Confederate Military History. Robert White

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      Chapter 5: Marylanders in the campaigns of 1861.

      When Virginia became one of the Confederate States by the vote of her people, May 24, 1861, the Confederate government, Mr. Jefferson Davis being President, removed to Richmond from Montgomery, Ala., and assumed the charge of military operations all over the Confederacy. The fixed idea of President Davis was that the first necessity was to save the Confederate States from invasion; for invasion, he argued, would demoralize the negro population and make inefficient the labor of the South behind the armies, which must rely on slave labor for food and clothes. Therefore the Confederate government undertook to cover the entire front, from the Chesapeake bay to the western frontier. In carrying out this strategy, armies were collected in Virginia at Norfolk; at Aquia Creek on the Potomac; at Manassas Junction, thirty miles from Alexandria; at Harper's Ferry, the junction of the Shenandoah and Potomac and the mouth or entrance of the valley of Virginia; and at Grafton, west of the mountains on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad. At Harper's Ferry the Potomac and Shenandoah break through the Blue Ridge and form a gorge of surpassing grandeur and picturesqueness. Mr. Jefferson once said in his notes of Virginia that the view from Loudoun heights on the Virginia side was worth a voyage across the Atlantic to see. The Virginians never got over it. Harper's Ferry was Thermopylae and Mont Blanc combined. It was an impregnable fortress of nature. John Brown agreed with them—about the only thing he did agree with them about—and seized Harper's Ferry as the base of his 50 proposed negro insurrection in 1859. So the very first step taken in Virginia, after secession was agreed to, was the seizure of Harper's Ferry. Governor Letcher ordered the volunteers of the valley there within five hours after the convention passed the ordinance of secession on April 17th, and about dusk on the 18th, the Second Virginia regiment, Colonel Allen, with several detached companies and with James Ashby's and Welby Carter's troops of cavalry from Fauquier land Loudoun, took possession of the place, with its workshops and machinery. The Union officer that was posted there as the regular guard with a detachment of half a hundred infantry, retired after having set fire to the armory, where a large number of muskets were stored, and to the storehouses and machine shops. The Virginians got in in time to save most of the buildings and the machinery, and a large lot of gunstocks was afterwards shipped to Fayetteville, N. C., for the Confederate armory at that place.

      Col. Thomas J. Jackson, a professor of the Virginia military institute, was assigned to command the post, which the Virginia authorities considered the one of greatest importance, responsibility and danger; for it was to protect the valley of Virginia from the Potomac to the North Carolina and Tennessee line. Virginia troops were poured into the place. Captain Johnson, as we have seen, procured from Colonel Jackson permission to rendezvous the Marylanders there and at the Point of Rocks, and by June 1st had collected about five hundred men. As soon as Virginia had joined the Confederacy, President Davis, equally impressed with the value and importance of this Thermopylae, assigned to command it Gen. Joseph Eggleston Johnston, the second in rank of the generals of the Confederate army. Johnston ranked next to Lee, but was his equal in experience in war. He was a Virginian by birth and blood, and knew all about the Virginia fetish about Harper's Ferry While the President was pouring troops from Arkansas, from Mississippi, from Alabama, from South Carolina, into Harper's Ferry, Johnston knew that it was a trap, a deadfall, for the soldier who attempted to hold it. It was commanded on the east by the Maryland heights beyond the Potomac, and on the south by heights on the other side of the Shenandoah.

      The Confederate States government was then offering every inducement for Maryland to join it. It exempted Maryland from its declaration of war against the United States, and it was tender of her territory and her feelings. When, therefore, Johnston saw the absolute necessity of holding Maryland heights, he saved the invasion of Maryland by sending Marylanders to occupy the position. He ordered Captain Johnson with his eight companies, and Col. Blanton Duncan with his First Kentucky regiment, to take the Maryland heights, fortify and hold them. They did so while Johnston strained every nerve to strip Harper's Ferry of everything that could be made of use to the Confederacy. By June 15th he had cleared out the place, brought the Marylanders and the Kentuckians from the mountains and evacuated Harper's Ferry. A large Federal army had been collected at Chambersburg, Pa., thirty miles to the north of Johnston, under command of Major-General Patterson. For several days Patterson had given signs of restlessness unmistakable to an old soldier of Johnston's caliber, and the very day Johnston moved out of Harper's Ferry, Patterson marched south from Chambersburg. The former moved to Charlestown, Va., the latter to Hagerstown, Md. On June 17th, Patterson crossed the Potomac at Williamsport and Johnston went into line of battle at Bunker Hill, a place halfway between Martinsburg and Winchester. The Confederates were delighted at the prospects of another battle of Bunker Hill on the 17th of June. But a large portion of Patterson's army were sixty-day men, and when their time expired they marched home, General Patterson and the remnant of his troops following in such temper as they might to the Maryland side. Patterson having recrossed the Potomac, Johnston fell back to Winchester, where he proceeded to organize his incongruous troops into brigades and divisions. One brigade, the Fourth, was formed of the First Maryland, the Tenth and the Thirteenth Virginia and the Third Tennessee, and Col. Arnold Elzey of the First Maryland was assigned to command it. The Fourth and Third brigades constituted a division under the command of Brig.-Gen. E. Kirby Smith. The field officers of the First Maryland were commissioned to date from June 17, 1861. The first duty the regiment was set to perform under its new field officers was on the day after the arrival at Winchester. On June 19th, Lieutenant-Colonel Steuart was directed to return to Harper's Ferry by railroad train and complete the destruction of the shops and Federal property left on the evacuation of the 15th. This duty Colonel Steuart executed with great intelligence. Instead of burning up a great magazine of seasoned and shaped gunstocks, which he found abandoned, he loaded the whole outfit on a train of cars and hauled them back with his command to Winchester. The service was so valuable and so exceedingly sensible that the commanding general rewarded it with a special order of approbation. Steuart and the Marylanders enjoyed the unique distinction of being probably the only command that was ever decorated by a special order for disobedience of orders. General Johnston had sent them on this detail with distinct and positive orders to burn everything burnable. They brought off a trainload of most valuable plunder, and the commanding general honored them thus: