The old Northwestern Turnpike once crossed the Tygart Valley River atop this stone bridge pier on the outskirts of Grafton. On the shore opposite this scene, 150 years ago, Pvt. T. Bailey Brown became the Civil War's first Union soldier to die at the hands of a Confederate soldier.
GRAFTON, W.Va. -- Elmer E. Ellsworth, a Union Army colonel and a personal friend of President Abraham Lincoln, was lionized as the North's first Civil War martyr after he removed a Confederate flag from the Marshall House hotel in Alexandria, Va., on May 24, 1861, and was promptly shot to death.
The flag could be seen from the White House, just across the Potomac River from Alexandria, and had been a steady source of irritation for Union loyalists since Virginia entered an alliance with the Confederate States of America several weeks earlier.
Although Ellsworth's death was dramatic and well publicized, he was not the first Union soldier to die in combat during the Civil War. Two days before the colonel's life came to an end in an Alexandria stairwell, a Taylor County private in the Grafton Guards fired on a small group of Confederate pickets at a roadblock on the outskirts of Grafton, and was gunned down by them.
While the dead colonel's body lay in state in the White House and cries of "Remember Ellsworth!" quickly became a Northern recruiting slogan, the body of Pvt. Thornsberry Bailey Brown was available for viewing for several hours in the lobby of the Grafton Hotel. Then, fellow members of the recently formed Grafton Guards departed for Wheeling, where on May 25, they were officially mustered into the Union Army.
Unlike Ellsworth, who was killed by a civilian, Brown was shot to death by a private in the Letcher Guards, a Confederate militia unit formed in the Grafton area and named in honor of secession-boosting Virginia Gov. John Letcher.
"There's an online exhibit by the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery about Ellsworth, in which he's described as the first Union martyr," said Civil War author and historian Hunter Lesser of Elkins. "That's really unfair.
"Brown may not have been a friend of the president and he wasn't capturing a flag when he was killed, but his story is just as good as Ellsworth's, and he died earlier."
Several other Union soldiers died before Brown, but not at the hands of Confederate soldiers.
On April 14, 1861, during a 100-gun salute to the U.S. flag preceding the surrender of the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, S.C., a spark from a Union cannon ignited an accumulation of live ordnance that exploded. Private Daniel Hough of New York was killed, and Pvt. Edward Galloway died the following day of injuries from the blast.
On April 19, Confederate sympathizers in Baltimore blocked and derailed a Union troop train, stranding several railcars. After soldiers occupying one of the cars decided to walk back to a rail station, they encountered a mob of civilians, some carrying Confederate banners, who threw rocks and bricks at them, and at one point, began to shoot at them. The troops eventually returned fire. Six federal troops from Pennsylvania and four from Massachusetts were killed by the mob, with a like number of civilians dying in the melee.
Confrontation
On May 22, 1861, the day of Brown's death, about 200 locally recruited members of the Letcher Guards led by Capt. John Robinson entered Grafton and attempted to tear down a large American flag displayed on Main Street. Grafton Guards Capt. George Latham, the lawyer and newspaper publisher who displayed the flag, also served as secretary at the First Wheeling Convention.
"Unionist sentiments were strong in Grafton because of the presence of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad," Lesser said. "Grafton was a key junction on the main rail route going into the capital, and a lot of railroad workers lived in and around Grafton."
Since the workers, many of them recent immigrants from Ireland, did not want to see their livelihoods disrupted, they tended to sympathize with the Union.
According to letters from participants Lesser researched in writing his book "Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided," townspeople jeered the Confederate unit as it entered the town.
After Robinson ordered two of his troops to tear down Latham's flag, a man in the crowd threw a chair at the Letcher Guards captain, knocking him off his horse. Members of the Grafton Guards were then seen on rooftops and in windows pointing weapons at the Confederates, who eventually withdrew to nearby Fetterman, where Robinson was a merchant.
"Fetterman, at the time, had a general store that doubled as a Confederate recruiting depot, a sawmill, a gristmill and a tobacco factory," said Grafton historian Walter Rohrbacher, who wrote his WVU master's thesis on the Letcher Guards.
At dusk that night, T. Bailey Brown and another Grafton Guards member, Daniel Wilson, were coming back to town through Fetterman after a recruiting mission at Pruntytown.
GRAFTON, W.Va. -- Elmer E. Ellsworth, a Union Army colonel and a personal friend of President Abraham Lincoln, was lionized as the North's first Civil War martyr after he removed a Confederate flag from the Marshall House hotel in Alexandria, Va., on May 24, 1861, and was promptly shot to death.
The flag could be seen from the White House, just across the Potomac River from Alexandria, and had been a steady source of irritation for Union loyalists since Virginia entered an alliance with the Confederate States of America several weeks earlier.
Although Ellsworth's death was dramatic and well publicized, he was not the first Union soldier to die in combat during the Civil War. Two days before the colonel's life came to an end in an Alexandria stairwell, a Taylor County private in the Grafton Guards fired on a small group of Confederate pickets at a roadblock on the outskirts of Grafton, and was gunned down by them.
While the dead colonel's body lay in state in the White House and cries of "Remember Ellsworth!" quickly became a Northern recruiting slogan, the body of Pvt. Thornsberry Bailey Brown was available for viewing for several hours in the lobby of the Grafton Hotel. Then, fellow members of the recently formed Grafton Guards departed for Wheeling, where on May 25, they were officially mustered into the Union Army.
Unlike Ellsworth, who was killed by a civilian, Brown was shot to death by a private in the Letcher Guards, a Confederate militia unit formed in the Grafton area and named in honor of secession-boosting Virginia Gov. John Letcher.
"There's an online exhibit by the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery about Ellsworth, in which he's described as the first Union martyr," said Civil War author and historian Hunter Lesser of Elkins. "That's really unfair.
"Brown may not have been a friend of the president and he wasn't capturing a flag when he was killed, but his story is just as good as Ellsworth's, and he died earlier."
Several other Union soldiers died before Brown, but not at the hands of Confederate soldiers.
On April 14, 1861, during a 100-gun salute to the U.S. flag preceding the surrender of the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, S.C., a spark from a Union cannon ignited an accumulation of live ordnance that exploded. Private Daniel Hough of New York was killed, and Pvt. Edward Galloway died the following day of injuries from the blast.
On April 19, Confederate sympathizers in Baltimore blocked and derailed a Union troop train, stranding several railcars. After soldiers occupying one of the cars decided to walk back to a rail station, they encountered a mob of civilians, some carrying Confederate banners, who threw rocks and bricks at them, and at one point, began to shoot at them. The troops eventually returned fire. Six federal troops from Pennsylvania and four from Massachusetts were killed by the mob, with a like number of civilians dying in the melee.
Confrontation
On May 22, 1861, the day of Brown's death, about 200 locally recruited members of the Letcher Guards led by Capt. John Robinson entered Grafton and attempted to tear down a large American flag displayed on Main Street. Grafton Guards Capt. George Latham, the lawyer and newspaper publisher who displayed the flag, also served as secretary at the First Wheeling Convention.
"Unionist sentiments were strong in Grafton because of the presence of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad," Lesser said. "Grafton was a key junction on the main rail route going into the capital, and a lot of railroad workers lived in and around Grafton."
Since the workers, many of them recent immigrants from Ireland, did not want to see their livelihoods disrupted, they tended to sympathize with the Union.
According to letters from participants Lesser researched in writing his book "Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided," townspeople jeered the Confederate unit as it entered the town.
After Robinson ordered two of his troops to tear down Latham's flag, a man in the crowd threw a chair at the Letcher Guards captain, knocking him off his horse. Members of the Grafton Guards were then seen on rooftops and in windows pointing weapons at the Confederates, who eventually withdrew to nearby Fetterman, where Robinson was a merchant.
"Fetterman, at the time, had a general store that doubled as a Confederate recruiting depot, a sawmill, a gristmill and a tobacco factory," said Grafton historian Walter Rohrbacher, who wrote his WVU master's thesis on the Letcher Guards.
At dusk that night, T. Bailey Brown and another Grafton Guards member, Daniel Wilson, were coming back to town through Fetterman after a recruiting mission at Pruntytown.
At Fetterman, the Letcher Guards had established a sentry post at the intersection of the Northwestern Turnpike and the B&O Railroad tracks, manned by Daniel S. Knight, William Reese and George E. Glenn. The Confederate pickets ordered their Union counterparts to halt.
"Brown knew Knight," said Lesser. "The two had a history that apparently involved some bad blood and an altercation years before. Brown was incensed when he realized who was confronting him, and asked what right he had to halt citizens on a public road.
"He maybe had less patience with Knight than he would have had with someone else."
According to Lesser's account in "Rebels at the Gate," Brown drew his revolver and fired, shearing away part of Knight's right earlobe. Knight fired back with his flintlock musket, striking Brown a mortal blow in the chest. Wilson, who would later become a lieutenant in the Union Army, turned and fled, and was grazed in the heel by fire from the pickets.
Brown, a father of three, had turned 32 the week before his death.
Aftermath
When the Grafton Guards asked that Brown's body be returned to them, the Confederates "sent the body on a railroad handcar into Grafton," Rohrbacher said.
On May 23 -- the date Virginians voted to ratify their secession from the Union -- hundreds of Taylor County residents viewed Brown's body on the way to vote. Virginia had entered into an alliance with the Confederacy weeks before that date, following a vote to support the Confederate cause by delegates to a Virginia secession convention in April.
On May 25, the Grafton Guards were in Wheeling, where they became Company B of the 2nd (U.S.) Virginia Volunteer Infantry. According to Lesser's book, it was the first Union company to be recruited from what was then Virginia's interior.
On that same day, Grafton was occupied by about 500 Confederate troops under the command of Col. George Porterfield. After Porterfield sent some of his men to the Mannington area to burn a pair of B&O Railroad bridges, his force, including the Letcher Guards, moved about 15 miles up the Tygart Valley River to the Confederate hotbed of Philippi.
"That 15 miles made a world of difference," Lesser said. "While Grafton sympathized with the Union, a Confederate flag had been flying over Philippi since as early as February.
"In West Virginia, you can't draw a line to divide Union supporters from Confederates - it's more a checkerboard of loyalties."
Lesser said that, despite Ellsworth's fame, Brown is generally acknowledged by historians as the first Union soldier killed by a Confederate.
Brown is buried in the Grafton National Cemetery. A Civil War Trail interpretive sign at the entrance to the cemetery summarizes the story of his death.
On Friday, starting at 8:30 p.m., historian Mark Tennant and a group of assistants dressed in Civil War-era uniforms and other attire will lead a lantern tour of Civil War graves in the Grafton National Cemetery, telling the stories of Brown and several other soldiers buried there. The event is free and open to the public.
Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelham...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5169.
The West Virginia Civil War Task Force has posted an online timeline of Civil War events in the state here.
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