o “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”
o Pickett’s Charge.
o The death of Abraham Lincoln.
They represent some Civil War milestones influenced by soldiers from Fort Vancouver.
Some of them fought for the Union, some fought for the Confederacy. Sometimes they fought on opposing sides in the same battle.
Former Fort Vancouver soldiers who became Union generals include George McClellan, Joseph Barnes and John Reynolds.
Gabriel Rains, George Pickett and William Wing Loring resigned their commissions to join the Confederate army.
George McClellan
McClellan graduated from West Point in 1846, second in his class. He was sent to Fort Vancouver in 1853 to find the best route for a railroad from the East. He left the military in 1857 to become a railroad executive, then went back into the Army during the Civil War.
McClellan was named commander of the Union Army in 1861. Criticized for his caution and lack of leadership, McClellan was relieved of command in November 1862.
The Democratic Party nominated McClellan to run for president in 1864, but Lincoln swept to a second term. (McClellan was the first candidate in what turned out to be three straight presidential elections featuring former Fort Vancouver soldiers, with Ulysses S. Grant winning in 1868 and 1872).
After the war, McClellan had better electoral luck when he successfully ran for governor of New Jersey in 1877.
McClellan left a lasting — but somewhat niche — military legacy, designing a saddle that still is being used.
McClellan Road at Vancouver Barracks also bears his name.
Gabriel Rains
While serving against the Seminole Indians in Florida in 1840, Rains became noted for tinkering around with explosives and booby traps. In the 1850s, he was assigned to Fort Vancouver.
An Army blockhouse on the north shore of the Columbia River, near the present site of Bonneville Dam, built in 1855 during the Northwest Indian Wars was named Fort Rains.
Rains resigned on July 31, 1861, to join the Confederate army. Another career milestone came at the Battle of Seven Pines in Virginia, when Rains was criticized for failing to attack McClellan’s Union troops.
In 1862, Rains was named head of the Confederate army’s torpedo bureau, where he could focus on new ways to blow stuff up. We now define “torpedo” as a self-propelled underwater projectile, but Civil War ordnance officers used the word for a wide range of explosive devices. Rains’ bureau turned out land mines, as well as anti-ship mines placed in rivers and harbors. Those were the torpedoes Union Admiral David Farragut cursed when his fleet steamed into Mobile Bay on Aug. 5, 1864.
And they weren’t the only ship-killing weapon Rains devised. He also invented hollow iron chunks that looked like lumps of coal. When shoveled into a ship’s boiler, the powder-filled bomb would explode.
According to one postwar report, Rains’ inventions sank more Union vessels than the entire Confederate navy.
John Reynolds
John Reynolds was an artillery major stationed at Fort Vancouver in 1860. Later that year, Reynolds was named commander of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy before being assigned to a combat role.
After 48 hours of fighting during the Battle of Gains’ Mill, the exhausted Reynolds fell asleep and awoke to find himself a prisoner. After six weeks in captivity, Reynolds was part of a prisoner exchange.
In 1863, he turned down Lincoln’s offer to lead the Army of the Potomac and the position went to one of Reynolds’ subordinates, George Meade. Reynolds was killed on July 1, 1863, during one of the opening engagements at Gettysburg, Pa.
Reynolds was commanding the left wing of the Army of the Potomac when he was shot in the head and fell from his horse. Reynolds was the highest-ranking officer on either side to die at Gettysburg.
George Pickett
Pickett was McClellan’s classmate at West Point, graduating 54th (and last) in the Class of 1846.
He came to Fort Vancouver in 1856 during a tour of Northwest posts, including Fort Steilacoom, Fort Bellingham and Camp Pickett on San Juan Island. The Virginia native left in July 1861 to join the Confederate Army.
On July 3, 1863, his division took part in one of the most famous assaults in U.S. military history.
While the ill-fated assault is known as Pickett’s Charge, “It was Lee’s idea, and Lee bears responsibility,” said Mike Vouri, a National Park Service historian. “Pickett was an instrument.”
Pickett never got over the charge, said Vouri, who did a presentation on Pickett in Vancouver two years ago.
“By the end of the war, his division had been reduced from 9,000 at its peak to 100 soldiers.”
Joseph Barnes
The Army commissioned Barnes as an assistant surgeon in 1840. He doctored soldiers in a series of military campaigns and often served as surgeon for two or more posts at the same time because of the shortage of medical officers.
Barnes was at Fort Vancouver when the Confederates shelled Fort Sumter, and he was immediately ordered east.
In August 1864, he was named surgeon general, with the rank of brigadier general. After Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, Barnes was at the president’s death bed. He also oversaw the recovery of Secretary of State William Seward, another assassination target.
And in 1881, Barnes treated President James Garfield, who lingered for 80 days before succumbing to complications of an assassin’s bullet.
Barnes Road at Vancouver Barracks is named for him.
William Wing Loring
Loring led a U.S. Army contingent to Fort Vancouver in 1849, helping America firm up its foothold in the Pacific Northwest.
His 2,500-mile expedition from Kansas to Fort Vancouver was just one chapter in a long military career that started when he was barely a teen. Loring was only 13 or 14 years old when he joined the Florida militia during the 1832 Seminole War.
Loring lost his left arm in the Mexican War. The Army transferred him from Fort Vancouver to the Southwest and he led U.S. troops in frontier battles against Apache warriors.
After the Civil War broke out, Loring joined the Southern cause. In 1863, Loring took on some of Grant’s forces in the Battle of Champion’s Hill, part of Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg.
After the Civil War, Loring became a financier in New York. But when the Khedive of Egypt was looking for former Union and Confederate officers as military advisers in 1869, Loring was quick to accept.
Loring spent almost 10 years in Egypt. In the book “Power, Faith and Fantasy,” Michael B. Oren wrote that Loring claimed to have survived 75 battles in his military career — more than any other American soldier.
Photos from National Archives and Library of Congress; William Wing Loring photo from the State Library and Archives of Florida
