Robert E. Lee's First Battle: Cheat Mountain, Eighteen Sixty-One
Near Snowshoe, West Virginia
In September of eighteen sixty-one, Robert E. Lee led his first battle of the Civil War, and he lost it on this mountain. Lee had been given command of Confederate forces trying to hold western Virginia, the pro-Union counties that were already in the process of breaking away to form a new state.
Union troops had built a fortification at the Cheat Mountain summit they called Fort Milroy, occupying the highest ground in the region. Lee planned a careful multi-pronged assault to surround and destroy the garrison. On the twelfth of September, the Confederate columns moved into position in driving fog and cold rain.
The attack collapsed before it began. Confederate soldiers captured some Union pickets who exaggerated, perhaps deliberately, the strength of the Union position. The Confederate commander tasked with triggering the assault believed the false report and never gave the order to attack.
The other columns waited for a signal that never came. Lee withdrew without achieving anything. Casualties were modest on both sides, fewer than about one hundred men each, but the strategic failure left western Virginia firmly in Union hands.
Critics in the Confederate press mocked Lee, and some called him Granny Lee, the general who would not fight. Lee left the region in October, having accomplished almost nothing. That reputation did not last.
He was recalled to Richmond, and his record over the next four years erased every memory of Cheat Mountain.
