The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home (20 page)

While they simmered over Van Dorn, the Orphans did find encouragement in another new commander for them. Ben Hardin Helm, his illness behind him, so to speak, reported for duty on July 8, and Breckinridge assigned him to replace Hawes in command of the brigade containing the 4th and 5th Kentucky regiments. The Orphans themselves, of course, were irrepressible as usual. Tommie Conelly, Company I of the 4th, always seemed to have a dozen or so cartridge belts around his neck. He repeatedly proved unsuitable as a soldier despite all his officers’ efforts, and when it came to marching in time, he was utterly useless. “Ah, Captain, I am not the height for a soldier,” he said in his heavy brogue, “I’m not the height.” The Irishman more than once demonstrated himself an able hand at raising a glass, however, and one night here in Vicksburg he was probably well anesthetized when “Vicksburg lamp-posts,” as they called exploding federal shells, started their trip to the city. Just as Tommie passed through a railroad cut, one of the “lamp-posts” came shrieking overhead and Conelly jumped for cover. “Be jabers, boys!—faith, and why don’t ye get out of the way?” he cried. “Don’t you hear the locomotive coming?” Hunt’s regiment, not to be outdone for the ridiculous, organized a race between two soldiers riding wild hogs. Grabbing them firmly by the ears, the Orphan riders held on for dear life as the race began and their comrades cheered. The enemy heard the cheering, however, and sent a few shells their way to dampen spirits. One burst close enough to the hogs to scatter them with dirt, hurting no one, but putting such a fright into the swine that they bolted at a frantic pace. One threw his rider, but Charley Edwards, just three months with the company, held on to his mount. The hog rushed straight for a fifty-foot bluff. Despite the efforts of those present to stop it, the animal ran off the edge with Edwards still astride. The hog survived, but the fall broke Charley’s back and in a few minutes he died. “This cast a gloom over
all,” wrote Johnny Green. As a measure of revenge, they slaughtered and dined on the late Edwards’ noble steed.
¹⁵

Of course, the Orphans were here for action, and they saw some almost from the first. It seemed their lot to encounter the unusual in this war. Here at Vicksburg, after two weeks of suffering the intermittent bombardment, several of the men turned sailor for a time. On July 15 the Orphans heard the thunder of firing upriver and rushed to the banks to learn its cause. Soon they saw a new Confederate ironclad ram, the
Arkansas
, passing through the federal fleet unscathed to dock at a wharf below the city. Thousands cheered the feat of daring, though it came not without cost. The ship took some casualties, and now Breckinridge called on Helm for twelve Kentucky volunteers to turn webfoot. They should be experienced seamen if possible and, if not, then artillerists who could work the vessel’s guns. Helm got Lieutenant R. B. Mathews and five men of Cobb’s battery who volunteered, as well as Cabell Breckinridge, and several others. They reported to Captain Isaac Brown, commanding the
Arkansas
, and served a gun during that evening’s fighting with Farragut’s gunboats. “We worked the gun throughout the engagement to the best of our abilities,” Mathews reported. That night they left the ship when the firing ceased, Captain Brown giving thanks for their services in what Mathews afterward called “our aquatic expedition.” To Preston, Mathews proudly reported that his men acted “as Kentuckians have always and will continue to act before the enemy, whether on land or water.” This did not end the Orphans’ service with the vessel, however. Four days later Breckinridge called again for volunteers, preferably sailors or artillerists, this time adding that those who volunteered would be permanently transferred to the Navy. Several stepped forward, at least one, Caleb Allen from Lewis’ 6th Kentucky, making the transfer and winning distinction in his service aboard ship. Several others, including four men from the 3d Kentucky, liked the Navy less, and deserted the ship the same day. On July 22 Breckinridge called for sixty more volunteers. By this time there was less enthusiasm. When Johnny Jackman thought he was destined to join the
Arkansas’
crew, one man in his company ran away, and he noted, “We all objected to such a fate.” The ship looked like a death trap. The lieutenant in charge of the sixty-man detail said that if that was the sentiment of all the men, then he would resist the order.

When morning came, however, the lieutenant took the men to the
ship just the same, having learned that they were only wanted as a work detail. That night they spent many laborious hours recoaling the ironclad. Then they were done.
¹⁶

While the Orphans served aboard the ship, or guarded it at night from ashore, all of the Kentuckians suffered mightily from the disease incident to the climate. Almost daily John Jackman complained to his diary of feeling tired, feverish, unfit for duty. Johnny Green noted the same thing. “Sickness has been playing great havoc,” he wrote. The problem was chiefly the water. That from the river was thick with mud, while well water “is almost milk white from the soapstone soil.” Green himself went into hospital and became delirious. Twice he took a pan in hand and wandered away from the tent to a nonexistent spring his fevered mind could see but his feet not reach. Jackman, too, reported sick and the surgeons confined him to the hospital for several days.

The main disease was malaria, but diarrhea and dysentery took their portion from the ranks. Breckinridge tried relieving the Orphans from duty during the hottest part of the day, but it availed little. In the 4th and 5th Kentucky regiments the number on the sick list doubled by the end of July. On the 22d of that month, 628 men out of the five Kentucky regiments stood on the hospital report, and this did not include many sent away from Vicksburg for their illness. Even if the enemy could not defeat the Orphans at Vicksburg, the climate would.
¹⁷

Thus, the timing could not have been worse for Van Dorn to send the Kentuckians on an ill-advised expedition against the Federal Williams and his command, now downriver at Baton Rouge. Yet on July 25 Van Dorn gave the order. At his own request, Breckinridge led his troops and commanded the campaign. Thanks to the illness and exhaustion among the men, it took three days before the Kentuckian put his Orphans and the rest of his division aboard the train. Always thinking of their wants, Breckinridge sent overland a herd of beef cattle and managed to coax a few new uniforms from the quartermaster. Alas, poor Jackman could not go. He was too ill. And Johnny Green, even though he arose from his cot and grabbed his rifle, telling the surgeon, “I would not stay away from my regiment when they were ordered to battle,” returned to the hospital under threat of arrest. “I was mad enough then to cry.” When the train bearing the soldiers left on the evening of July 27, it left a number of saddened Orphans behind.
But it left as well with the people of Vicksburg a high regard for these men of the Bluegrass who abandoned their homes to defend a country their state did not recognize. Just before leaving the city, Breckinridge received a letter from one citizen who declared, “I like your gallant band of Kentuckians, and now in exile from … home.”
¹⁸

The route led first to Jackson, then south to Camp Moore, Louisiana, not far from Tangipahoa, fifty miles east of Baton Rouge. Here Breckinridge joined other troops awaiting him, and bivouacked on July 28 while he organized his small Army into two divisions. Helm’s brigade he placed in the 1st Division, and Preston’s brigade—now led by Colonel Albert P. Thompson of the 3d Kentucky—in the 2d Division. Even before he could march, the sickness followed him to Camp Moore. “The climate and exposure are reducing regiments to companies,” he complained to Van Dorn. Then there were the rattlesnakes. In Gervis Grainger’s 6th Kentucky, one snake put five hundred men to rout. “Evidently we feared a rattlesnake more than the bluecoats.” Breckinridge tried to delay for a day here, hoping that Van Dorn would cancel the attack, but on July 30 came a peremptory order to proceed.

That same day they started the march, fifty miles of nightmare. The heat became so intense that the men, many without shoes, could not bear to walk on the sandy road. Their thirst drove them in flocks to every stagnant pool of murky green water, ensuring more dysentery. They fell out of ranks in numbers. “Almost every farm-house on the roadside was converted into a hospital,” wrote a newspaper reporter who accompanied the march. The wild razorback hogs caused them misery as well, stealing into their night bivouacs and making off with the Orphans’ haversacks of cornmeal rations. Faced with all this, Breckinridge decided to cancel the attack on his own unless Van Dorn would send the
Arkansas
downriver. With the ironclad to attack Baton Rouge from the rear, the Kentuckians’ reduced numbers of infantry might still have a chance against Williams’ soldiers. Van Dorn agreed and dispatched the ship. It would arrive, he said, at dawn on August 5.
¹⁹

By August 3 Breckinridge’s command reached the Comite River, just ten miles from its objective. The march cost him 600 men. To cheer the Orphans now, he made a speech. “My brave, noble, ragged Kentuckians,” he began. He promised to lead them personally in the coming battle, then gave them a day of rest. “We enjoyed the luxury
of a plunge and a swim in the bright, beautiful water,” recalled Grainger. Ordered to prepare two days’ rations, the Orphans foraged—or plundered—in the countryside thereabouts. Ganders and potatoes were cooked to carry, and the men each received a portion of vinegar to add to the water in their canteens. It did not improve the water’s taste, but might kill whatever lived in it. The general was still losing men to the climate. “The sickness had been appalling,” he reported. He started from Camp Moore with perhaps 3,400 men. When they marched toward Baton Rouge at 11
P.M.
on August 4, he had less than 2,600.
²⁰

“It was a rather dark starlit night,” wrote Major John B. Pirtle. The men knew they marched to battle, yet some like Grainger so gave in to fatigue that they actually slept while they walked. When the column halted, they awoke only by bumping into the men in their front. Helm’s brigade marched in the advance, and when he reached the vicinity of Baton Rouge halted shortly before dawn. Prior to this, some partisan rangers from the rear of the column slipped through the infantry and rode ahead of Helm. In the gathering dawn they stumbled into Williams’ advance pickets, and firing ensued. Grainger heard “the ringing crack of a dozen rifles about four o’clock
A.M.
, followed by another volley in a few seconds.” He heard the evidence of a terrible accident. The partisans, surprised by the Federals they encountered, turned and raced back toward their column. But Helm did not know that the rangers were in his front. “Suddenly there came galloping down on us at full speed what, from the noise made by the horses’ hoofs, seemed to be a regiment of cavalry,” wrote Pirtle. At this moment Helm was sitting his horse at the front of the column. His aide, Captain Alexander Todd, brother of Helm’s wife and of Mary Todd Lincoln, was just then talking with Lieutenant L. E. Payne, giving him messages to be sent home should he fall in the coming battle. Already one Todd son had died in the war.

Taking the horsemen thundering toward them for enemies, Helm’s Kentuckians scattered to either side of the road and delivered the second volley heard by Grainger. “A scene of the wildest confusion ensued.” Frightened artillery horses trampled men about them, two of Cobb’s field pieces overturned, their caissons mangled as the teams bashed them blindly into trees. Horses fell, crushing men beneath them, and men and animals dropped on the spot from the wild bullets flying in the predawn light.

Helm soon realized what had happened and calmly rode among the troops calling on them to stop firing. Before he could succeed entirely, a bullet killed his horse beneath him, and the animal fell on Helm’s thigh, so badly crushing it that he would be out of action for some time. Several enlisted men were killed, and Lieutenant Colonel John Caldwell of Hunt’s 5th Kentucky narrowly averted death. One of the first bullets fired wounded his horse, and the animal bolted, running blindly toward the rear. As it approached his own regiment, Caldwell’s men mistook him for a Federal and opened fire. His clothes took several balls, and his horse fell dead, in the act throwing Caldwell against the wheel of one of Cobb’s caissons. Miraculously he survived and, with Helm now out of action, Hunt would take command of the brigade, and Caldwell of the 5th Kentucky. Alex Todd was not so fortunate. A stray bullet killed him instantly, his last letter to his mother still on his body.
²¹

Once the Kentuckians restored order, Breckinridge arranged his battle line. The 1st Division, with Hunt and the 4th and 5th Kentucky, he placed on the right, and the 2d Division with Thompson and the 3d, 6th, and 7th Kentucky on the left. It was this latter command that first encountered the enemy as the Confederates advanced around 5
A.M.
Colonel Thompson put the 3d Kentucky on his right, the 7th in his center, and the 6th Kentucky on his left. “Old Joe” Lewis was himself ill now, and Martin Cofer led the 6th. The Orphans advanced nearly a mile before they met Williams’ skirmishers. The going was tough, the ground broken and covered with briars that some of the boys without shoes thought a bit “luxuriant.” Then came the order to double-quick, the Orphans raised the Rebel yell, and on they charged into the edge of the federal camps and into a cemetery. Here the first Orphans fell, appropriately, some of them never to be found again. The other brigade of their division gave way on their right, leaving them isolated for a time, and the order was passed to lie down. “We promptly obeyed,” said Grainger, “stretching ourselves like lizards.” Some were in a pea patch, others like Grainger in a sweet-potato field. The bullets sounded like bees as they buzzed over their heads. Then they rose and advanced again. “The Third, Sixth, and Seventh Kentucky regiments were going ahead like a hurricane,” wrote another newspaperman who witnessed the fight. “Nothing could stop their fearful and determined progress. The more obstinate the resistance the fiercer their onset. Overwhelming as were the odds against them, they
pressed forward, mostly at the ‘charge bayonet,’ yelling like madmen.” They halted briefly at a fence for cover, the men of the 6th Kentucky taking several casualties from a Yankee hiding inside a tent until Grainger and a half-dozen comrades sent a volley into it.