Union forces led by Col. Benjamin Franklin Kelley and Col. Ebenezer Dumont executed a double envelopment against Confederate troops at Philippi. The green Confederate volunteers failed to establish picket lines and fled in their bed clothes after Union artillery fire awakened them from their tents.
Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan assumed command of the Department of the Ohio on the 13th of May 1861 and ordered the advance into northwestern Virginia. He directed Col. Benjamin Franklin Kelley and Col. James Irvine to secure bridges over the Monongahela River and seize Grafton by May 30.
Union journalists called it the Races at Philippi because some Confederate soldiers fled while still wearing their bed clothes. A Confederate sympathizer named Mrs. Thomas Humphreys sent her son to warn the Confederates, but Union pickets captured him and fired his pistol prematurely, starting the attack before dawn.
James E. Hanger received a battlefield amputation believed to be one of the first such operations of the war and later returned home to Virginia. He crafted an artificial leg from barrel staves with a hinge at the knee that became so successful the Virginia State Legislature commissioned him to manufacture the Hanger Limb for other wounded soldiers.
The civilian population fled south with valuables in fear of the Federal advance because the village bore more ruinous effect than any other seen so far. Many houses were sacked and maliciously damaged, leaving not half of them occupied as inhabitants left women to care for families and property.