Although in the aftermath of Fort Sumter blood had been spilled in Baltimore and Alexandria, the first intentional military battle of the Civil War happened in what is now West Virginia. It was part of an odd secession from the secession.
For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and am traveling around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I have visited. :)
When the state of Virginia called a special convention in April 1861 to consider leaving the union, the delegates decided to hold off voting until after the situation at Fort Sumter was resolved. The state itself was divided: the eastern two-thirds was strongly Southern in sympathies, but the western portion was heavily pro-Union and largely anti-slavery. When the state delegates voted on April 17 to approve a resolution of secession and send it out for referendum, the westernmost counties staged a rebellion of their own: they walked out and set up their own rival convention in Wheeling, gathering there on May 13. Here they passed a resolution repudiating the act of secession and announced their intention to break away from Virginia and form a new state of their own, the pro-Union West Virginia, with Wheeling as its capitol. The Confederates in Virginia, meanwhile, continued to regard them as under Richmond’s sovereignty.
The political conflict soon gave way to military maneuvering. A series of roads passed through the little town of Philippi, not far from Wheeling, where they ran both north and south over a large covered bridge. Also nearby were several railroad lines. It was a strategic area, and when the war broke out, both sides wanted military control of it (and of course both sides also wanted to establish undisputed political control as well).
The Union and Confederate forces had already sparred with each other in Virginia. On the day that the state seceded, secessionist troops seized a stretch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and confiscated 56 locomotives and several hundred rail cars. The Federals, in turn, entered Virginia on May 24 and captured the city of Alexandria, just across the Potomac River from Washington DC.
To secure the pro-Union western region, the Confederate government sent a detachment of 1,000 Virginia troops under Colonel George Porterfield, while General George McClellan in Ohio sent troops of his own under General Thomas Morris. Porterfield established a base at Philippi, while Morris set up his camp at nearby Grafton.
The Federals did not know that they greatly outnumbered Porterfield’s forces, and proceeded cautiously. A column of 3,000 Union troops (recruited in Virginia as well as Indiana and Ohio) was sent to Philippi under Colonel Benjamin Franklin Kelley and, in an elaborate ruse to keep the Southerners guessing at the target, split into two, with one group marching towards one end of town and the other group taking a train some distance away before doubling back to approach the other end.
When the Union forces arrived, it was raining. Porterfield expected that they would take at least another day to reach him, and planned to move to higher ground in the morning. Instead, the Federals marched all night in the rain. The two columns had planned to surround Philippi and attack from opposite ends at dawn with the pre-arranged signal of a pistol shot, but one of the groups had taken a wrong turn and was not in position.
At that moment, a woman from town happened to discover the Federals, who promptly captured her young son (to prevent him from running ahead and alerting the Confederates). Grabbing a pistol, she angrily took a potshot at them, inadvertently launching a premature attack by the Federal forces. Nevertheless, the Confederates had not put out any pickets or sentries, and were completely surprised when a wall of Union troops rushed over the covered bridge towards them. Inexperienced and untested, they panicked and ran. (Northern newspapers referred to the rout as the “Philippi Races”.) The fighting lasted just twenty minutes. There were no deaths: the Confederates lost around 25 wounded and the Federals only a handful (including Colonel Kelley).
One of the wounded Confederates was Private James Hanger, whose leg, mangled by a cannonball, was amputated. During his recovery he made himself a hinged wooden leg that worked so well that the Confederate Army contracted with him to make artificial limbs for other wounded soldiers. Today, the company that Hanger founded is still a major manufacturer of prosthetic limbs.
In the light of the Civil War battles that were to follow, the combat at Philippi was a mere skirmish. But it had lasting effects both political and military. The Federal forces won a subsequent series of small battles and were able to secure the pro-Union areas of Virginia from Confederate attack, and shortly after this the provisional government in Wheeling applied for admission to the Union as the State of West Virginia. In Washington DC, General McClellan, who commanded the Army of Ohio, was lauded as a hero for the triumph at Philippi (though he was not actually there), and just a few weeks later, after General Irvin McDowell failed to win a victory at the First Battle of Manassas, McClellan was tapped to become the new Commander of the Union Army of the Potomac.
The commander of the Confederate Virginia militia, meanwhile, was General Robert E Lee. Although he was not at Philippi either, he was blamed by the Southern press for the loss of West Virginia, and was dubbed “Granny Lee”. He was subsequently re-assigned to constructing coastal defenses and harbor forts in the South, and was later sent to Richmond to serve on Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s staff.
Today, Philippi Covered Bridge is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is part of the Philippi Historic District. It has been rebuilt several times after being destroyed by fire and floods. A small museum is housed in the railroad station next to the bridge, and each year the battle is re-enacted at nearby Blue and Gray Park.
Some photos from a visit.