University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
THE SOUTHERN GUERILLAS.—REALITY vs.
ROMANCE.

From the Peaks of Otter, through Fancy Farm
to Liberty, our march was substantially unopposed,
only McCausland's rear-guard of guerillas
under Mosby, Gilmer, and McNeil, and some
scattering squadrons of Imboden's cavalry offering
any resistance; and these were quickly overcome—in
fact, never amounted to enough to retard
our movements. And here, perhaps, some few

words relative to those famed guerillas of the Virginia
valleys may not be out of place.

It was the fashion in secession circles, down to
the very closing of the rebellion, to magnify these
free-lances of the Southern cause into little less
than chivalric paladins, or knights-errant; all
mounted upon high-mettled chargers gorgeously
caparisoned, their persons sumptuously clothed
from the spoils of a hundred forays, their swords
glittering and their revolvers infallible; all heroes
sans peur et sans reproche, and each not only able
and eager to whip, but constantly in the habit of
whipping, from ten to a dozen of our Northern
mud-sills in open fight.

We have so few pleasant illusions left in connexion
with the late war, that nothing but a
strong sense of the reverence due to the truth of
history could induce us to give another side to this
picture, and paint these guerillas, both as they fell
under our own observation and as they were uniformly
described to us by scores of officers who
had served for years against them in the Shenandoah
and Kanawha valleys. Those Maryland
ladies of secession sympathies, therefore, who
crowned the “Noble Mosby” and “Brave Harry
Gilmer” with flowers, while the followers of those
illustrious chiefs were rifling trunks and picking
pockets on the train between Baltimore and Washington,
had better, perhaps, for their own peace

of mind, skip the following paragraph; as we
mean it to be the simple truth told in language as
plain as common decency and the respect due to
vanquished foes will permit.

These guerillas, then, we say, as they appeared
in fact, and not in the rhapsodical letters of such
correspondents as “Druid,” of the World, were
about the filthiest, drunkenest, meanest, most ill-looking,
ragged, mutinous, diseased, undisciplined,
lousy, and utterly cowardly gang of horse and
chicken-thieves, highway robbers, grand and petty
larcenists, that the Lord, for some inscrutable purpose—probably
to punish rebellion by a stick of
its own growth and cutting—ever permitted to
disgrace the noble calling of the soldier, or the
fair surface of American soil, to which neither
thieves nor cowards appear indigenous in any
extended degree. They were terrible, indeed, to
the stampeded muleteers, sutlers, and camp-followers
of some unprotected train; but still more
terrible to the wretched residents of their own
section in the regions through which they operated.

As to standing up in fair fight, however, before
any body of our troops, well-officered and even
half so numerous as themselves, the thing was out
of the question, and they never tried it. If a
report came in that Mosby, or Gilmer, or McNeil
were hidden at any gap in the mountains, waiting

for our troops to pass that they might swoop down
without fear of molestation on our exposed train
and sutler-wagons, the orders given to the famous
Captain Blazer of West Virginia; or Captain
Prendergast (since killed), of the 1st New York
cavalry; or Major Timothy Quinn, of the same
regiment; or that most dashing of all our young
cavalry officers, Captain Berry; or Captain Ellicott,
of the Scouts, would be: “Take a company,
or squadron, or platoon of your men, about so
many”—never assigning for this duty more than
one-third or one-fourth of what the guerilla
strength was reported to be—“and go chase those
scallywags over the mountains until our train has
got well up.” And chased in this manner they
were, and always allowed themselves to be, without
offering any soldierly resistance whenever and
wherever our troops in pursuit, if even decently
officered, were one-third as numerous as themselves.
This, however, is a digression; and now
to return to our lost sheep, from these rank-smelling,
cowardly, and thievish mountain-goats.

DESTROYING RAILROAD TRACKS AS ONE OF THE
“EXACT SCIENCES.”

At Liberty we struck the Virginia and East Tennessee
railroad, running south-east from Lynchburgh
to Salem, and thence viâ Wytheville and
Abingdon into the north-eastern section of that
State which contains the grave of Andrew Jackson
and the birth-place of Jackson's illustrious successor
and fellow-confessor, President Andrew Johnson.
It was a sight, indeed, worth going far to
see—though one, we trust, never to be repeated in
the history of this country—Crook's veteran infantry,
consisting of twelve West Virginia regiments,
all hurrying to the work of destruction on that
road, with the same delighted hum and buzz that
we hear from a young swarm of wandering bees
when they settle down on the white and well-sugared
table-cloth which the careful farmer has
spread for their detention. Up went the rails for
miles and miles along the road; soon the ties were
gathered in separate piles and set on fire; next
the rails were laid across these blazing bonfires,
taking care to have the centre of each rail above
the burning pile; and then, when the iron at a
white heat was soft and ductile, one or more soldiers
at each end would seize the cold extremity
of each rail-bar, rush with it to the nearest tree,
bringing the heated part against the trunk, and

twist the writhing metal into rings or semicircles,
or true-lovers'-knots, as best pleased their fancy.
The torch would then be applied to all trestle-work
bridges along the line, while bridges of stone
or iron would be “sent kiting” by gunpowder.

It was the illustrious Stonewall Jackson who
first invented and taught our boys how to destroy
a railroad scientifically and thoroughly; but the
scholars soon improved on their teacher; and in
the veterans of Crook's division—all infantry, for
cavalry are but hasty hands at such a workmanlike
business—he had pupils of whom any master could
have found no reason to be ashamed. It was,
indeed, surprising—the pleasure taken by our foot
soldiers in this species of labor. Whether, if
Lavater or Mr. Fowler had examined the rank
and file of our armies, either would have pronounced
the bump of destructiveness unusually
developed in our men, or not, we have no means
of judging; but of this fact we are sure: that no
matter how long the march, how hot the day, how
short the rations or water, how imminent and
menacing soever might be the enemy's movements
—the very moment our infantry struck a railroad
their fatigue, thirst, hunger, and sense of danger
all seemed to fall from them with their dropping
knapsacks; and they buckled down to the business
of rendering that line of transportation of no
further avail to the enemy for at least some

months, with all the eager, joyous, and untiring
energy of a flock of school-boys pelting snowballs
at some detested usher.

ON TO LYNCHBURG! THE MINERAL WEALTH OF
THIS SECTION.

Marching from Liberty towards Lynchburgh
along this line of railroad, and destroying it as we
advanced, the indications became every hour more
clear that General Lee had begun to pour down
heavy reinforcements against us by the Lynchburgh
and Richmond railroad, which General
Duffié's cavalry column had been dispatched to
destroy—a mission it had not been able to fulfil.
At New London our friends in grey first showed
in line of battle since Piedmont, but made no
determined stand there—Averell's cavalry developing
to feel and drive them, while Sullivan's
infantry demonstrated as if for a direct attack, and
Crook sought to wheel round on their right flank
and rear—a movement only thwarted by their
withdrawal after some few hours of rather heavy
but desultory fighting. We halted that night on
the Big Otter, and had headquarters at a house
alleged to be haunted—a large, and once handsome,
but now deserted red brick dwelling, of
which the negroes in the vicinity told some tales
that Mrs. Crowe might have been glad to gather

for any new edition of that banquet of ghostly
horrors—her “Night-side of Nature.” It is at
New London that the famous Alum-spring throws
up its mineral and healing treasures; and indeed,
many, if not most of the springs in this part of the
country, are more or less strongly tinctured with
the same astringent chemical. Perhaps, in the
new development of wealth which awaits this
entire section, the alum bed, which evidently
underlies the fertile surface for a distance of many
square miles, may play no inconspicuous part.
It was not far from here that the house of a Mr.
Mosby was burned—he being some kind of a
cousin to Mosby the guerilla, and the bodies of
two of our men, treacherously shot in cold blood
in his yard as they were drawing water from his
well, attesting that he was not unworthy to claim
kinship with his bushwhacking relative.

FIRST DAY'S FIGHTING BEFORE LYNCHBURGH.

Next day, the 17th of June, we started at earliest
daylight in the direction of Lynchburgh, our
way lying through a country more densely covered
and obstructed by wood and underbrush than any
we had yet seen. The roads were our only
resource, even the skirmishers failing to make
more than slow headway through the timber on
either hand of them, and our advance being consequently

much delayed. Meantime, the enemy
were not inattentive to our operations, their light
batteries and sharpshooters incessantly annoying
the heads of our various columns; and their skirmishers
keeping up a continual crackle of musketry
from behind the trees in the vicinity of our
advance-guard and pioneers.

It was therefore not until about two in the
afternoon that we came upon their first line of
irregular rifle-pits and rail-fence barricades, at a
place variously styled by the negroes Diamond
Hill, or the Old Stone Church; and here they
succeeded in holding us until about eight P.M. that
evening, when they were finally broken by a dash
in of Averell's cavalry upon their right, and a
splendid charge of Crook's infantry, under a heavy
fire of grape, across some open fields and over
their defences—the West Virginia boys clearing
the rebel barricades with a vault, and using their
clubbed muskets and bayonets in close quarters.

Here, and at this moment, the rout of our
grey-back friends became suddenly complete—
two guns, four or five caissons, and many hundred
prisoners falling into our hands; and had it
not been for the rapid coming on of night, and
the necessity of removing our own and the enemy's
wounded out of the woods, which had
caught fire during the action, and were now burning
fiercely with a mighty crackling and roar,

only pierced by the terror-stricken screams of the
mangled men who lay beneath the flaming canopy
of leaves and branches—we might have pushed
on into Lynchburgh that night, for as yet not more
than a third of Early's corps (formerly Ewell's)
had joined the forces under McCausland, and
these were again as utterly beaten and demoralized
as they had been on the fifth of the month, previous
to our having been joined by Crook and
Averell from the Kanawha.

BELLIGERENT RELATIVES.—A TRUE SOUTHERN
BELLE.

That night we lay in line of battle before the
enemy's second and main line of works for the
defence of Lynchburgh, on the south-eastern side
—two powerful and regular earthwork forts,
carefully built in 1861 and mounted with siege
artillery crowning the slopes in front of us; and
a regular chain of heavy rifle-pits connecting
these two together, and running off beyond them
to join yet other regular forts on right and left.
Our headquarters that night were at the beautiful
residence of an aged gentleman named Hutter,
formerly a major and paymaster in the United
States army, and some kind of distant relative to
General Hunter—as, by the way, in some degree
of cousinship, more or less remote, were pretty
nearly all the good families whose barns we had

been emptying, and whose cattle we had been
eating and driving off during the entire march.
Indeed it was often ludicrously, though painfully
amusing, to hear Colonel David Hunter Strother
(“Porte Crayon”), or the old General himself,
inquiring anxiously after the health of “Cousin
Kitty,” “Aunt Sallie,” “Cousin Joe,” or “Uncle
Bob,” from some nice old Virginia lady with
smoothed apron, silver spectacles, and in tears, or
some pretty young rebel beauty in homespun,
without hoops and in a towering passion,—our
soldiers meanwhile cleaning out smoke-houses and
granaries by wholesale; and the end of the conversation,
as the affectionate though politically
sundered relatives parted, usually finding those
of the rebel side without a week's food in the
house, without a single slave to do their bidding,
and with horses, cattle, sheep, bacon, pigs, poultry,
and so forth, things only to be recalled in
ecstatic dreams.

This Major Hutter “had one only daughter,
the divine”—but her name escaped us. For the
inexpressible sweetness of her pure silvery voice
and exquisite repose of manner, however, the
lady's image is yet a thing of vivid force in our
faithful memory—her eyes shedding no tear as
she saw in that hour of the gloaming, all the
refined surroundings of a costly and luxurious
home swept into ruin; and her cheek blanching

no shade of its clear olive-pink, though aware
that with the earliest dawn the heretofore splendid
and happy home of her childhood—the shrine to
which, we have no doubt, proud wooers must
have come from far and near to court the sunshine
of her smile—would in all human probability
become the central position for which two
infuriate armies must contend. “Oh, how I pray
for peace,” she exclaimed, as we opened a blind
in the drawing-room (metamorphosed the preceding
night into an Adjutant-General's office), to
see if the east yet gave any signs of dawn. “Do
not misunderstand me, however,” she continued,
in that silvery voice of inextinguishable sweetness.
“Do not think I crave, or would accept,
that peace you talk about—the peace of subjugation;
for I am Southern in every fibre;” and her
bright eyes kindled brighter, her cheek took a
deeper flush, and her musical voice swept upward
into a yet higher treble as if to give assurance
of her faith. “This dress I wear”—a plain
grey homespun, but made beautiful by the womanhood
it covered—“I have carded, and spun,
and cut out, and put together with my own
hands. Oh, we have given up everything for the
cause, save the barest necessaries of life; and I
cannot believe that God would allow a people to
suffer so much as we have done, if not intending
to reward us with final victory.”

SECOND DAY'S ENGAGEMENT BEFORE LYNCHBURGH.

Next morning, at daylight, the skirmishers
began amusing each other, and by seven o'clock
the work was lively. All night long we had
heard the incessant screaming of trains on the
Lynchburgh and Richmond railroad, as the reinforcements
sent by General Lee continued to
arrive in steady stream—General Duffié's attempt,
made the preceding night, to destroy the long
bridge across the James River, having been defeated
by superior forces. Various charges that
we made up the hills on which the earthworks
stood were heavily repulsed—only part of one
Ohio regiment getting over their works, and that
part remaining therein—either from pride in their
achievement, or because unable to fight their way
out again. Our men, too, now began to suffer severely
for want of proper food—General Sullivan
having reported the night before that his men were
then eating their last rations, a piece of information
which General Hunter answered by the laconic
remark: “Tell them there is plenty of food
in Lynchburgh.” It is true we had yet with us
plenty of beef cattle collected as we marched
along, for we had been mainly subsisting on the
country; but from the rapid movements of the
past few days, and the activity all round us of

the enemy's cavalry, we had not been able to
gather in any corn or materials for making bread.
Our coffee and sugar, too, were giving out—and
what are soldiers good for without their coffee?

By noon it became evident that the enemy's
forces were gaining a large numerical ascendancy,
a continual stream of Early's corps flowing from
the railroad terminus to the scene of action, and
their right flank beginning to overlap our left
with some danger of turning it. It was then,
after a brief consultation with Generals Crook,
Averell, and Sullivan, that Hunter gave orders
for our trains to commence falling back rapidly
towards Salem, on the Tennessee and Lynchburgh
railroad line; but of this—for the orders were
secret, and the trains far in our rear—neither our
own soldiers nor the enemy knew anything until
nightfall, the battle being thereafter continued on
our side with even greater activity, in order to
cover this movement, and our men believing
firmly that they were to enter Lynchburgh as
conquerors if it cost them a week's steady fighting.

Our situation, however, was indeed critical, and
fully justified the belief entertained both by
Generals Lee and Grant, that none of Hunter's
expedition could return save as prisoners. We
were but fifteen or sixteen thousand effective men
at the outside, cut off from our communications,

rapidly running short of ammunition, wholly
destitute of forage and rations, operating in a
country intensely hostile to us, with no hope of
any reinforcements, no hope of supplies nearer
than the far side of the Alleghanies, in presence
of an enemy already amounting to thirty-two
thousand well-supplied men, and at the terminus
of a good railroad in working order, by which
General Lee could have poured down upon us
thirty thousand more of his veterans, had such
been his judgment or pleasure. Back the road
we had come we could not go, as the country was
eaten out, in the first place; as an inferior force
cannot collect supplies in presence of a superior,
even if supplies lay around them as thick as
in that mythical town whose roofs were of pancake,
and through whose streets little roast pigs
ran crying out, “Come eat me;” and lastly, because
the enemy had another good railroad from
Lynchburg to Stanton, or rather to Waynesboro',
just twelve miles therefrom, by means of which
they could throw any force they pleased across
our front, while still pressing us in rear with
equal or even stronger forces.

These were the considerations which caused the
order, issued secretly at noon, for our trains to
commence retreating toward Salem; and it was
doubtless the hope of “bagging us,” body and boots,
when his full reinforcements should have come

up, and when (as he expected) we should commence
to fall back down the Shenandoah, that induced
Early not to press us any harder than he
did during the balance of this 18th day of June,
1864—anniversary of that most memorable world-battle
which sent the first Napoleon to St. Helena.
Press us, however, and rather heavily, Gen. Early
did on several occasions that day—more especially
about 3 P.M., when, with a charge over his works
and down the hill, he broke Sullivan's infantry on
our left, and drove the gallant Thoburne's brigade
(Thoburne since killed), and the brigade of Col.
Wells, of Massachusetts (also “dead on the field of
honour”), pell-mell through the woods. This disaster,
however, was but of short duration, though
extremely threatening at one time, two brigades
from Crook in the right-centre reinforcing our
left; and the engagement after that sullenly settling
down into an artillery and skirmishing duel,
with no charges though many demonstrations, and
consequently no repulses or heavy losses upon
either side. Averell's cavalry took no part in it,
that officer wishing to keep his men fresh for a raid
toward Danville which he projected under Hunter's
directions, but failed to put in practice; and
Duffié's cavalry doing but little on the extreme
left, from the woody and broken nature of the
ground, as also from the fact that there were
earthworks to contend against, and that Early's
veteran infantry were not the kind of troops with
whom it would be safe work for a forageless cavalry
to play tricks.

Before concluding this chapter, we cannot forbear
inserting here, though a little out of its place,
the brief and simple, yet how significant dispatch,
in which the great Lieut.-General of our Armies
frowned down and quietly trod into the mire
under his feet an attempt made in certain interested
quarters to make Hunter a scape-goat for all
the flurry and fuss of Gen. Early's subsequent raid
into “Maryland, My Maryland,” and the demonstrations
of that bibulous, one-legged warrior in
front of the walls of Washington. It was thus
wrote our good and gallant Lieut.-General at a
time when attempts were being made to blame
Hunter, who was then crossing the Alleghanies
with a starving command and with horses dying by
the thousand for want of forage, for not checking
in the Shenandoah with his fourteen or fifteen
thousand worn, wasted, shoeless, and nearly ammunitionless
troops, the thirty-five thousand well-supplied
veterans under General Jubal Early, for
whose proper reception in Maryland and around
the District of Columbia, no proper provision had
been either made or makable by the authorities: