The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home (11 page)

Finally Christmas came. Breckinridge had challenged the commander of the 1st Missouri Infantry to drill against the 2d Kentucky on Christmas Eve but, learning how good the Missourians were, he wisely backed out. It was just as well. This was the first Christmas of the war, the first away from home. The men of the brigade needed the time to themselves. It was a cold Christmas, but they ate well. Johnny Green’s mess bought a turkey and he made biscuits. “We thought we
had a sumptuous dinner for soldiers,” he wrote. Others made eggnog and cakes and bought pies. Shipments of chickens, eggs, apples, butter, bread, cakes, hams, and turkeys arrived from Kentucky to enliven the holiday.

That evening an anonymous soldier of the 4th Kentucky wrote in the clothing account book of Company C his verdict on the day, and the war: “Dec 25th 1861, The birth day of Christ our redeemer finds our country Struggling in the holy cause of liberty with the vile horde of Robbers & assasins sent to burn and destroy by their master Abraham Lincoln who occupies the chair at Washington.” The 1st Kentucky Brigade was trained now, armed in a fashion, and ably led. The coming New Year would show them the test. The writer and all his fellow Kentuckians would have their chance to fight in “the holy cause of liberty.” How they would stand in battle, and where they would be on Christmas next, none had the prescience to foretell.
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C
OLONEL
J
OSEPH
H. L
EWIS
of the 6th Kentucky Infantry already knew that his men would stand and fight. At least, fourteen of them would. As far back as October 10, 1861, his men shed first blood in Kentucky when the stalwart fourteen, guarding the home of a southern sympathizer in Barren County, fired on a party of Federals, killing one and wounding several more. Thereafter nearly two months passed before another Kentuckian fired his rifle in anger. Breckinridge’s brigade divided its time between training in Bowling Green and occupying Russellville, the Green River crossing, and parts in between.

While “Old Joe” Lewis inflicted the first casualties, it was “Uncle Tom” Hunt’s 5th Kentucky that felt the first pain of battle, modest though it was. Hunt occupied Russellville early in November, and on December 1 retired to Bowling Green, leaving a detail of thirteen behind to guard the crossing of the Louisville & Memphis Railroad at Whippoorwill Bridge. On December 5 a body of about ninety Home Guards approached, intent upon destroying the bridge. Its defenders made a gallant stand until surrounded, when they surrendered, but not before George Campbell and Hatch Jupin were killed, and Joe Wilson severely wounded. Ironically, theirs was the only blood that the Kentucky Brigade would ever shed on its native soil. The remaining Kentuckians were taken as prisoners, not to be released for nearly a year.
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Since the episode at Whippoorwill Creek, the only action seen by the Kentuckians was an occasional march to meet reported enemies
who did not materialize. Nothing could be more debilitating to their martial ardor, particularly when this winter marching was so exhausting and cold. On December 21 Breckinridge received a report that an enemy column was actually moving toward Bowling Green. He was ordered to move the next day to meet it. Early on December 22 the regiments formed to march twenty-five miles east toward Skeggs Creek. The men hoped this was to be the start of a campaign to move on Louisville and liberate the state, and cheer after cheer rang from their icy breath. They struck their tents and started the march, soon realizing that they were not on their way to Louisville. The mood turned more gloomy when the muddy road started clinging to their feet and the ice-cold rain that fell all day soaked their uniforms. By afternoon the rain froze as it fell, and a north wind drove the sleet into their faces. Hunt, riding at the head of the 5th Kentucky, looked back constantly to see his men shivering in the cold, often wading through swollen creeks only to have their soaked trousers freeze stiff around their legs. Finally he dismounted from Old Pomp, threw the bridle over his arm, and henceforward marched on foot through the mud and streams with his men. They made only ten miles that day, bivouacking at a place called Merry Oaks. There was little merriment. “We pitched our tents that night over the grass which was covered with sleet,” wrote Gervis Grainger of the 6th Kentucky. The next morning they awoke to find the ground frozen and a layer of snow over their camp. Then came word that the enemy was not approaching after all. There was nothing to do but return whence they came. Along the way they passed the debris of their march of the day before. Some men, for whom this had been the first real trek of the war, burdened themselves with up to fifty pounds and more of food and clothing, extra shoes, even slippers. “We also carried knives from eighteen to twenty inches long,” said Grainger, “with which we expected to hack the Yankees up on sight.” Now they left much of this excess by the roadside in lightening their heavy loads. “A Soldier has a hard road to travel,” complained Private Ferguson. Ever after the Kentuckians spoke with sobriety of the “Merry Oaks march.” It was one of the “hard times” they would as soon forget.
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If the Kentuckians themselves enjoyed relative inactivity, however, other events taking place in Kentucky and Tennessee soon changed that. General Albert S. Johnston had established a defensive line that ran from Cumberland Gap at the southeast corner of the state,
through Bowling Green, to Columbus on the Mississippi. On January 19, 1862, at Logan’s Cross Roads eighty miles east of Bowling Green, a small federal army defeated Confederate defenders led by Brigadier General George B. Crittenden—son of the senator—and thus pierced the right of Johnston’s line. A few days later a Union army led by U. S. Grant joined with gunboats in moving against Fort Henry on the Tennessee River just a few miles south of the Kentucky line. Midway between Columbus and Bowling Green, this fort and neighboring Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River blocked two waterways that provided a virtual highway into the heart of Confederate Tennessee. Lloyd Tilghman commanded at Fort Henry. Surrounded, he had no choice but to surrender the fort on February 6. The very next day Grant moved on Fort Donelson. Should that bastion fall, then Johnston’s center at Bowling Green would be dangerously exposed and he would have no choice but to abandon it, and Kentucky.

On January 20 Johnston ordered 8,000 men from Bowling Green to be sent under Brigadier General John B. Floyd to Clarksville, Tennessee, within supporting distance of Donelson. Floyd took his own brigade and, to fill out the required strength, Buckner added to it the 2d Kentucky and Rice Grave’s battery. Floyd left the Kentuckians at Russellville until February 8 when, with Fort Henry gone, he had to bring every available man to Donelson. That day Buckner put Hanson and Graves on trains and sent them south to Clarksville, while in Bowling Green those left behind grumbled. “Buckner’s pets,” the other Kentuckians called Hanson’s men. “Our regiment envied the Second,” wrote a man of the 4th Kentucky, “and thought General Buckner displayed a great deal of partiality in selecting it.” Buckner himself accompanied the trains to Clarksville. There the men boarded a steamer for Dover, Tennessee, remained there until February 10, and then marched into their places in line at Donelson. It would be a long time before their comrades in Bowling Green heard from them again.
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But they were busy that day themselves. Three days before, Johnston decided that Fort Donelson could not hold for long, and that he would have to give up his Kentucky line and abandon Bowling Green. On the evening of February 11 orders went to Breckinridge to be ready to evacuate the next morning. Without actually knowing what was happening, the Kentuckians felt a great uneasiness. Some whispered that Kentucky was to be abandoned. Yet others still held to the hope that they were actually to advance farther into the state. At 9
A.M.
, February
12, the birthday of another Kentuckian now waging war against them, the men of the brigade lined up on the road awaiting instructions. “The Kentucky Brigade experienced nothing but gloom and apprehension on that morning,” wrote Ed Thompson. Johnny Green found the men “altogether in doubts as to our movements.” The men awaited the order that would tell them to face north and march to liberate their homes and families, or else turn south and abandon all. They were a few miles north of Bowling Green this morning, and “it was with sinking, sickened hearts that their faces were turned toward Bowling Green.” They were going south. Kentucky was left to its fate.

Breckinridge issued strict rules for the march, and was mortified to see them ignored all the way by his dispirited regiments. In fact, in their gloom many of his officers failed even to read the orders to the men. The column straggled badly on the road into Bowling Green. Here, settled for the night in huts left by Hanson, the men briefly revived hope that they would face north again the next morning. But it was not to be so. The next morning’s marching orders set them on the road south toward Nashville, ordering all the sick of the brigade to precede them on trains. Breckinridge’s command would be the rear guard of the retreating army. He left a company of Trabue’s 4th Kentucky as brigade rear guard, sent Morgan’s cavalry in his front, and marched south, 2,478 strong. Behind him the advancing Federals, knowing the evacuation was afoot, closed in on Bowling Green and shelled the city even before all the Confederates had gone.
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That night Breckinridge bivouacked a few miles north of Franklin, Kentucky. The weather, mild for the past few days, now turned bitterly cold. On the morning of February 14, St. Valentine’s Day, snow carpeted the ground. The command arose early, but got no farther than Franklin, when they were halted. Standing in the cold, with an icy north wind seemingly trying to push them out of Kentucky, they straggled in large numbers and went into town, stealing food and whisky. The march resumed, only to stop again, with more plundering of private property. Hundreds of yards of rail fence along the road quickly became a string of fires to warm their frostbitten hands and feet. Then came the march again.

At last they reached the state line. Hodge caught the mood of the moment. “For the Kentuckians all was apparently lost. Behind their retiring regiments were the graves of their fathers, and the hearthstones about which clustered every happy memory of their childhood.…
Everything which could contribute to crush the spirits and weaken the nerves of men, seemed to have combined.” In a symbolic act done perhaps unconsciously, or perhaps to give heart to the men, Breckinridge, his staff, and the field officers dismounted in what Hodge termed a “common impulse,” and took their places on foot at the head of the column. “With sad and solemn countenances, but with erect and soldierly bearing,” wrote Hodge, they led the brigade across the line and into Tennessee. Breckinridge was the first to cross. He could not know or suspect that, with the irony so beloved of history, he would be the last of them ever to return to Kentucky.”
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That night they camped in the rain and sleet, then marched on through the snow the next day. They had stayed the night inside old huts with ventilation so poor that the fires burned for warmth made many of the men ill from inhaling the smoke. Yet this day, February 15, they marched twenty-seven miles, some of it at double time to meet a supposed threat to their route of retreat. The alarm proved false, but the men found that the excitement warmed their blood and girded them to continue the march. The next day they crossed the Cumberland River bridge and entered Nashville, to find much of the city ablaze. Some thought the fires were to honor their arrival. In fact, panicked by the collapse of Johnston’s defense line, many citizens fled their city, and others burned anything that might be valuable to the enemy. Yet the Kentuckians marched on. “Where are we going?” John Marshall of the 4th Kentucky asks. The question courses through the column, but none can answer. Remembering the old lady’s injunction never to turn the backs of his new socks to the enemy, Marshall began to fear “the heels of my socks are like ‘the wicked, who flee when no man pursueth.’ ”
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They did not stop in Nashville, but marched five miles beyond on the road to Murfreesboro. As they passed through the Tennessee capital, Breckinridge, who had been quiet and reflective since crossing the state line, confided in Captain John Cripps Wickliffe of Hunt’s regiment. “He told me that there was no hope for the Confederacy, unless there was an uprising of the Northern Democrats to stay the coercive arm of the Federal Government, and that, as he had no expectation of that, there was nothing before us but to do our duty to the end, and make any sacrifice for our convictions which honor and manhood demanded.”

And here it was, perhaps—none can say for sure—that Breckinridge
minted a name for his command. To be sure, they were the 1st Kentucky Brigade, a designation they guarded jealously in the months to come. But there was more to them than that. They were Kentucky’s sons, his sons. Yet they were forcibly taken from their mother state, and he, their father, might lose them at any time, as he had already lost Hanson and the 2d Kentucky. Unable, like Tennessee or Mississippi or Alabama soldiers, to see their homeland and, with fortune, visit their firesides, the Kentuckians were now outcasts, fighting for a cause their state denied. They were orphans of the storm, and Breckinridge regarded them as such. He did not call them so in public, it would be too demoralizing, but one day in agony he would give to them a name they bore with fierce pride to death and posterity. Now, perhaps, already he regarded them as the “Orphan Brigade.”
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Orphans they were, and none more so than Roger W. Hanson and his rowdy regiment. Even as Breckinridge rode through Nashville, “Old Flintlock” and his men marched on their way to a place farther from home than ever they imagined.

When Hanson reached Clarksville, he met with General Gideon J. Pillow, a Mexican War veteran now directing the marshaling of troops for Fort Donelson. “The redoubtable Gen Pillow,” as Hanson called him, ordered the Kentucky regiment and battery to proceed immediately to Donelson, which they did by steamboat. When he arrived, Hanson found a distressing situation. Fort Donelson consisted of a large earthwork erected on high ground on the south side of the Cumberland River, three quarters of a mile west of Dover, Tennessee. General Floyd, now in overall command, had just fifteen thousand men to defend over two miles of entrenchments that Pillow had begun building after the fall of Fort Henry. Grant, whose numbers were unknown but certain to be larger, was advancing overland while a gunboat fleet steamed up the river to attack Floyd from his rear. When Hanson marched into the entrenchments, Pillow sent him to the extreme right of the line, closest to Fort Donelson itself, with Hanson’s own right resting near the river. On February 11, immediately upon taking his place, Hanson began constructing more trenches and rifle pits in his front. “We had a great deal of work to do,” he wrote his wife, and precious little time to do it. By relays, the Kentuckians worked all through the night and the next day until they relinquished their tools so that other regiments might do the same. Meanwhile,
Graves’s battery emplaced itself at the center of the line commanded now by Buckner. The other half of the line belonged to Pillow.