What happened at the Battle of Rich Mountain?
On 11 July 1861 a Union brigade under Brigadier General William S. Rosecrans, guided by a young local Unionist named David Hart, climbed a pathless mountainside in western Virginia and came out behind Camp Garnett, a Confederate fortified camp on the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike. After a sharp fight of about two hours at the Hart farm on the summit, the Confederate outpost broke. Lieutenant Colonel John Pegram abandoned his camp that night and surrendered most of his men two days later, while the main Confederate force at Laurel Hill retreated and lost its commander, Robert S. Garnett. The victory made George B. McClellan, the Union commander, a national figure.1
In the first summer of the Civil War the mountain counties of western Virginia were contested ground. Whoever held their turnpikes held the road between the Ohio valley and the Shenandoah, and the fate of the region decided whether it stayed with Virginia and the Confederacy or became, as it did two years later, the separate state of West Virginia. The battle that settled the question was a small one, fought in the rain on a wooded summit by raw volunteers on both sides, and it turned on a farmer's son who knew a path through the forest.2
Background: the turnpikes of western Virginia
Many people in the northwestern counties had long resented the government in Richmond, and when Virginia moved to secede in the spring of 1861 they set about forming a loyal government of their own. Washington wanted the region for another reason: the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran through it. Richmond sent Colonel George A. Porterfield to hold the area, but on 3 June 1861 Union troops surprised his raw volunteers at Philippi and sent them fleeing south, an affair remembered as the Philippi Races.3
The new Confederate commander, Brigadier General Robert S. Garnett, fortified two passes across the mountains. One was at Laurel Hill near Belington. The other, named Camp Garnett after him, was a line of earth and log entrenchments at the western foot of Rich Mountain, overlooking the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike a few miles west of the town of Beverly. The turnpike was a vital link between the heart of Virginia and its western counties, and the camp sat squarely across it.4
Armies and commanders
The Union commander was Major General George B. McClellan, head of the Department of the Ohio, a West Point graduate who had resigned from the army before the war and was made a major general in 1861. He was charged with securing the loyal counties and protecting the railroad. For the move against Rich Mountain he brought his three brigades of Ohio and Indiana volunteers, a little over 5,000 infantry with two batteries and a little cavalry, to Roaring Creek Flats, about two miles west of Camp Garnett.5
His brigade commander William S. Rosecrans, nicknamed Rosy, had graduated fifth in his West Point class of 1842, taught at the academy and left the army for poor health in 1854. In civilian life he took out patents, and in 1859 an experimental oil lamp exploded in his face; the scars, both the American Battlefield Trust and the National Park Service note, left him looking as if he were permanently smirking. In 1861 he briefly led the 23rd Ohio and was made a brigadier general in the regular army.6
Camp Garnett was held by Lieutenant Colonel John Pegram of Petersburg, a West Point graduate of 1854 who had served with the dragoons in the West before resigning in 1861. He had about 1,300 men and four cannon. Pegram himself gave that figure in a report written as a prisoner four days after the battle.7
Garnett, a Virginian of the West Point class of 1841, had won two brevets in the Mexican War on the staff of Zachary Taylor and had served as adjutant general of the Virginia forces under Robert E. Lee before taking command in the northwest. Expecting McClellan to strike at Laurel Hill, he kept the larger part of his command there under his own eye. The numbers vary: e-WV gives him 3,200 men there, the American Battlefield Trust about 3,500 and the National Register nomination 4,000.8
The battle in phases
The approach. In early July McClellan's column advanced to the foot of Rich Mountain, while Brigadier General Thomas A. Morris led a separate Union brigade from Philippi to keep Garnett busy at Laurel Hill. McClellan had no wish to storm Camp Garnett from the front. In the words of the Rich Mountain Battlefield Foundation he characteristically overestimated the men facing him, and he judged a frontal assault on the entrenched camp a disaster in the making.9
The guide. The way around was offered by David Hart, a young man whose Unionist family lived at the pass where the turnpike crossed the summit, behind the Confederate camp. At about five in the morning of 11 July Rosecrans set out with four infantry regiments and a company of cavalry, 1,917 men in the count of the National Register nomination; his own report gives 1,912 rank and file. McClellan, with the rest of the force, was to attack Camp Garnett from the front once he heard the flanking column's guns.10
The climb. Rosecrans called his route a circuitous march through a trackless mountain forest. Thick undergrowth, steep slopes and rain slowed the column, and it came out on the ridge well south of the turnpike. Pegram knew something was afoot and had sent a guard to the Hart farm, but he expected any flank attack to come from the north. By the morning of the 11th the outpost at the pass numbered 310 men and one cannon under Captain Julius A. de Lagnel.11
The fight at Hart's farm. At about half past two in the afternoon the Federals struck the outpost from the south, the one direction it had not expected. The Confederates took cover behind log breastworks, rocks, trees and the farm buildings and, with the help of their single gun, held off the attack for more than two hours. The American Battlefield Trust and the National Park Service both describe a sharp two-hour fight. Then a renewed charge carried the position. In Rosecrans's words, his men drove the enemy "from behind some log breastworks" and pursued them into the thickets on the mountain.12
The relief that came too late. In Camp Garnett, Pegram tried to send help up the pike to the pass, but it came too little and too late, and a second gun sent up as reinforcement was captured by the Union troops. As night fell, Rosecrans's tired men bivouacked on the summit in cold, drenching rain, waiting for daylight.13
Turning point: the attack that never came
The plan called for McClellan to strike the front of Camp Garnett while Rosecrans hit its rear, but McClellan never moved. The National Register nomination describes his men standing at arms through the afternoon, listening to the firing on the mountain and waiting for an order that never came. McClellan's own dispatch the next morning says only that he had a position ready for twelve guns near his camp and, as the guns were moving up, learned that the enemy had gone.14
It did not matter. With the turnpike cut behind them, the Confederate position was untenable. That night Pegram withdrew his remaining troops from the camp, hoping to join Garnett at Laurel Hill, with the young mapmaker Jed Hotchkiss guiding the way. At dawn on 12 July Rosecrans marched down the turnpike and entered the camp from the rear. He found it abandoned except for 63 men, his report says; the National Register nomination counts some 69 sick, wounded and medical staff.15
McClellan never attacked. He did not need to: one brigade on one mountain path had already decided the campaign.
Aftermath: surrender and retreat
The Confederate command broke apart. About half of it got away toward Beverly, the American Battlefield Trust estimates, and Hotchkiss with a small party slipped through before the Federals occupied the town. Pegram, without food for his men and believing himself cut off, surrendered to McClellan at Beverly on 13 July. McClellan reported his command as 33 officers and 560 men; the National Register nomination gives 30 officers and 525 men.16
The losses are counted differently in every source. Rosecrans reported 12 killed and 49 wounded in his column, McClellan's summary 12 killed and 59 wounded, and the National Register nomination 12 killed and 62 wounded. For the Confederates Rosecrans reported 135 burials, the nomination at least 33 killed and 39 wounded confirmed in official records. The National Park Service summary estimates 74 Union and 88 Confederate casualties; the American Battlefield Trust estimates about 46 and 300.17
Hearing that Rich Mountain had fallen, Garnett abandoned Laurel Hill. False word that Beverly was already in Union hands sent him north and east by rough back roads, and Morris's men followed through rain and mud strewn with discarded equipment. On 13 July, at Corrick's Ford on the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River, Garnett was shot while directing his rear guard. He was the first general officer killed in the Civil War.18
McClellan telegraphed Washington in triumph. "Our success is complete, and secession is killed in this country," he wrote on 14 July. His dispatches spoke of some ten thousand Confederates driven out, roughly ten times the 1,300 Pegram actually had, as the National Register nomination points out.19
Legacy and memory
The timing made McClellan's name. On 21 July the Union army was routed at the First Battle of Bull Run, and on 22 July McClellan was ordered to Washington, while Rosecrans took over in western Virginia. The American Battlefield Trust and the National Park Service both call the victory instrumental in raising him to command of the Army of the Potomac, which he led through the Seven Days and Antietam until he was removed in the fall of 1862.20
Both the Rich Mountain Battlefield Foundation and the National Register nomination see in this first campaign the traits that marked his later command: real gifts as an organizer, too much caution in the field and a habit of inflating the enemy's numbers. The nomination adds that McClellan never admitted Rosecrans's independent role in the victory.21
For the region the result was more lasting. In the judgment of e-WV, Virginia west of the Alleghenies was from then on lost to the Confederacy in all but name, and that cleared the way for the new state of West Virginia, admitted to the Union on 20 June 1863. The National Register nomination makes the same point: apart from raids, the area and its railroad stayed in Union hands. Confederate efforts to win it back that fall, under Lee at Cheat Mountain and at Camp Bartow on the Greenbrier, failed.22 › Battle of Greenbrier River, 1861
The men of Rich Mountain went on to larger fields. Rosecrans went west, won at Stones River and was relieved after the disaster at Chickamauga in 1863. Pegram was paroled, rose to command a division under Jubal Early and was killed at Hatcher's Run on 6 February 1865.23
Visiting the battlefield today
Rich Mountain Battlefield was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992 and is owned and interpreted by the Rich Mountain Battlefield Foundation, based in Beverly. The battle site at the Hart farm on the summit has historical markers, interpretive signs and the remains of the Hart family's spring house. Among the boulders the Confederates fought from, names carved into the rocks by soldiers can still be seen.24
About a mile and a half to the west, at the foot of the mountain, the earthworks of Camp Garnett survive in the woods. Both sites lie on Rich Mountain Road, the county road west of Beverly that links them over the pass.25
