Originally aired on May 03, 1996 - In part 88 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes the largest battle fought in Southwest Virginia: the Battle of Cloyd’s Mountain.
#88 – Battle of Cloyd’s Mountain
It was the largest Civil War battle fought in southwestern Virginia. A future president of the United States was conspicuous on the field. The engagement, though short, resulted in some of the most violent combat of the war. One result of the battle was to sever momentarily an important railroad in Virginia. Yet to most students of the war, the name Cloyd’s Mountain is totally unfamiliar.
In the spring of 1864, Union armies invaded Virginia from several directions. One Federal column of 6,500 infantry and 12 guns snaked south and east through the gaps of the Appalachian Mountains. Its destination was the New River bridge and nearby supply depot at Dublin, both vital links in the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. In command of the Union force was Brigadier General George Crook, a solid professional soldier who said little and fought hard. Crook was dark-haired and bearded; he would later win much larger fame not only in the Shenandoah Valley and at Petersburg but also in the Indian wars out west.
Word of the approach of this Union column brought confusion to the meager and scattered Confederate defenders in the isolated southwestern part of the state. The Southern commander (who had been at his post less than a day when he learned of the Union threat) was Brigadier General Albert Jenkins. A graduate of the Harvard Law School and former three-term member of the U. S. Congress, Jenkins wore a beard that covered his chest. He was not fully recovered from wounds received at Gettysburg, but he quickly gathered together all the men he could find to confront the Union threat.
On a sunny May 9, 1864, Jenkins’ woefully outnumbered band was in position on wooded high ground directly opposite imposing Cloyd’s Mountain. Crook sent his forces across the intervening valley in an effort to turn the Confederate right flank. Fighting began at midday. West Virginia and Ohio units in this assault became pinned down by Southern musketry. The gunfire caused a thick carpet of leaves to burst into flames. Untold numbers of wounded soldiers were cremated.
Jenkins was desperately strengthening his flank when Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes led his Ohio brigade in a concerted attack on the Confederate center. Hand-to-hand combat swelled all along the face of the ridge the Confederates were defending. The area became what a Union soldier called “one living, flashing sheet of flame”.
Northern reinforcements at that point overran the Confederates position. Jenkins went down with a shattered arm. His second-in-command, General John McCausland, could not stop the Union tide. What was left of the Southern force then abandoned the field. The battle at Cloyd’s Mountain had lasted little more than an hour. It had produced 1,200 casualties. Crook’s men moved into Dublin, destroyed track as they advanced north to the New River, and then set fire to the bridge at Radford. The one rail connection that Confederate officials at Richmond had with Tennessee and the west had been cut.
Union soldiers captured the wounded General Jenkins. The Confederate brigadier was taken to the nearby village of Belspring, where Federal surgeons amputated his arm. On the morning of May 24, two weeks after the battle, an attendant was dressing Jenkins’ stump when the man carelessly broke the ligature on the main artery. Jenkins bled to death before a physician could be found to attend to the injury.
Today the Cloyd’s Mountain battlefield is the property of the Dalton family in Radford. How proud every resident of southwest Virginia should be that the ground is as it was and not vandalized by modern-day commercialism. Let us hope that Cloyd’s Mountain will continue to stand as a silent monument to an age of gallantry when Americans willingly gave their lives for a country they all loved.
