Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (34 page)

“Oh, no! Don't get gloomy; they will not dare kill us.”

While they talked, Confederate General Donelson and staff rode to the tent. The two prisoners were brought out and led to a large field beyond the camp. A crowd of men followed them until restrained by the guards.

Clark and Fletcher were halted in the field. The officers stood fifty paces off, apparently deep in consultation. The tread of boots was heard; a squad of riflemen filed into place, their bayonets glittering in the moonlight.

Fletcher paled. Every sound was so cold and cheerless.

“Prisoners,” interrupted a Confederate colonel, “if you have anything to say, you must say it now, as you will never have another opportunity. You must hold all conversation in the presence of these officers.”

Fletcher swallowed hard and turned to his friend. “Well, Clark, I am sorry to part with one who became a prisoner to save my life. Your life as a prisoner, under all your trials and fortunes, has shown you to be ever the same brave, unwavering, honorable man. Whatever may be our future, I respect and love you. We shall meet again, but until then good-bye.”

Clark responded: “Fletcher, I am not sorry that I gave myself up to save you. I feel that you are a true man. If you ever get home,
see my wife and children; tell her to do for them as I intended to do. I am not afraid to die for my country. This is all I wish to say.”

Interminable silence followed. The seconds ticked by like hours. The spies stood alone in the darkness. The squad of riflemen were poised for their orders.

“Return these men to separate quarters,” rasped General Donelson, “and do not permit them to speak to each other.” Fletcher concluded that the whole stunt was “foolery,” aimed to get each man to condemn the other.

In the morning, Clark was bound to a horse and led away. A feeling of grim resolve rose within Fletcher's breast. With Clark gone, there was nothing to keep him a prisoner but the guns. Fletcher made up his mind to escape.
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One stormy night, Fletcher slipped out of his irons, crawled out of the back of his tent, and struck into the hills. His destination was the Union fortress on Cheat Mountain, and he had saved enough fat pork for a journey of four days. The intense darkness, steep ledges, and tangled laurel brakes hampered his escape.

Signal shots echoed from the distant camp; Fletcher's absence had been discovered. No pains would be spared to retake him. There could be no turning back. He had been warned that a speedy hanging would follow any escape attempt. Losing his way in the darkness time and again, Fletcher scrambled up the mountain as if in a “horrid nightmare.” When dawn broke, he crawled into a laurel thicket for sanctuary. Far below could be seen the Confederate camp, where mounted scouts dashed in every direction, some toward the very ridge upon which he hid.

At nightfall, Fletcher began anew. Cresting the ridge top, he descended to a brawling stream and followed its bed for perhaps two miles. “Halt, halt!” rang out from above, followed by two or three shots. Fletcher dashed up the stream like a madman. “Halt!” cried out a strong voice. “Halt!” A sentinel fired—so near that Fletcher could have touched the barrel of his gun. Climbing the rocky streambed like a staircase, Fletcher raced for his life, with the sentinel at his heels. In desperation, he turned and pounced,
receiving the point of the sentinel's bayonet in his left hip. Falling to the water in agony, Fletcher was again a prisoner of war.
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This time he was taken to the county jail at Huntersville. “Well, you got de Yankee, did you?” exclaimed the wrinkled old jailer as Fletcher was carried into the two-story brick bastion. The jailer inserted his key into a padlock and opened a huge oak door covered with spikes. A second door, forged of iron crossbars, was revealed. “I hardly ever unlock this door, and it's mighty rusty,” he added while fumbling with the second lock. The iron door finally swung open, shrieking on its corroded hinges. Fletcher was shoved inside as it slammed shut.

His eyes gradually adjusted to a dank cell about fourteen feet long and twelve feet wide. Two small, double-grated windows allowed sparse light. The air was so foul that Fletcher laid upon the floor at night, his face pushed against a small crack at the bottom of the door.

A runaway slave named Jim and a “poor idiot boy” named Moses were Fletcher's jail-mates. With kindness, he soon won their confidence. Jim waited on Fletcher, brushed his clothes with an old broom, and blackened his weathered shoes with soot. Fletcher, in turn, taught Jim the alphabet by drawing figures on the floor with bits of charcoal. Jim learned quickly, and when citizens came to gawk at Fletcher, he would take a stand by the door and do all the talking “as the keeper of wild animals stands by their cage and explains where they were caught, how trained, and their habits.” Jim spun marvelous tales of “the Yankee,” embellishing his story with gusto.

But with each passing day, Fletcher grew weaker. He could not sleep in that stifling cell; the foul air was a poison. The weeks passed slowly until one day, a body of Federal prisoners from Cheat Mountain arrived in Huntersville. Fletcher learned he would accompany them to Richmond.

Jim and Moses shared tearful good-byes. The huge door was thrown open at last. “Oh, how soft and balmy seemed the air,” Fletcher marveled. “How quiet and free everything seemed!”
Fletcher hobbled into line with the Yankee prisoners, looked each man in the face, hoping for some sign of recognition. The soldiers glared at his wild, furrowed countenance.

Finally, a young man stepped forward.

“My God,” he said, “is this Dr. Fletcher?”

“Yes,” came the feeble reply, “it is what remains of him.”

Fletcher was introduced to Captain Bense of the Sixth Ohio Infantry, the ranking officer among the prisoners. The long imprisonment left Fletcher unable to march. A comrade shouldered him for a time, then he was laid in a wagon, and finally atop a mule for the journey to the railroad at Millboro.
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There the prisoners were loaded into boxcars and taken to Richmond. Citizens and soldiers taunted and jeered as the captives were led through the city to a large tobacco warehouse. “The guards threw up their guns, and we walked in amid the noise and bustle of a soldier-prison,” recalled Fletcher. “The rooms were very large, and the gas burning brightly. Here were men from every State, in all sorts of uniforms, laughing, singing, playing cards…. Before we had been in half an hour, I heard some two shots fired at the new prisoners who had foolishly gone near a third-story window.”

By a stroke of luck, the list of new inmates was unreadable—scrawled by a drunken lieutenant. A perplexed Confederate officer handed it to Captain Bense for translation. Coming to the last name, instead of reading Fletcher's charge as “captured in July as a spy,” the clever captain read; “captured in September at Elk Water; belonging to the Sixth Regiment Indiana Volunteers.” A scribe copied those words onto the new roll sheet.

“All commissioned officers step two paces to the front,” a Confederate sergeant commanded. Captain Bense and two others stepped out. Bense looked back, saw Fletcher in line, and said, “There is Dr. Fletcher, Assistant Surgeon of the Sixth Regiment.” Fletcher took the hint and followed them to the officers' quarters. He was ragged and filthy—shunned by the other prisoners—but alive! The fate of Clark now became his obsession.
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The date was October 3, 1861. Back in Western Virginia, the crash of artillery echoed from the hills around a little tavern known as Travellers Repose.

” To meet those cannonballs & muskets is an awful thing; a man can see death tolerable plain.”

—Shepherd Pryor, Twelfth Georgia Infantry

Travellers Repose was once a renowned wayside inn. It was located astride the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, a vital link between the Shenandoah Valley and the Ohio River. Tucked in a picturesque glen near the eastern base of Cheat Mountain, about seventy miles west of the Virginia Central Railroad and more than one hundred and fifty miles from Richmond, this delightful tavern, mill, and farmstead sprawled along the lonely headwaters of the Greenbrier River. Its pastoral setting offered welcome respite from a bone-jarring stagecoach ride across the Alleghenies.

Guests could expect comfortable lodging at Travellers Repose. The inn exuded tranquility and charm. Feasts of mountain trout and mutton awaited; the breakfast tables overflowed with stacks of pancakes and maple syrup. Meals were offered for the quaint charge of “four pence ha’ penny” (six and one quarter cents).

Innkeeper Andrew Yeager must have turned heads in early 1861 with a prophecy that the scourge of war would reach his peaceful little valley. Armies would contend for the turnpike, he had stated,
“houses and barns would be put to the torch and families turned out of their homes.” It all seemed unthinkable to the cheerful patrons of Travellers Repose.
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But Yeager's tranquil tavern soon lay square between the armies, in a coveted “middle ground.” By mid-July, Confederates dug in on Allegheny Mountain, only nine miles east of Travellers Repose, while the Federals erected their Cheat Mountain fortress twelve miles west. A wagon road led to the Confederate depot at Huntersville from a turnpike intersection near Yeager's front door. The East Fork of Greenbrier River rollicked through lush meadows in the rear, offering ample water and campgrounds for troops.

On August 13, 1861, Confederate forces under General Henry Jackson seized Travellers Repose. Tents soon covered the lush meadows. Majestic trees were felled and their branches sharpened as abatis. Above the inn, pleasant hills were girdled with rifle pits. The millrace became a defensive moat. Cannons frowned upon that once tranquil land.
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The Confederate defenses were named “Camp Bartow” after a brave Georgian killed at the battle of Manassas. General Jackson thought this new post was not so strong as it looked. His flanks were exposed to salient hills. Two Confederate brigades, greatly weakened by sickness and detached service, were barely adequate to cover the mile-long defenses.
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By mid-September, a sense of urgency filled the air. Frosty mornings hinted of winter and an end to campaigning. As Union General Rosecrans marched south to test Lee at Sewell Mountain, General Joseph Reynolds, now commanding some ten thousand Federal troops in the Cheat Mountain District, was ordered to “worry and harass” the Rebels in his front. There was talk that Reynolds might “strike a decisive blow.” The soldiers on Cheat Mountain dreamed of leaving their cheerless lair for the
Shenandoah Valley, eighty miles southeast, prayed that before snow whitened the ridge tops, they would march to the “garden of Virginia.” To reach that garden, they first had to drive the Rebels from Camp Bartow.
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But nature had yet to weigh in. On September 27 and 28, “one of the most terrible storms ever known” in that region slammed the Alleghenies. Howling winds flattened shelters and tents. Mountain freshets turned the rivers into raging torrents. Floodwaters drowned men, dashed away some of the works at Elkwater, and washed out entire camps. Temperatures plummeted on Cheat Mountain—more than a dozen horses “chilled to death” from exposure. “[I]t seemed as though the storm-king had become angry with the puny efforts of the contending hosts,” wrote J.T. Pool, “and was about to settle the disputes in the wilds of Western Virginia, by annihilating both parties.”
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As the skies cleared and the waters receded, Union General Reynolds amassed a large force on the summit of Cheat Mountain. There, during the night of October 2, soldiers gathered around bright campfires to speculate on the coming fight. “There was a constant jingle, jingle of iron ram-rods, snapping of caps, and sputtering of hot grease in sundry frying pans,” recalled one, “notes of preparation for the morrow.” Precisely at midnight, the order was given to advance. Within an hour, nearly five thousand Federal infantry, cavalry, and thirteen pieces of artillery wound down the mountain toward Camp Bartow.
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