West Virginia and the Civil War

Mountaineers Are Always Free

Mark A Snell

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781614233909
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

A comprehensive account of the state's creation, its citizens, and their contributions to the war effort—whether supporters of the Union or Confederacy. The only state born as a result of the Civil War, West Virginia was the most divided state in the nation. About forty thousand of its residents served in the combatant forces about twenty thousand on each side. The Mountain State also saw its fair share of battles, skirmishes, raids and guerrilla warfare, with places like Harpers Ferry, Philippi and Rich Mountain becoming household names in 1861. When the Commonwealth of Virginia seceded from the Union on April 17, 1861, leaders primarily from the northwestern region of the state began the political process that eventually led to the creation of West Virginia on June 20, 1863. Renowned Civil War historian Mark A. Snell has written the first thorough history of these West Virginians and their civil war in more than fifty years.

Chapter 1

“Let Us Organize a Legislature…”

In 1895, when Theodore Lang, a former major in the 6^th West Virginia Cavalry Regiment, published his version of West Virginia’s contribution to the Union war effort, he began with a description of the differences between the eastern part of Virginia and the TransMontaigne section of the commonwealth. According to Lang:

The people of the western part of the State enjoyed a climate as genial as that of the Italians who dwell on the slopes of the Apennines; they had forests of hard wood more valuable than those that skirt the upper Rhine; rich fields of coal and petroleum that are not excelled in the world; a soil which yields abundant crops of grain and fruit; its rivers and creeks are bountifully supplied with fish. Game of all kinds are found in the mountains, and the air is rendered musical by the songs of birds of many kinds…The men of the west [at the time of settlement] were hardy frontiersmen, a majority of them soldiers of the Revolution and their immediate descendents, with little but the honorable record of patriotic service and their own strong arms for their fortunes. They had few slaves…they depended upon their own labor for a new home in the wilderness.

Although his portrayal of the region that would become West Virginia was simplistic, almost stereotypical, his conclusion concerning the dissimilarities of the two geographic regions and the political hostilities they engendered was fairly accurate: “A population thus originating, a community thus founded was naturally uncongenial to the aristocratic element of the Old Dominion.” Just to be sure his readers understood the dividing line between the sections, he specified that “the Blue Ridge was the boundary between eastern and western Virginia.”³

Taken at his word, Lang would have had his readers believe that there were vast differences between these sections and the people who inhabited them. If the Blue Ridge Mountains are used as the geographical boundary, his conclusions bear scrutiny: the residents of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (which is west of the Blue Ridge) were, for the most part, staunch supporters of the Confederacy, as were many of the citizens of the three counties that comprise West Virginia’s “Eastern Panhandle.” Scores of residents of the Kanawha River Valley of West Virginia also swore their allegiance to the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Confederate States of America, as did much of the population of the southwest portion of West Virginia. Perhaps Lang’s most telling assertion was that the people from the area that would become West Virginia “had few slaves.”

Most Civil War scholars agree that the immediate cause of the Civil War was the election of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican whose party platform included a plank that called for the nonextension of slavery into the territories and the free states. In 1860, the year of the presidential election that elevated Lincoln to the highest office in the land, there were nearly 491,000 slaves in the Commonwealth of Virginia, yet only 18,371 resided in Western Virginia. Those slaves in the latter group were held by 3,593 owners, out of a white population of 376,677—1 owner per 100 white citizens. Most Western Virginia slaves lived along the Potomac River, the far southeastern counties and the Valley of the Great Kanawha, those areas of the future state of West Virginia that, for the most part, voted to leave the Union in the Secession Ordinance Referendum of May 23, 1861.⁴

According to the 1860 U.S. Census, 3,960 slaves were held in bondage in Jefferson County, the easternmost county in what would become West Virginia. There, at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers, the important little manufacturing town of Harpers Ferry provided the United States government with small arms from the U.S. Rifle Works on the Shenandoah River and the U.S. Armory located on the Potomac River. Finished small arms were stored in the U.S. Arsenal located adjacent to the armory complex. Because Harpers Ferry was so close to Washington, D.C.—about forty miles away—and because the mountains of Western Virginia were nearby, the abolitionist John Brown and his followers hoped to capture national attention by stealing enough weapons from the arsenal to arm the slaves of Jefferson and other counties in the region and then take to the hills to evade federal authority and establish a provisional U.S. government. Brown was an experienced and courageous fighter who already had waged civil war against slavery advocates trying to form a bogus government in Kansas Territory. He brought that war to Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859. Nearby militia companies from Charles Town and Shepherdstown quickly penned up Brown and his surviving raiders in the armory’s fire-engine house, and when U.S. Marines—led by the U.S. Army’s Colonel Robert E. Lee and accompanied by another army officer, Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart—arrived a few days later, the raid came to an inglorious and rapid end. Brown was tried by the Commonwealth of Virginia in Charles Town for murder, treason and inciting a slave insurrection, all three charges punishable by death. In a very speedy trial, he was found guilty on all counts and was hanged on December 2, 1859.

A forty-three-year-old native of Martinsburg in neighboring Berkeley County who was employed as an artist and writer for the national newspaper Harper’s Weekly witnessed the aftermath of the raid soon after the Marines stormed the engine house. David Hunter Strother, who would become a Union general during the upcoming war, overheard Lieutenant Stuart admonishing one of the raiders: “You son of a Bitch. You had better keep silent. Your treatment is to be that of midnight thieves and murderers, not of men taken in honourable warfare.” Because of Strother’s credentials—he also went by the pseudonym “Porte Crayon”—the aspiring journalist was given access to Brown to complete a sketch for the newspaper. When Brown was tried in Charles Town, it was Strother’s uncle who served as the prosecutor, and a good friend, Richard Parker, was the presiding judge. Strother thus had unfettered access to the trial with almost no journalistic competition. He also covered Brown’s execution and even was permitted to climb the steps of the scaffold after Brown was dead, remove the hood from the corpse’s head and sketch his death image.⁵

Brown’s raid sent fears of slave insurrection throughout Virginia and the South. Making matters worse, 1860 was a presidential election year. The Democratic Party could not decide on a suitable candidate, and so factions of the party nominated a Northern candidate, Stephen Douglas of Illinois, and a Southerner, Vice President John C. Breckinridge. Complicating the election even more was the nomination of a third-party candidate, the Constitutional Union Party’s John Bell. Of course, Abraham Lincoln represented the Republican Party. In the area that would become West Virginia, Breckinridge and Bell were about evenly split, although Virginia as a whole was carried by Bell. (In the future state of West Virginia, Bell garnered 20,997 votes while Breckinridge tallied 21,908 votes.) Lincoln’s miniscule support (1,921 votes) was located primarily in the northern panhandle counties, and even there Breckinridge and Bell fared better at the polls.⁶ However, when Lincoln captured most of the Northern states and with those the national election, the secession crisis began.

Yet, the status of slavery was not much of a direct political issue in parts of the future state of West Virginia. In fact, most of the opposition to it was because the institution was seen as a hindrance to free labor, not for moral reasons.⁷ During the decades prior to the war, issues revolving around taxation, internal improvements and political apportionment were more significant in pitting Western Virginians, particularly those from the northwest region of the state, against their eastern counterparts. It was in northwestern Virginia where the strongest support for the Union could be found, a region with very few slaves and whose inhabitants shared far more cultural, social, ideological and economic similarities with their neighbors in southwestern Pennsylvania and eastern and southeastern Ohio than with the rest of the Commonwealth of Virginia. “Whatever…[these] forces had individually,” wrote historian Richard Orr Curry, “collectively they tipped the balance in Northwestern Virginia in favor of Unionism in 1861.”⁸

A month and a half after Lincoln’s election, political leaders in South Carolina pulled their state out of the Union on December 20, 1860, and in the next two months, other states of the Deep South followed the Palmetto State’s lead. Less than a month before South Carolina had even seceded, however, politicians in Western Virginia met at Clarksburg on November 24, 1860, to condemn secession and resist a Virginia secession convention. Nevertheless, Virginia’s General Assembly adopted a proclamation on January 21, 1861, that stated that in the case of hostilities between North and South, the commonwealth would side with the slaveholding states that already had seceded.⁹ In Parkersburg, in Wood County on the Ohio River, the prevailing mood was much different. In a meeting held three weeks before the General Assembly proclaimed its support for the slaveholding states, a resolution passed that stated, “Resolved: that the doctrine of Secession of a State has no warrant in the Constitution, and that such doctrine would be fatal to the Union, and all the purposes of its creation; and in the judgment of this meeting, secession is revolution.”¹⁰ When Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, he appealed to his countrymen to not allow the passion of the moment to “break our bonds of affection” and asked them to listen to “the better angels of our nature.” It was, however, too late.

On April 12, 1861, the provisional army of the Confederate States of America shelled the United States coastal defenses at Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The South thus had fired first, and President Lincoln would call on the loyal states—which included the slaveholding states that still remained in the Union—for seventy-five thousand volunteers to quell the “rebellion.” When Virginia governor John Letcher received the telegram requesting troops, he quickly shot back his refusal: “The militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view.”¹¹ Now, the Virginia Secession Convention passed its own Ordinance of Secession on April 17, 1861, by a vote of eighty-eight to fifty-five, with forty-eight dissenting votes cast from delegates from the lower (northern) Shenandoah Valley and the TransMontaigne.¹² Twenty-five northwestern Virginia delegates voted against secession, while five were in favor and two abstained.¹³

In the aftermath of the Secession Convention’s vote, the Virginia militia illegally seized the United States Arsenal and Armory at Harpers Ferry and the U.S. Navy Yard at Norfolk—illegal because the convention had required that the Ordinance of Secession be put to a popular referendum, which was not scheduled to occur until May 23, 1861. Nonetheless, Harpers Ferry was now in the hands of the secessionists, despite the fact that the Union officer responsible for the security of this Federal installation had incinerated the arsenal and all of its stored weapons. Virginia militiamen, however, had doused the flames in the armory buildings, thus saving the important rifle-manufacturing machinery, which promptly was disassembled and packed for shipment southward, to eventually find its way into armories in Richmond and Fayetteville, North Carolina.¹⁴ The journalist David Strother covered this dramatic early war episode. According to Strother’s biographer, in the aftermath of John Brown’s raid, Strother “was typical of most Virginians in abhorring the demonstration of belligerent abolitionism. At the…[capture of the armory by secessionists] he was atypical in deploring the equally fanatical action of the Virginia militia, which demanded the surrender of the town.” His attitude was reflected by a large segment of the population residing in the TransMontaigne region of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Like so many of his fellow citizens with similar inclinations, Strother would join the Union army in 1862. He eventually served on the staff of his distant cousin, Major General David Hunter, who would command Union troops in the Shenandoah Valley in the summer of 1864.¹⁵

Some 250 miles west of Harpers Ferry, Unionist delegates from twenty-four northwestern Virginia counties and three Shenandoah Valley counties met in Wheeling, Western Virginia’s largest city, from May 13 to 15 to confer and deliberate the secession crisis, but one delegate had different motives. John S. Carlile of Harrison County was a former U.S. representative who urged the formation of a provisional “loyal” government. He had been one of the northwestern Virginia delegates in Richmond who had voted against secession, and returning home, he penned the “Clarksburg Resolutions,” intending to determine the course of action that the people of the northwest counties would take next. He also planted the seed for the convention that currently was meeting in Wheeling. Other influential delegates, including Waitman T. Willey and Francis Pierpont, cautioned those in attendance at the so-called “First Wheeling Convention” not to be too rash and to wait until the vote was tabulated after the May 23 Secession Referendum. Undaunted, Carlile pushed for the immediate creation of the state of “New Virginia.”¹⁶ According to Carlile, “After the 23^rd of this month, it will not be a constitutional right [to separate from Virginia]. We will have been transferred to the Southern Confederacy.”¹⁷ Carlile was ruled out of order, and moderation won the day. If the Secession Ordinance passed the referendum, as was expected, only then would steps be taken to form a new state government. In anticipation of what seemed to be the inevitable, the delegates passed a resolution to meet on June 4 for a “Second Wheeling Convention.” On May 23, 1861, the Secession Referendum passed, with the electorate of exactly half of the forty-eight counties of the future state of West Virginia voting to secede from the Union, a portent of the thirty-fifth state’s divided loyalty that would manifest itself on the battlefield from 1861 to 1865.¹⁸

John Snyder Carlile of Clarksburg: Anti-secessionist; elected to the U.S. Senate; drafted the statehood bill. Courtesy of the privately held Richard Wolfe Collection.

Not far from where Carlile wrote the Clarksburg Resolutions and less than a week before the Secession Referendum, Frederick W. Bartlett of Fairmont, Marion County, and a tailor by occupation, enlisted in Company A, 31^st Virginia Infantry, on May 17, 1861. He had been quite excited about joining the military, as he told his Fairmont neighbor, Lieutenant William P. Cooper of the 31^st, who was enquiring about a tailor-made uniform. According to Bartlett, “Send me a sample of the goods so that I can get me a uniform. I want to join your company so that I can give the Abolitionists the benefit of a Virginia cartridge in the neighborhood of the guts.” Then, obviously referring to the heated and sometimes physical altercations caused by the political crisis, Bartlett wrote: “I am just itching and sp[o]iling for a fight. I have not had one since last Monday, and of course I am getti...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• 1. “Let Us Organize a Legislature…”
• 2. The First Campaign and Other Firsts
• 3. “There Stands Jackson Like a Stone Wall”: (West) Virginians at Manassas
• 4. Toward Statehood
• 5. West Virginians at War, 1862
• 6. 1863: The Thirty-fifth Star in the Flag
• 7. West Virginians at War: Spring and Summer 1864
• 8. “Follow Him to the Death”: The End of the War and Beyond
• Epilogue: Mountaineers Remember Their War
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author