By Stephen Smoot
It was a February much like the winter seen this year. Bitter cold settled over the land. Ground and streams both froze solid in temperatures that ranged at times not just below freezing, but below zero.
The winter of 1865 brought more than cold. For partisans of the Confederate States, it brought also discontent. The dream of Southern independence was dying slowly, wounded first by European unwillingness to challenge the United States, then by the gradual attrition of Southern men, materials, and will to fight, and finally by the confident re-election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency.
Hardy County joined many southern and eastern counties in favoring the Confederacy. Regardless of what wartime votes for West Virginia statehood in Hardy might say, ties of family, business, and tradition bound her tightly to the destiny of the Commonwealth of Virginia, capital Richmond.
But that destiny’s time was about to expire.
Through much of the war, the Potomac Highlands of Virginia or West Virginia, depending on whom one asked, hosted a different type of war than most associate with the Civil War. The remote and broken landscape, thick forests, endless patrols punctuated by short, vicious firefights, the occasional terror inflicted on the civilian population, this looked more like later warfare in Vietnam or Afghanistan than the large set piece battles between large forces in relatively flat regions.
According to Simeon Miller Bright, whose 1951 article in the academic journal West Virginia History detailed the history of the unit, the subject of John Hanson McNeill and his famous Rangers “is always a welcome subject in the South Branch Valley or its vicinity” (although that did not at the time likely include Union leaning Petersburg and Grant County!)
The “brave, sharp-witted, kind-hearted” McNeill came into the world in 1815 at the tail end of the War of 1812. His father had emigrated from the difficult and demanding land of Scotland to raise his family in the difficult and demanding land of Western Virginia.
An enterprising character, McNeill established himself also in Kentucky, then Missouri as a prosperous farmer and trader. The running of the “Philippi Races,” the first land battle of the Civil War took place as McNeill first joined with Sterling Price’s forces trying to secure Missouri as a Confederate state. He and his son Jesse both suffered capture and imprisonment there.
Both the Confederate and United States failed to take care of prisoners of war in any humane fashion. For every Andersonville there was a Camp Chase. The McNeills received transfer to a decrepit and roughly run facility in St. Louis, which inspired their escape and flight to familiar surroundings in Hardy County.
Once there, on his own, he and his son raised a company, the former with the rank of Captain and the latter held that of lieutenant. Like the Union “Swamp Dragons” based in Mouth of Seneca, these units formed independently and fought ferociously.
Until 1862, however, these units ran great risks. Union forces considered them “bushwhackers,” or little better than organized criminals, and treated them as such. Capture could, and often did, lead to summary execution in the field. In 1862, the Confederate Congress did such units and themselves a favor by bringing them officially into the Army fold as “Partisan Ranger Units” subject to both the discipline and protection of officially being part of the Confederate and Virginia armed forces.
One of the chief tasks regularly assigned to McNeill’s group was to help secure food and horses for Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Thousands of cattle, horses, and other livestock taken by hook or by crook from the Potomac Highlands helped primary forces in Virginia to both eat and travel.
In 1863, they served another role by accompanying larger Confederate forces on successful raids against Petersburg or Union occupied Romney. They also continually targeted the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the most convenient and efficient route connecting the northeastern and Midwestern states, carrying materials and troops back and forth for the Union cause as needed.
The next year saw them engaged in more actions, raising their profile and reputation as a force to be respected and feared in the region.
Attrition took its toll on the South. The Union had a higher population and still enjoyed heavy immigration that helped to keep the army at full strength. Industrial capacity expanded significantly. Confederate forces relied increasingly on middle aged men and teenagers, industrial capacity diminished as key areas fell to the Federals, and destruction of transportation could not be continually repaired.
In late 1864, all understood the Confederate States would lose the war. By 1865, it was just a matter of when.
On January 1, 1865, the Army of Northern Virginia clung to life facing Ulysses S. Grant and George Meade’s Army of the Potomac as it slowly extended to surround the national capital and surrounding cities. The McNeill Rangers’ efforts on their behalf had denuded Union leaning farms in the South Branch watershed of any supplies.
The Rangers themselves had taken heavy losses, not the least of which was John Hanson himself. He died in the same manner as a much more known Confederate and West Virginia hero, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, wounded mistakenly by his own men.
On February 22nd, 1864, the Rangers’ reputation evolved from “merely” a solid fighting unit with a number of successes to the architects of one of the most daring actions ever launched on American soil.
John Hanson McNeill for two years alternately joked and planned about an operation to capture Union generals at Cumberland. He mentioned, specifically, Benjamin Kelley and George Crook.
Kelley had ordered McNeill’s wife, a non combatant, arrested and sent to Ohio. Crook, widely renowned as the greatest United States Army commander in terms of irregular warfare, had garnered attention by leading the specially trained 36th Ohio throughout the eastern part of the state. Their training and talent lay in finding and annihilating Confederate partisans. Crook also admitted in his memoirs that he secretly started executing every Confederate captured, claiming he’d captured the same soldiers over and over that he had sent to Camp Chase.
The hard charging Crook even initiated a battle over a blackberry bush, stating with satisfaction in his memoirs that “we won the battle.”
In February of 1865, the cadre of commanders at Cumberland also included the gentlemanly Rutherford B. Hayes. He punished his own men in 1861 for burning courthouse records in Confederate leaning counties because it would harm civilians.
The bitterly cold night of February 21st found the generals sleeping in vastly different conditions. Hayes followed the example of George Washington at Valley Forge and slept in a simple tent like the men he commanded.
Crook and Kelley, however, bedded down in a lightly guarded hotel in Cumberland, unlike Hayes, not surrounded by thousands of troops.
Hayes reported the next day “Captain McNeal (sic) and fifty or so of his band kidnapped Generals Kelley and Crook from their hotel on Baltimore Street. Daring and well executed. They inquired for me, but learning that I quartered in camp did not look further.”
Kelley was at the St. Nicholas Hotel and Crook the Revere. Another source states that Kelley stayed at the Barnum House.
Hayes wrote to his wife and mother the next morning, assuring his wife that he slept a mile away in camp. He said “no special blame will attach to anyone, I suppose.” The future president speculated to his wife that “the only possible danger to General Crook is the chance of him attempting to escape – and failing.”
To his mother, Hayes said Crook was well-regarded and respected and should come to no harm. He had little to say about the somewhat abrasive Kelley, who was no relation to Ed Kelley, an honored World War II serviceman from Keyser.
Kelley, who commanded forces also from New Creek at times, suffered a wound early in the war that afflicted him the rest of his life and likely strained his general disposition.
Crook shared in his Autobiography that the Rangers “had relatives and sympathizers all through that country who kept them posted on everything that transpired within our lines.” He explained that they wore Confederate uniforms, but “represented themselves as Sherman’s scouts.”
They got past the initial level of security because, as Crook shared, “by threats they made the ignorant Dutchman who happened to be on picket gave them the countersign,” which provided the code needed to get past the rest of the light guard.
The Rangers headed out by “the shortest possible route.” As Bright describes, that brought them down Canal Street and across the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to Wiley Ford. When checked by sentries, the Rangers declared loudly that they were General Crook’s guard “and we have no time to waste!” Then they were “ordered” to stand down, which they did.
After crossing into what after the war became Mineral County, another sentry ordered a halt and demanded the countersign. A Ranger responded instead by saying “Oh, old Granny Kelley had a nightmare that the Rebs were about to come down on him. He is sending us out in this bitter weather to scout this side of the river.”
This rang true to the sentry, since Kelley often ordered out patrols.
Next they traveled to Romney, then from there upstream along the “little used” Trough Hollow Road to Moorefield.
The trip to their brief prison stay proved amiable to Crook and obnoxious to Kelley. The Rangers and Crook ganged up to make sport of the miserable Kelley through much of the trip. Two weeks later, an exchange brought both back to Union lines, not much worse for the wear.
McNeill’s Rangers spent 24 hours risking their life in terrible conditions to complete an expedition for a cause that was set to soon expire. But that action raised their stature from lofty to legendary with their exploits still shared up and down the South Branch Valley generations later.
