Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (26 page)

Lee was bothered no more.
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Federal authorities were troubled by Lee's activity. The defensive posture of Confederate troops less than twenty-five miles from Washington fueled suspicion of an impending assault by Lee in Western Virginia. Generals Scott and McClellan encouraged General Rosecrans to complete his fortifications—they could not be “too strong” in McClellan's view—and to be certain he had an escape plan in case of disaster. But a deaf ear was turned when Rosecrans sought reinforcements. Again, it was McClellan who
urgently needed troops. Greatly overestimating the number of Confederates near Washington, he declared a state of emergency.
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On August 4, McClellan had offered President Lincoln a plan to “crush the rebellion at one blow.” To pull it off he required a massive army—no fewer than 273,000 men and six hundred guns. With this juggernaut, McClellan would march on Richmond to smash the Southern Confederacy. He furnished no timetable for the grand offensive, but did not expect to move before spring.

In the meantime, McClellan restored order around Washington. He took headquarters in a spacious house on Pennsylvania Avenue. When not dining with the president, royalty, or other heads of state, he inspected the camps and forts. The soldiers roared whenever McClellan appeared. He posed for photographers with folded arms, in fine Napoleonic style. A New York editor asserted, “Genl McClellan has done more in ten days towards organizing the advance than Scott did in ten weeks.”
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Another threat loomed in the Alleghenies. By August 12, General Loring joined Lee at Valley Mountain. On the Monterey line, General Henry Jackson established Camp Bartow, twelve miles east of the Federals at Cheat Mountain. The Confederates amassed a force of more than ten thousand—actually outnumbering their foe. They might now reclaim Western Virginia.

Lee would soon be confirmed as a full general—the third-highest-ranking officer in the Confederacy. His rank and diplomacy seemed to make Loring more amenable. But as the two generals readied for battle, a trio of foes intervened.
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First came the rain. The very heavens had opened since Lee reached Western Virginia. “It rains here all the time, literally,” he wrote Mary. “There has not been sunshine enough since my arrival to dry my clothes.”

“Rain, rain, rain! Mud, mud, mud!” groused a Tennessee foot soldier at Valley Mountain. “In all my experience of the war I never
saw as much mud,” recalled Virginian John Worsham. “It seemed to rain every day. It got to be a saying in our company that you must not halloo loud; for if you should, we would immediately have a hard shower. When some of the men on their return from picket had to shoot off their guns to get the load out, it brought on a regular flood.”
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“We were camped on Valley Mountain 43 days,” added George Peterkin of the Twenty-first Virginia, “and it rained 37 days out of the number.” Springs bubbled up everywhere, flooding the tents. One disgusted colonel likened his regimental camp to a “Tennessee hog pen.”
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Endless showers turned the roads into bottomless quagmires. All efforts to advance were paralyzed. “Time and again could be seen double teams of horses struggling with six or eight barrels of flour, and the axle of the wagon scraping and leveling the roadbed,” recalled Lee's aide Walter Taylor. Wagoners complained it was difficult to haul more than feed for their teams from the rail depot at Millboro, sixty miles away. John Worsham swore he saw dead mules lying in the road “with nothing but their ears showing above the mud.”
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Unable to bring up supplies, the Confederates were placed on short rations. “Mud and water were the prevailing commodities,” recalled a Tennessean. Lee and Loring seriously debated whether the army might be forced to retire to a point nearer the railroad.
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Next came sickness. Poor sanitation, rain, and toil spread the epidemic of measles, dysentery, and typhoid fever that had ravaged the Confederates at Monterey. Illness reduced entire regiments to token strength. “There is nearly half the regiment sick,” wrote Shepherd Pryor of the Twelfth Georgia Infantry, “some getting well, some getting sick every day…we are more subject to die by disease than the bullet. Our regiment has lost more men than they would in a Battle of Manassas.” General Lee confessed that the sick list at Valley Mountain “would form an army.”
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Then came the cold. “The wind blows like winter,” grumbled a Tennessean at Valley Mountain on August 16. “Ice was abundant yesterday morning, a large frost covering the ground.” Shivering
men huddled around huge bonfires to keep warm. Even General Lee was stunned by this latest trick of nature. “The cold,” he wrote, “has been greater than I could have conceived. In my winter clothing and buttoned up in my overcoat, I have still been cold.”
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The weather aggravated sickness, resulting in many deaths. Row upon row of freshly dug graves sprung up behind the regimental camps. “ To die, away from all the comforts and endearments of home, on the ground, in a wilderness, and be buried alone, without a stone to mark our resting-place, is pitiable,” mourned a Tennessee officer.
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The Confederates were stymied—mired in the mud—unable to move until the heavens relented and the roads dried up. Yet there was no let-up in sight. Lee wrote to his daughters in late August, “It is raining now. Has been all day, last night, day before & day before that, &c. But we must be patient.”
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It was little consolation that the Federals were also suffering. “The angels in Heaven seem to be weeping constantly over the unhappy condition of this once most peaceful and prosperous Republic,” wrote an Indiana soldier of the rain. Downpours swelled the Tygart Valley River, inundating Camp Elkwater. The hospital tent had been imprudently placed on a small island. As rising waters threatened the sick, John Beatty led a rescue effort that left him stranded in a tree above the raging torrent. Men and horses were drowned in the flood.
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Cold, chiseling rains wore on the constitutions of the volunteers. Even in the “dog days” of August, brisk temperatures on Cheat Mountain compelled the men to heat flat rocks by campfires and place them at their feet each night for any hope of comfortable rest. “Very wet, cold and disagreeable. Almost as cold as December,” scrawled a member of the Fourteenth Indiana upon his diary in mid-August. “ We are shivering in an almost winter atmosphere. The scarcity of overcoats render it still more disagreeable.”
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Frigid it was on the summit of Cheat Mountain. To the Hoosiers' disbelief, snow fell on the afternoon of August 13! “What do you say to that, ye drinkers of Patrick's soda water, and eaters of Scudder's ice creams?” howled J.T. Pool in a report to the folks at home. Huffed an astonished Federal, “While our friends in the States are basking in the sunshine, eating peaches and watermelons, we poor devils are nearly freezing to death upon the top of Cheat Mountain.”
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To make matters worse, their flimsy wedge tents were attacked by mildew and began to rot. The crumbling shelters offered little protection against fierce mountain storms that drove rain through “as though they had been mosquito bars.” The Hoosiers' state-issued uniforms fared no better. “Our regiment is sadly in want of clothing,” wrote an officer of the Fourteenth Indiana on August 23. “The worse than second rate clothing which was issued to us at Camp Vigo is in rags.”

Scouts returned to camp with only the waistband of what had been a pair of pantaloons—having left the remainder shredded in the laurel thickets. It was said that a man's rank could be determined by the amount of his backside exposed. If the view proved too offensive,
dab!
would come a pound of black mud from snickering comrades. To hide their nakedness, many strolled around camp wrapped in blankets—like “Scotch Highlanders” in their kilts.
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As the rain and temperatures plummeted, so did morale. “[W]e are still stationed on the summit of this infernal mountain which is the meanest camping ground that I have ever seen,” growled a soldier on Cheat Mountain. “The mud is not less than shoe top deep any place and if [it] continues to rain there is no telling how deep it will be….” Tents were pitched on the slopes, and men had to brace their feet against rocks or stumps at night to keep from sliding down the mountainside. Speaking for all, a Hoosier declared: “The name of this mountain certainly could not have been more appropriate…For we have been
cheated
in various ways…since our arrival.”
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The mood blackened. Shivering men watched their comrades fall to disease, then laid them to rest in shallow, rocky graves. Tall spruces around the dreary, windswept fortress on Cheat Mountain seemed to wail a constant “funeral dirge.”
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Political intrigue grew thick as the billowing fog. The Ohio Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry regiments appeared on Cheat Mountain with new uniforms, overcoats, and money from the paymaster. Kimball's suffering Fourteenth Indiana boys had none of those luxuries. Bitterness turned to mutiny. Homesick Hoosiers were determined to leave that wretched mountain. Their leaders were openly denounced. “I know that there is not a man in our company but what would be pleased to get rid of our captain,” swore one, “and many are the curses not loud but deep that he gets.” When officers began to resign, the men refused to elect replacements. Resistance grew so impassioned that General Reynolds was called up to force the issue. Malcontents were tossed in the guardhouse; everyone was ordered not to write home of the incident.
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Reynolds placed the troops under tighter discipline. Haphazardly pitched regimental camps were lined up in the strictest military order. Company streets were paved with stone to combat the mud. All the ditching, paving, and cleaning brought a remarkable transformation to the camp on Cheat Mountain. The hum of camp life became more animated. The stroke of axes, the roar and crash of towering spruces, the clash of shovels and picks in the trenches, and the ringing of blacksmith hammers all had a sound of renewed purpose.
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Discord seemed to melt away with the August snow. “I for one say we will neve[r] give up the ship,” vowed a member of the Fourteenth Indiana. “We have been looking so long for a battle,” wrote another, “that the men are really anxious to be attacked.”
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