Battle of Charleston 1862: Six Weeks of Confederate Control

The city of Charleston, now West Virginia's capital, sits in a steep river valley where the Elk meets the Kanawha. In the late summer of eighteen sixty-two, Confederate Major General William Wing Loring decided he wanted it back.

The Kanawha Valley had been under Union control since George McClellan's early campaigns of eighteen sixty-one, the operations that made his reputation before he was handed command of the Army of the Potomac. The valley mattered for several reasons: its salt works, its rivers, its political symbolism as the heartland of the Unionist western counties that would become West Virginia the following year.

In August of eighteen sixty-two, the Union stripped the Kanawha garrison to reinforce Washington after the Peninsula Campaign. Colonel Joseph Lightburn was left with a thinned force. Loring moved fast. On September sixth he marched five thousand men out of Narrows, Virginia, pushing northwest through the mountain gaps.

By the morning of September thirteenth, Charleston residents woke to Confederate artillery shelling Union positions east of town. Loring's men overwhelmed Lightburn's defenders, and by mid-afternoon the general rode into downtown Charleston. The Confederate flag flew over the Kanawha Valley for the first time in over a year.

It flew for less than four weeks. Twelve thousand Union troops moved south from the north. Loring's force, unable to hold against that strength, began withdrawing on October ninth. By November the valley was back under Federal control and would remain so.

The brief Confederate occupation was a tactical success with no strategic consequence. But it demonstrated the vulnerability of the thinly held mountain territories and foreshadowed the guerrilla struggle that would grind on in the Appalachians long after the main armies had moved elsewhere.