Everything war related in contested West Virginia during the fall of 1863 revolved around railroads, supply lines, and minerals. One of the costliest railroads to construct at the time, the Virginia and Tennessee, stretched over 200 miles from Lynchburg northwest to Bristol and included a branch to Saltville, Virginia. Five tunnels, over 230 bridges, and nineteen depots lined the route. The South depended on this vital artery to move troops and crucial supplies such as salt, lead, and saltpeter, which flowed from Confederate factories and mines in western Virginia.
Although established in the 1820s, American railroads came into their own during the Civil War, and their use in transporting troops and supplies from one front to another was part of what made this conflict the first modern war. While the South had much less to work with, having only about a third of the rail lines of the North and limited manufacturing capacity, its leaders realized the potential of trains to move troops and supplies sooner than their Union counterparts. The Confederates worked miracles with what they had, starting with the first major contest of the Civil War, the Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, where they used rail lines to move their limited number of troops quickly from unthreatened areas in Virginia. The North soon recognized the crucial nature of the rail lines. Consequently, ripping up track or restoring destroyed lines became a top priority, and, here, Jessie Scouts would play a crucial role.
Severing the vital Virginia and Tennessee rail line proved more difficult than initially thought. It took the Union three separate attempts to reach the railroad. General William Woods Averell led the first raid in August 1863, which targeted the track along with a rather unusual objective: a library brimming with law books located in Lewisburg, West Virginia. Averell’s superiors deemed that the tomes could be of use to the judiciary of the new state.
Renowned for his skills on horseback and as an experienced Indian fighter, Averell also held various patents after the war, including one that pioneered asphalt pavement, making him a wealthy man. The thirty-one-year-old Union commander and expert drillmaster could also whip men into shape. The brigade that he commanded in West Virginia needed it.
After the crushing Union defeat at Chancellorsville in April of that year, in which Lee’s badly outnumbered army outmaneuvered General Joseph Hooker’s Army of the Potomac, the Union commander looked for scapegoats. He blamed Averell, a Democrat surrounded by Republicans in his chain of command, for his slow performance on a raid on Confederate lines of communication. Averell was relieved of command and exiled to the backwater of West Virginia. Here the Union high command assigned him the 4th Separate Brigade and the daunting task of converting a significant portion of its infantry into cavalry to counter enemy raids on the crucial Union B&O Railroad that ran through West Virginia and required protection at all costs.
In April 1863, Confederates disrupted the line and destroyed a massive amount of war materiel in what would be known as the Jones-Imboden Raid, whose added purpose was to derail the momentum toward statehood in western Virginia, because it was unclear on which side of the slavery issue the area would fall. Snail-like Union foot infantry could not keep up with fast-moving mounted raiders as they pillaged, burned, blew up a railroad bridge, and made off with thousands of cattle and horses. After the raid, Union commanders begged Washington, DC, for additional cavalry to counter future Confederate attacks. There was none to be had—Union horsemen had to be created from the infantry. One officer remembered the pitiful condition of the troops Averell had to transform: “When General Averell assumed command of these troops, he found himself with a brigade of loyal, courageous fighters, scattered through a dozen counties, but who knew little of discipline, or of knowledge of regimental or brigade maneuvers—scantily supplied with approved arms, equipments, clothing, etc. They were inefficient for any reliable defense of the country, and the utter hopelessness of any effort to take the offensive our experience had so recently demonstrated.”1 Luckily, Averell would inherit from the previous commander of the brigade, Major General Robert Huston Milroy, the Jessie Scouts, who acted as Milroy’s eyes and ears. Arch Rowand, James White, and the remaining Jessie Scouts, who furnished priceless battlefield intelligence to Milroy, would now give William Averell the edge in battle against his opponents.
Horses and men required lengthy training, but within weeks, Averell, who had a reputation to resurrect, pulled off a minor miracle of organization. Led by the Jessie Scouts, Averell’s force left their encampment on August 3 with about 1,500 cavalry, mounted infantry, and a battery of light artillery. Traversing mountains and rugged terrain, they routed a force of Confederates led by Stonewall Jackson’s cousin, William L. “Mudwall” Jackson, and destroyed a Rebel saltpeter factory located in a cave. As the men neared White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the present-day site of the Greenbriar Hotel, Averell’s men ran into a dug-in force led by Colonel George S. Patton, grandfather of the famous World War II general-to-be. The two sides battled for two days starting on August 26, until Averell ran low on ammunition and withdrew. Felling trees behind them to slow the pursuing Confederates, they rode hard back to base “and were mercilessly bushwhacked [by Thurmond’s Rangers among others] going into camp weary and sore.”2 The force sustained twenty-seven killed and nearly 200 wounded and captured—costly considering their size—and the law books remained firmly in Confederate hands.
Three months later, not to be outgunned again, Averell set out for the books and the railroad a second time, but with a much larger force. In the first week of November 1863, Averell left Beverly, West Virginia, with Rowand, White, and the Jessie Scouts in Confederate uniforms in advance of about 4,000 Union cavalry and infantry with the mission to march to Dublin, Virginia, and destroy depots, track, and the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad bridge across the New River. The Jessie Scouts relied on speed and deception to lead the raid. Death was always near. “I had a man killed on either side of me,”3 recalled Rowand. By the very nature of their hazardous duty, most Jessie Scouts would not live to see the war’s end.
The attack on the railroad came from multiple forces: Averell’s brigade was to link up with Brigadier General Alfred N. Duffié’s force, with the Scouts led by Richard Blazer and Otis out front. Duffié was one of the more colorful characters in the Union Army. The French-born officer, a poster boy for stolen valor, made several spurious claims, including that he earned the Légion d’honneur, which he wore in several photographs. Unfortunately, the Union Army did not know he had been tried by the French army in absentia and sentenced to ten years for desertion. Duffié then fled to America, where he married a wealthy aristocratic woman he met in France while she was serving as a nurse.4 Through her family connections, he secured a position as a colonel in the Union cavalry.
Blazer’s men forged ahead of Duffié’s force, reconnoitering and determining the location of the Confederates. “It fell to our lot to take the advance all the way, which was just to our hands. We distinguished ourselves by marching and routing Thurmond,” Asbe Montgomery recalled.5 According to one contemporary source, Blazer’s Scouts stalked Thurmond’s Confederates: “Like the Nomads, [the Scout] reckoned time by nights and not days; he lurks like a wild creature in the darkness when it is in his heart all the while to stand forth like a man in the day.”6
The Scouts charged into Lewisburg and captured several prisoners and a piece of artillery as they clashed with Confederate troops commanded by Brigadier General John Echols. Despite capturing Lewisburg, the Federals had Echols’ force to contend with, and the mission to capture the library and law books had to wait. Before advancing further, the Federals set up camp outside Hillsboro, West Virginia, about thirty miles north of Lewisburg, in the shadow of Echols’ Confederate defenses, which bristled above on the rugged face of Droop Mountain. The Confederates managed to maintain the high ground through the morning but, by the afternoon, were overwhelmed by Union infantry who fought their way up the side of the mountain, attacking the Confederates’ left flank and forcing Patton and the rest of Echols’ troops to retreat south into Virginia. However, the combination of rugged terrain, his burden of prisoners, and foul weather forced Averell to abort the raid without accomplishing his principal mission of severing the vital railway.
After the battle, the weather turned bitter, and it snowed on the long, exhausting westward march back toward Fayetteville. “Cold, snowy morning. All ready to move by daylight, boys anxious to reach camp which is ten miles, slowly traveling, cross by Sewell Mt.… Boys [were] never more anxious being worried and having but little sleep during the whole trip. Many of them have worn out their shoes and are barefooted,”7 Union soldier James Ireland recorded in his November 10, 1863, diary entry.
Despite their success, Blazer and Otis’ immediate commanding officer, Colonel Carr B. White, disbanded the Union special operators, likely because skilled men were in short supply and needed in their respective units. But the Scouts’ absence from hazardous duty did not last long.
Strategically, the North’s approach in the fall of 1863 was about to change. Following the Federals’ defeat at Chickamauga, Georgia, on September 18–20, the Army of the Cumberland, under the command of General William Starke Rosecrans, fell back north to the strategic railhead of Chattanooga, in southeastern Tennessee. Hoping to starve out the Federals, the Confederate Army of Tennessee, under the command of Braxton Bragg, besieged the city.
In October 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant was handed command of the disjointed and recently defeated Union forces. Determined to hold Chattanooga, he replaced Rosecrans, who had planned to withdraw from the city, with Major General George Henry Thomas. Grant understood the strategic importance of Chattanooga as a gateway into the heart of the South and a jumping-off point for an attack on Atlanta. Supplying the Union Army became a major factor, and Grant devised a novel solution: the “Cracker Line.” Thomas’ troops counterattacked and secured a bridgehead on the Confederate side of the Tennessee River. Engineers laid a pontoon bridge over the water, allowing supplies to flow into Chattanooga over a wagon road from a Union supply depot at Bridgeport, in far northern Alabama.
After securing his lines of communication, Grant broke the Confederate siege through a series of bold engagements. The Federals struck after learning that the Confederates had peeled off troops from Chattanooga to attack Knoxville, then in Union control. Shortly after Gettysburg, and despite Longstreet’s objection, Lee had dispatched Longstreet’s Corps from the Army of Northern Virginia, where it played a key role in the Battle of Chickamauga. Despite Longstreet’s objections, who marched north to Knoxville: “We thus expose both to failure, and really take no chance to ourselves of great result,” the Confederate general had protested.8 Union troops then seized the critical high ground at Orchard Knob outside Chattanooga. At the same time, Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman maneuvered near the strong Confederate entrenchments on Missionary Ridge, seemingly impregnable high ground overlooking the city. The same day, a Union force of three divisions moved on the Confederates holding the rocky crags of Lookout Mountain, which they overran when Bragg decided to withdraw his troops to secure Missionary Ridge.
On November 25, an attack on the Confederates’ right flank made little progress, and Grant ordered Thomas to secure and clear the rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge but not advance up the steep mount. After taking the Confederate rifle pits, the Union troops were sitting ducks taking Confederate fire from above. Out of necessity and without orders, the Union troops stormed the ridge in a dramatic assault—one of the few that would succeed against an entrenched enemy holding the high ground during the war. By 4:30 p.m., the center of the Confederate line collapsed, and Bragg’s army fell back to Chickamauga Creek and later Dalton, Georgia. Upon hearing of the victory, Lincoln congratulated Grant and urged him to save Burnside: “Well done. Many thanks to all. Remember Burnside.”9
General Ambrose Everett Burnside commanded the Federal troops at Knoxville in eastern Tennessee, holding out against Longstreet’s siege with limited rations. Relieving Burnside became the priority. Jessie Scouts would play a key role in the operations to assist the Union commander.