Free Terrible Swift Sword by Bruce Catton Page A

heart and center of the land the war got away from
them and made its own demands, creating unsuspected perils and opportunities.
The fire was running down to the grass roots. Somewhere between the too vivid
realities of slavery and abolitionism and the fine-spun abstractions of states'
rights and Unionism, the war was becoming something which men could interpret
in terms of wrongs done by their neighbors, of old grudges and local feuds, of
farm prices and the cost of living and the pestilent inequities of courthouse
politics. Flames burning so could be hard to control and hard to put out.

In western Virginia the mountain folk
were trying to secede from secession, paying off old scores with the tidewater
aristocracy and bringing on a series of fights that went sputtering from farm
to farm and from town to town in the remotest highland valleys—mean little
fights, altogether unromantic, in which generals lost reputations while private
soldiers and assorted private citizens lost their lives. When Virginia left the
Union, a majority of her people west of the Alleghenies dissented vigorously.
Delegates from the western counties convened, orated, passed resolutions and,
on June 11, announced that they had nullified the ordinance of secession and
had established something which, they insisted, was henceforth the legal
government of the state, with one Francis Pierpoint as governor. This expedient
seemed useful, and Washington agreed to pretend—for a while, at any rate—that
this creation was indeed Virginia; and the westerners prepared to carry their
dissent to its logical if unconstitutional conclusion by wrenching the whole
mountain district away from the Old Dominion and creating an entirely new
state—a state which, they believed, might be called Kanawha, but which
eventually would enter the Union as West Virginia. 1
    So
Union and Confederacy fought for title to this land, believing that much was
at stake. A Confederacy which held western Virginia could squelch the
mountaineer Unionists and could also carry the war to the Ohio River;
furthermore, by seizing the western half of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
it could cut Washington's only direct railway line to the west. The Federals
for their part felt that western Virginia offered both a back-door approach to
Richmond and a prime chance to cut the line of the vital Virginia and Tennessee
Railroad, which connected Richmond with Memphis and the Mississippi Valley.
Eastern Tennessee, in addition, seemed to contain as many Unionists as western
Virginia, and Union victories in Virginia might lead them to rally around the
old flag to very good effect. Campaigning in the mountains was extraordinarily
difficult, but the winner stood to get great advantages.
    Things went badly for the South from the
start. During the spring a remarkably brilliant and personable young major
general, a former West Pointer turned railroad man, George Brinton McClellan,
led a Federal Army of Middle Westerners in from Wheeling and Parkersburg,
clearing the line of the B & O and smashing a small Confederate Army which
guarded the mountain passes where the great turnpike from the Ohio River ran
southeast to Staunton, in the Shenandoah Valley. McClellan did this with a
flair and a competence which made him famous, and after the Federal disaster at
Bull Run he was called east to reorganize and lead the shattered Army of the
Potomac. He turned the mountain department over to his second-in-command,
Brigadier General William S. Rosecrans, and went where opportunity called him.
It was up to Rosecrans to hold what had been won and to add to it if possible.
    Not much could be added. It seemed, just
at first, that a victorious Federal Army ought to be able to march straight
through to tidewater or to the deep South, attaining glory either way. This was
possible, according to the maps. But the maps did not show how terribly bad the
roads were, or how barren was much of the country they crossed; the central
mass of