By 1863, the Civil War that immersed Archibald Rowand, James White, and the other Jessie Scouts had entered its third winter. The hope for a short war envisioned at the beginning of 1861 seemed nowhere in sight, and the massive modern conflict had mushroomed into a constant clash of hundreds of thousands of troops on multiple fronts stretched across well over a thousand miles. Through scores of battles, the South proved remarkably resilient and, recently, once again, victorious at Fredericksburg.
The butcher’s bill of battles through the early months of 1863 had been immense, and the days of a flood tide of volunteer enlistments in the North were gone. Flagging support for the war forced the North first to pay bounties to encourage soldiers to enlist, and when that failed to secure adequate numbers of bodies to fill the ranks, the Federals would soon be forced to resort to a draft.
On the first day of 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”1 The proclamation fundamentally transformed the nature and tone of the war and its ideals, even though it was limited to enslaved individuals in the Confederacy and did not include Union border states where slavery remained legal. It would also enable hundreds of thousands of Black Americans to enlist in the Union Army and Navy.
The previous year, 1862, had brought bloody fighting and larger armies. In massive battles such as in Shiloh, Tennessee, the Confederacy had an opportunity to annihilate a western Federal army under the command of Ulysses S. Grant but failed. In the east, General George Brinton McClellan assumed command of the Union Army of the Potomac and became known as the great organizer as he whipped the Federal force into fighting shape. McClellan attempted to seize the Confederate capitol at Richmond during the Peninsula Campaign from March through July. Initial hopes that the campaign would capture Richmond and end the war led Union secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton to make one of the war’s great blunders. In April 1862, he suspended Federal recruiting efforts and sent volunteers and recruits who were about to enter the North’s armies home. About two months later, after bodies had piled up from the bloody battles, he reversed the bungled policy.
Major General George McClellan’s failure of the Peninsula Campaign led to the emergence of General Robert E. Lee as the leading Southern commander. At the Second Battle of Manassas, a Federal army nearly met its end and its retreat to Washington, DC, opened up a gateway in the Shenandoah Valley for an invasion of the North. Through a stroke of good fortune, the North captured a document wrapped around three cigars that outlined Lee’s invasion plans. Based on the document, McClellan molded his defensive plans and repulsed Lee’s army on September 17, 1862, at Antietam, Maryland, the bloodiest day in American history, when over 23,000 soldiers were killed or wounded, or went missing, during the course of the twelve-hour battle. Despite the horrific losses, because of McClellan’s lackluster pursuit, Lee successfully retreated across the Potomac.
During the fall of 1862, Lincoln authorized an unprecedented crackdown on civil liberties. He suspended habeas corpus and military trials for civilians who were accused of interfering in the war. Any US citizen could be thrown in prison for an accusation of disloyalty. The order read, “To arrest and imprison any person or persons who may be engaged by act, speech, or writing, in discouraging volunteer enlistments, or in any way giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or in any other disloyal practice against the United States.”2 The crackdown, combined with the military failures and horrendous loss of life and limb, bred growing dissatisfaction with the war and unrest in midwestern states. The midterm elections of 1862 were a rout for Republicans in key states: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana, all of whose electoral votes Lincoln won in the presidential election of 1860. Republicans held the Senate but saw their margins in the House drastically reduced.
After the midterm elections of 1862, Lincoln sacked McClellan. A variety of factors led to his dismissal. Weeks earlier, McClellan had brazenly outlined his vision of how the war should be conducted. In what would be dubbed the Harrison Landing Letter, McClellan emphasized the need for a limited war without abolishing slavery and for the appointment of a general-in-chief. Republican politicians saw a parallel to the Northern Democrats’ “Address to Democracy of the United States.” In their manifesto, they stated they “were opposed to waging war against any of the states or people of the Union for any purpose of conquest or subjugation or interfering with the rights of established institutions of any state.”3 “Established institutions” was the Democrats’ euphemism for slavery. McClellan pleaded with one powerful lawyer, “Help me dodge the n***er—we want nothing to do with him.”4 The general had contempt for the commander in chief, often calling Lincoln a “baboon” and “gorilla,” and was also partisan, unwisely stating to several Republican senators, “[I am] fighting for my country and the Union, not for abolition and the Republican Party.”5 For his insubordination, Stanton wanted Lincoln to fire McClellan immediately. Lincoln sensed that his dismissal before the midterms could cause a firestorm and shrewdly waited until after the elections.
The battlefield disasters continued for the North as Lee repulsed a Union offensive on Richmond at Fredericksburg in mid-December 1862. On Fredericksburg’s Marye’s Heights, Federal frontal assaults against an entrenched Confederate enemy behind stone walls proved futile and demonstrated the obsolescence of infantry assault tactics against a fixed position with rifled muskets and dug-in troops. Failure begat failure for the North’s armies. After the debacle at Fredericksburg, many Republicans blamed the disaster on Lincoln, and some demanded he resign. Reelection in 1864 seemed increasingly unlikely for the war’s most persistent advocate. Support for the conflict in the North waned to a new low—a stark contrast to the first year of the war.
A short war, over in weeks, was what both sides had envisioned in 1861. The battle of Bull Run at Manassas, Virginia, which led to the flight of the Union Army and threatened Washington, DC, quickly shattered any thoughts of a quick victory over the South. Over a month before the Confederate victory, some of the war’s first battles were fought in western Virginia, where McClellan repulsed and routed Confederate forces at Philippi, not far from Grafton and the vital Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The victory kept most of the northwestern portion of Virginia in Union hands. Other Union victories followed, setting up the conditions by which the new state of West Virginia would be admitted into the Union in June 1863. The Confederacy would contest the western portion of the state through conventional forces and raids on Union lines of communication. The South used the area as a buffer zone to protect their lines of communication and minerals such as salt and lead, vital to the Confederate war effort. In addition, a Southern-leaning population in the western part of Virginia made it fertile ground for guerrilla warfare.
Local Southerners ambushed Union forces in hit-and-run attacks. Channeling the American Revolution and Native American–style warfare, many mountain men aimed to protect their homes and attack the enemy, but in the guise of military combat, they often used violence to settle old scores. The irregular tactics proved successful in tying up large numbers of Union troops and keeping the western portion of Virginia contested. The Union presence in western Virginia would lead to the Partisan Ranger Act, authored by Colonel John Scott in March 1862 and passed by the Confederate Congress on April 21, in an attempt to rein in the guerrillas. The act allowed for the formation of companies, battalions, and regiments of partisan rangers for unconventional warfare. Partisan rangers would be subject to the same pay and regulations as regular soldiers but would operate independently, albeit with some oversight by the regular Confederate Army. These irregulars could also sell captured arms and munitions to Confederate quartermasters and receive full value. A grisly provision in the original act assigned a bounty for killing Union soldiers, but this politically toxic provision was dropped in the final bill.
A recruitment advertisement in the Richmond Examiner explained the nature of the warfare and the type of men wanted for service: to “wage thermoactive [sic] warfare against our brutal invaders and their domestic allies; to hang about their camp and shoot down every sentinel, picket, courier and wagon driver we can find; to watch opportunities for attacking convoys and forage trains, and thus rendering the country so unsafe that they will not dare to move except in large bodies. Our own Virginia traitors—men of the Pierpoint and Carlisle Stamp—will receive our special regards.… It is only men I want—men who will pull the trigger on a Yankee with as much alacrity as they would on a mad dog.”6
Discipline and leadership were keys to effective partisan units. But discipline proved elusive, and the Confederate partisans harmed civilians loyal to both sides. Lee expressed his frustration that “they have become an injury instead of benefit to the service, and even where this is accomplished, the system gives license to many deserters and marauders, who assume to belong to these authorized companies and commit depredations on friend and foe alike.”7 A debate between advocates of conventional and unconventional warfare raged for much of the war. Some Confederates considered irregular warfare ungentlemanly and a drain on manpower from conventional units—an argument that would surface for the next hundred years of American history. But discipline, leadership, and skill would evolve in ranger and irregular Southern units. Ultimately, covert, special operations would be used strategically in an attempt to alter the course of the war.
The Federal Jessie Scouts focused on tactical battlefield reconnaissance—scouting in front of the armies and gathering intelligence. They also concentrated on routing out Southern partisans. Learning and evolving as events unfolded, both North and South laid the groundwork for modern special operations forces.
One of the most innovative and pioneering of those units would be known as Mosby’s Rangers.