The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home (19 page)

The Orphans could not wait for Hanson. They must wait, instead, for Henry W. Halleck, Grant’s replacement in command of the federal army before them. He moved slowly toward Corinth, but move he did, and that meant a return to active campaigning. By the end of April Breckinridge again cautioned the Kentuckians to “fire with deliberation at the feet of the enemy.” At Shiloh, he said, there had been “a lamentable waste of ammunition.” It was mid-May when Halleck came close enough for skirmishing to begin, and finally on May 22 Johnny Green believed “a fight to the finish was at hand.” There stood just under sixteen hundred Orphans ready for duty when the drums sounded the long roll that morning. The Kentuckians fell into line, two days’ rations in their haversacks. A train of ambulances followed as they moved toward the battle line, hardly a comforting sign. Breckinridge, dressed in civilian clothes and wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat, rode along the regiments, Hunt’s 5th Kentucky first. The men cheered him as he passed, and he stopped. “Boys,” he said, “I shall try and be with you more to-day, than before.” He said he felt he had not needed to be with them at Shiloh, knowing they would do well. Johnny Jackman considered this “quite a compliment,” and joined in the huzza as Breckinridge rode on to be cheered by each regiment in turn. After a march of three miles the Orphans formed a line of battle and waited for the expected fight to begin, but it never did. Instead, they lounged about, then returned to camp, disappointed at not “hearing the bear growl.”
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By the end of the month the Confederates determined that they could not meet Halleck on even terms at Corinth. Nearly besieged, they must evacuate. On May 28 Beauregard set his plan in motion, hoping to move his Army out of the fortifications without Halleck knowing it. To do so successfully he needed a reliable rear guard, and once again he turned to Breckinridge. To serve as rear guard for his
own corps, “Old Breck” selected “Uncle Tom” Hunt and his 5th Kentucky, with Cobb’s battery and a Mississippi regiment.

On the morning of May 28 Hunt broke his tents, sent his wagons to the rear, and marched the men into the trenches. There they sat all day, sometimes with heavy skirmishing. In the evening the Federals advanced close enough to lob a couple of artillery shells into the fortifications, but Halleck still did not appreciate what was happening. The Orphans in the trenches were not sure either. “Cannot tell whether we are going to wait for an attack, or retreat,” Jackman scribbled in his diary. There they stayed the next day as well, the enemy not pressing them much. About dusk signal guns roared in the town, calling all but the rear guard to the trains that took them south toward Tupelo.

This left Hunt and the Orphans, with all the federal army before them. The next several hours passed quietly, many of the men dozing until midnight, when the whispered order to fall in passed from man to man. In absolute silence the Kentuckians padded back from the trenches. “It was so dark we could not see our file leaders.” During the day the men speculated what would happen, not knowing about the evacuation. Now they would either attack or retreat. “We were in suspense—all were silent and anxious.” Then, just as the column moved, someone accidentally set a tent ablaze. “The light dazzled only a moment on the aslanted guns of the gray column, as it wended through the colonnade of old oaks, then died away leaving inky darkness.” They found now that the rest of the Army had gone, and when they turned left, south, they knew that they, too, were on the retreat. Still they bantered cheerfully when Hunt lifted the order for silence. “The ‘orphans’ are always cheerful,” thought Jackman, “whether sharing the glories of victory, or in the midst of disaster.”

They found Cobb and his guns and the whole of them moved south, the darkness so impenetrable that the artillery and even the men often bumped into trees lining the road. Crossing a bridge over a swamp, several Orphans fell into the mud below. By the coming of the first gray hints of dawn, the command saw Corinth to their rear, and rising from it the long black pillars of smoke that told of tons of stores set on fire to prevent capture. “All was quiet as death,” Jackman noted. Nothing moved but a few broken-down horses gnawing at the grass. They were all the spoils that the Confederates left behind. That afternoon Hunt camped the Orphans at the crossing of the Tuscumbia
River after burning the bridge, effectively eliminating the best federal avenue of pursuit. For the first time in thirty-six hours the Orphans lay down to a good sleep, though Johnny Green wished he had not. When he awoke the next morning, he saw a rattlesnake coiled atop the blanket he shared with a mate. Green rolled out quick enough, and then warned his comrade, “Rattlesnake in bed with us!” The friend made speedy his exit, “but mr Rattler after poking out his tongue once or twice crawled quietly away beside a log near by & coiled up again.” Jim Burba grasped the snake and waved it in the faces of several in camp before Captain John Wickliffe ordered him to kill the reptile.

Hunt marched all day and night June 1, and the next day halted at noon when he received word that federal cavalry had somehow ridden around him and now held a junction at Booneville that cut off his route to the main Army. While he allowed the men to rest and eat, Hunt consulted with the Mississippi officers and Cobb about what they should do. The Orphans could tell something was amiss. “We saw the field officers riding about looking ‘blue,’ ” Jackman entered in his diary. Then a report came that the enemy was closing on them, and Hunt ordered the men into line.

With Tom Hunt in command of the rear guard, charge of the 5th Kentucky temporarily rested with Robert “Uncle Bob” Johnson. He missed capture with his regiment at Donelson and, Lieutenant Colonel Caldwell of the 5th being wounded at Shiloh, Johnson was filling his place. “Uncle Bob is a clever brave man,” thought Johnny Jackman, “but utterly ignorant of military tactics.”

The Orphans stood in line awhile as Hunt and the others tried to reach a consensus, and then several of them sat. Johnson gave a loud oath and ordered them back on their feet, saying they “didn’t know the first principle of drilling.” He gave the order to right face, but no one moved. “He grew purple with rage, thinking he had a little mutiny on hand.”

“Why don’t you move?” he shouted.

Someone reminded him that they had to have the order to shoulder arms first. He cooled slightly, mumbled something about everyone being able to make a mistake now and then, and gave the proper order. “The boys were full of laugh,” said Jackman, “and knew that he would make other mistakes, and resolved to show them to him.” Johnson marched them about for a bit until they halted where he wished, and gave the order to face the front. They did, but in the opposite
direction. “Why in the h—–I don’t you turn around this way?” he shouted, but all he got in reply was a laugh from five hundred throats.

Johnson was saved further embarrassment when Hunt ended his council of war. The other commanders could not agree what to do, and finally Hunt told them to fend for themselves, that he would take his regiment straight through Booneville, enemy or no enemy. As “Uncle Bob” sheepishly moved to the rear of the 5th Kentucky, Hunt took the lead and marched south, the remainder of the rear guard deciding to follow him. Fortunately, the Federals in their front felt too weak to stop them and retired with only slight skirmishing. That night Hunt led his Orphans back into Breckinridge’s lines to join their siblings. The general himself seemed overjoyed. Hearing that the enemy held Booneville, he feared that Hunt had been captured. That night, having successfully conducted yet another rear-guard action, Hunt’s Kentuckians took a much-deserved rest. Johnny Jackman hardly understated when he wrote, “We were a tired set of boys.”
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It was June 7 when the Orphans, still divided between two brigades, reached the rest of the Army at Tupelo. Here they might have thought to rest. It was oppressively hot, unaccustomed as these Kentuckians were to the rigors of summer in the Deep South. They might have hoped to spend a few weeks doing nothing more than seeking shade and trading with the farmers for food, though the latter proved something of a battle in itself. They asked outlandish prices for every kind of fowl from spring chickens to tough old ganders, and as for vegetables, Jackman declared that the enterprising tillers of the soil would charge “50 cts for peeping over the fence into the garden!”

Of course it could not last. Already it appeared that the Orphans and their general would not be allowed to rest or stand idle when there was a need for good men. Certainly the Confederacy would always be short of soldiers in this western theater, yet with notable regularity henceforth, when the call went out, the Kentuckians would be sent to answer. Now the call came from Vicksburg.
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Breckinridge left the command for a brief leave on June 9, Preston taking the reserve corps in his place. On June 19 the order came to proceed with the corps to Abbeville, Mississippi, to meet an anticipated move by the enemy against an important railroad bridge. Yet this was only a brief stop. Four days later, on June 23, instructions arrived to bring the brigades to Vicksburg and report to the Confederate
commander there, Major General Earl Van Dorn. The Orphans found the march, and the ride from Jackson to Vicksburg by train, sobering. “Armies, whether friend or foe, desolate a country,” wrote Jackman after viewing the waste of Mississippi. When he tried to buy his supper in a hotel in Canton, he had to stand in line to buy a ticket, then crammed into the dining hall with scores of other soldiers. He found too little food, too few of the young black waiters, and not nearly enough patience. Soldiers shouted for soup or beef, one threw his cornbread like a cannon ball, exploding it against a waiter’s head. Someone else sent a roast potato “à la solid-shot” against the other side of the poor black’s battered pate. Handfuls of onions and radishes rained like shrapnel, and soon steaming collards flew with the dispatch of grenades. Jackman pitied the waiters. “There were guests to the right of them, guests to the left of them, guests in front and rear of them.” Finally the dark brigade charged under the tables for cover, only to be driven out the back door with a volley of hard crackers. The enemy routed, Jackman and the other Orphans captured the kitchen, where he finally got a piece of beef so tough his teeth “could not even make a print.” He dined that night out of his own haversack.
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It was on June 30 that the Orphans caught their first sight of the environs of Vicksburg. They made camp under the bridge trestle of the railroad to Jackson, in a beautiful dell that unfortunately afforded no fresh water. Except when they went into the city itself, where cisterns held rain water, they relied upon stagnant pools here and there whose sweet, unpleasantly warm beverage contained a host of contaminants. No wonder that more of them feared catching yellow fever than an enemy bullet. Yet here they would stay for the next four weeks, though hardly idle.

Vicksburg, always a prize in federal strategy, controlled passage down the Mississippi to New Orleans, which the Yankees had recently captured. Should Vicksburg fall, then Lincoln’s minions would enjoy unrestricted use of the Father of Waters, and thus split the Confederacy in two. To this end, a small army led by Brigadier General Thomas Williams moved toward the city from New Orleans, while a fleet of gunboats commanded by David G. Farragut steamed upriver to bombard the river fortress. To counter this threat Van Dorn needed the Kentuckians.

Breckinridge rejoined the command on July 1, the same day that the Orphans marched into the heart of the city. For many this was
their first view of the Mississippi, and they found it impressive, the more so because of the enemy gunboats in plain sight below the city, and the smoke from others visible upriver. That night they went on picket duty on the riverbank, and for the next several days acted as guards for the river batteries. Here the Kentuckians encountered a real shelling for the first time, and they met it with varied reactions. “There can be no dodging of mortar shells,” Jackman found. “One has to stand bolt upright, like a duck in the rain, and take the consequences.” Some men dove into sink holes to escape, but ran the risk of being buried alive if the shell burst too near. They heard the deep boom of the mortars three miles away and soon saw the shells whirling high in the air before “they would come shrieking down.” If one burst in the air, they first saw a little tuft of white smoke, then heard the explosion, and then a bizarre symphony as each of the jagged pieces of iron hummed on their way to the earth, “the different sized pieces making the different notes in the demoralizing music.”
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For the next two weeks the shelling continued with little abatement, the Orphans alternating between duty on the river batteries and resting in their camp by the bridge. Finally on July 15 they received orders to move their permanent camp into the city. It came as a great relief. Already the bad water took its toll, and the sick list grew daily. In Vicksburg they would have good cistern water. The mosquitoes, too, would be less troublesome in the town. The gunners on the batteries slept under insect netting, which the Orphans did not have. “I had often heard that Mississippi mosquitoes were large enough to carry a brickbat under their wings upon which to whet their bills,” Jackman wrote one night after the insects enjoyed a good feed at his expense, “but I was never so impressed with the truthfulness of the story.” In the city, too, Breckinridge got better rations for his men. The beef sent them at the bridge spoiled before it arrived, but here he could requisition fresh bacon.
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Other changes of more importance took place. Van Dorn reorganized Breckinridge’s command, making it no longer a corps but instead a division within his own Army. To this the Kentuckian readily agreed, for at first he and Van Dorn got on famously. Indeed, early in the shelling they even played together, manning one of the guns in a battery personally and firing away at an enemy gunboat “to amuse themselves.” Yet it did not take long for Breckinridge to find Van Dorn’s blatant egotism offensive, and thereafter their relations became
very formal. The Orphans, too, resented Van Dorn’s demeanor. One day one of the Kentuckians chanced to be near headquarters when the two generals appeared together. He found himself appalled. There he saw “the finest-looking man in the Confederacy, and that man a Kentuckian, subordinate to one so apparently inferior in every way.” His blood seethed, and he exploded in rage when he returned to his mates in camp. “Coxcomb, dandy, fop, ball-room beau,” he called Van Dorn, “and such a thing of paint, perfume, and feathers to command our Breckinridge—and us!”