Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (46 page)

Finally, Mr. Lincoln pulled open the drawer of a small table and retrieved his own written opinion. Referring to the card game Whist, the president declared, “Now, gentlemen, I will give you the ‘odd trick'!”

“That is the trick we hope to take,” shot back Congressman Blair.
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Blair returned the next morning for Lincoln's “New Year's gift,” a visit shrouded in myth. He reportedly arrived at daybreak, found the White House locked up, and crawled in through a window. In one version of the tale, he found Mr. Lincoln fully dressed, in another the president had just risen from bed. Whatever Lincoln's state of dress, he greeted Blair cheerfully. “Here is your bill,” Lincoln sang out. “You see the signature.” It read “Approved—Abraham Lincoln.”

Governor Pierpont's eleventh hour plea had won the day. The president would be troubled no longer by constitutional questions—the issue of West Virginia statehood was one of expedience. “The government has been fighting nearly two years for its existence,” Lincoln said. “The friends of the bill say it will strengthen the Union cause and will weaken the cause of the Rebels. It is a step and is political.”

” We can scarcely dispense with the aid of West Virginia in this struggle,” wrote Lincoln. “Much less can we afford to have her against us, in Congress and in the field. Her brave and good men
regard her admission into the Union as a matter of life and death. They have been true to the Union under very severe trials.…The division of the State is dreaded as a precedent. But a measure made expedient by a war is no precedent for times of peace. It is said that the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only because it is our secession. Well, if we call it by that name, there is still difference between secession against the Constitution, and secession in favor of the Constitution.”

The Willey Amendment, with its gradual emancipation clause, was unanimously approved in convention; on March 26, 1863, West Virginians ratified it by a vote of 28,321 to 572. Opponents of statehood shunned the polls. Reverend Gordon Battelle—champion of the emancipation fight—did not live to see passage of the Willey Amendment. Battelle had died of typhoid fever, contracted while serving as chaplain to the First (U.S.) Virginia Infantry.
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Confederate raiders sought to disrupt elections and punish leaders of the statehood movement. The approach of General William “Grumble” Jones's cavalry in late April 1863 chased Senator Willey from his Morgantown home. Defiant Rebels burned the lavish library at Governor Pierpont's vacant Fairmont residence. When a pious Confederate attempted to retrieve the governor's family Bible, his lieutenant, a Wheeling native, consigned it to the flames. “Here goes the word of God,” the officer exclaimed, “and I would to God it were Frank Pierpont's body.”
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Pierpont chose to remain head of the Restored Government of Virginia, then made up of five eastern counties, with a capital in Alexandria. In his stead, Arthur I. Boreman of Parkersburg was elected as West Virginia's first governor. Wheeling's Linsly Institute became the temporary state capitol.

On June 20, 1863, by proclamation of President Lincoln, West Virginia became the nation's thirty-fifth state. She was a creation without parallel in American history—a “child of the storm.” Although forged to aid the Union war effort, fully half of West Virginia's counties had voted
for
secession in 1861. Scholars have estimated that as many as 40 percent of her citizens remained loyal to the Confederacy.
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The war within her borders was truly “brother against brother.” More than twenty-eight thousand West Virginians served in the Union army; perhaps eighteen thousand fought for the Confederacy. A surprising number switched loyalty during the conflict. As Federal troops departed for other campaigns, the new state became a guerrilla battleground. Much of her soil lapsed into anarchy. Partisan bands like the “Moccasin Rangers,” “Snake Hunters,” “Swamp Dragons,” and “Dixie Boys” carried the fight to every hill and hollow.
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The scars of that conflict are visible to this day.

“
After forty-odd years there are neither enemies nor victories, but only gracious mountains & sleepy valleys…hazy & dim as old memories.”

—Ambrose Bierce

The epic scale of America's Civil War doomed the first campaign to obscurity. Historians transfixed by the carnage at bloody battlefields like Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg have neglected it. Yet the little clashes of 1861 in West Virginia's Allegheny Mountains have a significance long unrecognized.

The first campaign was decisive, with great political impact. General George McClellan's army rescued Virginia Unionists and rallied wavering citizens to Mr. Lincoln's government. Building on that success, loyal delegates in Wheeling hammered out a government of their own. Their novel act of defiance, in the face of armed secessionists, resulted in the new state of West Virginia.

Virginia thereby lost forty-eight western counties, nearly one third of her landmass—and perhaps the war. The Confederates lost an opportunity to shift the fight to the upper Ohio Valley. West Virginia's mountainous buffer enabled Federal authorities in Ohio and Pennsylvania to focus on invasions of the South, rather than on defense of their borders. Equally important, the Baltimore and
Ohio Railroad was secured for the Union. That vital link from Washington to Cincinnati and St. Louis would speed Federal armies to both flanks of the Confederacy.

Yet Federal troops pulled up short in the Alleghenies. General McClellan's 1861 victories threw the Confederates into disarray; a few days of hard marching could have taken his army to the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. Had Confederate forces lost control of the Virginia Central or Virginia and Tennessee Railroads—direct lines to Richmond and the Deep South—the result would have been catastrophic. Union arms might then have cut a swath across central Virginia, perhaps ending the war in its second year. Instead, the fertile Shenandoah Valley remained a “breadbasket” for the Confederacy, and a sally port for invasion of the North.

Mountains hindered the movement of armies. Federal troops in Western Virginia dug in along the turnpikes, confounded by the realities of mountain warfare. “It was easy,” wrote General Jacob Cox of that region, “sitting at one's office table, to sweep the hand over a few inches of chart showing next to nothing of the topography, and to say, ‘We will march from here to here.'” But it was another thing entirely to make that march. The Alleghenies loomed as a towering fortress for armies to pass.
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For citizen-soldiers, those mountains were a stern proving ground. Many looked back on their first campaign as the severest of the war. Colonel Samuel Fulkerson of Virginia believed “the history of that remarkable campaign would show, if truly portrayed, a degree of severity, of hardship, of toil, of exposure and suffering that finds no parallel [and]…would have done honor to our sires in the most trying times of the Revolution.” A veteran of the Twenty-fifth Ohio Infantry flatly declared, “The history of the Rebellion furnishes no instances of greater suffering, excepting in rebel prisons, than that experienced by the troops on the summit of Cheat Mountain, in the fall and winter of 1861.”
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General Lee's aide Walter Taylor wrote, “In the subsequent campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia the troops were subjected to great privations and to many very severe trials—in hunger often; their
nakedness scarcely concealed; strength at times almost exhausted—but never did I experience the same heart-sinking emotions as when contemplating the wan faces and the emaciated forms of those hungry, sickly, shivering men of the army at Valley Mountain!”

The toil of mountain warfare chiseled raw recruits into hardy veterans. Many who began the war in Western Virginia went on to perform great feats of bravery and endurance. Their numbers swelled fabled armies North and South, including the Gibraltar Brigade, Stonewall Jackson's “foot cavalry,” the Army of the Cumberland, and the Army of Northern Virginia.
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The first campaign shaped leaders, notably Generals George McClellan and Robert E. Lee. Each would rise to supreme command of their respective armies, yet each took a different path from the Alleghenies. Here McClellan rocketed to stardom as the “Young Napoleon,” while a mud-spattered “Granny” Lee left the mountains in disgrace.

Robert E. Lee
badly misjudged the political sentiments in Western Virginia, yet gained valuable lessons from defeat. Lee learned to handle troops during the first campaign. His concern for the wants of rank and file soldiers fast became the stuff of legend. He also learned to deal with recalcitrant commanders. The leaders who failed him in Western Virginia—Loring, Rust, Wise, and Floyd—were quietly transferred to distant fields.

Lee never forgot the disappointment on the faces of his volunteers at Cheat and Sewell Mountains when attacks did not come off. In the future, he resolved to strike boldly. Asked of Lee's capacity to make war, a staff officer would later reply, “Lee is audacity personified.” There was no more talk of “Granny” Lee.
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The cheers for Lee that rang from “Jubilee Mountain” in 1861 were heard again. At Chancellorsville in 1863, Lee rode through flaming woods to the head of his army as the enemy was put to flight. An aide wrote, “One long, unbroken cheer, in which the
feeble cry of those who lay helpless on the earth, blended with the strong voices of those who still fought, rose high above the roar of battle, and hailed the presence of the victorious chief. He sat in the full realization of all that soldiers dream of—triumph; and as I looked upon him in the complete fruition of the success.…I thought that it must have been from such a scene that men in ancient days rose to the dignity of gods.”

Yet the great chieftain remained a man of simplicity. “A more modest man did not live,” avowed Walter Taylor. In the full zenith of his fame, Lee wore a plain uniform, kept a simple tent for headquarters, and ate from the same old tinware with which he began the war on Valley Mountain.
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When the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox Court House in 1865, weary veterans flocked to their beloved general and his warhorse, Traveller. Lee became an icon of the “Lost Cause.” Sheathing his sword, he declined lucrative offers to sell his name and took a modest salary as president of little Washington College in Lexington, Virginia.

Lee's Arlington home was forfeited as a national cemetery. His petition for amnesty went ignored. Nonetheless, until his death in 1870, Lee served as a role model for healing the nation's wounds. One hundred and five years later, Congress restored his citizenship.
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George B. McClellan
used the first campaign as a springboard to fame. In the mountains of Western Virginia, McClellan won the North's first victories. Soon after his dazzling telegrams reached Washington, Federal hopes were dashed at Manassas and the thirty-four-year-old McClellan was called to save the Union.

But the call proved costly. General McClellan had been miles from the scene of his early triumphs—never “within the range of a hostile cannon,” as one of his officers not-so-gently put it. Overlooked in the glow of those little mountain victories were some distressing traits.

“The assumed dash and energy of his first campaign made the disappointment and the reaction more painful, when the excessive
caution of his conduct in command of the Army of the Potomac was seen,” General Cox would reflect. “But the Rich Mountain affair, when analyzed, shows the same characteristics which became well-known later. There was the same overestimate of the enemy, the same tendency to interpret unfavorably the sights and sounds in front, the same hesitancy to throw in his whole force when he knew that his subordinate was engaged.” Remarked a
Cincinnati Daily Gazette
columnist in 1862: “[I]s there any apparent difference in the generalship of Gen. McClellan in Western Virginia and on the Potomac? Did he not show the same reluctance to smell gunpowder then that he has since?”
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The talented McClellan organized two great armies. He devised masterful strategy. But, at the moment of truth, he lacked the will to fight. When handed a lost copy of General Lee's orders before Antietam, he failed to seize the opportunity and allowed the Confederates to escape disaster. “Are you acquainted with General McClellan?” Lee had asked one of his subordinates before that epic battle. “He is an able general, but a very cautious one. His enemies among his own people think him too much so.”
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