Northwestern Virginia
Northwestern Virginia, which included what is now West Virginia, became the first part of the state to experience both types of guerrilla conflict: conflict aimed at outside invaders and conflict aimed at intimidating one’s neighbors. The northwest was home to Virginia’s largest concentration of Union sympathizers, and the struggle for political and economic control of its communities began in the spring of 1861. In places not immediately occupied by the Union army, these Unionists formed “guerrilla parties” to counter Confederate neighbors and defend, as one man put it, “our respective regions … as well as … the Union.” Among the first rival bands, operating in a cluster of counties north of Charleston, were the Confederate Moccasin Rangers and the Unionist Snake Hunters. Family and kinship often bound together many members of these bands, thus turning community tussles into something like clan warfare.
In the meantime, in the absence of any substantial number of Confederate soldiers, Confederate guerrillas also did what they could to slow the Union advance. Union troops, for their part, were determined to protect Unionist civilians in the region, to control the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and to block Confederate raids into Ohio and Pennsylvania. A measure of their frustration in achieving these goals may be seen in the harsh retaliatory measures taken against Confederate guerrillas by late in June of 1861. George B. McClellan, the Union commander in the region, announced that “marauding parties” would be treated according to the “severest rules of military law.” McClellan’s successor, William S. Rosecrans, hoping to stop the “neighborhood and private wars,” included civilian supporters of guerrillas in these proscriptions.
A standoff ensued in northwestern Virginia. Union troops became so desperate to control the rebels that they allowed Unionist guerrillas to arrest suspected enemies. They also organized Unionist volunteers into special counterguerrilla units. Company C, 11th (West) Virginia Infantry, for example, was assigned to break up the Moccasin Rangers. For their part, Confederate guerrillas, unable to hit military targets effectively, created chaos by destroying U.S. post offices and county courthouses, waylaying sheriffs and tax collectors, and threatening the operation of law courts.
Soon, even Confederate officials became alarmed by the unchecked nature of this contest. Virginia governor John Letcher had initially encouraged guerrilla resistance. According to Daniel Ruggles, a colonel in the provisional army, the “policy of the State” in May 1861 was “to make each house a citadel, and every rock and tree positions of defense.” By March 1862, however, hoping to bring the independent guerrilla bands under government control, instilling discipline, and better organizing guerrilla resistance, Letcher had authorized the Virginia State Rangers. A few weeks later, Virginia’s law became a model for the national Partisan Ranger Act, passed by the Confederate Congress, to control Confederate guerrillas across the South. No amount of legislation, however, at either the state or the national level, could check the spread and continuing violence of the guerrilla war.
Confederate Virginia
Guerrillas also resisted the Union advance into central and eastern Virginia. The first reports of guerrilla fighting came from Alexandria and Hampton late in June 1861 and, around the same time, Turner Ashby began partisan operations in the Shenandoah Valley. Generally, though, the scope of guerrilla war in Confederate Virginia did not assume major importance until 1863 and 1864, when the Union army secured a permanent foothold south of the Rappahannock River. By then, the state’s most famous band of sanctioned partisan rangers, John Singleton Mosby’s 43rd Cavalry Battalion, had been formed. His men became such a dominant force in Fauquier, Loudoun, Fairfax, and Prince William counties that the region became known as “Mosby’s Confederacy.”
While the number of Unionists in Confederate Virginia was smaller than in the northwestern part of the state, fierce neighborhood wars could also be found there. Indeed, the bitterness of these contests only deepened as the war went on. “Just one thing after another seemed to fan the flame of the war spirit,” explained a resident of southwestern Virginia. Another man in the same region declared, “People had grudges against some neighbor[s]. So they got together to steal and destroy the property of absent soldiers, and even to kill those whom they particularly hated.”
Guerrilla warfare against the Union army came to a head in November 1864, when, following his successful Shenandoah Valley Campaign, Union general Philip H. Sheridan turned his attention to Mosby’s Confederacy—Fauquier and Loudoun counties in northern Virginia. (Some accounts extend Mosby’s reach to Fairfax and Prince William counties, as well.) Sheridan told his men not to destroy private homes, and he wanted no “personal violence” against civilians, but his troops burned thousands of haystacks and hundreds of buildings, confiscated crops, and seized hundreds of horses and cattle. It seemed harsh retribution to many Union soldiers, but at least one of them concluded, “There is no stopping this Infernal Guerrilla Warfare unless destroying [it] Root & Branch.”
Just as the guerrilla war had begun before conventional military operations gained effectiveness, so, too, did it end after Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Unwilling even to use the word “surrender,” Mosby did not “disband” his men until April 21, 1865. Jesse C. McNeill did not surrender the state’s last company of partisan rangers until May 8.
The legacy of Confederate guerrilla resistance in Virginia proved to be mixed. It made a distinct contribution to Confederate defense of the state, but it also brought more violence to more communities than conventional warfare could have done. Ironically, by forcing the Union army to take harsh punitive measures against both Confederate guerrillas and their civilian supporters, it also heightened the savagery of the war and contributed to Confederate defeat.
