Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 17, 2025
Here Willcox's line volleyed into them a destructive fire, followed by a charge that swept them in confusion back along the road, where the men of the Kanawha division took up the attack and completed their rout. Willcox succeeded in getting a foothold on the further side of the open ground and driving off the artillery which was there.
Within the district of the Kanawha I tried to avoid the difficulty by stringent orders that slaves should be kept out of the camps; but I declined to order the troops to arrest and return them. I had two little controversies on the subject, and in both of them I had to come in collision with Colonel Benjamin Smith.
Elliot burned his wagons and took to the hills with his men, cutting across the angle between the Gauley and the Kanawha and joining Gilbert's column near Cannelton. A smaller detachment, only a little way up the Gauley, was also left to its fate in the precipitate retreat, and it also took to the hills and woods and succeeded in evading the enemy.
I went with Mooney on a scout up Coal River and we found Indian signs four miles from camp. Other scouts were sent down the Kanawha and up the Elk. On returning, I found Cousin impatiently waiting for me to come in. He had changed and his bearing puzzled me. He was given to laughing loudly at the horse-play of the men, yet his eyes never laughed.
'Very good! or is it 'Good, good!" He felt himself growing incoherent, pulled himself sharply together, and with his one hand thrust the paper into his breast pocket. "It's all right, Stafford. Major Cleave, the Army of the Kanawha welcomes you. Will you stay with us to-night, or have you fifty miles to make ere dawn?" Cleave, it appeared, had not fifty miles to make, but four.
The incident between Reno and Hayes occurred in the camp of the latter, and could not possibly be known to the author of the regimental history but by hearsay. Yet he affirms as a fact that the Kanawha division "plundered the country unmercifully," for which Reno "took Lieutenant-Colonel Hayes severely though justly to task."
McClellan is in accord with all other witnesses in declaring that when the movement began, the conduct of the troops was gallant beyond criticism. Willcox's division formed the right, Christ's brigade being north, and Welsh's brigade south of the road leading from the bridge to Sharpsburg. Crook's brigade of the Kanawha division supported Willcox.
The Kanawha division took the advance of the right wing when we left Leesboro on the 8th, and marched to Brookville. On the 9th it reached Goshen, where it lay on the 10th, and on the 11th reached Ridgeville on the railroad. The rest of the Ninth Corps was an easy march behind us.
Just now, however, the conditions existing in the Shenandoah Valley and along the upper Potomac demanded the special attention of General Grant, for, notwithstanding the successful march that Major-General David Hunter had made toward Lynchburg early in the summer, what he had first gained was subsequently lost by strategical mistakes, that culminated in disaster during the retreat he was obliged to make from the vicinity of Lynchburg to the Kanawha Valley.
On the 5th of October the condition of the Kanawha valley had become such that Rosecrans felt compelled to withdraw his forces to the vicinity of Gauley Bridge. The freshet had been an extraordinary one.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking