The Kanawha Valley Campaign: When West Virginia Was Briefly Confederate Again

The land along the Kanawha River has always been contested. Salt springs laced the valley floor and had been worked by Native peoples for centuries. By the eighteen hundreds, the salt works here were among the most productive in the eastern United States, and when the Civil War began, both sides knew this valley was too valuable to leave in the other's hands.

In the summer of eighteen sixty-two, the Union held the Kanawha Valley. Brigadier General Jacob Cox and roughly five thousand men of his Kanawha Division had controlled the river corridor since the war's early months. But in August, Union command pulled Cox east to reinforce the army near Washington. The valley was left with a skeleton garrison.

Confederate Major General William Wing Loring saw the opening. Loring was a hard-edged fighter who had lost an arm in the Mexican War and spent months quarreling with Stonewall Jackson the previous winter. Now he had a mission of his own. Through September he pushed a Confederate force north through the mountains from the Virginia side. His objective was the valley's salt works, its river road, and its symbolism: western Virginia had voted to break from the Confederacy, but the Confederacy had not yet given up on taking it back.

After skirmishes at Fayetteville and a pitched fight at Charleston in mid-September, the Union garrison retreated all the way to the Ohio River. For about four weeks in the fall of eighteen sixty-two, the Kanawha Valley was Confederate again.

But Loring could not hold it. With the Confederate Army's attention fixed on Maryland and Antietam, reinforcements never came. Union forces regrouped across the Ohio and returned in late October. The valley changed hands for the last time, and the salt works, the river, and these mountains went permanently into the state that would formally become West Virginia on June twentieth, eighteen sixty-three.