Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (47 page)

General-in-Chief Henry Halleck complained that “the lever of Archimedes” was needed to get McClellan moving. Even President Lincoln agonized that the Army of the Potomac was only “McClellan's body-guard.” Repeated urgings went unheeded; McClellan was finally relieved of command on November 7, 1862, for what Lincoln called a hopeless case of the “slows.”

McClellan went home to New Jersey for orders that never came. Despite his failings on the battlefield, the charismatic general was enormously popular with his troops. In the 1864 election, McClellan failed as the Democratic presidential candidate against Lincoln, resigned his military commission the next day and left for Europe. Returning home in 1868, he served honorably as Governor of New Jersey from 1878–1881, and died there in 1885.

McClellan's rise to command likely prolonged the war—long enough, it could be said, for the abolition of slavery to become a principal aim. General U.S. Grant would use the army McClellan
forged to defeat Lee and end the conflict. Yet Grant had been unable to secure an appointment from the young general in 1861! He would later call McClellan “one of the mysteries of the war.”
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As the “Young Napoleon” rocketed to stardom, his luckless opponent
Robert S. Garnett
was buried and forgotten. “[H]ad he lived,” wrote Confederate General E.P. Alexander of the dreary-hearted Garnett, “I am sure [he] would have won a reputation no whit behind Stonewall Jackson's.” Garnett's body lies unmarked beside those of his wife and child at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. He is often confused with a cousin, Confederate General Richard B. Garnett, killed at the battle of Gettysburg—and likewise reposing in an unmarked grave.
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Thomas A. Morris
, the Indiana brigadier commanding at Laurel Hill, was mustered out of service on July 27, 1861. A promised major-generalship was withheld until the fall of 1862, largely due to McClellan's declaration that Morris was “unfit.” When the position was finally tendered, Morris declined it and quietly resumed his duties as a railroad executive. He died in 1904, a leading citizen of Indianapolis.
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William S. Rosecrans
was appointed a major general to date from March 1862, took command of the Army of the Cumberland that fall, and repulsed the Confederates at Stones River, Tennessee. In 1863, he inaugurated a brilliant campaign to force the Rebels from Chattanooga. However, in September of that year, Rosecrans suffered a crushing defeat at Chickamauga, Georgia, which virtually ended his military career. “Old Rosey” earned a reputation as one of the North's great strategists, but made political enemies he could not overcome. Rosecrans entered business pursuits in California and was elected to Congress before his death in 1898.
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Henry W. Benham
was arrested for “neglect of duty” while commanding a brigade under Rosecrans during the fall of 1861, but the charges were dropped. Failure at Secessionville, South Carolina in June 1862 caused Benham's removal. Lincoln reinstated his commission in 1863 and Benham went on to lead the engineer brigade of the Army of the Potomac with great skill. He was awarded the brevet of major general, remained in the Corps of Engineers until 1882, and died in New York City two years later.
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John Pegram
, a prisoner since the battle of Rich Mountain, gained release in 1862 and fought as a brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia. On January 19, 1865, Pegram married Hetty Cary, the “Belle of Richmond.” Their wedding was marred by omens. First, Hetty broke a mirror; then horses leading a coach sent by President Davis bucked and refused to move. Three weeks later, General Pegram returned to the church where he was married—in a casket. He had been killed in action at Hatcher's Run, Virginia.
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David Hart
, the Rich Mountain guide, found his life changed by that battle. Feeling unsafe at home, young Hart followed the Tenth Indiana Infantry, a three-month unit, back to Indianapolis for reenlistment. He served as commissary sergeant of that regiment until illness claimed his life near Nashville, Tennessee, in March 1862. His father Joseph served as a delegate in nominating the first state officials of West Virginia.
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Charles “Lab” Cox
, the wounded Confederate left on Rich Mountain by fleeing comrades, was never seen again. Decades later, a hunter stumbled upon a human skull in the woods about one mile east of the battlefield. Nearby were a rusted musket barrel, bayonet, and enough buttons to identify the remains as those of a Southern soldier.
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Benjamin F. Kelley
spent the bulk of his war service protecting the vital Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Brevetted a Federal major
general in 1864, he was captured with General George Crook in a brilliant raid by McNeill's Partisan Rangers at Cumberland, Maryland, in February 1865. After the war, Kelley held a number of government positions until his death in 1891.

Confederate Colonel
George A. Porterfield
never escaped his role in the “Philippi Races.” He served on General Loring's staff for a time, then retired from the army in 1862 and resumed civilian life as a banker in Charles Town, West Virginia.
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James E. Hanger
, the Confederate who lost a leg in the war's first amputation, went on to perfect an artificial limb that he manufactured for other veterans. After the war, Hanger appeared at reunions displaying the cannonball that struck him at Philippi, along with his patented “Hanger Limb.” J.E. Hanger, Inc. became one of the largest manufacturers of artificial limbs in the world and remains so to this day.

Philippi's covered bridge, the
Monarch of the River
, still stands, having defied the ravages of war, floods, ice jams, and fire. The bridge has been lovingly restored, and remains the only two-lane covered span in America serving a Federal highway.
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German soldiers
of the
Ninth Ohio Infantry
went on to serve with great distinction. Their dramatic bayonet charge at Mill Springs, Kentucky, in 1862 won the field. In 1863, tenacious fighting by the “Bloody Dutch” at Chickamauga, Georgia, and Missionary Ridge, Tennessee, resulted in the loss of more than half of the regiment. The venerable survivors were mustered out of Federal service in 1864.
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Whitelaw Reid
, one of the first young newsmen to bring the human tragedy of civil war to northern doorsteps, continued his “Agate” dispatches for the Cincinnati
Gazette
. In 1872, he became principal owner of the New York
Tribune
. Reid was the
Republican vice-presidential candidate on the Harrison ticket in 1892, and served as ambassador to England from 1905 until his death in 1912.
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Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson
became a Confederate lieutenant general in 1862 and went on to immortality as the “right arm” of Lee. On the night of a dramatic flank attack at Chancellorsville, May 2, 1863, Jackson was accidentally shot by his own troops. He died eight days later. Jackson's last words, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees” likely referred to his boyhood home, Jackson's Mill, West Virginia. His estranged sister,
Laura Jackson Arnold
, remained a Unionist until her death in 1911. She was one of two women given honorary membership in a Federal veterans' group, the Grand Army of the Republic.
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Mapmaker
Jedediah Hotchkiss
fell victim to typhoid fever at Valley Mountain, but returned to Confederate service in 1862. Valuable contacts made during the first campaign enabled him to secure an appointment with Stonewall Jackson, beginning an association that made Hotchkiss the foremost mapmaker of the Civil War.

Frederick W. Lander
was the only unranked and unpaid Union volunteer to receive a general's star. Despite ill health stemming from his Potomac River wound, the intrepid warrior continued to lead with flair. While suffering from “congestive chills” at Paw Paw, Western Virginia, in March 1862, Lander lapsed into a coma and died. Trotting behind the hearse at his Washington funeral was the same gray charger that had carried him on “Lander's Ride” at Philippi and to the battle of Rich Mountain.
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Robert H. Milroy
, the “Gray Eagle,” went on to lock horns with Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. Milroy's suppression of guerrillas in the Alleghenies proved so onerous that the Confederates put a price on his head. As a major general in June
1863, his seven-thousand-man force was virtually “gobbled up” by Lee's army at Winchester, Virginia. Exonerated by a court of inquiry, he commanded defenses of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad until the end of the war. Until his death in 1890, Milroy remained a strident abolitionist. The people of Rensselaer, Indiana, later erected a statue of heroic size to his memory.
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Ben “Summit
,
”
the runaway slave taken in by General Milroy on Cheat Mountain, was freed and sent to the Milroy home in Indiana where he learned to read and write. In 1864, Ben volunteered in a regiment of United States Colored Troops and became a private in the fight for liberty.

Richard “Old Dick” Green
, the faithful Tygart Valley slave, remained loyal to the Confederacy. Throughout the war, he piloted gray jackets across the mountains and looked after defenseless neighbors. Years later, a visitor to Green's home was startled to see memorials to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on the mantelpiece.
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John Elwood
of the Ringgold Cavalry (Twenty-second Pennsylvania Cavalry, U.S.A.) eventually traded in his old horse pistol for a new Colt revolver. He also carried a copy of the New Testament in his breast pocket. That testament was later struck by a bullet, saving his life.

John Higginbotham
, “lead magnet” of the Twenty-fifth Virginia Infantry, C.S.A., took additional wounds on the Virginia battlefields of McDowell, Cedar Mountain, and Second Manassas. At the tender age of twenty, he was promoted to the rank of colonel for gallantry. Higginbotham was wounded for a
seventh
time at Gettysburg and carried from the field. He returned to lead a brigade at Spotsylvania in 1864, but was killed by a shot through the heart before his commission as brigadier general arrived.
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William W. Loring
became a Confederate major general in 1862. Assigned to the Army of Mississippi, he escaped capture at Vicksburg, and was a division and corps commander during the Atlanta campaign and at Franklin and Nashville. After the war, Loring went abroad to fight under the Khedive of Egypt. At his 1886 Florida funeral, the body was borne to the grave by three Federal and three ex-Confederate soldiers.
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Joseph J. Reynolds
returned to active duty as a major general of U.S. volunteers in 1862. He served as chief of staff to George H. Thomas and led U.S. forces in the Department of the Gulf and the Department of Arkansas through the war's end. Remaining in the army, he attacked Crazy Horse's winter hideout in 1876, but withdrew prematurely, thereby contributing to Custer's defeat at Little Bighorn. Reynolds resigned after a court martial and died in 1899.
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After besting Lee at Cheat Mountain,
Nathan Kimball
went on to defeat Stonewall Jackson at Kernstown, Virginia, in 1862. For those exploits, he became a brigadier general. Kimball led desperate fighting at Antietam, where more than half of his old Fourteenth Indiana Regiment were casualties. He was badly wounded at Fredericksburg, fought at Vicksburg, Atlanta, Franklin, and Nashville, and was brevetted a major general in 1865. Kimball entered political life and remained there until his death in 1898.
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Billy Davis
of the Seventh Indiana Infantry—once nearly expelled from the army for his diminutive size—was cited for personal valor at Port Republic, Virginia. Permanently crippled by wounds received at the Wilderness, Billy limped home on July 4, 1864, to discover his family in mourning. He had been reported dead!
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On more than one occasion,
John H. Cammack
of the Thirty-first Virginia Infantry faced old neighbors on the battlefield. After the war, he became a leading member of the Garnett Camp,
United Confederate Veterans. When citizens of Philippi invited him to an observance of the first land battle, Cammack wrote, “I like a celebration as well as anybody, but as I reviewed the events which transpired…when I went away from Philippi in something of a hurry, leaving a nicely cooked breakfast for some Yankee to eat, I was unable to think of any reason why I should go back to Philippi and celebrate, so I did not go.”
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