The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home (46 page)

The returning Orphans coped with the change in their homeland in varying ways. Gervis Grainger, released from prison, took the direct route to vengeance by attempting to assassinate General Stephen G. Burbridge, perhaps the most hated Federal of all in the state. Friends prevented him from succeeding in his design, but Burbridge later left the state for his own safety. Others took more lawful means of reconstructing themselves and their state. That December the legislature removed all indictments against Kentuckians who served the South, and quickly the men of the Orphan Brigade became the
crème
of state society and government. Indeed, Kentucky very quickly passed into the hands of ex-Confederates, and remained there for years even while some of the actual Confederate states were ruled by transplanted Yankees. In time, the 1st Kentucky Brigade’s ranks provided the state with a governor, three Cabinet members, six militia leaders, two Supreme Court justices, superintendents of public instruction, United States district attorneys, auditors, Treasury officials, four congressmen, two foreign consuls, five circuit judges, untold county legal officials and judges, three commonwealth’s attorneys, a mayor for Louisville and several lesser municipalities, many state legislators, county, district, and municipal officers beyond counting, and one nominee for Vice President of the United States. Nowhere else in the reunited nation did the veterans of a single military body of men so virtually control the destiny of a state in the years after Appomattox.
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The individual Orphans themselves met varying fates. “Old Joe” Lewis returned to his law practice in Glasgow, then spent a term in the state legislature and three terms in Congress. In 1880 he took a seat on the Kentucky Court of Appeals, and the next year succeeded Martin Cofer as chief justice. There he served for eighteen years before retiring. To the last of his days, on July 6, 1904, he remained ever loyal to the men and memory of his old brigade, an active supporter and participant in veteran affairs.

Simon B. Buckner, too, retained a devotion to the Orphans’ memory that only died with his own passing. He took the editorship of the Louisville
Courier
for a time after the war, then entered politics. In 1887 he won the governorship, and in 1896 a faction of the Democratic Party nominated him for Vice President. Ironically his running mate, John M. Palmer, was also a Kentuckian, a one-time federal general who commanded a division that besieged the Orphans at Corinth and battled them in the great charge at Murfreesboro. They ran a poor third in the ballot, but achieved a grand gesture of reconciliation. Buckner himself lived on until January 8, 1914, when he had outlived every other Confederate general of his rank.

Of the regimental commanders from the old brigade who survived the war, all were lionized in the years following the conflict. Light-hearted Phil Lee of the 2d Kentucky returned to the law, married, and won a position as commonwealth’s attorney for Louisville in 1868, but his untimely death at age forty-two cut short his promising career. Tom Thompson, last commander of the 4th Kentucky, fared little better. He, too, won political office, clerk of the chancery court when he, like Lee, died early, at the same age. Hiram Hawkins broke the pattern, fortunately. He settled in Alabama with his new wife, became a college president, served two terms in the legislature, and for ten years thereafter acted as executive officer of the National Grange organization. Cofer of the 6th Kentucky went back to the law as well, took a judgeship on the circuit court at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and died in 1881 while chief justice of the Court of Appeals. And Colonel John Caldwell of the 9th Kentucky also became a judge, of the Logan County Court, then won a seat in Congress. Twice his constituents returned him to Washington, and then he retired to Russellville, where on Independence Day, 1903, he joined in death those comrades he led on the battlefields of the South.

Jolly Cripps Wickliffe, like Jackman, returned to Bardstown and
eventually assumed a circuit judgeship. In 1885 President Grover Cleveland appointed him United States attorney for the District of Kentucky, and eight years later he became brigadier general and adjutant of the state militia. Fayette Hewitt took the quartermaster generalship of the militia in 1867 and at once entered the tender business of recovering from the United States Government the money it owed to the state for Kentucky’s expenses in arming and equipping her
Union
soldiers. He held the post successfully for nine years, later served as state auditor, and finally retired as president of the National Bank of Frankfort.

John Weller followed the lead of so many other Orphans by filling an office in the state civil service, but in 1893 the governor appointed him a commissioner to locate the positions occupied by the Kentucky brigade at Chickamauga, preparatory to the dedication of a national park on the site. Later he sat in the state senate, and devoted his declining years to writings historical and poetic. He composed a song, “Oh! Lay Me Away with the Boys in Gray,” which became a funeral elegy for countless Orphans as they journeyed to join that final Father. George B. Hodge returned to Newport, Kentucky, at war’s end, practiced law, and served in the state legislature, but later removed to Florida, where he died in 1892. Captain Bob Cobb and Frank Gracey both went into business after the war, and General William Preston, after a time in exile in England and Canada, returned to Lexington to finish his days in Democratic politics and die at his home in 1887.

The men in the ranks of the old brigade did not all achieve the positions their officers enjoyed, but they basked nevertheless in the glory of having been members of that unique organization. “I teach my children to honor the men of the Orphan Brigade above all others,” said Lycurgus Reid of the 9th Kentucky. “I point them out as we meet them as men on whom the country can depend in time of need.” Squire Helm Bush, brother-in-law of Martin Cofer, tried his hand at the law, but suffered to the end of his life with pain from his Chickamauga wound. He lived on until August 13, 1925, sixty-three years after he made the long trip from Louisiana to Murfreesboro. Gervis Grainger spent more than forty years after the war, first in Kentucky, then in Gallatin, Tennessee, a few bare miles from Hartsville on the east, and the now overgrown site of Camp Boone on the west. He stayed bitter against his enemies to the end of his life. John Jackman became a lawyer at the Louisville bar and dabbled at publishing, but he never recovered entirely the health that the war damaged.
Elder Joseph D. Pickett took a professorship at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and became superintendent of public instruction in the state before he retired to Illinois.

Another holder of the latter office was Ed Porter Thompson. He wrote widely after the war, young people’s texts and mathematics books. He served as state librarian, private secretary to Governor Buckner, and president of the Frankfort Board of Education. His mourners were legion when he died on March 5, 1903. “He could dream,” said his eulogists. And the mourners were equally saddened at the loss of Johnny Green of the 9th Kentucky. He became a banker in Louisville, and a successful one, then went into a brokerage firm, staying in that business until 1920. That spring arthritis vengefully attacked his body, and neuritis brought an agony of pain to his head. For two weeks he stood the most intense pain. Then on Sunday morning, June 13, 1920, the telephone in the hall outside his room rang and his wife answered it. While she was out of the room, Johnny rose from his bed, pulled a pistol from a drawer, and put a bullet through his brain. He died two hours later without regaining consciousness.
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Ironically, the last of the veterans of the Orphan Brigade to return to Kentucky was the first man to step across the state line in the retreat from Bowling Green. For John C. Breckinridge, his adventures had only begun when he left Washington, Georgia, on May 5, 1865. For the next month he and a small band of followers, including James Wilson, endured a harrowing escape that paled the best Victorian romance by comparison. They rode through Georgia into Florida, sailed and rowed the Indian River on the Atlantic Coast, lived from turtle eggs and inedible slop bartered from local Indians, turned pirate by taking at gunpoint a larger boat from some federal renegades, engaged in a running gun battle between their boat and that of another party of guerrillas intent on robbery and murder, played fox and hounds with enemy patrol boats, and finally made the passage from Florida to Cuba in an eighteen-foot open boat during the worst storm at sea in several years.

After some weeks in Cuba, where he issued a final plea for all Confederates to surrender and accept the clemency of the United States, he journeyed to England, and then on to Canada to join Mary and his family, who awaited him. He lived in Toronto for a time, still concerned with the affairs of the defunct Confederacy, including paying off its legitimate debts and obtaining a good defense for Jefferson Davis in his coming treason trial. In the spring of 1866 he moved his
family to Niagara on Lake Ontario. It was a pleasant place, and here he could look across the narrow waters of the Niagara River to New York, Fort Niagara, and flying over it, the Stars and Stripes. It was a comfort to him “with its flag flying to refresh our patriotism.” He never wanted to leave that flag. All he wanted now was to return to it, and to Kentucky.

A considerable movement arose, first in the Bluegrass, and then nationwide, to pardon Breckinridge, or at least grant him leave to return home unmolested by the treason indictments. Even old political enemies like the irascible George Prentice called for his pardon, and Horace Greeley began an interest in the general’s case. The animosities were still too strong in 1866, however, and that summer Breckinridge took his family to Europe for a year and a half to tour, to recuperate their health, and to wait for time to heal the wounds that kept him from home.

He enjoyed himself abroad, in company with a host of other exiled Confederates, many of them, too, under indictments at home. In time Breckinridge came to be a symbol for all the exiles. As a result, even though friends assured him that they could get him a special dispensation to return, he refused to consider coming home until
all
Confederates were free to return. His became the test case, and the matter finally reached the White House and the Kentuckian’s old friend President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. On Christmas 1868, Johnson finally issued a universal proclamation of amnesty. All Confederates could come home free of fear. Breckinridge had won.

He lost no time in returning. By early February he was back in Niagara, and a few days later crossed the river into New York. He went to New York City, where Greeley and other influential northern men met with and congratulated him. Then to Washington, then to Lexington, Virginia, for a last visit with Robert E. Lee. The two formed a close bond in those last months of the war. Lee regarded the Kentuckian as the best of the Confederacy’s War Secretaries, “a lofty, pure strong man,” he said—“a great man.” Breckinridge went on to Cincinnati for a few days with friends. So many Kentuckians wanted to see their old leader that railroad stations along the routes from Cincinnati to Lexington, Kentucky, thronged with onlookers. Wishing to avoid any demonstrations, Breckinridge gave a false departure time to mislead the well-wishers, and then at dawn of March 9, 1869, he and Mary boarded the train that took them to Lexington. As they passed station after station, some people still knew he was aboard this train,
and at several stops they called him out to the rear of his car. He spoke once or twice, quietly, asking their patience. “I am glad to get to my home once more,” he told them. “It is nearly eight years since I was here.”

It was nighttime when the train finally approached Lexington. Rain threatened. The general sat quiet for several hours watching the familiar old places pass by his window, a thousand memories stirring. A passenger behind him heard Breckinridge repeating softly to himself, “nearly eight years ago, nearly eight years ago.” Then he was silent.

Breckinridge might have had any political office the state could give him if he wished. He stood easily the most popular Kentuckian of the era. Yet he was tired. The war he had not wanted had exhausted him, broken his health, and perhaps left him somewhat skeptical of the profession of politics, which had brought on the war. He wished only to practice law and do what he could to rebuild Kentucky and the South. He took the vice presidency of the Elizabethtown, Lexington, and Big Sandy Railroad, overseeing its construction and financial affairs until the Panic of 1873 ceased its operations. He accepted the presidency of the Piedmont and Arlington Life Insurance Company. At every opportunity he counseled patience, moderation, reconciliation. He publicly denounced the Ku Klux Klan as “idiots or banditti.” He supported freedmen’s rights, including the acceptance of the testimony of blacks in courts. As the Democratic Party in Kentucky split into conservative and liberal wings, he became identified with the latter, more progressive faction. Some believed his opposition was the single greatest factor in putting down the Ku Klux Klan during his lifetime. And no matter how the Republican administrations seemed to ride over the South, he did not lose heart. He and his old foe Grant became friends, Grant even hoping that he might, as President, enable Breckinridge to take a governorship. When friends denounced the party of Lincoln, Breckinridge’s reply was, “Let the Republican Party do the worst it can; let the Republicans do fifty times worse than they are doing, and then we shall have the best government any people in the world ever had.” Like the Orphans he led over so many fields, he never lost his hope or his faith in his country. It was the very essence of a Kentuckian, and he its quintessential.

The war killed John C. Breckinridge. He never recovered his health after the years of exposure and privation, and the mental anguish of seeing his country sundered and at war with itself. He lasted barely six years after returning to his beloved Lexington. His injury at Cold Harbor
brought on a cirrhosis of the liver, and that, aggravated by his exertions in the war, damaged other organs. Death came quietly on May 17, 1875.
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