📗 Harpers Ferry during the Civil War

A review of Six Years of Hell by Chester G. Hearn, which ranges from its founding to Brown's raid, to the poor bastard stuck untangling the property ownership messes after the war.

A lot of Civil War books I’ve seen around are about a leader, a battle, or a regiment. I picked up Chester G. Hearn’s Six Years of Hell: Harpers Ferry During the Civil War (affililate link) because I wanted to learn more about the history of my favorite town.

The book focuses on the period of time between Robert E. Lee getting sent to put down John Brown’s raid in October 1859 and closes with a some poor bastard after the war trying to sort out which squatters got to keep which houses. In between, Harpers Ferry changed hands either eight or fourteen times, depending on how you count^[1]. There was an utterly ridiculous number of different commanders. The bridges got blown up or burned and rebuilt almost ten separate times, and we all know how I feel about bridges failing!

The prewar ballot total of roughly 1,800 collapsed to 250 votes during the war, only one of which was cast by “a staunch rebel.”

Harpers Ferry’s staunchest rebels, the Floyd Guards (aka Company K of the 2nd Virginia and eventually part of the Stonewall Brigade), mustered there in April 1861. Most of them never got to go home; the ones that made it back returned to a town almost unrecognizably damaged. It never regained its former glory.

I obviously love Harpers Ferry (more for the hiking than the history, admittedly), but the book is pretty good even if you don’t care that much about the town itself. Hearn does a good job of balancing interesting battle stories with remembering the civilians and the “little ironies” of war. Lee, McClellan, and Jackson all turn up, but the focus stays on the town and its people.

Townsfolk like Joseph Barry, Jessie Johnson, eight-year-old Annie Marmion, and Father Costello saw it through, from beginning to end, and from their perspective, no town suffered more than Harpers Ferry.

A Quick Overview

If you’re not super familiar with the Civil War (and I was not; so many people make it a core interest that it sorta turned me off trying to learn about it too, same as Rome), the story of Harpers Ferry during the Civil War goes something like this:

October 1859: John Brown heads over to the federal armory hoping to use the weapons to fuel a slave uprising, although he had pikes brought in for the freed slaves because he didn’t trust them with guns. Robert E. Lee, summoned from Arlington on short notice, misses his train and is so rushed he shows up in civilian clothes to reclaim the arsenal and arrest the raiders. There’s a trial, with a chronically drunk prosector and a few shenanigans, and then some hangings.

April 1861: Virginia seceded, the federal garrison under Lieutenant Roger Jones evacuated and tried to blow up the armory before leaving. “Tried.” His men laid powder and lit the fuses... but the civilian armory workers (most of them Northerners, but partial to their jobs and aware that an intact armory meant a future paycheck) ran along behind the soldiers wetting the powder. There’s something cartoonish about two columns of men working alongside each other at total cross-purposes, one laying fuse and the other dousing it. Most of the buildings burned anyway, of course.

Then Stonewall (formerly professor) Jackson arrived a week later and spent the spring methodically stripping the place^[2], boxing up rifle-works machinery and shipping it to Richmond, burning what he couldn’t take, and dropping the railroad and Winchester & Potomac bridges into the rivers. The town emptiesdo f jobs, and the men who built rifles for a living mostly followed the jobs south regardless of politics. I got the impression that those working-class guys treated government more like weather than something to participate in; something to adapt to, not control.

Then the merry-go-round started. Geary garrisons in fall 1861, Banks in spring 1862. Saxton repulses Jackson on May 30, 1862, and gets a Medal of Honor for it three decades later... he’s maybe the only guy who walks out of Harpers Ferry covered in glory instead of shame.

Corporal Miles, fresh off of a court-martial trial for being drunk during a critical battle, takes over in June and surrenders the entire garrison a couple of months later despite basically everybody begging him not to. The book devoted a ton of time to Miles’ stubborn, drunken incompetence, although the folks on r/CIVILWAR seem to think he was more dealt a bad hand than anything. But he still spent his time systematically ignoring competent reconnaissance from his own scouts, including a cavalry officer named Davis who threatened to disobey orders rather than surrender his horses to the enemy. Colonel Downey of the 3rd Maryland gave sworn testimony at the postwar Board of Inquiry that Miles, on the morning of the Maryland Heights retreat, could not remember which of his own colonels he was supposed to be giving an order to.

Hewitt on Maryland Heights, the officer who actually relayed the retreat order, was issuing it from partway down the mountain where he could not see the line he was telling them to fall back from, citing an order from Miles he later admitted “may not have applied to the moment in question.” Gah!

It was so bad that historian Paul R. Teetor (his 1982 book A Matter of Hours: Treason at Harpers Ferry is on my list; let me know if you’ve read it or would like to!) apparently argues Miles deliberately moved up the surrender schedule so he could surrender before McClellan — who was close, not that Miles bothered to tell anyone else — got there.

Anyway, after Antietam, McClellan reoccupied the town, and some guy named Cyrus B. Comstock submitted a lengthy proposal to turn the place into an impregnable fort that mostly doesn’t get built. One of these days I want to see if I can find a copy of the proposal. Mosby’s Raiders kicked off a daring raid against Cole’s Maryland Cavalry on Loudoun Heights and blew the surprise by opening fire too early. Sheridan makes Harpers Ferry his Middle Military District headquarters in August 1864. The town gets shelled, which basically only manages to kill civilians. The war ends.

Then in October 1870, the Potomac and Shenandoah both rise and take out the Winchester & Potomac bridge and most of the rebuilt buildings on Virginius Island. The B&O bridge, set on stone piers framed in heavy iron, was the one structure that survived.

Honestly I think the most important (as opposed to interesting; there were a lot of great stories I’m eliding here) part of the book was the railroad bridges.

The bridges kept going down because they were corporate infrastructure

The B&O is actually the reason the federal response to John Brown’s raid started early enough to matter at all. The conductor of the eastbound train, Phelps, came into Baltimore with a wild story about armed men holding the armory at gunpoint. William Prescott Smith, the B&O’s master of transportation, whose job it was to decide whether to believe his own conductors, blew him off. The patrol night watchman, Patrick Higgins, had been struck a glancing rifle wound on the head, and his story was dismissed at the armory clerk’s office as drunken talk about a strike.

The first man to actually take the report seriously was John W. Garrett, president of the B&O. Garrett wired Washington, and the federal government took him seriously; without that, October 17 and the whole Civil War would have played out very differently. Garrett held no federal appointment and no military rank, but then as now, private enterprise played a key role in America’s warfighting capacity.

Indeed, despite Brown’s raid and the early efforts to destroy and loot it, the arsenal wasn’t why Harpers Ferry was so strategically important. It had long since been overshadowed by the much more competently-run Springfield. Harpers Ferry during the Civil War was mostly a supply depot and a key reason was the fact that it was one of the best places to cross the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers heading west toward Ohio.

Harpers Ferry was also, for most of the war, a critically important corporate asset, and the Union needed the railroads if they were going to win the war. For the first couple of months, the railroads tried to remain neutral, actually, but as far as I can tell, there was no way for that to last.

The B&O Railroad ran east-west through the town across a long covered bridge over the Potomac, and that bridge was the only practical east-west supply line west of Washington, D.C. The Winchester & Potomac spur ran south out of the same junction toward the Valley. Whoever controlled the junction controlled rail movement of grain, troops, and weapons between the Atlantic seaboard and the west.

The B&O bridge across the Potomac was destroyed and rebuilt several times, and the Winchester & Potomac spur went down nearly as often. Both sides destroyed the bridges at various points, and of course the railroad presidents wanted them rebuilt (and defended!) so the trains could get through. By 1864 the railroad’s chief engineer was, in effect, on call to put a bridge across the Potomac roughly twice a year. Later in the war, the B&O literally writes letters to the Union officer in charge of Harpers Ferry begging him not to destroy the “costly and difficult” structure, which the railroad had by that point rebuilt at its own expense more times than I feel like going back to check.

Of course, it wasn’t just the armies destroying the bridges...

What Jackson failed to accomplish with his night attack on May 30, the flooded Potomac took care of on the night of June 5 by washing out the rebuilt Baltimore and Ohio bridge and sweeping away a trestle on the Shenandoah serving the Winchester spur.

Floods kept wiping out the bridges even after the war was over: lower town sits inside a V where the Shenandoah meets the Potomac, and the V fills up pretty easily. But during the war, it’s kinda worse, because once the spans are out and the river is running high, soldiers on either side of either river can end up stranded from their wagons and their food. Saxton repulsed Jackson partly because of this; the May 1862 Confederate probe collapsed when the pontoon bridge washed away on its own.

At some point I need to figure out why levees have never been built at Harpers Ferry? The town floods this much, has flooded this much for at least a century and a half of recorded history, and still floods this much (the most recent serious flood was 2018 and there have been multiple high-water events since). Is it the cost? The topography (the place really is a V between two fast-moving rivers and maybe you can’t put a levee there)? How do levees even work? I’ve only seen them on the Mississippi now that I think about it...

Why Harpers Ferry is so hard to defend

Speaking of the terrain of Harpers Ferry, water isn’t the only thing it’s hard to protect against.

Peter Stephens, who built the very first home below Jefferson’s Rock, called his own settlement “The Hole.” About a hundred years later, Hearn writes, “thousands of soldiers would write home to loved ones that the dirty little town of Harpers Ferry was nothing but a ‘godforsaken, stinking hole.’ And to any military man with an ounce of tactical sense, a hole it was.”

Three high points surround Harpers Ferry, and because the industries needed the river for power, the town sits in the bowl below all three of them.

Maryland Heights and Loudon Heights both sharply rise over a thousand feet — seriously the cliffs are nearly shear, which is handy for the falcons, which are making a comeback — directly across the river from the town. Whoever holds the heights has artillery pointed straight down into the lower town. To hold these heights, you have to put your troops across a river from your supply base, and if that river floods or the pontoon bridge goes out (and it will, see above), your soldiers up there are stranded.

Bolivar Heights is the only piece of high ground on the same side of the rivers as the town itself. It’s the gentle land approach west of Harpers Ferry, with some chill trails I need to check out at some point. Bolivar Heights is how any wagon-supported enemy is going to come, so if you don’t hold Bolivar Heights, the town is cut off from the main road east.

So to defend Harpers Ferry, you have to hold three hills simultaneously, two of them across rivers, all of which require their own garrisons and their own supply, in a town whose bridges are getting wiped out basically all the time.

When Jackson attacked in September 1862, he sent McLaws to Maryland Heights, Walker to Loudoun Heights, and took Bolivar Heights himself, in three converging columns. It’s just brutally complex to deal with compared to something like “find the enemy, march your guys to a field, line up and shoot.” And even that “relatively simple” stuff was really hard in the fog of war, even with telegraphs! Caesar, one of the most brilliant military commanders of his time, got lost going off-road on his way to crossing the Rhine in his own metaphorical back yard, and he wasn’t even under fire!

For an example of the kind of craziness I mean, one retreat from Maryland Heights went through three couriers, none of whom could produce a written order, off a position that was holding when the order arrived. Downey, hearing the order, replied, “For God’s sake, don’t fall back; we must hold this position.” They fell back anyway, and the whole defensive position folded the next day.

Pigs ate a guy

So those are some of the bits about the town infrastructure and strategic value. But honestly my favorite parts of the book were the weird details and human stories that weren’t super important to the history of the town but made the town feel more real.

If you’ve ever read or watched Hannibal (great book, terrible movie) you may remember that a critical plot point is that you shouldn’t trust guys that own a bunch of hogs because they’re maybe serial killers. While I have absolutely never doubted that pigs will eat people, Six Years of Hell was the first time I ever came across a real-life example.

It started with a sharpshooter hidden in a house at the foot of High Street during Brown’s raid of the armory. He loaded his rifle with a rail spike — apparently they’re roughly the same size? I’m shaky on the details — and shot raider Dangerfield Newby in the head. After the shot, Hearn goes on for a full paragraph about what the townspeople did to the body, and I’m going to quote the whole thing because paraphrase won’t do it justice:

Townsfolk dragged the body into an alley and took their revenge. They cut off his genitals, slit his throat, and rammed sticks into his wounds. Another knife wielder trimmed off Newby’s ears and put them in his pocket. When the crowd tired of their sport, they pushed the remains into a gutter, and the town’s hogs finished off the body. A few spectators temporarily lost their appetite for pork.

I can’t really blame them...

Cemetaries & Churches

One of Hearn’s best sources is Joseph Barry’s The Strange Story of Harper’s Ferry which was published in 1903, so it’s public domain and available online. After Patterson’s Union army occupied Harpers Ferry in the summer of 1861 and then withdrew at the end of their three-month enlistment, Barry says some of Patterson’s men carried off a tombstone from the Methodist cemetery. I decided to share the primary source here because it’s more unfiltered:

What they wanted with it he will not venture to guess, but a regard for the truth of history compels him to relate the fact. It may have been that some company cook wanted it for a hearth-stone or it may have been that some pious warrior desired to set it up in his tent as an aid to his devotions, but certain it is that six or eight soldiers of this army were seen by many of the citizens conveying it between them from the cemetery to their bivouac in the armory yard.

Part of the other reason for sharing Barry directly is that there were a couple of places where I think Hearn was just wrong. For example, he says Father Michael Costello, the Catholic priest at St. Peter’s, billeted Confederate officers in his home, but when I researched this I ended up pretty convinced this is a myth; I don’t think the church housed the priest, even. Costello was the only priest to stick it out, though, and the NPS agrees that his efforts to signal neutrality probably saved the church:

Costello is noted for flying a Union Jack flag atop of St. Peter’s to express neutrality. This action is attributed with saving the church from being a target during the many bombardments the town. He held services and administered sacraments as much as possible during wartime along with allowing the church to be used as a hospital.

As far as I know, the Catholic Church itself had a strict position of neutrality in the American Civil War.

By 1860, there was an estimated 4.5 million Catholics in the United States, nearly one-sixth of the American population. Half of this Catholic population came from two decades of massive Irish immigration. [...] while Protestant denominations split along sectional lines and theological interpretations of slavery, even to the point of advocating war, the Catholic Church seemed maddeningly united and suspiciously neutral during the secession crisis.

Don’t Volunteer To Do Hard Things If You Can’t Follow Through

For all his flaws and flamboyance, no one denies that John Brown had the courage of his convictions. Even Miles, who was by all accounts an incompetet jackass, wasn’t a coward. But some of the guys in this story... kinda were, in ways that I sympathized with very deeply. So I’ll end on the note of the two stories that I’m mostly likely to remember when making decisions:

Alfred Balbour was sent to the Virginia secession convention as a pro-Union delegate by a Jefferson County electorate that wanted him to keep them out of the war. He got teased about being a Union stooge, got pressured by lobbyists, got rattled, and ended up resigning his armory position and helping the former governor of Virginia unilaterally seize the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. Barry talked to him about it and later Balbour came back and admitted Barry had been right to advise him to hold firm. Too late, oops.

Herr the miller does basically the same thing, just less formal and over less tiem. Herr literally volunteered — again: volunteered, unprompted! — to ride to Washington and beg for federal reinforcements when the Virginia troops first began menacing Harpers Ferry in April 1861. He got halfway and panicked that his anti-Union neighbors would ruin his business if word got out, and turned around. Someone else might have gone, man!

Anyway, it was a nice reminder that if you don’t want to risk being involved in something, you should keep your mouth shut and not volunteer. This is hard! I like to volunteer to help people when I know that I have the necessary skills. But I do not always have the necessary time, or risk appetite, to actually help with those projects, and sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to say nothing or “no, I’m sorry, I can’t commit to that.”

Not exactly what I went into the book looking for a reminder of, but hey. It was a good book in a lot of respects, with a ton of interesting stories that I could not include here. You should absolutely double-check names and dates and anecdotes because Hearn does sometimes get things wrong, but for the most part they seemed like clerical errors or honest mistakes caused by writing in a pre-internet era where it was much harder to get accurate context for stories that started out largely anecdotal to begin with.

Let me know if you decide to read it, either here or on the newly opened Harpers Ferry subreddit, where I’ve been posting photos and history snippets lately.

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1. I’ve previously written that Harpers Ferry changed hands eight times during the war, which is what’s on the NPS signs. Hearn’s appendix gets to fourteen by counting command transfers within the same garrison and brief raid-and-withdraw sequences that didn’t last long enough for a new commander to settle in. Both numbers are legit, they’re just measuring slightly different things.↩︎

2. Hearn mentions almost in passing that Jackson gave most of his coat buttons away to admiring Maryland ladies during the campaigns of 1862 as souvenirs. I have no idea how normal this was in either the Civil War or in older wars, but the idea of fussy Stonewall, who once held up an urgent deployment in order to be pedantically on time, slowly unbuttoning his coat all summer, one button per fan, is a really weird mental image. I imagine him as sort of weirdly flustered by all the fluttering women. ↩︎