The Whartons' War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton, 1863–1865

By Peter S. Carmichael

Between March 1863 and July 1865, Confederate newlyweds Brigadier General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton wrote 524 letters, and all survived, unknown until now. Separated by twenty years in age and differing opinions on myriad subjects, these educated and articulate Confederates wrote frankly and perceptively on their Civil War world. Sharing opinions on generals and politicians, the course of the war, the fate of the Confederacy, life at home, and their wavering loyalties, the Whartons explored the shifting gender roles brought on by war, changing relations between slave owners and enslaved people, the challenges of life behind Confederate lines, the pain of familial loss, the definitions of duty and honor, and more.

Featuring one of the fullest known sets of correspondence by a high-level officer and his wife, this volume reveals the Whartons' wartime experience from their courtship in the spring of 1863 to June 1865, when Gabriel Wharton swore loyalty to the United States and accepted parole before returning home. William C. Davis and Sue Heth Bell's thoughtful editing guides readers into this world of experience and its ongoing historical relevance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469667713

Peter S. Carmichael

Peter S. Carmichael is the Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, and author of previous books, including The Last Generation.

Book preview

Cover: The Whartons’ War, THE CIVIL WAR CORRESPONDENCE OF by General Gabriel C. Wharton & Anne Radford Wharton

The Whartons’ War

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

The Whartons’ War

The Civil War Correspondence of

GENERAL GABRIEL C. WHARTON

& ANNE RADFORD WHARTON,

1863–1865

EDITED BY WILLIAM C. DAVIS & SUE HETH BELL

FOREWORD BY PETER S. CARMICHAEL

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

© 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Arnhem and Sentinel

by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wharton, Gabriel Colvin, 1824–1906, author. | Wharton, Anne Radford. Correspondence. Selections. | Wharton, Anne Radford, author. | Davis, William C., 1946– editor. | Bell, Sue Heth, editor. | Carmichael, Peter S., writer of foreword.

Title: The Whartons' war : the Civil War correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton, 1863–1865 / edited by William C. Davis and Sue Heth Bell ; foreword by Peter S. Carmichael.

Other titles: Civil War correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton, 1863–1865 | Civil War America (Series)

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2022. | Series: Civil War America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021054800 | ISBN 9781469667706 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469668291 (pbk. ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469667713 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Wharton, Gabriel Colvin, 1824–1906—Correspondence. | Wharton, Anne Radford—Correspondence. | Confederate States of America. Army—Officers—Correspondence. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives, Confederate. | Confederate States of America—Social conditions.

Classification: LCC E467.1.W48 A4 2022 | DDC 973.7/30130922—dc23/eng/20211129

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054800

Cover illustrations:

Left, Gabriel C. Wharton (courtesy of Sue Heth Bell); right, Anne Radford Wharton (courtesy of Glencoe Mansion, Museum and Gallery, Radford Heritage Foundation); background, Wharton letter (courtesy of Sue Heth Bell).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Preface

Introduction. Gabe and Nannie: 1824–March 1863

Chapter 1. Engagement: March 8–May 12, 1863

Chapter 2. Newlyweds: June 9–July 16, 1863

Chapter 3. Off to Join General Lee: July 20–28, 1863

Chapter 4. Nannie Sees Action: August 1–6, 1863

Chapter 5. Waiting for Lee: August 7–13, 1863

Chapter 6. A General at Last: August 17–September 26, 1863

Chapter 7. Stuck in East Tennessee: September 27–November 8, 1863

Chapter 8. Blountville Days: November 9–25, 1863

Chapter 9. Endless Tennessee: November 25–30, 1863

Chapter 10. Marching All Year and Doing Nothing: December 1–14, 1863

Chapter 11. Fed Up with General Jones: December 15, 1863–January 7, 1864

Chapter 12. Bull’s Gap: January 9–22, 1864

Chapter 13. Still at Bull’s Gap: January 23–31, 1864

Chapter 14. Farewell, General Jones: February 1–13, 1864

Chapter 15. The Hope of Spring: February 14–March 25, 1864

Chapter 16. Back to Old Virginia: March 27–April 10, 1864

Chapter 17. The Eve of Battle: April 13–May 4, 1864

Chapter 18. New Market: May 5–17, 1864

Chapter 19. Battles and a Baby: May 19–June 23, 1864

Chapter 20. Yankees in Commotion: June 29–August 10, 1864

Chapter 21. Glimmers of Hope: August 12–September 2, 1864

Chapter 22. Winchester to Fisher’s Hill: September 6–29, 1864

Chapter 23. Cedar Creek: September 30–October 22, 1864

Chapter 24. Disillusionment with Early: October 23–November 4, 1864

Chapter 25. Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?: November 4–24, 1864

Chapter 26. Winter of Discontent: November 26–December 23, 1864

Chapter 27. An End at Last: December 26, 1864–June 21, 1865

Epilogue. Aftermath: A Full, Rich Life

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Colonel Gabriel C. Wharton   9

Gabe in uniform as a colonel   12

Anne Rebecca Nannie Radford   13

Nannie’s father, John Blair Radford   14

Arnheim, the Radford family home   15

Elizabeth Campbell Taylor Radford   16

Nannie’s brother Lieutenant William Moseley Radford   18

William Washington’s portrait of Colonel Wharton   30

Nannie’s brother Lieutenant Colonel John Taylor Radford   322

William Radford Willie Wharton   359

Nannie and William Radford Willie Wharton   362

Glencoe, the house that Gabe built   363

Nannie in later years   368

Gabe in later years   374

Dedication of General Wharton’s memorial   380

FOREWORD

Letters from a couple in love can be tedious to read: long on sentiment and short on substance, full of obsessive longing but light on serious reflection. The words coming from happy loving couples—to take a phrase from a song by Joe Jackson—seemingly offer little to the historian. And yet today’s savvy readers can find embedded in romantic exchanges a range of deeper meanings, particularly if they consider what is unsaid alongside what is written, looking for the blind spots that kept the letter writers from seeing their own flaws as well as the flaws of the world they inhabited. Slaveholding couples such as Gabriel and Anne Wharton, whose letters are presented here, exemplify the particular challenges in deciphering written sources from privileged classes. Slaveholders, like all ruling classes, could be loving, sharply observant, insightful, but also vain, self-righteous, violent, and hopelessly insecure about losing their privileged status. Such traits seem especially odious among elites whose status depended on chattel slavery.

One might question the worthiness of studying white people who owned Black bodies, when they left a paper trail that today seems so inattentive to their culpability in the injustices of slavery. It is a reasonable reservation, but it should not keep us from exploring how historical actors lived, thought, and acted. As readers will discover in The Whartons’ War, Gabriel and Anne routinely fell short of their Christian aspirations as a couple in a number of realms. To render final judgment on the Whartons for their failings—whether as husband and wife, as Confederates, or as slaveholders—is not particularly revealing or useful. Instead, one would do well to focus on the ways nineteenth-century Virginians like the Whartons navigated the jarring contradictions between their high ideals and the ugly realities of daily life. This approach requires that we acknowledge the great distance and difference that separates us from people in the past. If we refuse to do so, we risk losing touch with valuable historical sources such as those presented here.

The correspondence between Gabriel and Anne Wharton offers a remarkable portal into a unique sensibility of the past. What is commonly understood as the foreignness of history is discoverable when empathy is shown for all historical actors. Empathy should not be confused with acceptance of the unacceptable or conflated with sympathy for the detestable. Empathy is about understanding how a life in the past, which seems morally incomprehensible and unjustifiable today, made sense to those who were living it then. The Wharton correspondence tells more than a love story. Their letters invite us into their homes, into their military camps, and, above all else, into their most intimate conversations. Their private expressions are not reducible to emotional flashes sparked by the heat of war. Feelings were cultivated, carefully considered within a cultural context, and put on paper with purposeful intent. When emotional etiquette relaxed during the war, women and men felt free to divulge their most intimate thoughts, and in some cases, they transgressed gendered boundaries that were inviolable before the war.

Anne wrote without fear to her husband, carefully using emotions associated with honor to influence his professional decisions. Knowing that Gabriel was always trying to win her love and respect, Anne felt free to use her leverage, reminding him that her future husband must be ambitious. Lacking the drive for acclaim, she believed, signified a lack of honor in a man. She dreamed of Gabriel Wharton winning battlefield laurels that would bring prestige to the entire household. When public recognition was slow in coming, Anne pressed Gabriel to pull the right political wires in Richmond for a promotion. At the end of one letter, penned on March 14, 1863, she delivered her marching orders: I secretly admire that delicacy & nobility of character wh prompts you to act so but alas it so materially interferes with the ruling passion of my life—Ambition—that I am almost tempted to condemn it & quarrel with you in good fashion.… You cannot intrigue for yourself—just remember you are doing it for me—& I know you will do anything in the world for me.

Gabriel did not chafe at Anne’s pointed words. In fact, her demands made her more desirable in his eyes. Anne’s purity and inherent goodness—traits that were seen as uniquely inherent to women—he believed he could feel when reading her letters. Gabriel put Anne on an altar, as a woman to be adored and admired; throughout the war, he looked to her as his inspiration to achieve greatness. I worship you, that all my ambition is centered in you, all that I have to be proud of in the wide world is my beautiful sweet precious little wife, he wrote. You are my all, my life, my whole existence. When with you all is right & bright. When separated I am looking forward to & pining for the time to come when I can have you on my knee again, have you in my arms & feel the pulsations of your pure heart against my own.

Anne was the foundation from which Gabriel Wharton built his sense of self as a man and as a Confederate soldier. Her letters gave him the confidence to realize his dreams, and he was routinely in need of encouragement. His career aspirations were stymied in the military backwater of Southwest Virginia, where he spent almost the entirety of his career. There were few battles but plenty of dreary expeditions into the mountains, where nature, not the enemy, was a soldier’s greatest nemesis. These assignments were career killers, and his stormy relationship with President Jefferson Davis did not help his cause for promotion. Opportunity eventually came in the summer of 1864, when Wharton had respectable showings at the battles of New Market on May 15 and Cold Harbor on June 3, but he never achieved the rank of major general. Given that Wharton oversaw a large department in Virginia, his failure to earn promotion was a major slight.

During a time of war, women then, as today, were often portrayed as helpless bystanders, silent but supportive. They could do nothing more than darn socks, sew flags, or send care packages to the troops. The Whartons’ War tells a more complicated story, one in which Anne aimed hard criticisms against the Confederate government’s management of the war, condemned generals for their battlefield failures, and denounced politicians for their being relentlessly self-serving. In the summer of 1863, she was convinced that Richmond authorities had it out for her husband. "I was willing to be separated from

[you]

if

[it]

would be to your interest, but for you to bare

[

sic

]

hardship, work, & get no honor is more than I can stand. I know you only care for promotion on my account & I am sure I don’t care

[anymore].…

We can be independent of the applause of the world. I still admire you & think you the greatest man in the world if nobody else does. The strivings of ambition had cooled in Gabriel. In the late fall of 1864, he gave up on receiving recognition from the military or the government. I have a right to expect Promotion but Genl. Early is cold blooded he thinks very little of other folks.… You recollect you told me the night you promised to be mine, that I must be a Ma. Genl. I have tried to deserve it whether I have succeeded or not others must decide. But darling I am much more ambitious now to be your husband & to be with you & our baby I desire now to be quiet on a nice little farm & be left alone with you & Willie." The war had remade the Whartons as a couple.

Beneath the romantic veneer of the Wharton correspondence also reside powerful stories of enslaved people, soldiers, nonslaveholders, politicians, civilians, guerrilla fighters, Unionists, and generals, all of whom were mixed together in the cauldron of war. The Whartons inadvertently included in their letters the voices of people who existed on the margins of power. Their words, though from the slaveholder perspective, reveal the ways in which enslaved people contested authority. Predictably, the Whartons were anxious over the demise of slavery. They were unapologetic about owning African Americans. The system of human bondage, in their eyes, was morally sound and under the blessings of God. The thread of self-justification running through their correspondence might create the false impression that the slaves owned by the couple were helpless, childlike, incapable of even knowing their own interests. When Federal forces passed by the Wharton’s home, however, enslaved people in the neighborhood bolted for Union lines. Emeline, Anne’s personal slave, was getting restless and weighing her options. In Anne’s eyes, to even ponder such calculations was an act of insubordination. She bluntly told Gabriel, "Emeline has been very impu[dent as a] consequence

[and]

I am thoroughly outdone with her. She is entirely changed for the worse & I wish the Yankees had her as well as others. Anne also disclosed that she had dreams of a negro threatening to slap

[her]

in the face." The Whartons would not relinquish slavery, even late in the war, when they judged that Confederate military operations were doomed and defeat was inevitable. Whatever else we may learn from these letters, the truth remains that love, ambition, and patriotism flowed into the Whartons’ commitment to a Confederate nation founded on the centrality of slavery to their own lives and the society to which they belonged.

PETER S. CARMICHAEL

Gettysburg College

PREFACE

There is nothing quite like the Whartons’ correspondence in the archives of the Civil War. For a start, in most correspondences, the wife’s or sweetheart’s letters rarely survive, often being lost or destroyed during campaigning or disintegrated from repeated reading. Moreover, both of these correspondents were educated well above the average for their time and place and expressed themselves with facility as they discussed virtually everything. The breadth of their reading in current literature is evident in their ease with quotations from poets now obscure. They kept abreast of what appeared in the Confederate press, and not just what was published in their region but also from Richmond papers and sometimes even Atlanta and Charleston.

Of course, like virtually all epistolarians during that time in the country, they wrote about the war, putting fears and hopes fully and forthrightly on display. Modern scholars have persuasively identified a significant number of themes that go far toward defining the ethos and personality of mid-nineteenth-century Southern Americans. What truly sets the Whartons’ correspondence apart is its refusal to be pigeonholed or confined within many of those definitions. Through their letters, they created a private world in the midst of the conflagration raging about them. Long periods of separation bound them in mutual need and longing, impelling them to loose the bonds of conventional etiquette of their times to express their most intimate dreams, fears, and desires. That inner realm that Gabe and Nannie reveal frequently intersects many of those themes now recognized by historians, yet more often than not it goes its own course, often contradicting the prevailing intellectual and emotional norms of their generation. While their personas at the outset of marriage were well formed prior to their meeting, interaction thereafter evolved reactions, coping mechanisms, and shifts of viewpoint and behavior all their own. Both were products of a culture rooted in family and household, male patriarchy, female dependency, slavery, and individual, family, and regional honor—all of them strained by the relentless demands of war.

Certainly, family was important to both of them, yet thanks to his being a generation older, Gabe’s sense of connection was more distant, just as his parents and siblings lived at a considerable remove from him in Alabama. Nannie, meanwhile, went to marriage straight from being her parents’ adored favorite, a woman at nineteen to be sure but still more intimately attached, a situation that remained unchanged even after her wedding, since, with her husband in the army, she would spend most of the war living with her family. Gabe’s postings often put him near enough to make frequent visits to Arnheim, which in effect made him a part of her family’s household, but they would have a discrete household of their own only occasionally during periods she lived with him in rented quarters near the army. Consequently, in times of danger from Union raiders in Southwest Virginia, the ordinary fears of disruption and dislocation ran strong in Nannie, with her deep roots in her home, whereas her husband’s concern was almost exclusively with her safety. Having no house and property or slave ownership, Gabe’s home and household was Nannie, and even more so after the birth of their son. Ultimately, however, neither had a home anchor strong enough to bind them inextricably to place or cause. That helps explain the freedom with which they often spoke of going elsewhere, even overseas, abandoning the Confederacy whose war kept them apart.¹

Lacking a real household, the Whartons also revealed little investment in the code of family governance prevailing in their time and place. Southern and American society was patriarchal. Men made the major decisions and took active political and social roles outside the home, while women were confined to domestic pursuits within the household and those outside interests and activities deemed suitable for feminine temperament and intellect. The husband was clearly in charge, for wives, rather like children and slaves, were presumed to be unable to govern themselves or others.² It was an ancient ethic, yet while both Gabe and Nannie were raised in homes where that ethic was very much in place, neither entered into matrimony committed to its practice. As a middle-aged bachelor who had never exercised such domestic control, Gabe felt overjoyed just to have found a living companion. As the spoiled favorite of indulgent parents, Nannie had little or no experience of subordinating herself to anyone and a personality and temper that made subordination foreign to her nature. From their very first letters, it was evident that Nannie would have her say and expect her views to be respected and that Gabe so adored her that he would indulge virtually anything to hold her love. Nothing better testifies to their atypical relationship than her complaint at giving up her name Radford for Wharton and his suggestion in response, and perhaps only half in jest, that if it would make her happy, he would gladly take her surname for his own.

Nor was that the only evidence of an atypical approach to the gender roles of their contemporaries. Their personalities seemed cast to counter mid-nineteenth-century expectations. Gabe simply lacked the temperament to be an authoritarian, patriarchal husband—and later father. He was steady, almost passive by nature, always in control of himself, slow to anger, and even then, entirely contained in his behavior. Whether at home with Nannie or in camp with fellow officers, he sought calm and accord. Meanwhile, even though she often represented herself to him in her letters as a dependent woman unable to deal with the pressures of wartime life without his guidance, her actions then and postwar revealed a bold and assertive personality that refused to be intimidated by any male. A wife was expected to encourage her husband’s ambitions, of course, but Nannie went beyond that and actively tried to propel Gabe professionally, giving him unsolicited advice and guidance that went well beyond accepted behavior for women. On his part, however, rather than feeling threatened or offended by her trespasses onto a plain that would have irked most men, he did not balk or complain but rather welcomed her opinions even when he did not share them.

Nannie’s temperament was challenging, often mercurial between dark depression and near euphoria, which became considerably more pronounced postwar. Consequently, Gabe in his letters also assumed the task of managing her emotions.³ A dynamic developed early that cast him as peacekeeper, trying to calm her in her dark moods, while she found his calm and unflappability irritating and tried to spur him to be less phlegmatic and more assertive. In yet another reversal of traditional roles, while Nannie herself rarely made reference to her Methodist faith except to wonder how her God could allow the holocaust of war, Wharton routinely employed pleas to religion to steady her and renew her faith in the Confederate cause.

A continuing trigger to Nannie’s moods was the difference in their senses of ambition. Her husband had some measure of it, to be sure, but nothing compared to Nannie’s. Gabe was certainly frustrated that the government was dilatory in giving him rank that recognized his level of responsibility and his contributions to the Confederate cause, but he confined his response to temperate protests to immediate superiors, an occasional letter to a politician in Richmond, and occasional threats to resign his commission. By contrast, Nannie freely admitted to a consuming ambition. Understanding that their times did not allow her scope to make a name for herself, she sought that fulfillment through her husband and consequently found Gabe’s easygoing nature and unwillingness to put himself forward assertively for advancement to be a continuing irritant. In a reversal of traditional roles, she was the one driving for advancement, and to the extent that he did press his case, it was increasingly to make her happy rather than to satisfy ambitions of his own.

Like most men of his time, Gabe looked to Nannie to believe in him, to fulfill a wife’s expected role to encourage, cheer, and give him purpose.⁴ Nannie certainly did that, and it is evident in their letters that Gabe drew inspiration from her romantic love. As did many men of his class and era, he elevated her to a pedestal as a paragon of womanhood: pious, unselfish, virtuous, and in every respect superior. Indeed, he based his own view of himself on the fact of her choosing to marry him, reminding her repeatedly that she was all he had in the world to be proud of. For years prior to their marriage, he had believed that circumstances, not choice, doomed him to be a bachelor. Nannie released him from emotional imprisonment. His letters reveal that he saw her and their marriage as agents actively remaking him into a better man beyond his former expectations. She actively did so in her letters, as women were expected to do, by being unguarded with him, a human, whole person, but she rejected the submissive public face that her sex was expected to present.⁵

Of course, both Gabe and Nannie grew up in households largely made by slavery and where the constant presence of enslaved people was a fact of life. With the faintly possible exception of the young man Robert in 1859, Gabe owned no slaves himself prior to the war. Being a man without home or property, he had no need of them, and life as an engineer kept him too much on the road to house or care for them. It can at least be inferred from his family environment that, like many Southern Whigs, he accepted slavery as a fact of life whether or not he was uncomfortable with it in practice. Nannie grew up accustomed to her father being one of the larger slave owners in their county and to enjoying the direct benefits of enslaved labor in her home. Probably as a wedding gift, Nannie’s mother gave them two slaves, and neither newlywed gave indication of anything other than willing acceptance of the existence of the institution.⁶ Many Southern women felt conflicted about slavery, occasionally confronting doubts about injustice and fears that their enslaved people were not as faithful and content as they appeared. Nannie showed few, if any, such qualms, and her letters are barren of any expression of unease or disapproval of slavery. And during one of Gabe’s musings about leaving the country, he implied that they could finance their exile by selling her enslaved people. That put them in the mainstream of many Upper South whites, especially in Virginia.⁷

During the war, both Gabe and Nannie would show a degree of involvement in, and concern for, the lives of her enslaved servants, but it was nuanced. They were close with their people, and two especially, but they were not friends in the conventional sense. There was little female solidarity between white mistresses and their Black servants in the Old South, and that certainly applied to Nannie and her favorite woman, Emeline.⁸ Nannie might speak fondly of Emeline and make her first among equals in Arnheim’s Black female community, but there was always an assumed and unchallenged power differential. Nannie had it; Emeline did not, as her occasional crossing of the line of expected restraint revealed. In line with most other slaveholders, Nannie was going to discover that she did not know Emeline and others nearly as well as she thought, with the result that she felt disillusionment and disgust when her slaves became insubordinate toward the close of the war.⁹ Nannie freely revealed her inner thoughts about her servant, but nothing survives to illuminate how Emeline truly felt about her mistress.

Similarly, Gabe was free and easy in his association with the enslaved Tim, whom Nannie sent to war with him as body servant. Gabe took considerable interest in Tim’s welfare; but the unspoken hierarchy was never questioned, and there was no doubt that Tim was with Gabe to serve him. Only Gabe’s perception of their relationship survives; Tim, like Emeline, is mute. Well treated though Tim and Emeline were, it is significant that Tim seriously planned on escaping to Union lines at least once, and Emeline may have considered it. What adds complexity to the picture is that Gabe knew of Tim’s plans and offered to abet his flight with money and a horse, a radically different reaction from that of other slaveholders. While Gabe and Nannie took great interest in the pair, and in some degree encouraged their romance, it was clearly an interest of the sort that parents took in children. As chattels, Tim and Emeline received paternalistic treatment and supervision so long as they were docile and obedient, in keeping with almost universal practice in the Old South.¹⁰ The fact that postwar Tim and Emeline continued to work for the Whartons and lived on their property suggests perhaps some stronger connection, but in the shift from owners to employers and from property to employees, the relations between the couples remained paternalistic. Gabe and Nannie still held all of the power.

Perhaps most interesting of all is where the Whartons’ views of themselves and their world placed them in a society deeply embedded in a culture of honor. Their letters are laced with expressions of duty and responsibility. They clearly understood the dictate of individual and national honor that they persevere even in the face of adversity and defeat. Nannie’s ambition was largely driven by her aspirations for honor for her husband and, by extension, for herself, and boldly she would try to guide Gabe in that direction, using the language of honor to support her arguments. Women sought more than just reflected honor from their husbands. Throughout the South, when the approach of a Union army or raiders suddenly merged war front and home front, it placed enormous strains on the patriotism and resistance defining women’s honor. Generally, the proximity of Yankees actually increased their morale for, along with uncomplainingly enduring hardships and deprivation, demonstrating patriotism and defiance at the enemy’s approach was the only way Confederate ladies could stand symbolically toe-to-toe with their men in uniform. Such acts reaffirmed their credentials as rebels, especially if they were defiant during direct confrontations with the enemy.

Against that backdrop, Nannie would show a mixed response. She did not have to experience what women in Georgia and the northern Shenandoah endured from invaders in the fall of 1864. Still, when the approach of enemy soldiers demonstrated that she was no longer a protected noncombatant and that enemy boots could come to her doorstep and muddy her carpet, her response revealed a flexible and situational adherence to the demands of honor.¹¹

Nannie’s husband, at least by his letters, shared her variable commitment to honor’s dictates. He was certainly a brave soldier and at least by his words was willing to give his life for his infant nation. But there were multiple kinds of honor. Frustrated at being denied promotion for so long, Gabe considered resigning his commission and effectively abandoning the Confederate cause, putting personal pique ahead of patriotism. Moreover, when enemy raiders penetrated into Southwest Virginia in 1863 and 1864, what did it say for his honor as a man that he could defend his country on a battlefield but could not protect his wife from insult or worse in her home? Unlike some Southerners, and to their credit, the Whartons’ enthusiasm and patriotism did not wax and wane entirely in lockstep with battlefield victories and defeats. They understood that there was honor in perseverance against the odds. Gabe generally met news of defeat in the field with an inflexible optimism that only made him more resolute, an optimism perhaps assumed for Nannie’s benefit and one that she could not match.¹²

Ultimately, however, like virtually everything else in the Whartons’ world, honor always came secondary to their love for each other. Their letters reveal that as the war ground on, they would even consider abandoning the dying cause of the Confederacy—better to go abroad and escape the war, defeat, and destruction, regardless of what the people behind might think. Then they might live together in peace, in the words of one of Gabe’s favorite poets, Alexander Pope, the world forgetting, by the world forgot. For Gabe and Nannie both, honor was a malleable quantity.

None of these things was completely defined at the time the Whartons’ wed. Rather, they emerged from a dynamic that developed in their marriage and was shaped by the events around them. All of their representation—and rejection—of these defining social and personal ethics of their time and place were expressed with a degree of emotional intimacy that put them in the mainstream. Ordinarily men did not talk or write about emotions, trapping themselves in a mold of their own devising that left them looking somehow incomplete.¹³ In men’s diaries and letters to loved ones, especially wives, however, they could break out of the pose that society expected of them. In written words, a man could speak more freely with his pen than face-to-face with his loved one.¹⁴ Gabe almost fit the mold. He had always felt loneliness, fear, uncertainty, and love, intensely. Before the war, he frequently expressed his feelings in diaries and probably in letters, too. When the war came, he continued to keep brief occasional journals, but in what survives of them, he spoke little of Nannie.

Rather, he poured out his heart in his letters, discussing his feelings for her in an uninhibited degree that most men of his time would have been embarrassed to express vocally. It was rejuvenating. As he told her, when he wrote, he felt as if they were together and often kept his pen in hand well into the dark hours, unwilling to break their imaginary connection.¹⁵ No shrinking violet, Nannie expressed herself with equal force and freedom, and it is clear that as with her husband, the emotional revelations they shared went well beyond mere Victorian formula. She held and expressed her own opinions and did not fear to disagree with him on anything. In many ways, they seem more to be people of the twenty-first century than the nineteenth. They were also more fortunate in their correspondence than most Confederate soldiers and officers. Thanks to Gabe’s long periods in Southwest Virginia and the Shenandoah, no great distance separated them. Gabe usually served on or within reach of the railroad to Central Depot, which meant that their letters traveled at considerable speed and more reliably than much-longer-distance mail, and his being a high-ranking officer often allowed him to send his letters along with official couriers bearing communications to department headquarters at Dublin.

Moreover, the Whartons’ correspondence reveals the nuanced and sometimes mercurial ambitions and loyalties of many Confederates who were slow to accept secession. Their hearts were in the cause, but it was an allegiance that vied with other ties to home, family, and especially each other. Nannie’s letters open a window on the daily life of the rural elite and a broader view of Southwest Virginia, a vital yet generally overlooked theater of the war, with its networks of mutually sustaining families and friendships. Gabe’s letters allow an inside look at the military high command in that sector, as well as its often conflicting—and sometimes poisoned—command culture. Taken together, their correspondence presents an unparalleled view of the stresses the war placed on romance and family bonds and how love weathered the crisis, wounded perhaps but unbowed. Theirs was a story that would change over time, just as their roles within their marriage saw shifts, but the dynamics within their private world cast light on multiple dimensions of Southern society and how it and they evolved together amid war’s turmoil.

INTRODUCTION

Gabe and Nannie

1824–MARCH 1863

His mother always remembered him as a beautiful little boy.¹ Gabriel Colvin Wharton was born in a log cabin near Culpeper, Virginia, to John Redd and Eliza Colvin Wharton on July 23, 1824. He grew up spending hours listening to his grandfather Samuel Wharton’s stories of serving in the 3d Virginia Regiment under the Marquis de Lafayette in the Revolution. Shortly before the British army surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, grapeshot badly mangled Samuel’s hands, but he defied the surgeons and avoided amputation. Thereafter, he used his hands expressively to illustrate his war stories of Washington sending him on a special mission and giving him a silver dollar for a coffin should he be killed.²

John Redd Wharton was a prosperous farmer on his 1,000-acre property, Compton, near the community of Mitchell’s Station. By 1860, he had twenty-four slaves and nine children—seven girls and Gabriel and his brother, James, twenty years his junior.³ Gabe attended a private school in the neighborhood until about 1840, when his father entered him in Bleak Hill Academy, run by the Latin-quoting minister Albert Gallatin Simms.⁴ Though the Whartons were Episcopalians, the Baptist Simms’s Whig politics matched their own. Every morning Gabe and his friends recited a chapter from the Bible, which no doubt spurred and reinforced Gabe’s lifelong faith. He studied algebra, drawing, French, and Latin classics, meanwhile making lasting friendships with fellow pupils, in particular, his closest friend, Ambrose Powell Hill, a future Confederate lieutenant general.⁵

Gabe left Bleak Hill in 1843 to enter the Warren Greene Academy at Warrenton, where he continued studies for one or two years and expanded his circle of friends to include classmates William H. Payne, Charles Marshall, and other future Confederate high-ranking officers. Leaving the academy, he tutored students in Culpeper privately while reviewing his studies to date and saving his earnings to pay for further education. Apparently, his grandfather’s stories of the Revolution sparked an interest in the military life, and his friend Hill, who left in the fall of 1842 to enter the United States Military Academy at West Point, encouraged him. Gabe, if you have any penchant for a military life I wish very much you would try and get in here, Hill wrote him early in 1843. I know very well that you could graduate with honour, for all that is necessary is a small amount of mathematical genius and I know you have a good supply.⁶ Young Wharton’s predilection for math also pointed him toward engineering, making the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) at Lexington a natural choice for him.

Many entering cadets at VMI came on scholarship, but the school also admitted what it called pay cadets, for whom a year’s tuition cost $250.⁷ Thanks to Gabe’s academy studies, he already had the equivalent of the first two years’ classes out of the way. Hence, when VMI appointed him a pay cadet on July 5, 1845, he entered on September 1 as a second classman and paid most of his tuition from his saved earnings.⁸ Immediately he found himself amid a new set of friends. Barracks roommates included William Mahone, another future Confederate general, and several other officers-to-be. Classmates and close friends were John Q. Marr, who later had the tragic distinction of being the first Confederate officer killed in the Civil War, and future generals Raleigh Colston, Samuel Garland, John R. Jones, Robert Roddy, and especially Robert E. Rodes, who became a particular friend.⁹

That first year, Gabe studied geometry, drawing, surveying, calculus, French, Latin, and topography. The following year, as a first classman, he addressed natural philosophy, chemistry, military and civil engineering, infantry and artillery tactics, more Latin, English literature, rhetoric, geography, and history.¹⁰ He finished first in his class in English, natural philosophy, chemistry, and Latin; second in conduct; third in geography and math, fourth in engineering; sixth in French and tactics; and seventh in drawing, and he had not a single demerit on his record. On July 5, 1847, among a graduating class of thirteen, he stood second overall. As one of only two to graduate with distinction, he delivered an oration at the ceremony.¹¹ A full-grown man by now, he stood about five feet nine inches tall and weighed perhaps 135 pounds.¹²

Wharton did not devote all of those years to his books. He felt a healthy, and highly romantic, interest in young ladies and inevitably let his thoughts wander to matters other than studies. At Bleak Hill, he and his friend A. P. Hill confided to each other their secret dreams about the distaff teenagers of Culpeper, and for much of the next two decades, Wharton meandered in and out of love with one belle after another, frequently heartsick in the offing. He constantly attended cotillions and parties, and by Christmas 1842, aged just eighteen, he had already courted so many young women that Hill confessed himself positively envious.¹³ Less than a year after graduation, he was romancing and possibly engaged to Virginia Phillips, daughter of the clerk of court in Fauquier County. Besotted with "Gabe, my own dear Gabe, by April 1848, she referred to him hopefully as her future husband. Wharton, dearest Gabe, my soul blesses thee, my very soul loves thee, she effused. A year later, she still bubbled over, I do love thee—I do—I do—oh, too madly, too madly. Then she inexplicably stopped writing, ostensibly because she feared she was doomed to die when having a tooth pulled.¹⁴ Soon there were others, and Wharton earned a reputation for at least aspiring to romance, if not succeeding. Even as the young Miss Phillips apprehended death by dentist, a friend teased Gabe, I expected ere this to hear of you being a Father & yet you are not a husband, admonishing, Why tarryest thou?"¹⁵

Wharton enjoyed more success professionally. VMI’s superintendent recommended him for teaching positions as soon as he graduated, and attorney Major G. C. Powell hired Wharton to tutor his children at Middleburg at $500 a year plus board. Wharton taught Latin, French, math, and English at several grade levels and forewarned, my system of teaching is somewhat peculiar. No doubt remembering Simms’s practice of frequent canings at Bleak Hill, he rejected the barbarous custom of whipping and instead tried to gain the love & confidence of the pupil, & then to govern more by keeping always before them, their duty to themselves & parents, & their respect to the teacher, than by any regular list of punishments or rewards.¹⁶ It was the earliest indication of a lifelong tenderness toward the young and a nature that impelled him to eschew confrontation whenever possible.

While teaching, Gabe read law in his employer’s office, but he soon found the sedentary life of classroom and bar incompatible with his desire for activity. After a year, he resigned to seek a position as a civil engineer, armed with a professor’s recommendation that his command of math and science were much above that of most of the Chief Engrs of our day.¹⁷ Virginia’s Orange & Alexandria Railroad soon hired him as a leveler to join other engineers laying an extension of the line from Orange to Gordonsville. In less than a year, superiors put him in charge of surveying and grading a further extension from Charlottesville to Lynchburg. He found that the work suited him. It paid well, $900 that first year, and rising steadily to $1,500 in a few years, he got to work with his old roommate Mahone, who was now chief engineer of the railroad.¹⁸ When not at work, he and Mahone attended frequent parties. They also found a shared interest in Virginia’s enslaved population. Nothing suggests that Gabe was anything other than a product of his time and place with regard to slavery, but if he had any qualms about it in his youth, he kept them muted. Still, his being an Upper South Whig at least hints that he might have shared the hostility that many Whigs felt to political agitation over the institution. He and Mahone attended at least one Black social event, and Gabe recoiled in disgust when he witnessed a lynch mob taking a Black man out of jail to be hanged.¹⁹

By early 1853, Wharton had charge of engineering a rail extension to Warrenton, and not only was his company pleased with him, but so was the community of Warrenton itself, where he stayed while superintending the work. You have a happy faculty of making friends among all classes, one citizen wrote him that fall, and the town itself held a dinner in his honor, announcing that he had made friends of all with whom he is acquainted.²⁰ It would not be the last time a community thanked him for being among them. For himself, Wharton loved the life there. His VMI schoolmate Isaac W. Smith was resident surveyor for the Orange & Alexandria, and the pair of them had gay and happy days keeping house together as they lived on a dollar a day, making resolutions one day and breaking them the next. They spent their evenings smoking at leisure and talking expansively of what Smith called getting up a load of heavy and useful reading, and commencing a new life.²¹

By early 1854, Wharton was in Amherst surveying the Lynchburg extension when further funding of the line looked problematical, and he began to inquire about possible openings in the Southwest should the recent Gadsden Purchase be ratified by Congress. It would add territory along the southern boundary of modern-day New Mexico and Arizona that would be vitally important to a proposed southern transcontinental railroad from Texas to San Diego.²²

Gabe might have welcomed a dramatic change of scenery. However well the surveying went, his pursuit of romance continued to disappoint, though not for want of trying. He may have been his own worst enemy. No sooner did he fall in love than he retreated, telling himself, I have nothing to do with women, convinced that he must fall out again soon.²³ When he was away from Warrenton, he sometimes kicked over the traces, joining his friend Peter Otey for a spree on the town. On more than one occasion, they went to a bordello, after which Gabe guiltily told his diary that he must stop this: Indeed I must.²⁴ After one hangover, he told himself, I am getting too old for any thing of that kind, and must stop it.²⁵ By February 1854, he concluded to stop thinking about Ladies.²⁶ He was thirty and still a bachelor, a condition he was coming to believe would be permanent.

Gabe’s professional advancement continued steadily, however. By November 1856, he was chief engineer of the Washington & Alexandria Railroad and had completed building the line.²⁷ Then a new lure called him to real adventure.²⁸ That past April, a friend advised Gabe to look to the West, where he could make good money as a surveyor.²⁹ Exactly a year later, he was hired as a civil engineer to locate a road for an overland mail route between Memphis, Tennessee, and El Paso, Texas, and then on through Tucson to Fort Yuma and eventually to San Diego. He needed the change. He and his friend Robert Rodes, who was about to start work on a railroad in Alabama, had discussed Gabe going to work for him.³⁰ Rodes offered him the job, but slow mails held up communication so long that Rodes gave the position to another, a disappointment that Gabe confessed gave him the blues.³¹ A trip through the wilds of the Southwest then would be just the thing for him.

Congress had appropriated $200,000 for the new El Paso and Fort Yuma Wagon Road, and Wharton got the position of second assistant engineer. He left Washington on April 27, 1857, for Memphis, where by July 1 he had assembled 125 men, 166 mule teams, and 24 ox wagons. They left that day, reaching Des Arc, Arkansas, on the White River, on July 17, and then passed through Little Rock. By September 30, delayed now by incessant rain and sickness, they reached Fort Chadbourne in the middle of Texas.³² From there, Wharton moved on to El Paso, crossed the Rio Grande, and then passed through Mesilla, where he spent the winter exploring rivers and mountain passes in the southern part of the infant New Mexico Territory, some of which he believed he might have been the first white man to see. He looked for potential railroad crossings over the Rio Grande, while keeping eyes peeled for marauding Apaches. It is very provoking to have to spring up from a warm comfortable pair of blankets & run out in the dark & rain to look for Indians, he joked after one scare, & worse still not to find them.³³ Then he lost part of a finger at Mesilla when his pistol accidentally discharged.³⁴

In February 1858, they set out again, moving on to the Gila River and the San Pedro, and then they followed the Gila through the Chiricahua Mountains to Fort Yuma and the Colorado River. Gabe and others did a little gold prospecting along the way and faced more alarms when Apache attacked one of his surveying parties, but for the most part, the days passed without incident. From Fort Yuma, they moved on to San Diego, a small village of adobe houses with few Americans other than soldiers in the local garrison.³⁵ Thanks to their survey, the overland mail and commercial stage-coach companies thereafter changed their routes to the San Antonio, El Paso, Tucson, and Fort Yuma line to San Diego.

His work done, Wharton intended to go home by way of an ocean voyage from San Francisco around South America, but then the expedition’s superintendent suddenly left while under suspicion of financial mismanagement, which left Gabe charged to take all of its instruments overland back to Washington, D.C. He left with men and wagons on August 23, reaching Independence, Missouri, on October 9, and there took a steamboat to St. Louis.³⁶ By the first week of February 1859, Wharton was in Washington to begin preparing materials for a report on the survey.³⁷ Behind him in California, he left at least one acquaintance with the impression that Wharton was a gentleman of very fair abilities in his profession.³⁸

Wharton’s work was well represented when Congress published a report on the surveys later that year.³⁹ Unfortunately, controversy soon arose over the so-called El Paso and Fort Yuma Wagon Road. Charges of fraud first appeared, none aimed Gabe, and then came rumors of a secret motive for the expedition, which Wharton himself was accused of revealing while in California.⁴⁰ Supposedly the survey had been a blind passed by Southern legislators to use government money to locate a transcontinental route for the newly incorporated Southern Pacific Railroad Company, which meant to bring goods from Asia to the East in a matter of days rather than weeks spent sailing around South America. Though nothing came of the proposed rail line, the wagon road Gabe helped survey would be in use for years to come. Still, he left at least one acquaintance in the West with the impression that he enthusiastically supported a southern route over a central or northern one, and as a Southerner, he probably did.⁴¹

In fact, Gabriel Wharton expressed little interest in politics and the growing sectional controversy, or else kept his opinions to himself. The Whartons were comfortable with slavery as a lawful economic and social institution in Virginia and a fixture on their property and in their daily lives. By June 1859, Gabe had the personal use of a young enslaved man named Robert, who was either his or, more likely, on loan from his father.⁴² They certainly were not secessionists, and they held strong attachments to the United States. Like other Upper South Whigs, however, they accepted that a disaffected state could leave the Union as a last resort and that there was a point beyond which remaining risked compromising personal and property rights both in Virginia and in the expanding territories of the West. One acquaintance went so far as to conclude that Gabe was "a Virginian, and possesses, in ‘an eminent degree,’ all of the absurd ideas of the most ultra of the extremists of her extreme school of politicians."⁴³

That was a gross overstatement, but it touched on something. In the margin of Gabe’s copy of a recent edition of The Federalist, he scribbled a caveat next to James Madison’s statement that the nation could never be divided into jealous and alien sovereignties. States, Gabe wrote, must secede if oppressed.⁴⁴ Certainly, the progress of crisis accelerated as he finished his work. In December, Virginia authorities hanged the abolitionist raider John Brown for his attempt to foment servile insurrection at Harpers Ferry, with one of Gabe’s friends present.⁴⁵ A fair number of his old comrades like A. P. Hill and Rodes began contemplating what their states might do and considered their own response if it came to disunion. If Wharton was yet thinking about his own future, he kept his thoughts to himself.

Meanwhile, there would be more engineering jobs. In the spring of 1860, Rodes asked Gabe to join the cash-poor North East & South West Alabama Railroad, but Wharton needed more than his friend could pay.⁴⁶ Secretary of War John B. Floyd of Virginia offered his backing for the position of surveyor general in the General Land Office, but then a new opportunity came with the Virginia & Kentucky Railroad to build a line from Southwest Virginia into the Bluegrass.⁴⁷ Floyd was its president and probably had a hand in it, and chief engineer Colonel Claudius Crozet had been board president of the VMI when Wharton attended.⁴⁸ Gabe was to be principal assistant engineer.⁴⁹

By the fall of 1860, Wharton was hard at work out of Goodson in Southwest Virginia and finding it a congenial position.⁵⁰ His associates included John F. Terry, his close friend Peter Otey, Floyd himself, and the company’s vice president, Robert W. Hughes, who would be influential in securing Wharton a commission in the Confederate army a year later. There was also a man destined to become a special friend, the New Jersey–born Charles DeRussy. His wealthy maternal grandfather was a British baronet addressed as Sir Miles Smith, the master of Ross Hall in Piscataway, New Jersey, which had been George Washington’s headquarters following the Battle of Monmouth. Friends teased his grandson by addressing him as Count DeRussy.⁵¹

The November presidential election found Wharton in Goodson, away from his home county and therefore unable to vote.⁵² He probably would have followed his father in casting for Democratic candidate Stephen A. Douglas. That represented a break with pro-secession Southern Democrats who backed sitting vice president John C. Breckinridge—who himself was opposed to secession—and also with the majority of Virginia’s old Whigs, who supported John Bell, the conservative Unionist candidate. Only the election of Douglas, John Wharton believed, could avert disunion.⁵³

A week after Abraham Lincoln was announced the winner, a friend wrote Gabe that whatever happened to the Union, let her rip we will have our women & wine by the way.⁵⁴ Bachelor Wharton may not have sworn off wine or women as 1861 dawned, but his answer to friends like the one who wrote in a mock stammer to ask, are you m-m-arried? was still no.⁵⁵ He never stopped looking, but disappointment could not erode his ideal of feminine beauty, which included a belief that dresses worn without hoops made women look like crows.⁵⁶ But change was coming, and not on crows’ wings but on the wings of war.

In the early months of 1861, Wharton was surveying a route through Moccasin Gap on Clinch Mountain in Scott County. Though far removed from the centers of power, he could not avoid the gathering storm as Deep South states began to secede.⁵⁷ In mid-January, his father told him that, though things begin to look a little squally, he had not given up on avoiding a crisis. You know I am a great union man, he wrote his son. I believe in God & the people & that the union will be saved yet. If only they could settle the negro question and preserve the rights of slaveholders, the Union might still be preserved, but if the incoming Lincoln administration failed to accord the South its rights, then no thing but war will do. John Wharton condemned both abolitionists and secessionists for bringing about this state affairs, a sentiment soon echoed by his eldest son.⁵⁸

Gabe could scarcely avoid choosing a side, and given his Virginia blood and military training, it was almost inevitable that he would follow the Old Dominion. By January 22, with five states seceded and their senators leaving Washington, an old friend told him that he had better "go back to

[his]

old tactics and burnish up the old sword. But Wharton had already and finally spoken his views, sharing with others his hope that Old Virginia will not be found lagging in the back grounds when her rights are invaded."⁵⁹ On March 4, the very day that Lincoln took his oath of office, a friend predicted to Gabe that Virginia would soon call on him as an officer to lead Va. Troops to meet the common enemy.⁶⁰ On April 12, South Carolina state forces attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Three days later, Lincoln declared a state of insurrection and called on all the states, including Virginia, to raise volunteers to quell the rebellion. Rather than send Virginians to fight against fellow Southerners, a state convention voted for secession on April 17. Two days later, John Redd Wharton wrote his son, when ever it is necessary for you to act go it with a rush, and he knew Gabe would act when the time comes for him to do so.⁶¹

Wharton was working in the field near Moccasin Gap that day when someone brought the news of Virginia’s secession.⁶² The next morning, he disbanded his party and took the first train for Richmond.⁶³ The coming war would see him often in company with some of his surveyors, including Terry, who afterward became colonel of the 37th Virginia Infantry; his friend Otey, who would command the 30th Virginia Battalion; and Count DeRussy.⁶⁴ Appointed a lieutenant of engineers ten days later, Wharton made topographical surveys of the Richmond vicinity that were used to site and erect fortifications. He often worked with the new commander of the state forces, Maj. Gen. Robert E. Lee and his son Custis Lee.⁶⁵

My duties around Richmond were very distasteful to me, Gabe later recalled. He wanted to be on the front line. Learning that Floyd had been made a brigadier general and ordered to raise a brigade of infantry in Southwest Virginia, he called on Floyd and found him in company with Harry Heth, who had resigned his commission in the United States Army, and Benjamin Ficklin, a VMI classmate dismissed for chronic pranks, who afterward originated the Pony Express and briefly owned Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.⁶⁶ Floyd was getting commissions for field officers for a regiment he was to raise and already selected Heth as colonel and Ficklin and Wharton for lieutenant-colonel and major. Both Ficklin and Wharton preferred to be major, so Floyd allowed them to toss a coin. Gabe won, which made him Major Wharton.

The men’s commissions came a few days later.⁶⁷ Heth and Wharton went directly to Wytheville, where they organized the 45th Virginia Infantry and a few weeks later the 50th as well. As soon as the regiments were ready for the field, they marched to the Kanawha Valley in western Virginia, but Floyd ordered Major Wharton to remain behind to organize another regiment, the 51st Virginia. In a few weeks, he was done, and the officers elected him their colonel on July 17.⁶⁸ As soon as he had the 51st prepared for the field, he marched it to join Floyd on the banks of the Gauley River, near Carnifex Ferry, on September 9, with battle already imminent.

Colonel Gabriel C. Wharton, circa 1862.

Courtesy of Wilderness Road Regional Museum, Newbern, Virginia.

The next day, outposts reported Union troops advancing in force, and Wharton repulsed several spirited assaults in a skirmish that became known as the Battle of Carnifex Ferry. That evening, Floyd informed him that he intended to withdraw despite winning the day, having heard of strong enemy reinforcements coming. It was Gabe’s first encounter with Floyd’s reluctance to risk battle but not his last. For the rest of the year, Wharton took part in several skirmishes before being ordered back to Dublin Depot, on the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad, where he expected to go into winter quarters and recruit ranks thinned by sickness.⁶⁹

Instead, barely a fortnight later, Floyd received orders to take his command to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to reinforce Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, commanding the major Confederate army west of the Appalachians.⁷⁰ The Virginians remained in camp there until Fort Henry on the Tennessee River fell to the forces of Brig. Gen. U. S. Grant on February 6, 1862.⁷¹ The Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers cut like an arrow across Tennessee and northern Alabama, the former navigable almost to Chattanooga, while the latter could handle gunboat traffic as far as Nashville. By taking Fort Henry, Grant had opened central Tennessee to waterborne invasion, and if he could take Fort Donelson, a scant dozen miles away on the Cumberland, the whole of the Confederate heartland would be open to him.

The day after Fort Henry’s fall, orders rushed Wharton to Fort Donelson, which he reached after nightfall February 8. He found affairs there disorganized and to some extent demoralized, and Grant was expected to appear almost hourly. General Johnston placed Wharton’s men as outposts watching the roads that the enemy was likely to travel from Fort Henry. Meanwhile, Gabe made a personal inspection of the artillery batteries trained on the river to stop enemy traffic, concluding that they were not well placed either to defend the fort itself from land attack or to