John Thompson PEERCE

                   age = 31; Living with parents & wife

Pierce


http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh55-2.html

The Raid on Piedmont and the Crippling
of Franz Sigel in the Shenandoah Valley

By Richard R. Duncan

Volume 55 (1996), pp. 25-40

Piedmont, a small but important rail center on the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad in central West Virginia, suddenly came into sharp focus for federal, state, and railroad authorities on May 5, 1864, with the renewal of military campaigning. A surprise raid on the town by a Confederate partisan company, led by Captain John McNeill, left shops, several trains, and other railroad equipment smoldering in wreckage. The attack and news of his boldness reverberated through the state capital at Wheeling, Washington, and the camp of General Franz Sigel, Union commander of the Department of West Virginia, then poised at Winchester to advance up the Shenandoah Valley......

In May 1864, as Sigel rested his army at Winchester, McNeill and Captain John T. Peerce, who was on detached duty and had agreed to join the expedition, led the rangers across Knobly Mountain at Doll's Gap and then the summit of the Allegheny by the Elk Garden road onto the Piedmont-Bloomington road. Reaching Bloomington, Maryland, at daybreak, they captured the town. Hardly before they had time to dismount, they heard the approach of a freight train and quickly seized it. Leaving Peerce and ten men to occupy the town and stop all eastbound trains, McNeill then detached the locomotive. With Lieutenant George Dolan and two others in the cab, a flag of truce on the engine's front, and a pistol to the head of the engineer, they drove the engine toward Piedmont, some one-and-one-half miles from Bloomington.

McNeill and his remaining men followed cautiously behind. Concealed by the heavy overgrowth of trees on each side of the track, they penetrated well into the town before they were discovered. He immediately demanded the town's surrender. After exchanging a few shots, the ten-man provost guard from the Sixth Virginia Infantry capitulated, and McNeill secured a major prize: seven railroad shops--including two roundhouses--nine locomotives, and twenty-two loaded freight cars. The machine and paint shops, plus the sand and oil houses were burned, while an engine house was partially wrecked. Within an hour the rangers destroyed property worth an estimated one-quarter to more than one million dollars. Before leaving, they tore up some two thousand feet of track. To add insult to injury, McNeill sent six locomotive engines at full steam down the rail line toward the federal garrison at New Creek. Several days later, Clifton M. Nichols, the editor of the Springfield, Ohio, Daily News who was traveling with the 152nd Ohio Regiment through Piedmont to New Creek, noted, "the sight of these ruins aided us to appreciate the fact that we were in an enemy's country."3

In Bloomington Peerce's men snared another freight. Before destroying the captured trains and their cargo, he allowed residents to take what they wanted. One local man informed him that a resident had escaped to Frankville, probably to telegraph Oakland, Maryland, of the raiders presence. He warned that an approaching eastbound mail and passenger train would be filled with soldiers. Skeptical, Peerce nevertheless prepared a trap. He placed his dismounted men along the track with their horses tied nearby for an easy escape, then he sent a conductor under guard up the line to flag down the train. When it arrived, consisting of baggage and mail cars and four coaches, the alarm "loaded with soldiers" was quickly raised.

Their appearance seriously complicated and potentially threatened McNeill's position. With troops undoubtedly marching from New Creek, thus blocking the eastern end of the narrow valley, and with soldiers on board the passenger train, barring the western end, the situation posed a potential trap for the rangers still at Piedmont. Peerce, having remained mounted, ordered his men to "mount your horses" as the train pulled into the station. With considerable bravado he approached the rear of the train and asked conductor Samuel Gill to point out the company's captain, then standing on the platform. Quickly pointing a pistol at the officer's breast, Peerce demanded his surrender and commanded him to order his men to disembark from the coaches without their weapons.

Meanwhile, Private Charles Watkins, riding along the other side of the train, constantly shouted orders, leading the Union soldiers to believe companies F and G were concealed nearby. The ruse worked. The Union captain reputedly exclaimed, "my God, it s hard to be gobbled up in this way, but I have no alternative; I have no ammunition." Without cartridges or cartouche boxes at hand, the soldiers surrendered. Unarmed, they filed out as prisoners. When the captain learned that the raiders consisted of only a small squad, he vented his rage in "the most tremendous oaths" and proclaimed "that had he known how few the rebels were he would have fought them with butts of guns." Peerce informed the passengers in the rear car, mostly women and including the wife of General Lew Wallace, commander of the Middle Department, and daughters of Ohio Congressman Robert Schenck, that they "were Southern soldiers, and that no lady need feel the slightest alarm in the hands of a Southern gentleman." With some one hundred soldiers to guard, he sent a ranger to McNeill, informing him of his prize and the lack of sufficient men to secure it. With a guard, Peerce marched the prisoners across the North Branch of the Potomac River to the West Virginia side. The remaining rangers destroyed any arms they did not keep and burned the train before crossing the Potomac themselves. An elated McNeill, with his men at full gallop, soon joined Peerce. Only the timely arrival of federal troops from New Creek saved an important bridge there from destruction.

The failure to cut promptly the telegraph wire at Piedmont alerted federal garrisons eastward to McNeill's presence. Earlier, a local Unionist, discovering the Confederate rangers, had dashed to New Creek with the news. Reaching the post at 5:00 a.m., his attempts to sound the alarm went unheeded. Only local railroad workers believed the warning, and they rapidly assembled a train with five cars to carry troops to Piedmont. Smoke in the distance finally underscored the Southern presence. Belatedly, Lieutenant Charles Bagley, with a Parrott gun from the First Illinois Light Artillery and a detachment of seventy-five men of the Twenty-third Illinois Infantry under Lieutenant Brown, left on foot to repulse McNeill. Despite the presence of the train readied for use, Bagley chose to march the distance. Later critics bitterly denounced Bagley's indifference to the warning and accused him of incompetence. In addition, they charged that instead of using the train and thereby covering the distance in fifteen minutes, the lieutenant consumed "at least an hour and a half" by marching. A correspondent to the Baltimore American, present during the raid, demanded that "this certainly requires examination."

When Bagley reached the Bloomington vicinity, he positioned his gun on a bluff on the Maryland side overlooking the North Branch of the Potomac River and began firing at the Southerners. McNeill paroled Peerce's prisoners, finished destroying the trains, and then as Bagley's gun shelled them, the rangers slipped into the mountains to safety with some thirty-four horses belonging to Henry Gassaway Davis, who had purchased them for the government. Joseph Dixon, a local resident, helped guide their escape through the mountains for some eight to ten miles. Unwilling to pursue them, the federals merely watched them disappear. Except for two horses wounded by exploding shells, the Confederates sustained no casualties.4


For another account see: http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh12-1.html

SINCE the formation of the State, John T. Peerce has lived within the limits of West Virginia. He was born, December 15, 1818, at Patterson Creek, Hampshire county, Virginia. His early education was at home under a selected tutor. At sixteen he attended the Academy at Martinsburg, Berkeley county. From 17 to 18 he was instructed at the Academy in Romney, after which he lived on the farm with his father until the war of 1861, when he volunteered into Company F., Seventh Virginia Cavalry. He continued in such military service until the close of the war, when he resumed the peaceful avocation of farming and grazing cattle. From 1850 to almost the opening of the civil conflict he was a Justice of the Peace. In the 1872 convention to revise the constitution of West Virginia he was a member from the Tenth Senatorial District, and served his constituency and the State upon the Committee of Taxation and Finance. He was one of the Board of Regents for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institution under appointment by both Governors Mathews and Jackson. His residence is near Burlington, Mineral county.

Ancestry.com. West Virginia Prominent Men [database online]. Orem, UT: Ancestry.com, 1998. Original data: Atkinson, George W. Prominent Men of West Virginia, Vol. I-II (2). Wheeling, WV: W.L. Callin, 1890.