first battled Seminole Indians as a boy soldier of sixteen. He had fought in Mexico as a captain of mounted riflemen, won two brevets, and then was struck down at the Battle of Chapultepec. When told that his mangled left arm needed amputation, Loring coolly laid aside a cigar and sat quietly while the arm was cut off—without anesthetic relief. His men buried that limb on the battlefield with the hand pointed toward their goal, Mexico City. Loring called it the proudest moment of his life.

Loring had been the youngest line colonel in the U.S. Army prior to his resignation. Now he rode into the Alleghenies as a
Confederate brigadier general, stunned to find members of the Army of the Northwest—his soldiers—filling every farmhouse and outbuilding on the road from Staunton. It would not do. Loring gruffly cancelled all furloughs and dispatched officers to round up the men.

He reached Monterey on July 24 and assumed command from General Jackson. Upon reviewing the smartly dressed Twenty-first Virginia Infantry, Loring remarked that they were fine-looking men, but “Until they are able to sleep in winter amidst the snow and ice without tents, they are not soldiers!” John Worsham and his comrades angrily put their one-armed general down as “an officer who knew nothing.” Worsham wrote in retrospect: “Alas for our judgment! It was not many months before we were of the same opinion as General Loring.”
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Loring saw that the best hope for an offensive lay on the Huntersville Road—a dash to Huttonsville that would cut off the Cheat Mountain fortress, turning it completely. Directing Jackson to seize a point on the Staunton-Parkersburg pike at Greenbrier River, twelve miles from the Federals on Cheat Mountain, Loring left him with about five thousand men on the Monterey line and departed for Huntersville.

Huntersville was a tiny crossroads hamlet about fifty miles south of Huttonsville. Originally a wilderness outpost where eastern merchants bartered with trappers and hunters, it was the seat of Pocahontas County and General Loring's new headquarters. The general's talented staff converted Huntersville into a large army depot. Columns of infantry, cavalry, and artillery rolled into the town. Tents steadily filled the fields and slopes. General Loring would soon have nearly eighty-five hundred men on the Huntersville line.
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North Carolina Confederates recalled their campground at Huntersville as “one of the most eligible” of the war. A beautiful maple grove shaded tents along the banks of a cool mountain stream. Pointing to the spearmint-fringed margin, one impish company officer declared, “[H]ere [is] the water, here is the mint; if anyone can furnish the sugar and some one the spirits, we'll have the best mint julep you ever tasted.” The ingredients were discreetly secured, and soldiers huddled behind a fence to enjoy their “jolly, jolly grog.”
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There was more reason for good cheer. Even as Washington, D.C., hailed McClellan as the “Young Napoleon,” General Robert E. Lee was riding west into the mountains.

“
Like the country, may we not find the people, unpolished, rugged and uneven, capable of noble heroism or villainy?”

—Lt. Colonel John Beatty

Only the hoofbeats of horses and creaking saddle leather were discernable as eight finely mounted troopers of Burdsall's First Ohio Cavalry wound cautiously down the mountainside. Their orders were to scout east on the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike. It was a dangerous task. Many points between the friendly outposts on Cheat Mountain and the Greenbrier Valley below offered ground where horsemen might be attacked and left powerless to resist.

On this pleasant morning in July 1861, the scouts expected trouble. Each man scanned the roadside for signs of the enemy as their mounts trod down the grade. Near the base of the mountain, the turnpike descended precipitously to the West Fork of Greenbrier River. A small bridge and an old ford crossed the river there. Directly above that crossing was a sinister, laurel-crowned precipice known as the “hanging rock.”

It was a prime spot for ambush. As those silent Federal horsemen neared the bridge, they paused to scrutinize the ground. There was not a hint of danger; in fact, the atmosphere was disarming. Soft rays of sunlight danced across the fern-covered banks of the stream. A gentle, rippling current soothed jittery nerves. Satisfied, the horsemen rode on.

Late that afternoon, the merry riders returned, wheeled directly into the ford, and began to water their mounts. But this time, they were not alone.

A band of mountaineers had gathered at the home of a Mr. Gum on Back Allegheny to go hunting that day. Headed by a local gunsmith, each of the nine men was a practiced slayer of deer and bear. Armed with trusty rifles, they had stalked through dark woods to the hanging rock. The hunters were after big game, but today their quarry would be different.

The stealthy woodsmen chose positions overlooking the crossing and settled in. They were aware that a squad of Yankee cavalry was on the prowl; their plan was to reserve fire until assured of numbers, and then to “let them have it in the back.”