The Law Books and the Lost Raid

In August of eighteen sixty-three, a Union cavalry commander named William Averell rode into the mountains of western Virginia with an unusual assignment: retrieve law books from the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals library in Confederate-held Lewisburg, and while he was at it, destroy a saltpeter works, scatter a Confederate cavalry force, and generally make trouble behind enemy lines.

Averell led thirteen hundred mounted infantry and cavalry east through the Allegheny Mountains. The Confederates learned he was coming and moved fast. Colonel George Patton, grandfather of the future World War Two general, gathered about twenty-three hundred Confederate troops and blocked the road at White Sulphur Springs, about ten miles east of Lewisburg. On August twenty-sixth, Averell hit that wall.

For two days the Union attackers tried to break through. They charged the Confederate line repeatedly in the afternoon heat. They probed both flanks. They gained almost nothing. Patton's Virginia infantry held firm, and when Averell's ammunition ran low on the morning of August twenty-seventh, he ordered a retreat. He never reached Lewisburg, so the law books stayed where they were, although earlier in the raid his column had already destroyed the saltpeter works.

Averell withdrew all the way back to Union lines, leaving the field to the Confederates.

The resort at White Sulphur Springs had been one of the most fashionable destinations in antebellum Virginia, a place where the Southern planter class gathered every summer. The war had turned it into a military staging ground. Today it is the Greenbrier resort, still operating, famous for the vast Cold War bunker built beneath it in the nineteen fifties to shelter Congress in the event of a nuclear attack.