by Bruce Catton
No doubt General Polk had blundered; the Confederacy lost much more than it gained when Kentucky went to war. Yet it may be that Polk’s real blunder was that his drastic action was not quite drastic enough. Driven by military necessity, he had occupied Columbus; if at the same time he had also occupied Paducah, instead of leaving that place for General Grant to take, he might have put the Federals in a most uncomfortable box.
In one way this war in the West was going to be unlike any other war in history: it was going to be fought along the rivers, amphibious as no war had ever been before, and the generals were going to have to learn the rules as they went along. One of the rules was the unanticipated fact that in such warfare the defensive can be much more difficult than the offensive. It seemed obvious that guns on top of a high bluff could keep gunboats, transports, and supply steamers from getting past; Columbus had very high bluffs, and that was why General Polk had had the place occupied. But an invader blocked at Columbus could still invade if he could float south on some other stream that would put him close enough to the stronghold’s rear to enable him to snip its lifelines. A Yankee general stopped at Columbus was bound to realize that he could send a force up the Tennessee River, which comes north across the state of Tennessee a little less than one hundred miles east of the Mississippi; if he went up that river far enough the Confederates would have to evacuate Columbus, even though their works there were wholly impregnable to assault. No Yankee general could ascend the Tennessee unless he first took Paducah, which is where the Tennessee flows into the Ohio. Holding Paducah, the Confederates could hold the Tennessee and hence could hold Columbus and the Mississippi itself; losing Paducah, they could hold Columbus only until the Federals saw what the Tennessee River could do for them.
Polk had intended to take Paducah, but he was doing the job one step at a time, and Grant got into Paducah ahead of him. General Buckner promptly pointed out that this neutralized the possession of Columbus, which meant that the Confederacy had gained very little by its seizure of that place. As a result, Buckner believed that it would pay to get out of the state altogether, leaving the Yankees as the only invaders and trying to rally the citizens against them.15 The idea was probably impractical, but Buckner had seen one thing clearly enough; taken by itself, Columbus was not worth what it cost. Polk should have gone for everything, but his hand had been forced; he had had to make a quick decision at a time when any choice he made was quite likely to turn out to be wrong. He confessed that the Confederates really should have moved into Columbus months earlier, “If we could have found a respectable pretext,” for he believed that during all the time of neutrality “Kentucky was fast melting away under the influence of the Lincoln government.”16 In any case, another man now had the responsibility. Albert Sidney Johnston was on the scene at last, over-all commander for everything the Confederates had in the West.
Johnston was fifty-eight, a courtly man with a singularly winning personality, a famous veteran of the Old Army and in the opinion of some Southerners at that time the ablest soldier on either side. He had been in command for the United States Army on the West Coast when the war began; had stayed there, making no secret of his intention to side with the South but faithfully carrying on with his duties until Washington could send out a replacement; then he had resigned, traveling by horseback across the rough mountains and plains of the Southwest all the way to Texas, and going on to Richmond in the hope that President Davis could find something for him to do. He was cheered wherever he made an appearance, and no one received him more eagerly than Jefferson Davis, who immediately gave him a full general’s commission. (“I hoped and expected that I had others who would prove Generals,” Mr. Davis said a bit later, “but I knew I had one—and that was Sidney Johnston.”) Johnston reached Nashville on September 14, to be received at the State Capitol by Governor Harris and an enthusiastic crowd. Called on to say a few words to the multitude, he instinctively touched the right note, addressing his civilian audience as “Fellow Soldiers!” and explaining: “I call you soldiers because you all belong to the reserve corps.”
Polk was devoutly glad to see him. Before Johnston ever got to Richmond, Polk had written to Mr. Davis to urge Johnston’s appointment to the top spot in the West; he had known Johnston since boyhood, had roomed with him at West Point, and had himself been persuaded to take the Western command only on the understanding that the job would eventually go to Johnston. Now Johnston was on hand, taking a look at the field that would occupy him for the rest of his life.17
What he saw was enough to dismay any general: much to do, and not enough to do it with. He warned Mr. Davis, two days after his arrival, that “we have not over half the armed forces that are now likely to be required,” and he pointed out that although there were plenty of recruits there was no way to arm them. Whether faulty War Department planning or the tightening of the Federal blockade was responsible, the Confederacy was already pinched for weapons, and no one felt the pinch more than Albert Sidney Johnston. In addition to being responsible for Confederate operations in Missouri and Arkansas, he had to defend a line more than 300 miles long, from the Cumberland Gap in the east to Columbus in the west, and he had fewer than 30,000 men all told. The Yankees had nearly twice that many, and although every Federal commander was complaining bitterly about the lack of proper arms their situation was infinitely better than Johnston’s.18 He could do nothing but put on a bold front, acting as if he planned to move north to the Ohio River and hoping that the Federals could be bluffed into inaction. If he could stave off invasion during the fall and winter, Richmond might be able to help him by spring. It seemed to General Johnston that the war was going to last for at least seven years.
5: Mark of Desolation
Kentucky’s war had grown out of Missouri’s, a product of the shock waves that came surging east from the Mississippi; and these waves met others which rolled in from the south and the east, from Tennessee and Virginia, making a bewildering turbulence. While the rival governments in Washington and Richmond settled down to the slow and methodical business of training and equipping armies according to the professional pattern, in the heart and center of the land the war got away from them and made its own demands, creating unsuspected perils and opportunities. The fire was running down to the grass roots. Somewhere between the too vivid realities of slavery and abolitionism and the fine-spun abstractions of states’ rights and Unionism, the war was becoming something which men could interpret in terms of wrongs done by their neighbors, of old grudges and local feuds, of farm prices and the cost of living and the pestilent inequities of courthouse politics. Flames burning so could be hard to control and hard to put out.
In western Virginia the mountain folk were trying to secede from secession, paying off old scores with the tidewater aristocracy and bringing on a series of fights that went sputtering from farm to farm and from town to town in the remotest highland valleys—mean little fights, altogether unromantic, in which generals lost reputations while private soldiers and assorted private citizens lost their lives. When Virginia left the Union, a majority of her people west of the Alleghenies dissented vigorously. Delegates from the western counties convened, orated, passed resolutions and, on June 11, announced that they had nullified the ordinance of secession and had established something which, they insisted, was henceforth the legal government of the state, with one Francis Pierpoint as governor. This expedient seemed useful, and Washington agreed to pretend—for a while, at any rate—that this creation was indeed Virginia; and the westerners prepared to carry their dissent to its logical if unconstitutional conclusion by wrenching the whole mountain district away from the Old Dominion and creating an entirely new state—a state which, they believed, might be called Kanawha, but which eventually would enter the Union as West Virginia.1
So Union and Confederacy fought for title to this land, believing that much was at stake. A Confederacy which held western Virginia could squelch the mountaineer Unionists and could also carry the
war to the Ohio River; furthermore, by seizing the western half of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad it could cut Washington’s only direct railway line to the west. The Federals for their part felt that western Virginia offered both a back-door approach to Richmond and a prime chance to cut the line of the vital Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, which connected Richmond with Memphis and the Mississippi Valley. Eastern Tennessee, in addition, seemed to contain as many Unionists as western Virginia, and Union victories in Virginia might lead them to rally around the old flag to very good effect. Campaigning in the mountains was extraordinarily difficult, but the winner stood to get great advantages.
Things went badly for the South from the start. During the spring a remarkably brilliant and personable young major general, a former West Pointer turned railroad man, George Brinton McClellan, led a Federal Army of Middle Westerners in from Wheeling and Parkersburg, clearing the line of the B & O and smashing a small Confederate Army which guarded the mountain passes where the great turnpike from the Ohio River ran southeast to Staunton, in the Shenandoah Valley. McClellan did this with a flair and a competence which made him famous, and after the Federal disaster at Bull Run he was called east to reorganize and lead the shattered Army of the Potomac. He turned the mountain department over to his second-in-command, Brigadier General William S. Rosecrans, and went where opportunity called him. It was up to Rosecrans to hold what had been won and to add to it if possible.
Not much could be added. It seemed, just at first, that a victorious Federal Army ought to be able to march straight through to tidewater or to the deep South, attaining glory either way. This was possible, according to the maps. But the maps did not show how terribly bad the roads were, or how barren was much of the country they crossed; the central mass of the Alleghenies was an impossible spot for a major offensive because no army which made a really lengthy advance could supply itself.2 Besides, in August the Confederates undertook a strong counteroffensive, and Rosecrans found that simply to hold the line would keep him busy enough.
This counteroffensive was conducted by General Robert E. Lee.
Lee was already famous—General Scott had rated him the best man in the army, and many of the Old Army crowd doubtless would have agreed—and he was on his way to military immortality, but what happened in the Alleghenies gave no hint that one of history’s greatest soldiers was here commanding troops in action for the first time. If he had disappeared from view at the end of 1861 he would figure in today’s footnotes as a promising officer who somehow did not live up to expectations. His western Virginia campaign, in short, was a failure. Most of the failure, to be sure, was due to circumstances over which Lee had no control, but part of it was his own. In this, his first campaign, he was still learning his trade.
He had spent the spring and summer in Richmond, most of the time as President Davis’s principal military adviser—an important post, which he filled creditably, but devoid of real authority and, to a man with Lee’s taste for action, woefully unexciting. Mr. Davis sent him to the mountains in the hope that “he would be able to retrieve the disaster we had suffered … and, by combining all our forces in western Virginia on one plan of operations, give protection to that portion of our country.”3 It was probably the most thankless assignment of Lee’s career.
The Federals had about 11,000 soldiers in western Virginia. Detachments held the Baltimore & Ohio line, in the north, and some 2700 under Brigadier General Jacob Cox were off to the southwest in the Kanawha Valley, apparently meditating an advance along the Lewisburg Pike in the direction of Clifton Forge. The rest were in the center, in the general vicinity of Cheat Mountain, on the road that led to Staunton, guarding the country which McClellan’s victories had won. The Confederates in western Virginia could muster more men, but for a variety of reasons—ranging from the bad health of the soldiers to the incompetence and jealousy of some of their commanders—they would not be able to put all of them into action.4
The principal Confederate force was a loosely knit army of perhaps 10,000 stationed at the town of Huntersville in the valley of the Greenbrier, south of the Staunton turnpike. It was led by Brigadier General W. W. Loring, stiff, touchy and experienced, a competent officer who unfortunately could never forget that he had ranked Lee in the Old Army. He was clearly vexed at Lee’s arrival, and Lee carefully refrained from assuming direct command of the army; his own charter of authority was a little vague, and he contented himself with setting up his headquarters tent near Loring’s, assuming apparently that the man was soldier enough to accept a superior’s guidance if he were allowed to save a little face.5 Farther south, theoretically operating against the Federal General Cox but actually contending furiously with each other for authority and public favor, were two politicians who had become brigadiers—Henry A. Wise, former Governor of Virginia, who had been sent here with his “legion” in the belief that his popularity with western Virginians would be an asset to the cause, and former Secretary of War John B. Floyd, whose military incompetence had not yet been made manifest.
Conditions for campaigning were bad. It began to rain in mid-August and kept on raining for weeks, making the rough mountain roads almost impassable; a supply wagon carrying six or eight barrels of flour would be dragged along inches at a time, the wagon bed scraping the ground, wheels axle-deep in mud. Typhoid fever, measles, and other diseases went through the Confederate camps so that in a short time nearly a third of the army was out of action; a North Carolina regiment, which came in with 1000 men, was down to a strength of 300 in a few weeks, although it had not been in combat at all. One of Lee’s staff officers, writing after the war, said that although he saw the Army of Northern Virginia in all of its desperate trials he never felt as heartsick “as when contemplating the wan faces and the emaciated forms of those hungry, sickly, shivering men” whom Lee commanded in western Virginia in the summer and fall of 1861. A weary private wrote, “I am of opinion that we are near the jumping off place,” and concluded that people who talked ecstatically about the beautiful mountain country “never had the extraordinary pleasure of wearing their feet out to their ankles walking over the mountains to see the romantic scenery”; he recalled “short rations, thin and ragged clothing, rain, mud, water and measles, all mixed up together.”6
The same rains fell on the Federals, who had to tramp the same roads and contend with the same camp maladies; yet there seemed to be a difference. As sardonic an individual as Ambrose Bierce, who served here with the 9th Indiana Volunteers, wrote long afterward that he looked back on western Virginia “as a veritable realm of enchantment” and said that boys raised in the flat country of the Middle West found the mountains inspiring and picturesque. “How romantic it all was!” he cried. “The sunset valleys full of visible sleep; the glades suffused and interpenetrated with moonlight; the long valley of the Greenbrier stretching away to we knew not what silent cities.” He and his comrades, he recalled, still felt that early, innocent patriotism “which never for a moment doubted that a rebel was a fiend accursed of God and angels—one for whose extirpation by force and arms each youth of us considered himself specially ‘raised up.’ ”7 Soldiers could stand almost anything, it seemed, when they knew they were winning.
And the Federals were winning. Early in September, Cox’s column was endangered by the approach of wrangling Wise and Floyd, and Floyd’s men had routed an Ohio regiment on August 26 in a sharp little fight at Cross Lanes, not far from the mouth of the Gauley River. But Wise and Floyd just could not work together—Cox wrote that Wise “did me royal service by preventing anything approaching unity of action between the two principal Confederate columns”—and Rosecrans marched down to the rescue, leaving a brigade under Brigadier General J. J. Reynolds at Cheat Mountain and on September 10 attacking Floyd at Carnifix Ferry, on the Gauley River, forcing that general to beat a speedy retreat. Wise and Floyd drew back to the mountains west of Lewisburg, each accusing the other of failing to come to his aid; and Lee, seeing an opportunity in the wea
kening of the Cheat Mountain contingent, moved up to attack Reynolds.8
The opportunity was there, if it could be grasped. Reynolds’s Federals were spread out over a wide area, with a force at Cheat Mountain pass, another on the summit of the mountain, and the rest ranged along the valley of the Tygart River all the way to the town of Elkwater. The Confederates had an advantage in numbers; despite all the sickness, Lee probably had 6000 men ready for action. On September 8, after a conference with General Loring, Lee drew up his battle plan; in substance, it called for the convergence of several columns in Tygart River valley, with one force striking for the top of the mountain in order to turn the position in the pass. If all went well, Reynolds’s whole force could be hemmed in and destroyed.
