Cabell County

Cabell County, West Virginia in the American Civil War
The Massacre and Burning of Guyandotte

By Matt Prochnow

Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, 13 November 1861

Guyandotte…has always had the reputation of being the “ornaryest” place on the Ohio River. … Major Whaley and his one hundred and fifty soldiers were about the only decent, honest men who had ever staid in Guyandotte over night.”

During the American Civil War from 1861-1865, West Virginia flung aside both its status as “western Virginia” and its membership to the Confederate States of America, and joined President Abraham Lincoln and the northern Union states. Though considerable research has been done on the Wheeling area, which indeed was the region that drove West Virginia’s statehood movement, this paper will explore the roles and perspectives of Cabell County residents in the Civil War era. Specifically, I will concentrate on the aberrant opinions and actions of Guyandotte residents. Apart from the more broad research topics tackled by Jack L. Dickinson and Joe Geiger, little has been written specifically about Guyandotte.

The southern issue of secession from the United States grew in the 1850s, culminating for Virginia on April 17, 1861 with the decision to secede. The majority of counties in the western third of the state—which would later become West Virginia—voted no to secession in the statewide referendum. According to West Virginia state historian Virgil A. Lewis, the “mountain people…pledged undying attachment” to the Federal Republic and despised secession.[1]

In keeping with that feeling, 29 of the 38 delegates from the counties which would become West Virginia, including Cabell County representative William McComas, voted against secession.[2] In those counties, meetings and conferences were almost immediately called to address the idea of creating a new state, separate from Virginia and a part of the Union. McComas’s vote, however, could have gone either way. Cabell County essentially wished to remain included in the United States, but there were pockets of strong southern sympathy peppered throughout the county.

From the journals of his grandfather Waitman T. Willey, an essential figure in West Virginia’s statehood movement, William P. Willey argues that the “mountain people” had ulterior motivation for opposing Virginia’s secession from the United States; the people on opposing sides of the Alleghenies had little in common and no relationship whatsoever. Western Virginia was known to the tidewater aristocrats as “the peasantry of the West.”[3]

It was in this climate that the Civil War and West Virginia’s statehood movement simultaneously occurred. Therefore, it can be understood that confusion ensued—the state they had forever called their own was forsaking its nation, and their counties were abandoning that state. Brother would fight against brother, and father against son. Nowhere was an area less confused, though, than Guyandotte, West Virginia.

A small, independent Ohio River community in Cabell County, Guyandotte is an interesting case and one of the aforementioned pockets of resistance to West Virginia’s northern leaning. Though a westernmost community in western Virginia, Guyandotte was the only real spot in Cabell County which expressed where consistent and solid Confederate support. “The first secession flag along the Ohio River” was raised there, and since that time Guyandotte had been renowned “as a nest of outlaws, horse thieves and counterfeiters.”[4] Cabell County, like much of what would become West Virginia, voted against secession from the United States, but Guyandotte voted for the split. When West Virginia was vying for statehood and a chance to join the Union just a few years later, Guyandotte went against its county again and voted to remain a part of Virginia.[5] It was a hotbed of Confederate sympathy, and its citizens played a large role in the massacre of its Union regiment and their town’s subsequent destruction. Historian Joe Geiger has said that it was a chance to raise morale of Jenkins’ troops, but it is more closely related to the small-town vindictiveness of the Confederate breeding ground of Guyandotte than military necessity.

In early 1857, just a few years before the secession movement in Virginia and the rest of the South, Massachusetts Congressman Eli Thayer established Ceredo in Wayne County, just a few miles from Guyandotte. Many in the area saw Thayer’s community as an invasion and an attempt to begin abolishing slavery though he denied any such accusation.[6] Around July 21, Congressman Albert Gallatin Jenkins, who would later become a Brigadier General for the Confederate States of America, exchanged heated words with Thayer regarding the institution of slavery and his “abolitionist colony.” [7] A month later on August 26, Jenkins helped Guyandotte pass a resolution pledging to keep their county loyal to Virginia.

In 1860, the year Lincoln was elected president, Guyandotte established a pro-Confederate militia called the “Border Rangers,” a counterpart to the 5th Virginia (Union) Cavalry in Ceredo. Led by Jenkins, that company came to be known as the 8th Virginia Cavalry, and fought several battles against Union troops—including a raid on Guyandotte which would later be known as “the massacre of the 9th Infantry.”[8]

That same 9th Infantry (Union) had been recruited from Lawrence County, Ohio, Eastern Kentucky, and Cabell County by Union Major Kellian V. Whaley to defend the area from potential Confederate attacks. A Union force, this one commanded by Colonel John Ziegler, was already stationed at Ceredo, and would remain there for the entire war. Whaley’s approximately 150 recruits, a figure disputed by eyewitness J. H. Rouse, who wrote that the number was closer to 130, began training at Guyandotte in late October 1861, but the process did not start smoothly—nearly one third of his men either took a leave of absence or fell sick within three weeks. [9] The aforementioned raid on the encampment happened just then—when the new Union regiment was at its weakest. To further complicate the Union defense, approximately seventy men were cut off from their quarters and weapons by the suddenness of the onslaught.[10]

According to Joe Geiger, the raid on Guyandotte was essentially to raise morale among Jenkins’s troops, who also had been recruited from the area. Jenkins himself had a home in Green Bottom, located about 11 miles upriver from Guyandotte, and the attack was a homecoming for him as well as for his men. However, ridding their own hometown of Union men must have made the raid all the more pleasant for them, and that is exactly what they proceeded to do on November 10, 1861.

Because the training camp was so new, it was disorganized and had few men ready to staff its defenses. When Jenkins and his nearly 500 Confederate forces arrived, Whaley and his men were unprepared and unaware—no scouts had been sent out. A bloodbath ensued. Many of the green Union troops attempted to flee across the suspension bridge spanning the Guyandotte River, but Confederate troops mowed them down. Survivors who jumped off the bridge were captured below. The battle was short lived; save for the ten to twelve dead and a few escapees, Whaley and about one hundred men were captured and marched out of Guyandotte the next day.

The Point Pleasant Register Weekly reported on November 15 that the defeat of Whaley’s regiment was facilitated by the aid of Guyandotte citizens, a fact overlooked by Geiger. Though the Register Weekly is pointedly prejudiced, it is indubitably rooted in some degree of truth because eyewitness J.H. Rouse, a druggist who was also a Commissioner of the Federal Court,[11] concurs. It is impossible to ascertain whether Guyandotte secessionists and the 8th Virginia Cavalry had been in close contact, but after the massacre had settled, the Confederate troops were invited to dine on “rich viands which appeared to have been previously prepared and preserved for the occasion.”[12] According to the Register Weekly, Union troops had been invited to Sunday dinner in many of the same homes that same evening; during the meal, at approximately 8 P.M., the Confederates attacked. The homes hosting Union men were marked, and some of the dining soldiers were killed before they could take up arms.[13] It is even written that the residents personally fought against the Union men, though no other source corroborated this statement.

This evidence is arguable, but Rouse’s firsthand account of the post-raid events is more believable and substantial. As did the Register Weekly, he writes that the “secesh” opened their homes to the rebel soldiers and shared a meal for them before they went on their way. Over dinner, many of the rebel sympathizers in Guyandotte pointed out the Unionists among them. Rouse, a passionate Union man, implicated the notoriously Confederate Ricketts family as a leading culprit of this divulgence of semi-secret information.[14] The Confederates gathered up their booty and prisoners early the next morning, and hastily marched out of town. Rouse’s manuscript piercingly pictures the prisoners’ march, including details of their captors’ increase in speed as Ziegler’s Union forces could be heard at Guyandotte. Word had reached Ceredo that the Confederates had raided the Union camp at Guyandotte, and revenge was quick.

The 5th Virginia Cavalry (Union) arrived from Ceredo with the intention of battling the Confederate forces, who they expected to return to further loot the town. Apparently, though, they could not wait, and began to set fire to certain Guyandotte homes. No evidence remains to determine how the burning began—by order or by simple frustration at missing the Confederate contingent—but the blaze started at known secessionists’ homes, and much of the downtown area followed. The burning was later defended as an act of “military necessity,” but it was likely a mission of revenge. Ceredo was a colony of implanted northerners and already had a contentious history with Guyandotte. The same techniques of rumor and hearsay the Confederates had used to root out Unionists were employed by Ziegler’s men on November 11, and some houses of Union sympathizers were fired along with those of secessionists like the Ricketts family.[15]

This strategy was inevitable, however, due to the known Confederate sentiment which was seemingly inherent in Guyandotte residents. It would have been nearly impossible and definitely risky for Union soldiers to trust members of that community to reveal their partiality in the Civil War, especially after they had just aided a Confederate contingent. Alas, though there were indeed some Union sympathizers living in Guyandotte, like J. H. Rouse, some of their shops and homes were burned as well. The general rebel attitude and like actions of Guyandotte citizens not only allowed the massacre of the 9th (Union) Infantry, but also contributed to the ensuing destruction of their hometown