First Land Battle of the US Civil War
Posted: 2011-06-03 09:16pm
150th Anniversary of the Battle of Philippi
Charleston Gazette wrote: PHILIPPI, W.Va. -- When the first shot of the first land battle of the Civil War was fired 150 years ago today, neither a Union nor a Confederate soldier pulled the trigger.
A middle-aged Barbour County woman named Matilda Humphreys set the Battle of Philippi in motion on June 3, 1861, when she fired a pistol at a group of federal troops who forced her 12-year-old son, Oliver, off the family horse and onto the ground.
Oliver's older brother, Lorenzo, was among nearly 750 Confederate soldiers camped in town. He had enlisted in the Barbour Grays, later Company H of the 31st Virginia Infantry, two weeks earlier,
When Matilda Humphreys saw Union troops marching past her home on the outskirts of Philippi, she sent Oliver to warn his brother of their arrival.
The Union troops who forced Oliver Humphreys off his horse were part of a federal force of nearly 3,000 men. They had marched through the night in a driving rain to reach Philippi, a small town with large secessionist sympathies.
At the Barbour County Courthouse in the center of town, a palmetto tree flag had flown since February to show support for South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union.
Col. Ebenezer Dumont, an Indiana lawyer and Mexican-American War veteran, was in charge of the column of Ohio and Indiana soldiers who marched past the Humphreys home. Col. Benjamin Franklin Kelley of Philadelphia, a freight agent in Wheeling for the B&O Railroad several years earlier, led the second column. It included the 1st Virginia (U.S.) Infantry, comprised mainly of recruits from the Northern Panhandle, as well as companies from regiments formed in Ohio and Indiana.
Departing from Grafton on June 2, 1861, Dumont's soldiers rode a train about four miles south, to the small community of Webster. They disembarked and began a soggy, nightlong march to Philippi, about 11 miles away.
Kelley and his troops were dropped off at a siding at Thornton, six miles east of Grafton, where they marched over back roads to approach Philippi from the rear.
The Civil War's first march to combat was under way, following the world's first use of the railroad to deploy multiple forces in attacking an enemy objective.
The battle
The plan was for both Union forces, each consisting of about 1,500 men, to arrive at opposite ends of Philippi at 4 a.m. on June 3, to surprise and trap the Confederate force camped there.
"It was not a bad-looking plan on paper, but in reality, it ended up being much more difficult to pull off than anyone anticipated," said Danny Franke, a theology professor at Alderson-Broaddus College and a coordinator of Civil War history events around Philippi.
Among the Confederate troops in Philippi was a squad led by Col. William J. Willey, who had burned two wooden trestle bridges on the B&O line between Mannington and Farmington on May 25. (Although a Confederate officer, Willey was the half-brother of Waitman Willey, a Morgantown lawyer who voted against secession as a delegate to the Virginia Convention, and later became a U.S. senator representing the Restored State of Virginia.)
Upon learning of the May 25 raid, Union Gen. Winfield Scott ordered Gen. George McClellan, then stationed in Ohio, to move troops into western Virginia to protect the vital east-west rail line. That set in motion the attack on Philippi, where a Confederate force led by Col. George Porterfield, a Berkeley County native and another Mexican-American War veteran, was camped.
On the eve of the Union attack, Porterfield knew that a federal force was approaching Philippi, but decided no army would march in such a driving rain, according to Hunter Lesser, author of "Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided."
Porterfield waited to send a scouting party to pinpoint the Union force's position until the following morning.
Dumont's column, led by Col. Frederick Lander, a former explorer and surveyor in the western United States, arrived on Talbott Hill overlooking Philippi -- at the present-day site of Alderson-Broaddus College -- before the planned 4 a.m. attack time.
Lander's soldiers readied two six-pounder cannons from the 1st Ohio Light Artillery on the hill, and waited for Kelley's force to announce its arrival with a single gunshot.
As daylight broke, though, Kelley had yet to signal his arrival. Lander and the artillerymen on Talbott Hill could see Confederate soldiers stir around Philippi's homes, tents and the covered bridge over the Tygart Valley River, where they had spent the rainy night.
"Lander was anxious to open up before the Confederates were aware they were about to be attacked," said Lesser.
When Matilda Humphreys' pistol shot sounded, Lander might have thought it was Kelley's signal -- or he might have thought it a good-enough reason to begin the attack and maintain the element of surprise.
The first artillery volley struck near a small group of tents used by the Confederates, while Dumont's column, led by Lander in a galloping downhill ride, stormed down Talbott Hill toward the covered bridge. The other Union column, led by Kelley, could be seen closing in on the town from the east.
The Confederate force was taken completely by surprise.
Instead of blocking the Confederate soldiers' retreat, though, both Union columns charged into Philippi, allowing Porterfield's panicked troops to flee.
After the artillery volley from the heights above Philippi, Porterfield saddled his horse and rode toward a group of men at the north end of town -- only to discover they were federal troops. He reversed his course and tried to organize an orderly withdrawal of his panic-stricken, untrained force.
Union troops stormed across the covered bridge and into town. Kelley rode into town at a gallop, shooting at fleeing Confederate soldiers, one of whom shot him in the chest.
The wound was thought to be fatal, and newspaper accounts of the battle described Kelley as being mortally wounded, but Kelley recovered, and was eventually promoted to brigadier general.
The attack, skirmish and retreat were over within about 30 minutes, giving the battle the nickname the "Philippi Races."
The Union soldiers, exhausted and hungry after their nightlong march, did not pursue the fleeing Confederates, who regrouped southeast of town and began an orderly withdrawal to Beverly, in Randolph County.
Lost of Limb
As Union soldiers gathered up left-behind Confederate supplies, tore up two secessionist flags and rounded up five prisoners of war, they came across perhaps the battle's unluckiest participant.
Eighteen-year-old James E. Hanger of Churchville, Va., had arrived in Philippi two days before, in a wagon train bringing supplies to members of the Churchville Cavalry, which included two of his brothers.
Hanger, an engineering student at Washington College in Lexington, Va., enlisted in the Churchville unit on June 2 -- the day before the battle -- and was sleeping in a stable when one of a dozen cannonballs fired during the battle bounced off a support beam and shattered his left leg.
Union troops found Hanger bleeding in a hayloft. He was carried to the Methodist Episcopal Church, where James Robison, a surgeon attached to an Ohio infantry regiment, removed the remnants of his leg seven inches below the hip -- without benefit of anesthesia.
Hanger became the first of nearly 50,000 soldiers to lose limbs during the Civil War. (The second was Confederate Capt. Fauntleroy Daingerfield, whose knee was shattered by a musket ball at Philippi. A Confederate surgeon amputated Daingerfield's lower leg on June 4 in Beverly.)
After recuperating for several days at a Philippi-area farm, Hanger was sent to Camp Chase, in Ohio. He was later exchanged for a Union prisoner of war and sent home to Virginia, where he fashioned a hinged prosthetic leg from barrel staves.
The device worked so well, he was commissioned by the Virginia legislature to manufacture the "Hanger Limb" for other wounded veterans. When the war ended, he patented his artificial leg and sold it worldwide.
Today, Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics operates more than 600 patient care centers.
The Battle of Philippi might not have had much importance as a strategic military operation, "but it rallied a lot of citizens from northwestern Virginia to the Union," just one week before the Second Wheeling Convention was set to begin, Lesser said.
Most citizens in the region favored the Union cause, and "their faith has been strengthened" by the federal victory, wrote Cincinnati Daily Gazette reporter Whitelaw Reid, who followed the Union troops into action.
"A single success of the rebel army would have fanned to an instant flame all the concealed sparks of disunion," Reid wrote. With the Union win at Philippi, "the doubtful have been confirmed and almost hopeless reprobates have been converted into loyal citizens since 'We met them at Philippi.'"
One of the five Confederate prisoners of war captured at Philippi was William Willey, who led the bridge-burning raid that prompted the Union attack on Philippi. Willey was found in a Philippi home, where he was recovering from typhoid fever.
According to Lesser, Willey tried to pass himself off as his anti-secession brother, Waitman Willey -- until Union troops found papers authorizing his commission as a Confederate officer, along with letters dealing with his bridge-burning activity.
Gen. McClellan described the short-lived battle with a measure of hyperbole, calling it "the most brilliant episode of the war thus far."
It also was the only battle of the war at that point. Its brilliance would fade considerably during the four years to follow.
For a timeline of West Virginia Civil War and statehood events and a gallery of West Virginia Civil War photos, visit West Virginia Archives and History's "Child of the Rebellion" online exhibit at http://www.wvculture.org/history/sesquicentennial.html.
