Desperate to alleviate pressure on Burnside from Longstreet’s siege of Knoxville, the Union high command tasked Averell with severing the supply line and interrupting the flow of troops and supplies to the Confederate general, and distracting the Confederates by drawing Southern forces from the siege to defend their supply lines. During the first weeks of December 1863, Averell was ordered to attack the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad once again. The raid had strategic significance1—and the Jessie Scouts would lead the advance.
Averell devised a brilliant, complex stratagem involving four different commands raiding multiple enemy territories, three of them distracting the Confederates while Averell’s force of mounted men attacked the main railroad at Salem, Virginia. Deep in hostile Southern territory teeming with irregulars and Confederate cavalry in the middle of winter, the men would need to make the ride for their lives and escape across some of the most rugged territory in the United States. Deception, luck, and grit had to align perfectly for the plan to succeed.
Averell ordered Colonel Augustus Moor to march toward Frankford, West Virginia, and approach Lewisburg from the north. General Jeremiah Sullivan and Colonel Joseph Thoburn would threaten Staunton, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, which contained warehouses of Confederate supplies. At the same time, Brigadier General Eliakim P. Scammon was to move out of Kanawha Valley and seize Lewisburg once again, and potentially the law library, by December 12. However, after the earlier Union attempts to seize the law books, the Confederates had moved the tomes to Richmond. The Union command assumed the books would be invaluable to West Virginia’s new government. Through the complex nature of the plan, Averell hoped to keep the Confederates guessing as to his true objectives.
The forty-seven-year-old Scammon sported an Amish-like chin-curtain beard and was a seasoned army veteran. The former professor of mathematics required the skills of Richard Blazer to conduct a reconnaissance of Lewisburg, and he cut orders to reconstitute the recently disbanded Scouts: “Send Lieutenant Blazer to Lewisburg to learn the enemy’s force and position,” he wrote to his staff. “Let him take such men as he wants & do the work quickly and thoroughly—if he succeeds, he shall be rewarded.”2
Through Scammon’s mandate, Blazer quickly reorganized his unit with handpicked men from the 12th and 91st Ohio and 9th West Virginia—men he previously commanded—and new recruits. On foot, Blazer’s men, with their own Jessie Scouts out front, would lead Scammon’s force. The former joint commander of the Scouts, Harrison Gray Otis, returned to the infantry and led Company A of the 12th Ohio on the raid.
On a freezing wintry morning in early December, all the units in Averell’s raid advanced. Eighteen-year-old Archibald Rowand, Old Clayton, James White, and the remaining original Jessie Scouts spearheaded Averell’s force from New Creek, West Virginia, located not far from Cumberland, Maryland. The Union general added firepower to the Jessie Scouts’ arsenal, as he wrote, “The head of my column was preceded by vigilant scouts, armed with repeating rifles, mounted upon fleet horses, who permitted no one to go ahead of them.”3
Bone-chilling wind and sleet pelted Rowand and his partner for several hours as they rode toward a creek in the middle of nowhere in West Virginia. Averell had assigned the two Jessie Scouts to conduct a reconnaissance of the area and locate any enemy troops that could impede the unfolding Federal raid. About six miles from the creek, a swarm of Confederate bullets answered the question. Lead tore into Rowand’s horse, killing it; other bullets slew his partner riding next to him. Evading the Confederates, Rowand escaped on foot and ran back toward Averell’s advancing raiding force. The incident was one of the countless that epitomized the hazardous duty of scouting. Back with the main force, the Jessie Scout made a full report of what transpired to one of Averell’s staff officers, found a new horse, and readied himself for another mission.
The precious tactical intelligence furnished by the Scouts became the lifeblood on which crucial decisions flowed. When a raiding force moved behind the lines, it could be ambushed, flanked, or cut off by the Confederates at any time. For some reason, however, Averell initially believed Rowand had submitted an incorrect report of what transpired. With lives at stake, there was no room for error, and the enraged general ordered the West Virginian mustered out of the Jessie Scouts and back to his regiment.
When summoned in front of the general to explain himself, Rowand did not stand down and “wouldn’t have it that way.” He informed the general of what had happened and that the staff officer to whom he reported had mixed up some facts. Coolly, he told Averell, “The best evidence is you will find my dead horse there and find my partner’s body.”4 Another Scout who witnessed Rowand’s initial report was brought forward and cleared up the matter. Rowand then told Averell that if he wanted to retain him as a Scout, he would only report to the general in command directly—it would be how Rowand operated for the rest of the war. The following day, Rowand’s dead horse and his partner’s body were found where Rowand had said they would be.
With the incident behind him, Rowand, White, and the other Jessie Scouts probed deeper in front of Averell’s men, sometimes dispatching unsuspecting Rebels or capturing them. Despite Rowand’s ambush, the Confederates did not know the full extent or whereabouts of Averell’s raiding force. Near the summit of Sweet Springs Mountain in West Virginia, the Jessie Scouts captured a Rebel quartermaster who assured Averell “our advance was unknown yet to the enemy.”5
The muddy mountain trails and swollen streams proved impassable for the supply train, which could go no farther in these conditions. Many of the horses were poorly shod. Supply troops issued rations, forage, and ammunition to the men, and only the able bodied and well mounted pushed forward. To avoid detection, the Scouts led Averell’s troops through the mountainous terrain. At the top of a mountain, “a sublime spectacle was presented to us. Seventy miles to the eastward the Peaks of Otter reared their summits above the Blue Ridge, and all the space between was filled with a billowing ocean of hills and mountains, while behind us the great Alleghenies, coming from the north with the grandeur of innumerable tints, swept past and faded in the southern horizon,”6 Averell wrote. Hours earlier, the Union general had received word that Scammon, and Blazer’s Scouts, had entered Lewisburg.
In the vanguard of Scammons’ force, over a dozen of Blazer’s men incorporated the tactics of the Jessie Scouts and wore Confederate uniforms to gain an advantage on their adversaries and pass in and out of Confederate lines. Several of Blazer’s men had served in Milroy’s Jessie Scouts before joining Blazer, bringing with them the Jessie Scouts’ tradecraft and tactics.7 Being a Scout required “the coolest courage, and the clearest head and quickest wit. He passes the enemy’s lines, sits at his campfire, penetrates even the presences of the commanding General,”8 recalled one contemporary historian. Each operation honed the Scouts’ experience and tactics as the unit continued to evolve.
Despite their stealth and guile, Blazer’s men soon found themselves in a full-blown skirmish with Philip Thurmond’s guerrillas on Big Sewell Mountain. After the skirmish, the Rebel partisans realized that Blazer’s men were just the tip of a larger spear and quickly melted away. Thurmond reported back to John Echols that a large Union force was advancing on Lewisburg. Echols wisely decided not to contest them directly.
After Blazer’s Scouts took the town, a Union report recorded that on December 14, they “reached Lewisburg Saturday, 2 P.M. Duffié in advance with Lieutenant Blazer’s Company, Ninety-first. Twelfth and Ninety-first skirmishing in the front. Hayes was with the Fifth West Virginia, a part of the Twenty-third, and [Carr B.] White, with the Twelfth and the Ninety-first, and two sections of the artillery, following. Enemy’s scouts [Thurmond’s Rangers] assailed our skirmishers [Blazer] on Big Sewell and kept it up from point to point to Greenbrier River, with few casualties.”9
No longer a Scout but now in command of Company A of the 12th Ohio, Lieutenant Otis also clashed with Thurmond on December 14, 1863, at Blue Sulphur Road near Meadow Bluff, West Virginia. “[I] discovered Rebels lurking in the woods in the rear of my post. I immediately made preparations to receive them, and the post was at once attacked by what afterward proved to be Thurmond’s guerrillas, who fired from the cover of trees and bushes, killing 2 and wounding 4 of my command. I promptly returned the fire and very soon drove the Rebels. They retreated through the woods out of sight, leaving behind 1 killed and 1 wounded.”10 Despite the matter-of-fact nature of his report, Otis barely escaped with his life. Several men in his company deserted in the middle of the firefight.
Averell’s plan started to unravel. With reports flowing in from men like Otis, General Scammon, fearing that his rear was being overwhelmed by sizable Confederate forces and Thurmond’s Rangers, quickly left Lewisburg. Scammon was supposed to hold Lewisburg and keep the Confederates distracted and pinned down while he waited for Moore’s forces, who also turned back upon finding that Scammon had retreated. Instead of focusing on Scammon, Echols and other Southern troops could now concentrate on the real threat: Averell’s raiders.
Scammon’s retreat through the mountains turned into pure misery, Otis recalled: “While crossing Little and Big Sewell Mountains, a blinding snowstorm drove into the faces of the troops, and a piercing cold wind chilled the very marrow of our bones. We bivouacked in the snow on the summit of Big Sewell Mountain, spending a miserable, sleepless night.”11
After resting his horses and men, Averell received a dispatch telling him Scammon had abandoned Lewisburg. The dashing yet cautious New Yorker nonetheless ordered his men to mount up and put his plan back in motion. With the Jessie Scouts up front, Averell’s force rode and marched through rough terrain. Weather made the operation even more treacherous. “This raid was to be attempted in Midwinter, with all the chances of mountainous storms, frosts and snow, as well as swelling floods, against us,” wrote Captain J. M. Rife of the 7th West Virginia Cavalry. In the midst of their journey through the sparsely inhabited, dense wilderness, the men suddenly saw signs of civilization: a light from a cabin window shone through the trees. Rife approached, tied up his horse, and entered the cabin, finding a couple and several children by the end of their bed. After the soldier identified himself as a Yankee, the man “looked at me to his heart’s content,” then asked, “Stranger, whar is your horns?” The woman then responded, “Didn’t I tell ye they’re human critters like the rest of us.” When the officer asked who told him Yankees had horns, he answered, “The men that came round making war speeches and recruiting for the Rebel army!”12
Advancing over the mountains, the Scouts later stumbled upon a wedding party. They surrounded the revelers, capturing all, including the bride and groom—a Confederate soldier named John Starks. After the ravenous Union soldiers inhaled the wedding feast, leaving only a small bottle of vinegar behind on the table, the force marched on, taking their prisoners of war with them. When she realized they were taking her groom, the bride insisted on going as well. “She fell into line and marched on and on, in the cold and rain and mud, keeping up with the command until we reached Salem,” while the young soldiers “annoy[ed] the poor bride by asking all sorts of questions.” Not to be outdone, the feisty bride “often fired back at them so vigorously that one shot would sometimes balance quite an account.” Remarkably, the raiders encountered yet another feisty Southern bride when they reached an “old-time Virginia hotel” in White Sulphur Springs. “She was credited with kicking a Yankee soldier down the steps of the house, while he was seeking admission to get a share of the good things usually provided for such occasions.”13
Dressed in butternut, the Jessie Scouts were able to capture enemy pickets and a Confederate dispatch rider with orders from Major General Samuel Jones, who was based in Staunton. This priceless information was thus never delivered to the telegraph operator, leaving the Confederates blind to the actual whereabouts of Averell’s force heading toward the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad depot in Salem, Virginia. By nightfall, however, the Confederates knew where he was headed. The railroad was in the “utmost danger.” General Jones sent a message to Richmond: “I cannot throw any of my force here in time to save it. You may be able to do so if you will send a force to check Averell on the railroad.”14
As the first rays of dawn stretched over the countryside, Jessie Scouts encountered their enemy counterparts, Confederate scouts attempting to find the whereabouts of Averell’s command. Bringing them as captives back to Averell, they learned that units commanded by Fitzhugh Lee were dispatched from Charlottesville and a train loaded with Confederate troops from Lynchburg was approaching Salem. The Union commander ordered 350 men and two three-inch guns to meet the threat.
Riding at breakneck speed, Averell’s advance troops rushed into Salem, cut the telegraph wires, tore up track near the depot, and set up guns to ambush the trainload of Confederate reinforcements. “A shot was fired at it from one of the guns, which missed; a second went through the train diagonally, which caused it to retire.” The engineer threw the train in reverse. “A third and last shot hastened its movements.” Around 10 a.m., the bulk of Averell’s forces now entered the town and went to work destroying the track and Confederate infrastructure. Groups of men were also sent miles up and down the rail line. They torched bridges and destroyed as much track as possible by removing the rails from the ties, creating massive bonfires, then placing the metal rails on top and attempting to twist them once they were heated. “Five bridges were burned, and the track torn up and destroyed as much as possible in six hours. The ‘yanks’ [hand levers] with which we had provided ourselves proved too weak to twist the rails, and efforts were made to bend them, by heating the centers, with but partial success.”15
Now well over a hundred miles behind enemy lines, and with the Confederates fully alerted, Averell later reported that six Confederate commands attempted to block his retreat north. Once again, the Jessie Scouts would help pull off a near-miraculous escape. At Averell’s request, the special operators found and hauled in a local doctor, Oscar Wylie, who knew the neighborhood from his rounds through the countryside and presented him to the general.
Averell employed both kind words and a gun in compelling the doctor to guide them. First, he appealed to Wylie’s pocketbook, offering him the hefty sum of $500 in gold and conveyance of his family to the North, knowing he would be condemned as a traitor for his service. Wylie flatly refused, prompting Averell to bring out his watch and informed the doctor he had “five minutes to choose between life and death.” After a tense ticking of the clock, the doctor succumbed. When asked later by a family friend if he would have shot* the doctor, Averell answered, “Indeed I would, madam.”16
After Wylie rendered his services to the Scouts, with Confederates still swarming the area hunting the Union raiders, the Jessie Scouts fortuitously found an obscure trail that allowed the command to march literally parallel to Mudwall Jackson’s troops without being detected. As the Jessie Scouts and Averell’s men raced toward the bridges at Covington, Virginia, that spanned the swollen, raging Jackson River, Confederate newspapers speculated as to the position of Averell’s command and opined that the rivers would be unpassable and that he would be severely punished for his temerity and one of the deepest raids in their territory.
Averell kept the campfires lit after they left as a ruse to throw off their pursuers as they continued their desperate ride through Confederate territory. He also sent a detachment of men off in another direction to deceive his enemy. The Confederates set several traps on the bridges in the area, the crucial chokepoints enabling life-and-death egress over the swollen rivers.
Reaching the Island Ford Bridge at Covington, the Jessie Scouts found it miraculously still intact but surrounded by a small party of Confederates prepared to torch the vital wooden structure. In an incredible stroke of luck, however, a single Rebel rider approached the bridge, and the Jessie Scouts asked him where he was going, to which he replied unsuspectingly, “I am going to Colonel Jackson with a dispatch from General Jones.”17 The intercepted dispatch contained the orders to destroy the bridge immediately. Upon reading it, Averell ordered his men to charge ahead. They moved forward carefully at first so as not to be detected, but as their enemies realized the situation, “what a clatter of hooves on the wooden floorboards, and how the horse crowded on the front line!” one Union officer recalled. “I looked for a plunge through the bridge into the waters of the furious stream, for I expected the floor would be torn up at the other end. Fortunately, the floor was all right, the bridge strong, and the enemy, under the command of Major Lady, very kind to give way so that we made a safe landing on solid ground and were in possession of the bridge.”18
Averell quickly marched his command across the bridge and waited for the baggage train carrying wounded men and prisoners of war, including the Confederate groom captured days earlier, along with their rear guard, the 14th Pennsylvania Cavalry Regiment, all of which lagged several miles behind. The Federal raiders had fought and marched over 150 miles through mountains in snow and rain, on foot, in the most rugged terrain in the United States. Somehow, they would have to traverse approximately the same distance and avoid the Confederates to the safety of a Union garrison. Thousands of Confederates desperately combed the area for Averell. “Not less than 12,000 men were maneuvered to effect my capture,”19 wrote the general in his official report. Not willing to risk his entire command, Averell made the heart-wrenching decision to sacrifice his rear guard and torched the bridge to prevent the Confederates from pursuing him.
When the 14th Pennsylvania and other members of the baggage train realized their situation, they burned their wagons, including their rations and other supplies, to lighten their burden. With thousands of Confederates bearing down on them, they feverishly searched for another place to ford the ice-filled swollen Jackson River. The Pennsylvanians pressed a local civilian into service, demanding he show them a suitable place to cross. The first mounted soldier who rode into the whitewater at the indicated point was immediately engulfed by the current and drowned. Furious at the treachery, the Union cavalry threw the local man into the river. He also succumbed to the raging water. At the point of a gun and under threat of torching her house, the Union soldiers compelled another civilian, a woman, to direct them to a crossing point two miles upstream.
In the meantime, a rider from Mudwall Jackson’s force under a white flag of truce approached the men with the message that they were surrounded and presented them with an opportunity to surrender. Word of the potential capitulation spread among the regiment and someone cried out, “The 14th Pennsylvania never surrenders!”20 The commander of the 14th officially responded, “I admit that I am surrounded by your superior forces … even under these circumstances … I will sacrifice my own life and that of every true and brave soldier under my command before I surrender to a coward and a traitor!”21 The Confederates tell a different story, that a lack of discipline on the part of Southern troops allowed the Yankees to escape: “[The 14th] regiment hoisted a white flag three times and yet escaped; that instead of gathering up [Union] stragglers the [Confederate] soldiers were running about plundering and gathering up property abandoned by the enemy, and that almost every crime has been perpetrated by the command from burglary down to rape.”22 The distracted Confederates bought the Pennsylvanians precious time to find a fording place. “It was a dismal scene.… Low laden clouds overhead; in front, a roaring swishing torrent, carrying drift-ice; behind, and for all we knew, on all sides of us, the human enemy.”23
“Volunteers!” Shouts went out for the first men to take the plunge.24 Several men entered the swirling icy water on their mounts. Struggling against the turbulent water, the first man and his horse made it across and received a cheer from the men still on the bank. The rest of the force followed. Several men were swept away by the current, including groom John Starks. Separated from Averell, the 14th Pennsylvania Cavalry and other stragglers made it to yet another bridge burned by Averell and thus had to ford another treacherous river. But without Confederate troops directly on their heels, the men crossed safely. Once the last stragglers in the 14th crossed at Covington, Confederate commands gave up the chase. In terrible shape, barefoot, suffering from frozen limbs and feet, starving, without sleep, and under constant duress from the threat of attack, they would have a long, exhausting march back to Beverly, West Virginia. In uniforms reduced to rags and often shoeless, the men were remarkably expected to replace their worn-out gear using personal funds. Averell defended his men and requested the miserly War Department furnish them with new kit. The department charitably, at least in the eyes of the government, acquiesced and made an exception to their policy.
The 400-mile march in twenty days, mostly in hostile Confederate territory, exacted a high human toll and decimated the men’s constitutions for decades after. Total casualties were 138, including 120 captured.25 Of the captured men, only a handful would survive the horrors and brutal conditions in Libby Prison and Andersonville. Confederate general Jones minimized the raid’s impact: “The railroad was rather improved than injured by the raid … as the few small bridges burned were in such condition that they were scarcely safe and would require rebuilding very soon.”26 In fact, the mission successfully destroyed countless supplies and shut down the vital supply artery for more than two weeks while the Confederacy struggled to repair it. Averell’s superiors deemed the raid a great success, “highly satisfactory and important cutting off [the Confederacy’s] most important line of communication.”27
Averell’s raid may well have contributed to breaking Longstreet’s siege of Knoxville, as it cut off, at least temporarily, a vital source of supply and egress. After the collapse at Missionary Ridge, Bragg ordered Longstreet to return to the Army of Tennessee, which had now retreated to Georgia. Longstreet demurred and replied that he would maintain the siege on Knoxville as long as possible to prevent Burnside and Grant from linking up and destroying the Army of Tennessee. After failing to break through Burnside’s lines at Knoxville with a major assault on one of the city’s forts, Longstreet, on December 4, 1863, abandoned his eighteen-day siege when Grant sent Sherman and a force of 25,000 to relieve the Union forces inside the city. With the Southern army retreating from Chattanooga, both sides held off on major operations during the winter of 1863–1864. However, unlike the conventional forces, Mosby’s Rangers would remain active that winter.
* In fact, the Confederates did brand the doctor who received the $500 in gold from Averell a traitor for his service to the Union. He faded from history after posting bail upon being arrested for murder in Charleston, West Virginia, following the war. He absconded from justice, failing to show up for his trial, and was never to be seen again.