The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home (31 page)

13.
“Old Flintlock.” Brigadier General Roger W. Hanson died in the senseless charge at Stones River that made them all Orphans. (
Courtesy Jack McGuire Collection
)

14.
Colonel Martin Cofer helped raise the 6th Kentucky, and led it when “old Joe” Lewis took command of the Brigade.
(From Thompson
, Orphan Brigade)

15.
Colonel John W. Caldwell was not above challenging his general when his honor was impugned. (
From Thompson
, Orphan Brigade)

16.
Joseph P. Nuckols took over the 4th Kentucky from Trabue. They sang him the “Kentucky Battle Song” at Shiloh and died for him at Stones River. (
From Thompson
, Orphan Brigade)

17.
Major Rice E. Graves, the artillerist who became a personal favorite with everyone. “Old Breck” wept over him at Chickamauga. (
From Thompson
, Orphan Brigade)

18.
The gentle general, Ben Hardin Helm. Lincoln cried of Absalom when his brother-in-law died at Chickamauga.
(Courtesy Massachusetts MOLLUS Collection)

They reached Jackson on July 7, and here for the first time Johnston officially announced the fall of Vicksburg. “The news cast a gloom over most of the troops,” wrote Jackman in his diary, “but did not seem to affect the ‘Orphans’ much.” Two days later the Federals appeared in their front. The 1st Kentucky Brigade, now 2,089 including Cobb’s battery, took position on the extreme left of the Confederate line. On their right sat their old drill rival, Adams’ Louisianians. The Kentucky officers sent a party into Jackson to impress blacks for work in building up their fortifications, and found “quite a crowd” of them brought back. Several were barbers who did not much fancy working with pick and shovel, but the Orphans gave them little choice. “We layed around & took it easy while the negroes used the picks, spades & axes,” wrote Johnny Green. Jackman made his “headquarters” in a gentleman’s grape arbor.

Skirmishing began that same day, but nothing of note took place until July 11, when the Orphans were ordered to the right of the line to assist in meeting an expected assault. Caldwell’s 9th Kentucky took position immediately behind a lovely mansion belonging to an old gentleman named Withers. The old man himself shouldered a rifle to help defend his yard against the Yankees. He had previously moved all of his fine furniture into his back yard to protect it from enemy artillery fire, but this afternoon it started to rain, threatening ruin to the upholstered pieces. Jackman and several other Orphans volunteered to help Withers move the furniture into the house again and out of the downpour. They moved everything in by the back door, safe from enemy sharpshooters. But that left an enormous mahogany bedstead, which could only enter by the front. Despite the fire of Yankee marksmen, Jackman and the others moved the bed safely, no doubt giving the enemy cause to wonder just what was going on. Already they rumored among themselves that Breckinridge’s Kentucky soldiers were “considered the best in Johnston’s Army.” But best at what: fighting or furniture moving? The next day old Withers died fighting for his home, and a few days later furniture, house, and all disappeared in flames.
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The next day brought the only real fighting at Jackson, when three enemy brigades made a reconnaissance in force against the center of Breckinridge’s division. They engaged other brigades, but Cobb’s guns were chiefly responsible for repulsing the enemy with heavy loss. Spectators
of a fight for a change, the Orphans marveled at the scene. “This is the grandest site I ever saw,” Squire Bush wrote that night. “The sun shone most beautifully, the fire burning the large houses, the roaring artillery and the rattle of musketry, all combined, made it the most sublime sight that my eye was ever permitted to witness.”

The good Reverend Pickett watched the firing with a few other officers that day when a spent bullet struck his foot. One of them picked up the ball and handed it to Pickett, who remarked that he was glad it had hit his foot and not his head. He and the 2d Kentucky were there in support of Cobb’s battery, but Pickett was the only man hit. “You see, now,” he remarked, “that chaplains are not bulletproof.” Pickett was a favorite with the Orphans. “Their [
sic
] is not a man or officer in the Brigade who does not love him,” Private A. W. Randolph wrote his parents. Pickett proved a great friend to the sick and wounded, and always appeared on the field to lend cheer and aid. “He has no fear for him self.”

Thanks chiefly to fire from Cobb and another battery, the Federals fell back, leaving two hundred prisoners and two or three stands of colors. It was a puny battle, but in the aftermath of the Vicksburg loss, any little victory was prized. The Kentuckians lost only two killed and seven wounded, all from Cobb’s battery, and Johnston congratulated Breckinridge and “your gallant Division.” Yet it was also clear that the Confederates could not remain in Jackson much longer. With all of Grant’s Army in Vicksburg and nearby, Johnston could be overwhelmed if he allowed himself to be besieged. While a route of retreat still lay open, he must take it. On July 16 he readied for the evacuation. Even before orders arrived, the Orphans could tell from the look of things that another retreat was in the offing. At midnight they fell in line and marched out of their works. As a matter of habit now, the Kentuckians acted as a rear guard for the withdrawing Army, but the Federals did not pursue. “It has covered so many retreats,” Jackman wrote, “the boys know just how such things have to be done.”

In all they marched about fifty miles in the next six days, first in dust and heat, then in torrential rains. Even the usually cheerful Ben Helm grew depressed. “As usual, we are on a grand retreat,” he wrote his wife, Emily, “the sufferings of which, so far as I am personally concerned, are unparalleled in the war. We have to drink water that, in ordinary times, you wouldn’t offer your horse; and I have hardly slept out of a swamp since we left Jackson.”
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The Orphans found themselves tense and nervous on the retreat.
Tired, marching until well past dark, their perceptions were faulty. Once the mere act of an adjutant’s horse coming close to stepping on a man in the dark set nearly the entire 4th Kentucky into a stampede, and some time passed before the men calmed. In the dark they suddenly took each other for the enemy, and only eased back into their place in the road after calling out their names—all except “Devil Dick” Slusser, who found the whole business a bore and laid down in the road to sleep until the confusion subsided.

Their merry nature returned as always. In the retreat Johnston somehow lost track of his orderlies and baggage for the military court. He made inquiry of Breckinridge, asking that he consult his brigade and regimental commanders to see what they knew of the missing men and records. Helm’s adjutant, Fayette Hewitt, passed the inquiry to Jim Hewitt, commanding the 2d Kentucky, asking, “Has anybody found a Military Court lying around loose?” Jim Hewitt did not think so. “If this court understands herself (and she think she do), she haint seen that court,” he said in passing the matter on to the 4th Kentucky. “Narry sich as that about the Fourth Regiment,” came the response. And Caldwell of the 9th reported, “I hain’t neither seen nor hearn of a thing like that.” Johnston may not have gotten back his court, but the Orphans certainly recovered their spirit.

Johnny Green even received an invitation to General Breckinridge’s headquarters. Once there Johnny found a cousin who claimed he was now an aide to the general. When Green said he knew that his cousin could be no such thing as an aide, the man replied, “The hell I cant,” and produced two jugs of whisky and a basket filled with bottles of champagne. “Dont you call that aid?” he said. The man had written some time before to a friend in Union-occupied New Orleans complaining, “You no doubt are wallowing in ease & luxury with all things good to eat & drink while John Breckinridge & I & a multitude of your other friends are barely keeping alive on Bull Beef & corn bread & are actually dying for something to drink.” The friend sent the liquor, and Johnny Green’s cousin proudly declared now, “There is no doubt that I saved Genl Breckinridges life.” In fact, Breckinridge gave the whisky to his commissary for the men.
³⁴

The brigade spent the next month at a spot a few miles from Morton, Mississippi, that they dubbed Camp Hurricane. Later some claimed it to be the most peaceful month they ever knew during the war. There was little duty to do, and the men spent time building arbors of branches for shade. The brigade glee club sang the strains of
“Lorena,” “Neapolitan,” “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming,” and “Take Me Home to the Place.” Most of the songs turned on a home theme, and they became rather popular with the local citizenry. “General,” a farmer would say to Breckinridge, “I wish you would send them singin’ boys over to my house to-night,” and off they would go, the general and staff usually attending. John Marshall played the violin and sang tenor, John Weller bass, and with guitar, banjo, flute, and even a cornet, they sang for their supper. Every performance began with “We Come Again with Songs to Greet You.”

Some of the other Orphans found less pretentious ways to amuse themselves. They established a brigade market near a spring, just to the right of the 9th Kentucky’s bivouac. Breckinridge authorized the place for soldiers to “speculate” in fruits and vegetables, but he also established fixed prices on all goods the men could buy from the local farmers. Peaches and apples must go for no more than fifty cents per dozen, or six dollars the bushel. Fresh pork and mutton went for fifty cents a pound, but a single watermelon might bring as much as three dollars if large enough. Jackman and Green both claimed to have paid as much as forty dollars for one! The Orphans were to buy only from citizens. Any soldier caught selling goods to another soldier would be punished. That mattered little. They had no need to profiteer on vegetables, when right next to the market the Orphans established a primitive casino. They ran poker and keno games “& a few were raking in the money of many,” said Green, until Breckinridge sent his provost to visit the “sporting gentlemen” and end their enterprise.