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HALF A CENTURY FROM NOW, when the nation pauses to commemorate and contemplate the 200th anniversary of its civil war, there is a good chance that the Battle of Lynchburg will have risen in historical stature.
This three-day clash of Union and Confederate forces in mid-June of 1864 grows more interesting the more it is examined. Unlike many battles that turned chaotic during the conflict, the goals and strategies here remained clear-cut. One
side was obviously on offense, the other on defense. In the end, the winner and the loser were indisputable, and the result had far- reaching significance.
MOREOVER, the two commanding generals were both color- ful and intriguing figures, surrounded by controversy through- out their military careers. Union Major General David Hunter was born in Troy, New York,1 and grew up in Washington, D.C. Much of his ancestry was actually Virginian—a fact that led some Southerners to consider him a traitor for joining the Union cause. Deeply religious, he was a teetotaler who never smoked or even swore. Yet his was an Old Testament faith that impelled him to punish the South at every opportunity for what he saw as its cardinal sin of slavery. So zealous was Hunter in this regard that early in the war he declared all the slaves in South Carolina and Georgia freed. This order was quickly re- scinded by President Lincoln, who was still months away from his Emancipation Proclamation and worried about offending the border states.
Nor did Hunter shy away from spreading hellfire in his path, burning houses and public buildings that, to him, symbol-
ized the Confederacy. One of the houses he reduced to ashes belonged to a cousin.
His opposing commander, Lieutenant General Jubal Early, was a crusty veteran praised for his aggressiveness but also known to be cantankerous and, at times, reckless. Like Hunter, he carried an antipathy toward the other side that bordered upon hatred and smoldered long after Appomattox. Post-war,
1 Sources vary. Hunter’s birthplace is also listed as Princeton, New Jersey.
Early eventually returned to Lynchburg and became the instiga- tor and leader of what became known as the Cult of the Lost Cause.
PERHAPS ONE REASON Lynchburg’s battle has not re- ceived more attention from historians is that the casualty rate on that sweltering late-spring weekend was relatively low— somewhere between 200 and 500 killed and wounded on both sides near Lynchburg, perhaps 900 for the total period of what became known as Hunter’s Raid. Still, it was a Southern victory at a point in the conflict where those were few and far between, and also a precursor to a new era of mechanized warfare.
In Train, his chronicle of railroading around the world, historian Tom Zoellner notes that German military tacticians in World War I looked back to the American Civil War for ideas on how best to use railroads for troop movements. The Battle of Lynchburg, which was both won and lost on the rails, offers a good example.
The Confederates were able to repel a numerically superior Union force because General Early used the Orange & Alex- andria railroad to move reinforcements to Lynchburg from Charlottesville. The invaders were thwarted for a number of reasons, but chief among them was the failure of commanding general Hunter to cut this vital rail line north of the city when he had the opportunity.
Throughout most of the War Between the States, rank and file soldiers traveled from place to place via their much-abused feet, unless they were in the cavalry or fortunate enough to get a seat on a horse-drawn wagon. Railroads were used primarily to haul supplies and weapons or to transport the wounded to hospital centers (like the one in Lynchburg, which regularly received troop trains at the Ninth Street Station).
Yet just prior to the Battle of Lynchburg, a race developed between Hunter’s forces marching in from Liberty (now Bed- ford) and Early’s Second Corps regulars crammed into several southbound O&A cars. The railroad won.
Today, Lynchburg is considered somewhat isolated because it lacks close proximity to an interstate highway. In the 1860s, by contrast, three rail lines—the Orange & Alexandria, the South- side, and the Virginia & Tennessee—passed through the city, making it one of the best-connected in the South. Meanwhile, the James River & Kanawha Canal was still functional, includ- ing the passage through Lynchburg.
Nevertheless, the Hill City was left virtually unmolested through the first three years of the war, partly because it was surrounded by a large swath of Confederate-held territory. This made it difficult for the opposition to maintain the long supply lines needed to sustain an attack.
General Robert E. Lee’s beleaguered Army of Northern Vir- ginia relied heavily on supplies and weapons brought in from Lynchburg by rail. Therefore, Lynchburg had to be taken out of play, and Grant’s idea was for the attack to come not from the
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