April 16
On this day in 1862, Colonel Robert Martin McKinney (1835-1862) commanded the 15th North Carolina Infantry at Dam No. 1 (also known as Lee’s Mills), near the mouth of the Warwick River, about six miles south of Yorktown, Virginia. Confederate forces were trying to hold off a much larger Union Army of the Potomac under General George McClellan. The twenty-seven year old McKinney, a Lynchburg native and VMI graduate (1856), had been professor of French at the North Carolina Military Institute in Charlotte, NC, when the war broke out. McKinney immediately offered his services to the Confederacy and accepted the position of Colonel of the 15th North Carolina on June 24, 1861. On the morning of April 16, Union artillery shelled Confederate rifle pits along the Warwick River, but had slacked off by early afternoon. During the lull, McKinney ordered his men to stack rifles and use their shovels to strengthen the main trench line 200 yards behind the rifle pits. At 3:00 p.m., a contingent of the 3rd Vermont crossed the 200-yard wide, four-foot deep waterway, using the heavy timber and dense brush to mask their movement. They swarmed into the rifle pits, catching McKinney and his regiment off guard. McKinney ordered the long roll sounded as his men scrambled for their weapons amid the enemy’s scattered shots. The Colonel dispatched a runner to General Howell Cobb for reinforcements and formed his men into line for their very first combat experience. At the center of the line, raising his sword and waving his cap as encouragement, he gave the order to “Charge!” Just as the word left his mouth, a Minié ball from the enemy’s first ragged volley struck McKinney in the forehead, killing him instantly and stalling the charge. The exchange of gunfire lasted for nearly two hours before the Vermonters retreated in the face of Cobb’s reinforcements. McKinney had been well trained and had prepared for a year for this moment, but he died in the very first seconds of his only combat experience of the war.
Map by Union soldier, Robert Knox Sneden, showing the Warwick River
defensive line. Lee's Mills, where Colonel McKinney was killed is at the far left.
Sources
Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 5:500-502; Charles D. Walker, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates and Eleves of the Virginia Military Institute who Fell During the War Between the States (1875), 380-381; Richmond Dispatch, April 19, 1862
