Nathaniel Collins McLean wasn't exactly an unknown in the Union Army. His father, after all, was the eminent John McLean, one of two Supreme Court justices who voted in the minority in the court's infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision—a verdict that helped accelerate the race to civil war four years later. When outright war finally erupted in April 1861, Nathaniel, a 46-year-old Harvard Law School graduate, left his law practice in Cincinnati and volunteered to fight for the Union. He raised the 75th Ohio Infantry, soon to join Maj. Gen. John Frémont's Mountain Department, operating in western Virginia, and was commissioned its colonel on September 18.
In the spring of 1862, during Confederate Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson's legendary Shenandoah Valley Campaign, McLean was at last given a true opportunity to show he wasn't simply a lawyer, but a fighter, too. That three-month campaign would prove undeniably forgettable for Union forces, but at the May 8 Battle of McDowell, with the Federals in peril, McLean led the 25th Ohio and 75th Ohio in a daring attack up a steep hill to wrest away the tactical initiative from Jackson and allow an outgunned force to withdraw under cover of darkness. McLean's commander, Brig. Gen. Robert H. Milroy, was quick to praise the colonel and his men for their “undaunted bravery” in the face of a superior foe.
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