ugh too good a
wife to make her sympathies give annoyance to her husband or his
guests. Lewis Ruffner was also a prominent Union man, and among the
leaders of the movement to make West Virginia a separate State. Mr.
Doddridge, long the cashier and manager of the Bank at Charleston,
whose family was an old and well-known one, was an outspoken
Unionist, and in the next year, when the war put an end for the time
to banking in the valley, he became a paymaster in the National
army. Colonel Benjamin F. Smith was a noteworthy character also. He
was a leading lawyer, a man of vigorous and aggressive character,
and of tough fibre both physically and mentally. He shared the wish
of Summers to keep West Virginia out of the conflict if possible,
but when we had driven Wise out of the valley, he took a pronounced
position in favor of the new state movement. A little afterward he
was appointed District Attorney for the United States. Although the
loyal people had such competent leaders, the majority of the men of
wealth and of the families recognized as socially eminent were
avowed Secessionists. They were a small minority of the whole
people, but in all slave-holding communities social rank is so
powerful that their influence was out of proportion to their
numbers. Even the leaders of the Unionists found their own "house
divided against itself," for scarce one of them but had a son in
Wise's legion, and the Twenty-second Virginia Regiment was largely
composed of the young men of Charleston and the vicinity. I have
already referred to the journal of Major Smith which fell into my
hands as "captured rebel mail," and its pages are full of pathetic
evidence of the conflicting emotions which such a situation excited.
He was the son of B. F. Smith, whom I have just mentioned, and
whilst in Floyd's camp in front of us at Sewell Mountain he wrote:
"My source of constant trouble is that my father will be in danger.
Wicked and unscrupulous men, with whom he has lived in friendship
for years, absolutely thirst for his blood, as I truly believe. He
and Summers, as one of their friends remarked to me to-day, are
especial objects of hatred and aversion to men here. I am actually
leading a set of men one of whose avowed objects is the arrest and
the judicial or lynch murder of my father!" In the next month he
heard "the startling news" that his father had fully identified
himself with the new state movement, and writes: "Those with whom I
was co