E470 To Repite 149343 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. SMITH & MCDOUGAL, C. S. WESTCOTT & CO. Printers, WHEN the Report which is given in this volume was prepared and sent to the Adjutant-General, it was impossible to include in it the particulars of the Campaign in Western Virginia, for the reason that important papers relating to it had not come to my hands. During the various changes which had occurred in the Western Department, they had been moved from place to place, and efforts to reclaim them from among the papers of other officers, succeeded only a few weeks ago. In order to complete the history of the campaigns in which I have been engaged, it has seemed proper to prefix to the official report a simple narrative of the Campaign in Western Virginia. FEBRUARY 22, 1864. 523415 THE CAMPAIGN IN WESTERN VIRGINIA. THE attack upon Fort Sumter on the 12th of April, 1861, took the Northern people by surprise, and found them entirely unprepared to carry on a serious contest. Our people were born and educated amidst the blessings of peace and material prosperity; they were in the habit of yielding obedience to the laws of the country and the will of the majority as expressed in the elections, and had become accustomed to see great political excitement and animosity calmly subside through the deference of the minority to the decision of the majority. Thus to the last moment it was difficult to realize that a great civil war was imminent; and men clung fondly to the hope that the good sense of both sections would in the eleventh hour find some honorable solution to the difficulty, as had so often been the case before. It is probable that neither section fully realized the power and violence of the passions evoked, and that each flattered itself with the delusive hope that the other would yield something, rather than risk the inevitable and terrible consequences of an appeal to arms. Each underrated the strength, resources and courage of the other. These mutual misunderstandings, ably used by a comparatively small number of ambitious and unscrupulous men, were at their height when the insult offered the national flag in the harbor of Charleston aroused both parties to something like a true sense of their condition. The South were warned that they were irrevocably committed to make good their threats, and to establish by force their vaunted right of secession. It was brought clearly to the minds of Northern men that it was now too late to inquire what were the original causes of the contest, and that it only remained for them to avenge the insult to the flag, and to sustain the government in supporting the inviolability of the constitution, maintaining the unity of the nation, and enforcing its laws. There can be no question that these were the true issues which called forth that wonderful enthusiasm manifested by our people in 1861. When the President, on the 19th of April, 1861, issued his call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to suppress the rebellion, the difficulty was to restrain the ardor of the nation, and to limit the number of volunteers to something like that called for. The struggle then was as to who should be so fortunate as to be received, not as to who should avoid the call. The governors of States, were besieged by eager crowds, anxious to be permitted to fight for their country; and they, in turn, importuned the authorities in Washington for permission to increase their quotas-a permission usually very difficult to obtain-for the men were still few who foresaw the magnitude and duration of the struggle in which we had embarked. While there was no difficulty in procuring men, it was no easy task to arm, equip, and organize them, especially in the Western States. The scanty supplies of war material at the disposal of the general government were mainly in the East, with the exception of the arms at the St. Louis arsenal, which were not much more than sufficient to meet the demands in Missouri. There was no United States arsenal in the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, or Kentucky. The West at that time possessed no establishment capable of manufacturing arms on a large scale, and few for the preparation of clothing and equipments. In proportion to the population, there was much less military information in the West than in the East. It was under these circumstances that on the 23d of April, 1861, I was appointed by Governor Dennison Major-General of the Ohio contingent, under the three months call, and at once undertook the task of rendering available for the field the mass of unorganized and unarmed men who were collecting upon the call of the President. From Ohio thirteen regiments of infantry were demanded; in a few weeks the same number of |