Category: Civil War (1861-1865) Page 2 of 3

Charles Albright and George Baylor both spent their formative years as students at Dickinson College, and their shared participation in the Union Philosophical Society helped define their experience on campus. Despite their immediate similarities on campus, Baylor enrolled in Dickinson six years after Albright left campus in pursuit of a profession in law. Baylor’s wealthy roots in Jefferson County, Virginia, his birthplace, only accentuated his stark differences with Albright, who grew up in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Albright also demonstrated his fervent opposition to slavery in the decade prior to the outbreak of war, a sentiment not shared by Baylor, who immediately joined the Confederate army in May 1861. Both Baylor and Albright enlisted in the military and went on to become respected leaders in their respective units. Their dedicated service brought the otherwise unlikely pair of Dickinson students together in April 1865 in northern Virginia.

After graduating with the Class of 1860, Baylor returned to the academy he attended in Virginia as a child to teach. He kept this position until May 1861 when he enlisted in the Confederate army as a private. By 1863, Baylor established his reputation as an indefatigable and effective cavalry leader. His successful raids through Virginia in 1863 and 1864 only strengthened this reputation from the perspective of Colonel J. S. Mosby, who ensured the appointment of Baylor as captain of the company formed in April 1865. Less than a week after its formation, the unit encountered Union troops near Fairfax Station, Virginia and Baylor reluctantly retreated. He did not know, however, that the colonel leading the Union force was Charles Albright, fellow Dickinson alumnus and member of the Union Philosophical Society.

Well before confronting Baylor’s soldiers in 1865, Albright first established his military record in the Union army as a volunteer in a company dedicated to the protection Washington, D.C. He spent much of his service in Pennsylvania, first as a leader in the Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry and then as the commanding officer of Camp Muhlenberg in Reading. In September 1864, after having moved throughout the state with the Volunteer Infantry, Albright led the Infantry’s 202nd Regiment against several raids conducted by Confederate soldiers in attempts to sabotage Virginia’s railways. Albright attempted to stop one such raid, planned by Baylor, on April 10, 1865.

Albright’s report of the raid and his unit’s victory over Baylor’s soldiers noted that those Confederate soldiers who were not killed or did not escape were taken prisoner. In a less formal account of the attack, Albright told his superior that he “whipped him like thunder.” As one would expect, Baylor’s memoirs detail the events in a much different manner. Of the battle Baylor said that “if the critic will carefully review the reports from the Colonel himself, the advantage will appear exceedingly small” and, responding directly to Albright’s description of the confrontation, “I hope the devil will never whip him any worse.” This chance meeting between Dickinson alumni, however separated by class, background, politics, or ideology, illustrated one way the war divided a single campus. Student populations at Dickinson divided fairly evenly between Union and Confederate allegiances. While the campus saw the early manifestations of these divisions among students, some class members saw it demonstrated on the battlefield.

According to the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, the farthest north point of the Union attained by an organized body of the Confederate Army was present day Pennsylvania Route 34, about 1 mile north of Carlisle Springs. The Pennsylvania Historical marker, erected in 1929, states that on the morning of June 28, 1863, an organized band of the Confederate Army of Robert E. Lee reached the farm of Joseph Miller near Sterrett’s Gap. There is no evidence as to whose command these Confederates belonged to. Check out ExplorePAhistory.com for more information and details on the historical marker.

Another common conception of the farthest north point or high-water mark of the Confederate Army is a small grove of trees within a confined area known as “The Angle.” It was behind this location where the Union troops were positioned on July 3, 1863 during “Pickett’s Charge” which took place during the Battle of Gettysburg. The first government historian of the Gettysburg battlefield, John B. Bachelder, conferred the title “High Water Mark of the Rebellion” to the small grove or “copse” of trees. Bachelder’s influence led to the creation of the “High Water Mark of the Rebellion Monument,” dedicated in 1892. For more information the National Parks Service website and the Historical Marker Database provides further details, maps and images.

One other historical theory of the Confederate high-water mark is from Jeff Shaara’s Civil War Battlefields: Discovering America’s Hallowed Ground. Shaara contends that a monument representing the 11th Mississippi is the actual high-water mark. In his book he notes:

“I respect those who care deeply about paying homage to such noteworthy historical landmarks as the high-water mark. I speculate, however, that the copse of trees does not indicate the farthest advance of the Confederate troops that day. Drive just north, to the Bryan House. Walk to the stone wall on the left, peer over, and you will see the newest monument on the battlefield. This marks the spot where the battle flag of the 11th Mississippi was found as it lay across the stone wall. The 11th was part of the brigade commanded by Joe Davis, nephew of the Confederate president. By all information, a total of fourteen Mississippians reached this spot, farther into the Union position than the North Carolinians, at what is today labeled the high-water mark.”

On September 23, 1897 Horatio Collins King, a member of Dickinson College Class of 1858, received a Medal of Honor for his acts of bravery during the battle of Five Forks. As quartermaster of the first cavalry division of the Army of the Shenandoah, King fought in one of the final Eastern battles of the Civil War in Five Forks, Virginia on April 1, 1865. Maj. General Philip Sheridan led 50,000 Union troops in a victory over a Confederate force only one-fifth the size. In his military history, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac (2008), William Swinton explains the Union victory and capture of the Southside Railroad at Five Forks in terms the battle’s greater significance in the war. Within the eight days following the battle of Five Forks the Confederate Army had retreated from Petersburg and Richmond and General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his army to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

Nonetheless, for the soldiers who fought at Five Forks, the battle remained a personal experience. In his Civil War Journal (digitized in the Dickinson College database “Their Own Words”), Horatio King did not go to lengths to discuss the meaning of the battle and the Confederate retreat. Instead, King wrote a poignant passage describing a dead Southern soldier he encountered while collecting the wounded: “his face was raised toward heaven and the open eyes & sweet expression of countenance together with the hands uplifted as in prayer gave me the impression that he still lived.” Battles were personal affairs for generals as well, as exemplified by Gouverneur Kemble Warren’s obsession with Five Forks. After the battle, Sheridan relieved Warren of his command of the V Corps, and when Warren “personally sought of General Sheridan a reason for his order,” “he would not or could not give one.” After more than a decade of seeking an explanation, Warren finally received official recognition of his unjust treatment when President Rutherford B. Hayes authorized a court of inquiry on December 9, 1879.

The National Park Service has preserved Five Forks as part of the larger Petersburg National Battlefield. Their website contains Five Forks resources including multiple battle maps. J. Tracy Power’s Lee’s miserables : life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox (1998) is a unique military history of the last year of the war that uses Confederate soldier’s letters and diaries as a primary source of evidence, giving readers a different angle on the battle of Five Forks.

Click on this 1865 Waud sketch of the battle to see other Five Forks images:

William Princeton Willey, Dickinson College Class of 1862, was determined to graduate even though all odds seemed to be against him. As a junior in college, Willey’s world erupted as his country went to war with itself after the battle of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Ten days later Willey wrote his father, the future West Virginia senator Waitman T. Willey, of the precarious situation he was in as a Southern student in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. William sent two letters to his father within a one week period: one on April 22 and the second on April 29. Within this week William perceived that the situation in Carlisle had changed dramatically. In his first letter, William described the excited mobs of townspeople at the train station: “women bidding adieu to their husbands and sons.” Though a committee from the town approached the college’s president, Dr. Herman Merills Johnson, informing him that Southern students must either leave or take an oath of allegiance, William told his father that he would try to stay as long as he could: “I fear nothing yet. The only ones that are in danger are the students from S.C.” One week later, William and his friend McCants were the only Southern students left. Now however, Carlisle residents complimented William on his dedication for remaining at school. More often, William wrote, he and McCants were approached for their opinion as Southerners because “in Carlisle the prominent desire seems to be that of getting a hold on Jeff Davis.” William’s two letters document the remarkable shift in emotions of Carlisle residents after the immediate shock of Fort Sumter wore off—by April 29th it appeared that the women of Carlisle no longer felt it necessary to arm themselves with broomsticks against a possible Southern attack. After graduating, William P. Willey went on to earn his law degree and became a law professor at West Virginia University, where he founded the West Virginia Law Review in 1894.