Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (38 page)

Whiskey was rife in the Confederate camps, often sparking fights. “The boys are on a general drunk today & the guard house is full,” noted a bemused Southerner. “I feel more like throwing down my gun and cursing the hour I was born,” a demoralized James Hall jotted in his diary, “I wonder if they at home ever think about us. But I wonder more, what they would think if they were to see me with my large vial filled with whiskey!” Enormous flakes of snow drifted to the ground outside his tent as Hall concluded, “Not to save the life of Gen. Loring, and all the sons of bitches in the Confederate Army, would I volunteer again!”
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On November 16, the year's first major snowstorm hit the Alleghenies. Members of the First Georgia Regiment at Camp Bartow were sheltered only by blankets, having lost their tents in the retreat from Laurel Hill. “The snow had fallen during the night to the depth of eight inches,” wrote Isaac Hermann. “Not a man was to be seen, the hillocks of snow, however, showed where they lay, so I hollowed, ‘look at the snow.’ Like jumping out of the graves, the men pounced up in a jiffy, they were wrestling and snowballing and rubbing each other in it.”

Many of the Georgians had never seen the stuff. That afternoon, a great snowball “battle” commenced. Members of Hermann's regiment charged the Twelfth Georgia camp with all the fury of a real engagement, pelting their kinsmen with a barrage of icy missiles.
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The snow revived debate about a “great question” in the ranks—where would troops spend the winter? In an ominous development, parties had been detailed to erect wooden shanties on the mountain crests. A thousand clanking axe men felled the huge spruces on Cheat Mountain and cut them up in a portable steam saw mill. “Here we slew the forest and builded us giant habitations,” boasted Ambrose Bierce, “commodious to lodge an army and fitly loopholed for discomfiture of the adversary.” Each company built its cabins just inside the breastworks, forming a ring of houses with stone chimneys at each end. The Confederates built cabins as well; soldiers of both armies winterized their tents. “We took out two widths of the wall of our tent,” wrote one, “and have built a fire place of sod with a barrel for a chimney.”
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The flurry of construction only heightened debate about the great question. “The probable where abouts of our winter quarters is becoming a vital question to us,” admitted Billy Davis of the Seventh Indiana. “The great question” wrote a Georgia Confederate, “is what is to become of the remnant of our forces this winter! It is impossible, in my judgment, for the enemy to advance further into Virginia in this direction, this winter; nor can our army move Northward.”

Would troops be condemned to a winter in the mountains? An anxious Federal soldier wrote: “The weather being extremely cold, our tents being extremely thin, and our own love for the beauties of this delectable country extremely thinner, it is extremely impossible, I think, for us to winter here.” Some feared they might remain “till the snow gets so deep we can't get out, and then we will be content to stay here and starve to death.”
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A Virginia colonel admonished the Confederate Secretary of War that the weather on Allegheny Mountain was already severe enough “to freeze the tents of my regiment solid.” Politicians lobbied to bring the Georgians—so unaccustomed to those latitudes—home for the winter. “Now do, if there is any chance,” pleaded one of those Georgians, “try to get us away from these parts, for if we are not moved, we will all die here.”

“This country is not worth fighting for,” penned a disgruntled Confederate, warning of the “great horror” Southern troops felt at the prospect of remaining in that “bleak, inhospitable climate.” When General Loring predicted that the army would remain in those mountains until spring, a tidewater Virginian flatly declared, “Heaven or Hell will have the greater portion.”
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Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, commander of the newly formed Valley District at Winchester, sought Loring's army for a winter offensive. “I have frequently traveled over the road from Staunton to Cheat Mountain,” Jackson wrote Secretary of War Judah Benjamin on the fifth of November, “and I hope that you will pardon me for saying that if the withdrawal of the Confederate forces from the Cheat Mountain region shall induce the enemy to advance on Staunton it will be his ruin.”

Loring demurred; his intention was to defend the Monterey and Huntersville lines. Secretary Benjamin left the question of retreat to his own discretion. But Stonewall was persistent. Loring had nearly eleven thousand troops, and by his own account needed only forty-five hundred to hold the mountain passes. By late November, more than six thousand members of Loring's Army of the Northwest began to march east.
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In the wee hours of November 22, General Henry Jackson's troops abandoned Camp Bartow. Their retreat was a poorly managed thing. Anticipating a return to warmer climes, the Confederates burned clothing and blankets to lighten their load.
Wagon teams churned deep mud in climbing the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, overworked horses dropped dead in their harnesses and were shoved over the bank. A tortuous, nine-mile march led to the windswept summit of Allegheny Mountain. There, many were curtly ordered into winter quarters.

The great question had been answered at last! Angry Georgians swore and fumed at their fate. “It seemed unjust to place us, some of whom are from a climate, almost tropical, upon these bleak, snow-clad mountains, and send Virginia troops, whose homes are here…into other portions of the service,” growled a member of the Twelfth Georgia Infantry. Bitterly they pitched tents at Camp Allegheny, in the midst of a driving snowstorm.
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General Loring departed for Staunton, leaving a brigade at Huntersville under General Anderson and the brigade at Camp Allegheny under Colonel Ed Johnson. General Henry Jackson left to command state troops in his native Georgia. That reluctant warrior must have been dreaming of home when he encountered a soldier along the road, tinkering with his disassembled musket.

“Who are you?” Jackson inquired sternly.

“I am sort of a sentinel & who are you?” countered the soldier.

“I am sort of a General,” replied Jackson.

“Well, Gen.,” retorted the sentinel, “if youl wait until I get my old gun together I'll give you a sort of salute?”

The general shook his head and rode on.
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By early December, Federal troops also left the mountains in great numbers. General Reynolds resigned his commission and went home to Indiana. General Rosecrans moved department headquarters to Wheeling. Many of the departing troops were bound for Kentucky; all were delirious with excitement. “Virginia, farewell!” became their cry. “[H]ad it rained bullets upon them they would have pushed on,” wrote an observer, “so eager were they to get out.”
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“
[O]h, it was heart rending to hear the death shrieking of the dieing, the groans of the wounded and to behold the mangled corpses of the slain.”

—Neil Cameron, Twenty-fifth Ohio Infantry

A storm was brewing on Allegheny Mountain. Strong winds lashed across the crest. Whistling out of the northwest, they heralded the arrival of intense cold.

Camp Allegheny, a Confederate stronghold, lay upon that crest. From its windswept meadows, nearly 4,400 feet high, Colonel Edward Johnson stirred a tempest of his own. Tossing boxes from a poorly loaded wagon, Johnson unleashed a torrent of profanity. The cranky colonel was unrivaled in his swearing. On that blustery December day, he turned the air blue. Johnson cursed cowering soldiers, he spat oaths at teamsters and quartermasters, but loudest of all, he damned the Confederate War Department.
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Orders to withdraw, dated December 10, had triggered Johnson's ire. While his thin-blooded Georgians were delighted to leave that blustery camp, the colonel was not. His mandate had been to keep Federals out of the Shenandoah Valley, away from vital railroads leading to Richmond. The enemy was active in his
front. If the Richmond authorities thought bad roads and severe weather would keep the Yankees from advancing that winter, Ed Johnson swore they had made a “grave mistake.”
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From the haunting heights of Camp Allegheny, Colonel Johnson overlooked that portal to the Shenandoah, the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, winding through a gap beneath his works. Nearby was the home of John Yeager, the surveyor who had led Colonel Rust to Cheat Mountain. The Confederates had entrenched at Yeager's farm on Buffalo Ridge, just as they had on his brother's property at Travellers Repose, nine miles below. But defensive labors at Camp Allegheny ceased with the order to retreat.

For many days Colonel Johnson had studied the western horizon from his lofty post. The enemy camp on Cheat Mountain was in plain view. Although more than twenty miles distant by road, Johnson could make out details of the fortress with a powerful glass—even to the tents and campfires of his foe.
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Johnson's Confederate lair was also under scrutiny. From the distant horizon, Union General Robert Huston Milroy had watched the faint blue smoke of that camp for long, weary days of his own. Milroy was a newly minted brigadier, commanding the Cheat Mountain District. He was a forty-five-year-old judge from Rensselaer, Indiana, with a restless soul. Prior to leading the Ninth Indiana Infantry in 1861, he had attended a Vermont military academy, held a captaincy in the Mexican War, and toured New England as a fencing instructor. Squinting through a telescope from the parapet of Cheat Fort, General Milroy cut a striking figure.

He was tall and lithe with the look of a biblical prophet. He was stern and deeply religious to match. His thick mane of gray hair rose like the fretted quills of an angry porcupine. His black eyes were piercing and impatient, his nose was aquiline, his bearded countenance swiveled back and forth over the horizon like some gigantic bird of prey.

Milroy was impulsive. His voice broke into a stutter when excited, but his courage and daring were already well established. “No braver warrior than Gen. Milroy ever buckled on a sword,” one of his soldiers would declare. The general's wild locks and impetuous character had coined a nickname.
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