William W. Averell

• 1. Introduction

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  William Woods Averell was born on the 5th of November 1832, in Cameron, New York, and before he was done, he would be the only Union general to win a major victory in the Shenandoah Valley before Philip Sheridan arrived to take charge. Yet most people have never heard his name. He was the boy who clerked at a drugstore in Bath, New York, the young officer wounded fighting in New Mexico, the cavalry commander twice relieved of his command, and the man who eventually grew wealthy not from soldiering but from figuring out how to properly lay asphalt on a city street. How does a Civil War general end up patenting pavement? And how did a man who was broken and weeping outside his tent in September of 1864 come to be honored in a Hall of Fame more than a century after his birth?

• 2. From Bath to West Point

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  Bath, New York, is where Averell spent his boyhood working as a drugstore clerk, and it is also where he would ultimately die. Between those two moments in the same small town, he traveled an extraordinary distance. He entered the United States Military Academy at West Point and graduated in 1855, commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Mounted Rifles. Early postings took him to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, and the U.S. Army Cavalry School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he learned the precise discipline that cavalry service demanded. Two years of duty in New Mexico added something harder to learn in any school: in October 1858, he was wounded in action against the Indians and placed on the disabled list. He remained there until the Civil War's outbreak called him back.

• 3. A Solo Ride to War

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  Fort Sumter fell, and Lieutenant Averell did not wait for orders. He made a risky solo journey across the country to the Indian Territory to carry a message summoning his old mounted rifle regiment east to join the fighting. That instinct for independent action would define and occasionally doom him throughout the war. At the First Battle of Bull Run, he served as assistant adjutant general to Brigadier General Andrew Porter. By August 1861, he was colonel of the 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry regiment, leading it through the Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days Battles. On the 6th of July 1862, he was given command of the 1st Cavalry Brigade in the Army of the Potomac. Malaria, known at the time as "Chickahominy Fever," forced him to miss the Battle of Antietam and most of the Maryland Campaign while he recovered. He returned in time to lead his brigade in pursuit after Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart raided Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. President Abraham Lincoln nominated Averell as a brigadier general of volunteers on the 26th of September 1862, but had to nominate him three times before the Senate finally confirmed the appointment on the 11th of March 1863.

• 4. Kelly's Ford and Chancellorsville

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  On the 17th of March 1863, Averell's 2nd Division of the Cavalry Corps fought the Battle of Kelly's Ford, a moment his career never quite escaped. Union cavalrymen claimed their first genuine victory over their Confederate counterparts there, and it was the engagement the Senate later cited when confirming his brevet major general appointment. Six weeks later, that reputation was badly damaged. Major General George Stoneman's cavalry raid during the Battle of Chancellorsville was judged a failure, and Averell's division shared the blame. On the 2nd of May 1863, Army commander Major General Joseph Hooker relieved Averell of his command. Hooker's report to the Adjutant General was scathing. He wrote that Averell's command numbered "about 4,000 sabers and a light battery, a larger cavalry force than can be found in the rebel army between Fredericksburg and Richmond," and that Averell had marched a mere twenty-eight miles over several days while meeting "no enemy deserving the name." It was a humiliating public record.

• 5. The West Virginia Raids

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  Averell left the Army of the Potomac after Chancellorsville and moved to the Department of West Virginia, where he fought a series of smaller engagements at the brigade and division level. In November 1863, he led what came to be called Averell's West Virginia Raid against the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. At the Battle of Droop Mountain in West Virginia on the 6th of November 1863, he earned a brevet promotion to lieutenant colonel in the regular army. Actions at Salem, Virginia, on the 15th of December 1863 brought him a brevet to colonel. A spring 1864 cavalry raid aimed at Saltville ended when Confederate generals John Hunt Morgan and William E. "Grumble" Jones stopped him at Cove Gap in the Battle of Cove Mountain. He then commanded a cavalry division under Major General David Hunter in a failed raid on Lynchburg, known as the Battle of Lynchburg. These were the grinding, unglamorous assignments of an officer who had been pushed to the margins of the main war effort.

• 6. Victory in the Valley

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  The summer of 1864 gave Averell his defining moment. Confederate Lieutenant General Jubal Early had invaded Maryland and defeated one Union commander after another in the Shenandoah Valley. Averell was the only Union general to win a victory there before Philip Sheridan arrived to reorganize the effort. On the 20th of July 1864, he routed Confederate Major General Stephen D. Ramseur at the Battle of Rutherford's (Carter's) Farm, inflicting some 400 casualties and capturing a four-gun battery despite being significantly outnumbered. Ten days later, when Confederate Brigadier General John McCausland burned Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to the ground, Averell tracked him to Moorefield, West Virginia. He sent scouts disguised as Confederates into his vanguard and launched a sunrise attack on the Confederate camp. The Battle of Moorefield ended in another rout, with hundreds of prisoners taken and another four-gun battery captured. The man Hooker had dismissed as a timid dawdler had just pulled off one of the more audacious cavalry actions of the entire war.

• 7. Second Relief and Final Resignation

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  Philip Sheridan took command in the Valley and Averell served under him. The relationship did not last. On the 23rd of September 1864, following a dispute with Sheridan over Averell's conduct after the Battle of Fisher's Hill, Averell was relieved for the second time in his career. A staff officer who witnessed the aftermath wrote that he saw Averell "sitting in front of his tent" and that he was "dreadfully depressed and broken," adding that the general started for the rear within moments and was never employed again during the war. Averell resigned from the Union Army volunteers and from the U.S. regular army on the 18th of May 1865. On the 17th of July 1866, President Andrew Johnson nominated him for brevet brigadier general and brevet major general in the regular army, to rank from the 13th of March 1865. The Senate confirmed both appointments on the 23rd of July 1866.

• 8. Asphalt, Invention, and Late Recognition

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  After the war, President Johnson appointed Averell as U.S. consul general to British North America, a post he held from 1866 to 1869. In 1888, a special Act of Congress reinstated him in the Army and placed him on the retired list; that same year he was appointed Assistant Inspector General of Soldiers Homes, a role he held until 1898. His real wealth, though, came from invention. He worked in coal, steel, and eventually paving materials, and among his patents were methods for manufacturing steel castings and insulated electrical cable. Asphalt drew his interest as early as 1870, when experimental pavement built on procedures patented by Edward de Smedt, a Belgian engineer and chemist, was laid in New York City and Newark, New Jersey. Averell watched those installations fail, but he was not discouraged. As president of the Grahamite Asphalt Pavement Company, he studied the existing product, ran experiments, and in 1878 patented his own "Improvement in Asphaltic Pavement." He co-wrote a history of the Third Pennsylvania Cavalry, the 60th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, published in 1905. His memoir, Ten Years in the Saddle, was written about his army years from 1851 to 1862 but was not published in his lifetime; the manuscript was lost for a time, rediscovered in the late 20th century, and published in an annotated edition in 1978. Averell died in Bath, the same New York town where he had worked as a boy behind a drugstore counter, and he is buried there. In 1976, he was one of the first ten inductees into the Steuben County, New York, Hall of Fame.