Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (48 page)

Henry R. Jackson
, the scholar and diplomat, was recommissioned a brigadier in Confederate service in 1863, saw duty in the Atlanta campaign, and was captured at Nashville. Released in July 1865, Jackson was appointed Minister to Mexico and served as president of the Georgia Historical Society until his death in 1898.

Edward “Allegheny” Johnson
had the pleasure of whipping Robert Milroy on two more Virginia battlefields. Severely wounded at McDowell in 1862, Johnson recovered to lead Stonewall Jackson's old division at Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania until his capture at the “Bloody Angle.” Upon exchange, he was captured once again at Nashville. Johnson went back to farming in Virginia after the war and died in 1873, a life-long bachelor.
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George R. Latham
, supporter of the West Virginia statehood movement with pen and sword, commanded the Second (U.S.) Virginia Infantry (later the Fifth West Virginia Cavalry). He was elected to Congress in 1864, and mustered out of service in 1865 as a brevetted brigadier general of volunteers. Latham served as United States Consul to Australia before his death in 1917. He was said to be the last surviving member of the 1861 Wheeling conventions.
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Governor
Francis H. Pierpont's
Restored Government of Virginia moved from Alexandria to Richmond on May 25, 1865. After his term expired in 1868, Pierpont was elected to the West Virginia legislature. He died in 1899 and is honored with a place in the United States Capitol's Statuary Hall. Pierpont is often
known as the “Father of West Virginia,” yet he was never governor of the state.
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Upon the expiration of his term as United States Senator,
Waitman T. Willey
was reelected and served until 1871. The “Grand Old Man” never relinquished his legendary power of speech. At the funeral of Governor Pierpont, he needed assistance to mount the platform, but delivered a magical requiem for his old friend. Willey died in 1900. His half-brother, Confederate Colonel
William J. Willey
, was jailed in 1861 on a charge of treason, but later won parole. “Bridge Burner” Willey was indicted by a Marion County grand jury in 1865 for his part in the railroad vandalism that launched the first campaign. The indictment was dropped and Colonel Willey moved to Missouri, where he died in 1868.
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Senator
John S. Carlile's
star glowed brilliantly in 1861, but disdain for the abolition of slavery wrecked his political career. Ignoring calls from the West Virginia legislature to resign, Carlile served out his term and took up residence in Maryland by 1865. He later returned to practice law in Clarksburg and died there in 1878. Carlile's stunning reversal on West Virginia statehood is still debated.
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The lady guerrilla
Nancy Hart
was arrested by Federal troops in 1862. While in custody, she fashioned a dress from calico, needle, and thread. The jailer was so enchanted by Nancy's new look that he asked her to sit for a photograph. Nervously eying a camera for the first time, she feared it was an execution. As the jailer reassured her, Nancy charmed him out of his gun, shot him down, and rode off into legend. She died in 1902.

Mary Van Pelt
campaigned with Loomis's First Michigan Light Artillery beside her soldier husband until removed by military order. Upon learning of her spouse's battlefield death in 1863, Mary volunteered as a nurse. The pallbearers at her Michigan funeral in 1906 were veterans of her husband's battery.
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After serving time in Richmond prisons, Dr.
William B. Fletcher
—the Union spy given reprieve by a drunk's penmanship—was exchanged for a Confederate doctor in January 1862. He visited the family of spy Leonard Clark, then returned to Indianapolis and took charge of a hospital serving Confederate prisoners. Fletcher went on to become a leading Indiana physician and humanitarian before his death in 1907.

Fletcher's companion
Leonard Clark
endured nine months of solitary confinement in a Fincastle, Virginia, jail. Only the interposition of old friends in the Confederate army spared his life. Clark spent another year in the notorious Belle Isle prison before he was exchanged in 1863, looking, it was said, “like a man who had come out of the grave.” Unbroken in spirit, he joined the Third West Virginia Cavalry and was killed in action at Moorefield, West Virginia, in 1864.
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Confederate General
John B. Floyd
was removed from command in 1862 after his humiliating flight from Fort Donelson. He subsequently became a major general of “Virginia State Line” troops, but failing health resulted in his death at home near Abingdon in 1863.

Floyd's old nemesis, General
Henry A. Wise
, later served under P.G.T. Beauregard in South Carolina. Returning to Virginia in 1864, he fought gallantly in the battles around Richmond, Petersburg, and Appomattox. Wise practiced law in Richmond after the war and died there in 1876. He stubbornly refused to seek amnesty. “I never fought under the Confederate flag,” Wise claimed, only under the flag of Virginia—and proudly displayed his state buttons to make the point. Defiant as ever, Wise called the new state of West Virginia “the bastard offspring of a political rape.”
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John Beatty
led the Third Ohio Infantry, became a brigadier general in November 1862, and fought courageously at Stones River, Tennessee. He resigned in 1864 and returned to the family bank
so that his brother could enter the army. Beatty was later elected to Congress. His splendid diary was published in 1879 as
The Citizen-Soldier
.

Rutherford B. Hayes
of the
Twenty-third Ohio Infantry
rose to the rank of brevet major general, served in the Congress, and became governor of Ohio and president of the United States. From his regiment came William McKinley, another U.S. president, and Stanley Matthews, a justice of the Supreme Court.
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General Lee's famous warhorse
Traveller
developed lockjaw and died soon after the passing of his master. He is buried near the general's tomb in Lexington, Virginia. It is said that Traveller's ghost haunts his native Greenbrier County, West Virginia. Stories by old Confederate veterans of an equine apparition or the mysterious sounds of a galloping thoroughbred near Lee's old camp on Sewell Mountain are still told.
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Marcus Toney
, of the First Tennessee Infantry C.S.A., fought in both major theaters of conflict. He was captured at Spotsylvania in 1864 and spent the rest of the war in Union prisons. Of his original company, Toney later asked, “Where are the one hundred and four who marched out so gaily from the old Academy in 1861, when the bands were playing ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me?'” Seventy-two of that number had filled soldiers' graves. Toney returned to Tennessee and slept under a quilt in the front yard of his home for nearly a month before he could get used to a bed.
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Loyal
West Virginia Regiments
, twenty-nine in number, bore arms in defense of liberty, homeland, and the United States government. Proportionate to their strength in the field, it was said they captured a greater number of enemy battle flags than the troops of any other state.
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The
Thirty-first Virginia Infantry
, C.S.A., made up predominately of West Virginians, had mustered eight hundred and fifty men in 1861, but only about fifty-seven remained to answer the roll for their surrender at Appomattox Court House. “On the morning of [April 12, 1865] we were marched out into a large field and heard bands playing on both sides,” wrote a member of the regiment. “We saw a large white flag…and knew then that the end had come. The Thirty-first, with its colors, was marched up in front to the New York Zouaves, noted for their blue jackets, red trousers and cap. They saluted at a distance of about 30 feet, sank on their left knee, remaining in this position until we stacked arms. Not a jeer or taunt was heard.”
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Among the survivors of the Thirty-first Virginia was
James E. Hall
. During the surrender, he recognized several neighbors in the Yankee army. Hall kept up his pocket diary throughout the war. After his long walk home to Barbour County from Appomattox, the last entry, April 28, 1865, reads “Went fishing.”
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Veterans of the armies returned to the scene of their first campaign. “In the summer of 1885,” recalled one former Union soldier, “I made a visit to the Tygart's Valley, where we spent so many months during the summer and fall of 1861 and winter of 1862. Then desolation marked the path of war.…The condition of the people was pitiable, and their future seemed hopeless. Twenty…years of peace and plenty have worked a marvelous change.

“It seems to me that one of the grandest achievements of this age is the fact that a million men at the word of command left the battle front, and returned without a halt to the pursuit of peace, casting aside the animosities of the strife, and burying all bitterness.…To my surprise, I have never received so generous a welcome in my life.”

Old foes climbed mountains, visited battlefields, and rode through the country discussing the war as freely as if they had been comrades in arms. Among them was
Ambrose Bierce
, the Indiana volunteer so captivated by that land. He had since become a noted author. In the decade before his 1913 disappearance in Mexico, Bierce returned to the “delectable mountains” of his youth. He wrote in a brief memorial of that trip: “[T]he whole region is wild and grand, and if any one of the men who in his golden youth soldiered through its sleepy valleys and over its gracious mountains will revisit it in the hazy season when it is all aflame with the autumn foliage I promise him sentiments that he will willing entertain and emotions that he will care to feel. Among them will be, I fear, a haunting envy of those of his war comrades whose fall and burial in that enchanted land he once bewailed.”
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Deep in the wilds of the Alleghenies, a forgotten soldier rests. No flowers, banners, or inscriptions honor his name. Only a sliver of rough fieldstone remains.

On the soil of Virginia they laid him to rest,
Where the rude winds of Winter will sweep o'er his breast.
And his comrades will think as deep sighs their breasts rend,
Of the soldier, their brother and brave and true friend.

The night watch will pace past his rude lowly grave,
And think how he died his dear country to save,
And his heart will in silence a firm resolve form
To fight till our Union is freed from the storm.
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In the following notes, the author's last name, the short title of the work, and the page numbers are cited. Full source information on each work is presented alphabetically in the Bibliography section.

1. Lee, “The First Step of the War,” 76; Lang, Loyal West Virginia, 2–3; Hall, The Rending of Virginia, 54, 90.

2. Many primary sources use the capitalized “Western Virginia” in reference to the territory that became West Virginia in 1863. Modern writers have tended to use “western Virginia,” a term easily confused with the western part of modern-day Virginia. For a discussion of the evolution of “western Virginia,” see Moore,
A Banner in the Hills
, 1–2. Clayton Newell, in
Lee vs. McClellan
, xiii, ably demonstrates that the Western Virginia actions of 1861 were part of a single campaign. General George McClellan waged it “to secure Western Virginia to the Union.”

3. Brooks,
The Appalachians
, 12, 17–18.

4. Espenshade,
Pennsylvania Place Names
, 120; Lesser, “Prehistoric Human Settlement,” 231–260; Rice and Brown,
West Virginia
, 12–13, 15; Callahan,
Semi-Centennial History
, 14–15.

5. Rice and Brown,
West Virginia
, 16; Wayland,
The Fairfax Line
, 39, 46; Callahan,
Semi-Centennial History
, 17.

6. Callahan,
History of West Virginia, Old and New
, 54–61.

7. Rice and Brown,
West Virginia
, 25–28, 30–31.

8. Callahan,
History of West Virginia, Old and New
, 81; Rice and Brown,
West Virginia
, 38–40; Maxwell,
History of Randolph County
, 183–84.