History of the Blue Ridge Rifles

The Mountain Signal (June 1861)

In June of 1861, a small group of boys from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia formed a volunteer corps of soldiers formally known as Company E, Phillip's Legion Georgia Infantry. To North Georgians, the group was far better known as the "Blue Ridge Rifles."
The Dahlonega newspaper ,The Mountain Signal, described them as a company numbering about eighty and made up of the best citizens:"No company from the state is better qualified for destructiveness, as they have been from their earliest boyhood used to the rifle and shut one eye when they shoot, and everytime they pull the trigger a man will fall."
One of these boys was 3rd Lieut. Jesse Marion McDonald,who was promoted to Captain on June 29, 1864, of the Blue Ridge Rifles. McDonald wrote throughout the war to his sweetheart back in Dahlonega, Sarah Ann Thomas. His grandaughter Marion Boatfield of Dahlonega, still has many of these letters.
By the time of the 1862 Maryland Campaign, they had nothing to eat but apples and green corn, and like most of the Confederate army their clothes were tattered and many of them had no shoes, leading the soldiers to jokingly refer to their time in the state as the "Green Corn Campaign."
In September of 1862, General Robert E. Lee moved the Southern army into Maryland hoping to gain new recruits and fresh supplies on the way north. Lee split his army into three groups to get at 12,000 Union troops at Harper's Ferry. Lee did not know that General George McClellan's Union army was right behind him. During this campaign, the Blue Ridge Rifles (aka Company E, Phillips Legion Infantry Battalion) were a part of Thomas Drayton's Brigade, D R Jones Division of Longstreet's Corps.
On September 14, the Blue Ridge Rifles were in camp at Hagerstown, Md when the call came to fall in and march south to help D H Hill block the South Mountain Passes at Turner's and Fox's Gaps. These gaps, located just above the small hamlet of Boonsboro, Md were under attack by two full Federal Corps (Reno's IX Corps and Hooker's I Corps) and failure to hold them would permit McClellan to split Lee's Army in two.
After a forced march of about 12 miles, the Blue Ridge Rifles arrived with their unit at Turner's Gap around noon and were personally escorted one mile south to Fox's Gap by General D H Hill who hoped to use them to stem the effects of the Federal's rout of Garland's North Carolina Brigade there earlier that morning. Shortly after arriving at Fox's Gap the Federal's launched a massive assault on the gap. There was little time to set up a line of defense, and they (Drayton's Brigade) were forced to retreat behind the mountain.
During the night, the Confederates anxiously awaited a Union attack because they were too few in number to defend their postion.On the morning of the 15th after a tense night, the Union soldiers prepared to attack again when they heard cheers rolling up the valley from Harper's Ferry. A Union soldier jumped on a wall and yelled, "Hey, Johnny Reb, What's the cheering for?" A Confederate soldier replied, "Harper's Ferry has surrendered!" The Union army did not attack again that day. Shaken and exhausted with many of their company captured or killed, (Drayton's Brigade lost 622 men killed, wounded and captured in this fight, seven of these were from the Rifles) the Blue Ridge Rifles bivouacked the night of the 16th south of Sharpsburg, where General Lee regrouped his army.
On the morning of the 17th, Confederate forces were spread in a semi-circle along the east side of the Potomac River. The battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) started before 6 AM with the mist still rising off the ground. After a vicious battle, the entire Southern army recrossed the Potomac River back into Virginia to recover.
A letter dated Nov. 12 from Culpepper, Viirginia, written by Private A.J. Reese of the Blue Ridge Rifles, said, "The too (sic) Blackwell boys are with us and James Robberts. They were taken prisoners at South Mountain, Marylan, and was not killed as we thought they was."
In 1864, the Blue Ridge Rifles would have ended their enlistment period, but chose not to disband and re-enlisted for the duration of the war. In 1866, Captain Jesse Marion McDonald married Sarah Ann Thomas and bought the Thomas farm, located behind the Consolidated Gold Mine. Today the property belongs to their great-grandson Robert McDonald, who still farms the land. There are also many descendents of the brave men known as the Blue Ridge Rifles still living in Lumpkin, County.

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Capt. McDonald is the grandfather of Blanche McDonald Crowe

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Source: The Dahlonega Nugget, Dahlonega, Georgia. June 26, 1997, "The
Blue Ridge Rifles of 1861 and the Maryland Campaign"
Edited for clarity and accuracy by Kurt Graham -

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