The report of the strength of the position attacked and our knowledge of the increasing difficulty of the ground before us, led me to conclude that the wisest course would be to await the arrival of the wagons, now daily expected, and then, with supplies for several days in hand, move independent of the steamers, which became only an embarrassment when it was advisable to leave the river road for the purpose of turning a fortified position like that we had found before us. We therefore rested quietly in our strong camp for several days, holding both banks of the river and preparing to move the main column by a country road leading away from the stream on the north side, and returning to it at Tyler Mountain, where Wise's camp was reported to be. I ordered up the First Kentucky from Ravenswood and Ripley, but its colonel found obstacles in his way, and did not join us till we reached Charleston the following week.
On the 23d of July I had succeeded in getting wagons and teams enough to supply the most necessary uses, and renewed the advance. We marched rapidly on the 24th by the circuitous route I have mentioned, leaving a regiment to protect the steamboats. The country was very broken and the roads very rough, but the enemy had no knowledge of our movement, and toward evening we again approached the river immediately in rear of their camp at Tyler Mountain. When we drove in their pickets, the force was panic-stricken and ran off, leaving their camp in confusion, and their supper which they were cooking but did not stop to eat. A little below the point where we reached the river, and on the other side, was the steamboat "Maffet" with a party of soldiers gathering the wheat which had been cut in the neighboring fields and was in the sheaf. I was for a moment doubtful whether it might not be one of our own boats which had ventured up the river under protection of the regiment left behind, and directed our skirmishers who were deployed along the edge of the water to hail the other side. "Who are you?" was shouted from both banks simultaneously. "United States troops," our men answered. "Hurrah for Jeff Davis!" shouted the others, and a rattling fire opened on both sides. A shell was sent from our cannon into the steamer, and the party upon her were immediately seen jumping ashore, having first set fire to her to prevent her falling into our hands. The enemy then moved away on that side, under cover of the trees which lined the river bank. Night was now falling, and, sending forward an advance-guard to follow up the force whose camp we had surprised, we bivouacked on the mountain side.
In the morning, as we were moving out at an early hour, we were met by the mayor and two or three prominent citizens of Charleston who came to surrender the town to us, Wise having hurriedly retreated during the night. He had done a very unnecessary piece of mischief before leaving, in partly cutting off the cables of a fine suspension bridge which spans the Elk River at Charleston. As this stream enters the Kanawha from the north and below the city, it may have seemed to him that it would delay our progress; but as a large number of empty coal barges were lying at the town, it took our company of mechanics, under Captain Lane of the Eleventh Ohio, but a little while to improvise a good floating bridge, and part of the command passed through the town and camped beyond it. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. li. pt. i. p. 425.] One day was now given to the establishment of a depot of supplies at Charleston and to the organization of regular communication by water with Gallipolis, and by wagons with such positions as we might occupy further up the river. Deputations of the townspeople were informed that it was not our policy to meddle with private persons who remained quietly at home, nor would we make any inquisition as to the personal opinions of those who attended strictly to their own business; but they were warned that any communication with the enemy would be remorselessly punished.
We were now able to get more accurate information about Wise's forces than we could obtain before, and this accorded pretty well with the strength which he reported officially. [Footnote: Ante, p. 63 note.] His infantry was therefore more than equal to the column under my command in the valley, whilst in artillery and in cavalry he was greatly superior. Our continued advance in the face of such opposition is sufficient evidence that the Confederate force was not well handled, for as the valley contracted and the hills crowded in closer to the river, nearly every mile offered positions in which small numbers could hold at bay an army. Our success in reaching Charleston was therefore good ground for being content with our progress, though I had to blame myself for errors in the management of my part of the campaign at Pocataligo. I ought not to have assumed as confidently as I did that the enemy was only five hundred strong at Scary Creek and that a detachment could dispose of that obstacle whilst the rest of the column prepared to advance on our principal line. Wise's force at that point was in fact double the number supposed. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. ii. p. 1011.] It is true it was very inconvenient to ferry any considerable body of troops back and forth across the river; but I should nevertheless have taken the bulk of my command to the left bank, and by occupying the enemy's attention at the mouth of Scary Creek, covered the movement of a sufficient force upon his flank by means of the fords farther up that stream. This would have resulted in the complete routing of the detachment, and it is nearly certain that I could have pushed on to Charleston at once, and could have waited there for the organization of my wagon train with the prestige of victory, instead of doing so at 'Poca' with the appearance of a check.
McClellan recognized the fact that he was asking me to face the enemy with no odds in my favor, and as soon as he heard that Wise was disposed to make a stand he directed me not to risk attacking him in front, but rather to await the result of his own movement toward the Upper Kanawha. [Footnote: Dispatches of July 16 and 20.] Rosecrans did the same when he assumed command; but I knew the hope had been that I would reach Gauley Bridge, and I was vexed that my movement should have the appearance of failing when I was conscious that we had not fairly measured our strength with my opponent. As soon, therefore, as the needful preparations could be made, I decided upon the turning movement which I have already described, and our resolute advance seems to have thrown Wise into a panic from which he did not recover till he got far beyond Gauley Bridge.
At Charleston I learned of the Bull Run disaster, and that McClellan had been ordered to Washington, leaving Rosecrans in command of our department. The latter sent me orders which implied that to reach Charleston was the most he could expect of me, and directing me to remain on the defensive if I should succeed in getting so far, whilst he should take up anew McClellan's plan of reaching the rear of Wise's army. [Footnote: Dispatches of July 26 and 29.] His dispatches, fortunately, did not reach me till I was close to Gauley Bridge and was sure of my ability to take possession of that defile, some forty miles above Charleston. An additional reason for my prompt advance was that the Twenty-first Ohio was not yet re-enlisted for the war, was only a "three months" regiment whose time was about to expire, and Governor Dennison had telegraphed me to send it back to Ohio. I left this regiment as a post-garrison at Charleston till it could be relieved by another, or till my success in reaching Gauley Bridge should enable me to send back a detachment for that post, and, on the 26th July, pushed forward with the rest of my column, which, now that the First Kentucky had joined me, consisted of four regiments. Our first night's encampment was about eleven miles above Charleston in a lovely nook between spurs of the hills. Here I was treated to a little surprise on the part of three of my subordinates which was an unexpected enlargement of my military experience. The camp had got nicely arranged for the night and supper was over, when these gentlemen waited upon me at my tent. The one who had shown the least capacity as commander of a regiment was spokesman, and informed me that after consultation they had concluded that it was foolhardy to follow the Confederates into the gorge we were travelling, and that unless I could show them satisfactory reasons for changing their opinion they would not lead their commands further into it. I dryly asked if he was quite sure he understood the nature of his communication. There was something probably in the tone of my question which was not altogether expected, and his companions began to look a little uneasy. He then protested that none of them meant any disrespect, but that as their military experience was about as extensive as my own, they thought I ought to make no movements but on consultation with them and by their consent. The others seemed to be better pleased with this way of putting it, and signified assent. My answer was that their conduct very plainly showed their own lack both of military experience and elementary military knowledge, and that this ignorance was the only thing which could palliate their action. Whether they meant it or not, their action was mutinous. The responsibility for the movement of the army was with me, and whilst I should be inclined to confer very freely with my principal subordinates and explain my purposes, I should call no councils of war, and submit nothing to vote till I felt incompetent to decide for myself. If they apologized for their conduct and showed earnestness in military obedience to orders, what they had now said would be overlooked, but on any recurrence of cause for complaint I should enforce my power by the arrest of the offender at once. I dismissed them with this, and immediately sent out the formal orders through my adjutant-general to march early next morning. Before they slept one of the three had come to me with earnest apology for his part in the matter, and a short time made them all as subordinate as I could wish. The incident could not have occurred in the brigade which had been under my command at Camp Dennison, and was a not unnatural result of the sudden assembling of inexperienced men under a brigade commander of whom they knew nothing except that at the beginning of the war he was a civilian like themselves. These very men afterward became devoted followers, and some of them life-long friends. It was part of their military education as well as mine. If I had been noisy and blustering in my intercourse with them at the beginning, and had done what seemed to be regarded as the "regulation" amount of cursing and swearing, they would probably have given me credit for military aptitude at least; but a systematic adherence to a quiet and undemonstrative manner evidently told against me, at first, in their opinion. Through my army life I met more or less of the same conduct when assigned to a new command; but when men learned that discipline would be inevitably enforced, and that it was as necessary to obey a quiet order as one emphasized by expletives, and especially when they had been a little under fire, there was no more trouble. Indeed, I was impressed with the fact that after this acquaintance was once made, my chief embarrassment in discipline was that an intimation of dissatisfaction on my part would cause deeper chagrin and more evident pain than I intended or wished.
The same march enabled me to make the acquaintance of another army "institution,"--the newspaper correspondent. We were joined at Charleston by two men representing influential Eastern journals, who wished to know on what terms they could accompany the column. The answer was that the quartermaster would furnish them with a tent and transportation, and that their letters should be submitted to one of the staff, to protect us from the publication of facts which might aid the enemy. This seemed unsatisfactory, and they intimated that they expected to be taken into my mess and to be announced as volunteer aides with military rank. They were told that military position or rank could only be given by authority much higher than mine, and that they could be more honestly independent if free from personal obligation and from temptation to repay favors with flattery. My only purpose was to put the matter upon the foundation of public right and of mutual self-respect. The day before we reached Gauley Bridge they opened the subject again to Captain McElroy, my adjutant-general, but were informed that I had decided it upon a principle by which I meant to abide. Their reply was, "Very well; General Cox thinks he can get along without us, and we will show him. We will write him down."
They left the camp the same evening, and wrote letters to their papers describing the army as demoralized, drunken, and without discipline, in a state of insubordination, and the commander as totally incompetent. As to the troops, more baseless slander was never uttered. Their march had been orderly. No wilful injury had been done to private property, and no case of personal violence to any non-combatant, man or woman, had been even charged. Yet the printing of such communications in widely read journals was likely to be as damaging as if it all were true. My nomination as Brigadier-General of U. S. Volunteers was then before the Senate for confirmation, and "the pen" would probably have proved "mightier than the sword" but for McClellan's knowledge of the nature of the task we had accomplished, as he was then in the flood-tide of power at Washington, and expressed his satisfaction at the performance of our part of the campaign which he had planned. By good fortune also, the injurious letters were printed at the same time with the telegraphic news of our occupation of Gauley Bridge and the retreat of the enemy out of the valley. [Footnote: As one of these correspondents became a writer of history, it is made proper to say that he was Mr. William Swinton, of whom General Grant has occasion to speak in his "Personal Memoirs" (vol. ii. p. 144), and whose facility in changing his point of view in historical writing was shown in his "McClellan's Military Career Reviewed and Exposed," which was published in 1864 by the Union Congressional Committee (first appearing in the "New York Times" of February, March, and April of that year), when compared with his "History of the Army of the Potomac" which appeared two years later. Burnside accused him of repeated instances of malicious libel of his command in June, 1864. Official Records, vol. xxxvi. pt. iii. p. 751.] I was, however, deeply convinced that my position was the right one, and never changed my rule of conduct in the matter. The relations of newspaper correspondents to general officers of the army became one of the crying scandals and notorious causes of intrigue and demoralization. It was a subject almost impossible to settle satisfactorily; but whoever gained or lost by cultivating this means of reputation, it is a satisfaction to have adhered throughout the war to the rule I first adopted and announced.
Wise made no resolute effort to oppose my march after I left Charleston, and contented himself with delaying us by his rear-guard, which obstructed the road by felling trees into it and by skirmishing with my head of column. We however advanced at the rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, reaching Gauley Bridge on the morning of the 29th of July. Here we captured some fifteen hundred stands of arms and a considerable store of munitions which the Confederate general had not been able to carry away or destroy. It is safe to say that in the wild defile which we had threaded for the last twenty miles there were as many positions as there were miles in which he could easily have delayed my advance a day or two, forcing me to turn his flank by the most difficult mountain climbing, and where indeed, with forces so nearly equal, my progress should have been permanently barred. At Gauley Bridge he burned the structure which gave name to the place, and which had been a series of substantial wooden trusses resting upon heavy stone piers. My orders definitively limited me to the point we had now reached in my advance, and I therefore sent forward only a detachment to follow the enemy and keep up his precipitate retreat. Wise did not stop till he reached Greenbrier and the White Sulphur Springs, and there was abundant evidence that he regarded his movement as a final abandonment of this part of West Virginia. [Footnote: Floyd's Dispatches, Official Records, vol. li. pt. ii. pp. 208, 213.] A few weeks later General Lee came in person with reinforcements over the mountains and began a new campaign; but until the 20th of August we were undisturbed except by a petty guerilla warfare.
McClellan telegraphed from Washington his congratulations, [Footnote: Dispatch of August 1.] and Rosecrans expressed his satisfaction also in terms which assured me that we had done more than had been expected of us. [Footnote: Dispatch of July 31.] The good effect upon the command was also very apparent; for our success not only justified the policy of a determined advance, but the officers who had been timid as to results were now glad to get their share of the credit, and to make amends for their insubordination by a hearty change in bearing and conduct. My term of service as a brigadier of the Ohio forces in the three months' enrolment had now ended, and until the Senate should confirm my appointment as a United States officer there was some doubt as to my right to continue in command. My embarrassment in this regard was very pleasantly removed by a dispatch from General Rosecrans in which he conveyed the request of Lieutenant-General Scott and of himself that I should remain in charge of the Kanawha column. It was only a week, however, before notice of the confirmation was received, and dropping all thoughts of returning home, I prepared my mind for continuous active duty till the war should end.