By Richard A. Wolfe
In the summer of 1861, the Restored Government of Virginia in Wheeling recruited volunteers to meet federal quotas and to preserve its borders. Two years would pass before West Virginia, the only state formed as a direct result of the Civil War, received statehood.
There were few men with military experience in the counties west of the Allegheny Mountains to lead the recruits. There was no shortage of men who wished to be colonels, but many failed the application process. As in other walks of life, true leaders rose to the top. Some of these men were physicians.
In the modern military, we do not make a surgeon a combat commander. The Civil War, however, was no ordinary time. Three doctors rose to become colonels of West Virginia volunteer regiments. Successful commanders all, the path of each man to the colonelcy varied. One received his spread-eagle shoulder straps after he raised a regiment. Two others, originally commissioned surgeons, advanced to command by their own merits in unusual circumstances.
These exceptional men went on to lead brigades and divisions. Military service would likely have been safer as a surgeon as opposed to a colonel. Yet they laid down their scalpel and picked up a sword—a grim reckoning that they would be more useful taking lives than saving them.
The Recruiter
Thomas Maley Harris, a graduate from medical school in Louisville, Ky., tended patients in Gilmer County before the war. When violence from secessionists plagued the county in 1861, he closed his practice and moved his family to Harrisville in neighboring Ritchie County. At the request of Gov. Francis H. Pierpont of the Restored Government, he recruited a regiment. Harris was commissioned a lieutenant colonel of the 10th West Virginia Infantry in March 1862 and made colonel in May.
The regiment initially battled Confederate forces and guerrillas in and around West Virginia. In the summer of 1864, Harris advanced to brigade and division command during Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan’s successful Shenandoah Valley Campaign.
Harris received his brigadier of volunteer’s star in March 1865. Appointed to the nine-member tribunal that presided over the military trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, he remained in uniform until 1866. After his return to civilian life, Harris’s occupations included doctor, West Virginia legislator, adjutant general and pension agent. He died at age 93 in 1906, and buried in Harrisville.
The Surprise Choice