What happened at the Battle of Greenbrier River?
On 3 October 1861, early in the Civil War, Union Brigadier General Joseph J. Reynolds marched about 5,000 men through the night from Cheat Mountain to the Confederate camp at Camp Bartow, where the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike crossed the Greenbrier River in western Virginia. His men drove in the pickets and shelled the camp for some four hours, but attempts to turn the Confederate flanks failed and Reynolds withdrew. Fewer than a hundred men were lost on both sides.1
It was a battle fought mostly by artillery, in a mountain valley where the sound of the guns echoed off the ridges. Both generals claimed far more than they had achieved, and the real verdict was written by the weather and by disease, which emptied Camp Bartow within weeks.2
Background: the war for the mountains
In the summer of 1861 the Union and the Confederacy fought for the mountains of western Virginia, where the turnpikes and passes of the Alleghenies linked the East with the Ohio valley. A Union army under George B. McClellan won at Rich Mountain on 11 July, and two days later the retreating Confederate commander, Robert S. Garnett, was killed at Corrick's Ford. Federal troops then pushed east into Pocahontas County and built a fort on top of Cheat Mountain to hold the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike.3 › Battle of Rich Mountain, 1861
In September General Robert E. Lee came to western Virginia to direct the Confederate effort. On 12 September he tried to take the Cheat Mountain fort and the Union camp at Elkwater with converging columns, but rain, rough country and bad communications wrecked the plan, and the Confederates fell back. Brigadier General Joseph J. Reynolds held his ground. In the account of e-WV, what worried the Confederates was the safety of the Virginia Central and the Virginia and Tennessee railroads behind them. Lee's aide-de-camp, Colonel John A. Washington, the last private owner of Mount Vernon, was killed while scouting at Elkwater, and the attackers were described as too wet and too hungry to fight. American History Central counts about 11,000 men in the Confederate Army of the Northwest under General William W. Loring, which Lee joined for the offensive.4
Camp Bartow
After the failure at Cheat Mountain the Confederates dug in where the turnpike crossed the Greenbrier River. The National Register nomination for the site explains why the place mattered: with the Federals holding the railroad, the turnpike was the Confederates' road for men and supplies, and a camp astride it kept the Union army out of the valleys to the east. The position was called Camp Bartow, and it was commanded by Brigadier General Henry R. Jackson.5
Jackson admitted in his report that the position was not a strong one by nature. His lines in front ran for at least a mile, and the works were still being dug when the attack came. They were laid out by a young engineer officer, Lieutenant Colonel Seth M. Barton of the 3rd Arkansas, whose trenches the National Register nomination traces on the ground to this day.6
Armies and commanders
Joseph Jones Reynolds was a Kentuckian, a West Point graduate of 1843 in the same class as Ulysses S. Grant, who had taught at the academy and at Washington University in St. Louis before going into the grocery trade in Indiana. When the war began he became colonel of an Indiana regiment and soon a brigadier general, and in the fall of 1861 he commanded the Union line around Cheat Mountain.7
Henry Rootes Jackson of Georgia was not a professional soldier. A Georgia lawyer and judge who had published a volume of poems, he had served in the 1850s as the American envoy in Vienna before accepting a commission as a Confederate brigadier general in 1861.8
Under Jackson served Colonel Edward Johnson of the 12th Georgia, a regular officer of the Seminole and Mexican wars who had resigned his commission in 1861. The numbers were badly uneven. Reynolds put his own force at about 5,000, infantry, cavalry and artillery. Jackson told the Confederate secretary of war afterward that his morning reports had shown no more than 1,800 men fit for duty, and that he had not wanted to admit how weak he was.9
The battle in phases
The night march. At midnight on 2 October Reynolds set out from the summit of Cheat Mountain, about 12 miles from the Confederate camp, on what he called an armed reconnaissance. Any hope of surprise ended when the Confederate pickets spotted the column before it reached the camp. Jackson credited Johnson and an advance guard of about a hundred men with holding the head of the Union column for nearly an hour before falling back.10
The artillery duel. The Federals drove in the pickets and the main action began at about eight in the morning with a prolonged artillery bombardment of the camp. Jackson's men, well dug in, held firm under it.11
The flank attacks. At about half past nine, Jackson wrote, a Union column crossed the shallow river to turn his left and was driven back by the 3rd Arkansas. Another climbed the wooded hill on his right, where the Confederates had built works in case of exactly such a move. The American Battlefield Trust and the National Park Service both describe this attempt on the Confederate right as abortive. Reports from the Union side show regiments confused about their orders on the hillside.12
Turning point: the reinforcements that never fought
The decision came from the mountain behind the camp. Jackson had sent word to Camp Allegheny for the 52nd Virginia to come down and fall on the Union rear. After about four and a half hours, American History Central writes, Reynolds saw Confederate reinforcements approaching and, wrongly fearing that he would be outnumbered, broke off the fight. In his own report Reynolds wrote that he had distinctly seen heavy reinforcements of infantry and artillery arrive.13
The Federals marched back to Cheat Mountain, arriving at sundown after a day of 24 miles on foot and some four hours under fire. The Confederates, without cavalry, could not pursue, and the 52nd Virginia was halted on the road when word came that the fight was over.14
Both generals reported a victory. Fewer than a hundred men had actually been hit.
Aftermath: small losses, large claims
For all the noise, the losses were light. The Union lost 43 men, 8 killed and 35 wounded, and the Confederates 52, 6 killed, 33 wounded and 13 missing. The claims were another matter. Reynolds estimated the enemy at 9,000 and their losses at no fewer than 300; Jackson put the attackers at 6,000 to 7,000 and their losses at 250 to 300. The American Battlefield Trust notes that both sides greatly exaggerated the losses they had inflicted, and American History Central makes the same point about the two generals' reports.15
The National Park Service classes the result as indecisive. Reynolds had failed to dislodge Jackson, while the Confederates stayed where they were. The Confederate secretary of war, Judah P. Benjamin, congratulated Jackson on a brilliant defense of an important position.16
Camp Bartow did not last. Disease broke out among the Confederates, and by late November they had abandoned the camp and moved up to winter quarters on the summit of Allegheny Mountain. There, on 13 December 1861, e-WV records, Union General Robert H. Milroy attacked them with about 1,900 men against about 1,200, in one of the bloodiest fights of the war's first year, and was beaten off. Ironically, the e-WV entry notes, the Confederate brigade had received orders to withdraw a few days earlier; the failed attack persuaded Loring to leave Johnson's men on the mountain for the winter.17
Legacy and memory
The men who fought at Greenbrier River went on to larger battles. The fight at Camp Allegheny made Edward Johnson a brigadier general and gave him the nickname he kept for the rest of the war, Allegheny Johnson; he later commanded Stonewall Jackson's old division at Gettysburg.18 › The Battle of Gettysburg, 1863
Reynolds commanded a division at Chickamauga and Chattanooga and then served as chief of staff of the Army of the Cumberland. After the war he governed Texas as a military commander during Reconstruction and fought on the Plains, where a failed attack on a Cheyenne village on the Powder River in 1876 led to a court-martial and his resignation.19 › The Battle of Chickamauga, 1863
Henry R. Jackson resigned in December 1861 to command Georgia state troops, returned to Confederate service in 1864, and was captured at Nashville. After the war he returned to his law practice and in the 1880s served as American minister to Mexico.20
Visiting the battlefield today
The battlefield lies around the small community of Bartow, where US Route 250, the old turnpike, meets West Virginia Routes 28 and 92. The National Register nomination for the Camp Bartow Historic District describes Confederate trenches and semicircular gun emplacements that still show the notches for the barrels, partly on National Forest land, and local historians lead walking tours of the earthworks on the hill above Traveller's Repose, the old inn at the crossroads, rebuilt after the war. For the 150th anniversary in 2011, Allegheny Mountain Radio reported, re-enactors brought a Parrott gun of the kind fired in the battle back to the site. The National Park Service's American Battlefield Protection Program has mapped the battlefield's core area around the camp and the Union line of approach from Cheat Mountain.21 › Battle of Droop Mountain, 1863
