“The ‘Milk and Water’ Policy…Is To Be Abandoned”: The Battle of Lewisburg, the Yankee, and Hard War in Western Virginia
/This post is the latest in Zac Cowsert’s series “The Civil War in the Press,” which explores the interactions between soldiers and civilians, politics and the press throughout the Civil War. You can read other posts in the series here.
In late May 1862, United States soldiers of the 44th Ohio Infantry occupied the abandoned offices of the Greenbrier Weekly Era in Lewisburg, western Virginia. Having recently emerged victorious in the Battle of Lewisburg and perhaps faced with the boredom of occupation, the soldiers set about publishing a newspaper they christened the Yankee. Though the Federals only managed to print a single issue before evacuating the town, the Yankee’s four pages reveal the hardening attitudes of Federal soldiers and the arrival of “hard war” in 1862 western Virginia.
In the spring of 1862, the United States army advanced into the valleys and narrows of southwestern Virginia. Their goal was to drive back scattered Confederate outfits in the region and ultimately strike at the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, a vital east-west Confederate supply line. As part of this multi-prong advance, Colonel George Crook was ordered to advance and secure Lewisburg, a cozy town of 700 residents nestled in the Greenbrier Valley and sitting astride the James River and Kanawha Turnpike. After brief skirmishing, Crook’s columns entered and occupied Lewisburg on May 15, 1862. As Private John McKee of the 44th Ohio admitted to his brother: “[Lewisburg] is the nicest town for the size I have seen in this state.”
The 44th Ohio Infantry, along with accompanying 36th Ohio Infantry, formed the backbone of Colonel Crook’s small force, which totaled 1,600 men. Both Ohio regiments had been raised in the summer of 1861, and both were quickly deployed to western Virginia. A strategic borderland with a divided populace, securing western Virginia was an early goal of Abraham Lincoln’s administration and the U.S. military. By the spring of 1862, the men of the 44th Ohio knew well the divided sentiments of western Virginia’s populace, having skirmished with secessionist bushwhackers, endured the scorn of secessionist women (“a woman’s tongue is generally at liberty to wag at its own discretion,” lamented Private McKee), and encountered small pockets of Unionism in their travels.
Left: C.S. General Henry Heth Right: U.S. GEneral George Crook
Local Confederate authorities refused to the let the occupation of Lewisburg go unchallenged. General Henry Heth commanded 2,300 Virginian troops in the area, primarily infantry, but with a few hundred cavalry and several artillery batteries. Included among Heth’s force was the 22nd Virginia Infantry, commanded by Colonel George S. Patton (grandfather to the famed WWII commander). Believing Crook’s force to be undersized and ill-prepared for an assault, General Heth advanced towards Lewisburg on the 22nd and arrived to give battle on the morning of May 23. “My chance of success was good, provided I could surprise the enemy and get into position,” Heth later recalled. “This I succeeded in doing far beyond my expectation.”
Around 5 a.m. on May 23, Heth’s men overran the Union picket line on a hill just east of town. Having seized a piece of high ground, Confederate artillery (somewhere between six and eight guns) opened upon the Union camp (just west of town) and Lewisburg itself. As Private George Hechler of the 36th Ohio later wrote to his sister, “They now commenced a furious cannonading, with one and then increased to eight pieces of artillery. They did some wild shooting. Before commencing to bombard us, they had raised a shout, calling: ‘Lewisburg is ours!’”
Although they had indeed seized the element of surprise, Confederate celebrations proved premature. The Federals reacted calmly and swiftly to the sudden arrival of the enemy. Days later, Private McKee “wondered” at he and his comrades’ coolness: “They commenced throwing bombs at us while we were eating and I set my tin of coffee in my bunk, got my gun and then tied my shoestrings tighter, took a look at my cartridges to see they were all right and was then ready to start.”
Not only did the Federal rank and file react coolly, but so too did their commanding officers. Colonel Crook calmly arranged his men into a line of battle on the edge of town. Despite being outnumbered, Colonel Crook ordered his men to advance. While a few brave companies opened a “very severe fire” on the Confederate center, the 36th Ohio drove towards the Confederates’ right flank and the 44th Ohio advanced on the Confederates’ left.
The Battle Flag of the 44th Ohio Infantry; Note the Lewisburg battle honor in the bottom center
As the Federals bravely advanced on the Confederate position, the enemy opened fire. “We drove them back,” reported Colonel Crook, “they disputing every inch of ground until we gained the top of the hill, when they fled in great confusion, utterly demoralized.” As the Federals seized the Confederates’ position and overran four of their guns, the Confederate line broke into a rout. Indeed, the suddenness of the Rebels’ retreat seems to have stunned everybody. Private Hechler of the 36th noted, “the enemy fled in confusion and in every direction.” Private McKee of the 44th wrote, “When the rebels found that we had silenced all their pieces, they commenced to waver and soon they were in full retreat.” Virtually every Union report commented on the large quantity of blankets, weapons, accoutrements, and supplies abandoned by the frightened Confederates. Nearly at a loss to explain the disaster, General Henry Heth could only report, “One of those causeless panics for which there is no accounting seized upon my command. Victory was in my grasp, instead of which I have to admit a most disgraceful retreat.”
In the wake of the battle, the several companies of the 44th Ohio carefully probed after the retreating Confederates, but the Rebels crossed the Greenbrier River and burned the bridge behind them. With only a small force on hand and the enemy already retreating beyond the Greenbrier, Colonel Crook elected not to pursue the broken foe. Still, the Federal army enjoyed a decisive victory at the Battle of Lewisburg. Union casualties numbered 13 killed, 53 wounded, and seven missing, while Confederate forces suffered 38 killed, 66 wounded, and perhaps 100 prisoners taken. Moreover, the Federals were left to collect the battlefield bounty abandoned by the Confederacy, including 300 small arms and four pieces of artillery. As the soldiers of the 44th Ohio encamped on the battlefield that evening, they discovered “several large [newspaper] type…which had been originally the filling of shells.” It proved a prescient find.
In the days following the battle, the victorious Federals settled back down into their camps about Lewisburg. Though excitement from the recent battle lingered, so too arrived the tedium of occupation and camp life. A handful of soldiers from the 44th Ohio escaped their doldrums by confiscating the press of the former Greenbrier Weekly Era. The Weekly Era had been a firmly secessionist organ. Adam Snyder, the Era’s editor, left the paper in to enlist in the 27th Virginia Infantry. In its final issue published in May 1861, the Era thundered, “The justice of our cause ensures our success...Abe Lincoln, his diabolical advisers and sycophants will enjoy the superlative torments of a special and intense hell.”
Now, a year later, Ohio soldiers reveled in using the Era’s press to publish their own paper on May 29—the Yankee. As they joked, “We beg the numerous subscribers of the Greenbrier Weekly Era—lately defunct—not to come in and pay their subscriptions. Our Quartermasters would be unable to furnish sufficient transportation to haul away the Confederacy scrip which we would thereby receive; besides, waste paper is not in demand in Ohio.”
It’s unclear exactly who edited and printed the Yankee. In the paper’s masthead, the editors are simply listed as “Watt, Frye, Oldham, Skyes, and Raymond,” and several men by those last names enlisted in the 44th Ohio Infantry. What the editors did make clear, however, is that they did not consider themselves “yankees” (a term they likely associated with men from New England). “It would be impossible, however,” the editors lamented, “to convince the denizens of this delightful valley, that we are not yankees; so we assume the name, and thus avoid controversy.” Thus, they embraced the Yankee as their title and submitted it “as a candidate for newspaperial renown” to local citizens and fellow Union soldiers alike, catering its content to both audiences. The paper’s contents made clear the United States army’s growing intolerance of secessionist sympathizers.
The Yankee MAsthead
Federal soldiers were simultaneously struck by the beauty of their surroundings and the horrid secessionist politics that clouded the region. Lewisburg and Greenbrier County were decidedly pro-Confederate. The county voted for secession by a wide margin of 1,016 in favor to 110 against in 1861. Publishing anonymously in the Yankee, an officer in the 36th Ohio opined: “The immediate surroundings of the village are fine, but far finer is the more distant environment of the grand old mountains which wall it round. Who could believe,” the officer exclaimed,” that this is ‘the land of the traitor and the slave’?…Alas, ‘Satan beguiled them and they did eat,’ and now their paradise is trodden by martial hosts and the gore of their own sons slain on the battlefield.”
Faced with secessionist citizenry, the Yankee attempted to convince the locals of the error of their ways. In an article entitled “Plain Talk,” the editors spoke directly to “the sympathizers with the rebel cause” and the hardening of Union sentiment against the Confederacy and its supporters:
“We are not sure but what Uncle Samuel…using a mild, persuasive policy, endeavoring by moral suasion to induce you to see the error of your ways and abandon them. If he has, we are afraid the benevolent old gentleman has only encouraged you in your evil doings, and that he will have to resort to hard measures…the ‘milk and water’ policy that was pursued last summer was found ineffectual and is to abandoned. A citizen who refuses to take the oath of allegiance to the United States government is an enemy of it, and we are here to suppress those enemies…It is a military necessity that you shall take sides. We feel sure that we are right, and that we shall prevail…We offer you the olive branch, and invite you to assist us in restoring order out of chaos. If you will not meet us in this, the consequences must rest with you.”
Unwilling to brook dissent any longer, the Ohioans advocated for harsher treatment of disloyal citizens. As historian Mark Grimsley noted in Hard Hand of War, by 1862 many Union soldiers increasingly disdained the “conciliatory” policies of the U.S. army towards secessionist sympathizers and instead called for pragmatic, harsher measures that would erode Confederate civilian morale. In calling for an end to the "milk and water policy” of 1861, the Ohio editors of the Yankee stand as an excellent example of the hardened attitudes Union soldiers embraced as the war dragged on.
Undoubtedly, when writing these words, the Ohioans were thinking of their fallen comrades, slain and wounded just days before on the outskirts of Lewisburg. They may well have been thinking of the numerous small skirmishes, ambushes, and assassinations endured by the 44th Ohio and other Union regiments at the hands of Confederate guerrillas and bushwhackers who haunted western Virginia by late 1861 and 1862. In the face of such resistance, they embraced hard war.
The Ohio editors may also have been thinking about 62-year-old widow Mrs. Phoebe Welsh. In the immediate aftermath of the battle on May 23, Mrs. Welsh received an unexpected visit from Abraham Strealey, her grandson by marriage. Strealey was a member of Company A, 22nd Virginia, and having just fought in the battle, he apparently slipped into Lewisburg to visit his in-laws and find clean clothing. While in Mrs. Welsh’s home, he saw a Union soldier walk past the window. The soldier was Private George Sherer of the 36th Ohio, recently wounded in the fighting. Perhaps unaware of the enemy’s wound, Strealey fatally shot Private Sherer. Having slain a perceived foe, Strealey hid in the rafters of a shed before making his escape.
Reports quickly circulated that wounded U.S. soldiers were being shot by Confederate sympathizers. And indeed, it’s unclear whether Strealey’s attack on George Sherer was the only such attack on Union soldiers in rear areas. Unwilling to countenance such ambushing, Crook took a hard stance. “I have instituted a search, and shall burn all the houses from which [there] was firing from and shall order a commission on those who are charged with firing, and if found guilty will execute them at once in the main street of this town as examples.” Mrs. Phoebe Welsh’s home was identified, and it was burned to the ground.
Union soldiers in General Crook’s army approved. Private James Haddow of the 36th wrote, “A fearful day of reckoning waits those guilty of such barbarism…The whole place should be destroyed as there are no Union people in it.” The Yankee’s editors, reporting on the sobering affair, likewise approved. “Enlightened usages of war require that all who fire on wounded men from houses, should be killed and their property committed to the flame.” Attacks such as the one on George Sherer contributed to Union soldiers’ perception of the enemy, at least guerrillas and bushwhackers, as “barbarians” and “savages” and thus deserving of harsh punishment.
The Yankee’s columns also reveal the evolving attitudes of Federal soldiers towards slavery. Early-war United States policy required U.S. soldiers to return runaway slaves to their enslavers. Yet as the Yankee lamented, “The people of the South have been taught by their leaders that the soldiers of the Northern army were a pack of ‘negro thieves and sympathizers.’ They have been told that the Government in Washington was not to maintain the Union, but to give freedom to the slaves.” This belief also extended to enslaved blacks, who viewed the Union army as possible liberators and an avenue to freedom. “The negroes themselves have been convinced, and even here, in this town of Lewisburg, they are continually coming into our camps, and asking to be taken to free States.”
The arrival of runaway slaves forced the editors of the Yankee to reassess their views on the issue:
“We are inclined to the opinion that the negroes had better stay where they are, and we despise an Abolitionist; but when a negro has been taught by his master that all he has to do in order to secure his freedom, is to get inside the lines of the Union army, we are in favor of permitting the consequences to be visited upon the head of such master. We will take no special pains to conciliate the people of the South by attempting to convince them that they have slandered us. They will probably soon come to their sense, and learn by sad experience to be truthful in all their statements.”
Once again, the views of the Yankee reflect a wider transformation among the Union army during the Civil War. Seizing an opportunity to gain their freedom, runaway slaves forced the issue of slavery center-stage. While many Union soldiers cared little for abolitionism, they also disdained returning slaves to their enslavers, especially since those enslavers constituted the backbone of the Confederacy. Over the course of the war, as a result of runaway slaves, many United States military officers and government officials came to see the wisdom in embracing the abolition of slavery as a powerful war measure. Runaway slaves and their impact on military policy and politics eventually led the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. To the Yankee’s editors, making Southern fears of slaves’ liberation a reality seemed prudent.
The Federal occupation of Lewisburg proved relatively brief. Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s successes in the Shenandoah Valley left Crook’s small force at Lewisburg exposed. On May 29, they very day the Yankee was published, United States abandoned Lewisburg and retreated westward. Without a press, the Yankee ceased publication after only a single issue. Yet that issue reveals much about the growing hostility of United States’ soldiers towards pro-secession Southerners and slavery.
A Civil War historian, Dr. Zac Cowsert holds a PhD in history from West Virginia University, where he also received his master's degree. He earned his bachelor's degree in history and political science from Centenary College of Louisiana in Shreveport. Zac’s dissertation explored the American Civil War in Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma), and his research interests include the Civil War Trans-Mississippi, Southern Unionism, and the interactions between Civil War armies and newspaper presses. ©
Sources & Further Reading
The Yankee. [Lewisburg, WV].
Richard L. Armstrong. The Battle of Lewisburg, May 23, 1862. Charleston, WV: 35th Star Publishing, 2007.
J.W. Benjamin. “‘The Yankee Printed in Lewisburg in 1862.” Journal of the Greenbrier Historical Society. 1968.
---. “Gray Forces Defeated in Battle of Lewisburg.” West Virginia History 20, no. 1 (October 1958): 24-35. Web. http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh20-1.html
Mark Grimsley. The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Ken Hechler, ed. Soldier of the Union: Private George Hechler’s Civil War Service. Charleston, WV: Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., 2011.
James R. James, ed. To See the Elephant: The Civil War Letters of John A. McKee, 1861-1865. Leawood, KS: Leathers Publishing, 1998.
Tim McKinney. The Civil War in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. Charleston, WV: Quarrier Press, 2004.
Kenneth W. Noe. “Exterminating Savages: The Union Army and Mountain Guerrillas in Southern West Virginia, 1861-1862.” The Civil in Appalachia: Collected Essays. Edited by Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
Stewart Plein. “The War in Words: Union and Confederate Civil War Military Camp Newspapers in Western Virginia.” Smithfield Review. Vol. 24. Web. https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/smithfieldreview/v23/
Donald C. Simmons, Jr. “The Battle of Lewisburg.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. November 1, 2013. Web. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1371