The Invisible Line (19 page)

T
HE TENTS ON THE HILLSIDE struck newcomers as a “pretty queer” sight, a city where there should only have been a cabin or two. In firelight blurred by sleet and fog, the rows of pale canvas resembled stones in a mountain cemetery. For soldiers in the Fifth Kentucky Infantry, the resemblance did not end there. Hundreds without tents had hacked holes in the hard ground, filled them with leaves and dirt, and slept in them, sometimes huddled together for warmth.
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George Washington Spencer was just three miles below Paintsville and a short ride from his family, but he could not have been farther from home. On the Spencer farm he was the oldest of eight boys and girls and had labored many hard years under his father, Jordan. As his brothers got older, and as the farm became more productive, the work and his responsibilities only grew more intense. The war had some effect on the families along Rockhouse Creek. A few of the boys left to fight. Soldiers on both sides took food, and there were more strangers wandering through the hills. Irregular “home guards” of various stripes periodically attacked farms and businesses in Johnson County, but the raids were more like robberies than military actions—victims sued the bushwhackers for damages in the local court. Otherwise, life continued as it always had; every moment of the war, Malinda Spencer was either pregnant or nursing an infant.
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Now, instead of being the oldest son, George was among the youngest soldiers in his company, just fourteen or fifteen. He huddled around a fire with five other men. They shared their rations but were still hungry. In January 1862 George Spencer had been a rebel for a little more than two months. His decision to volunteer had hardly been a given. Kentucky was a divided state, and Johnson was a divided county, one of the few places where brother actually fought brother. Even after the commonwealth declared its allegiance to the Union, the county tried to maintain its neutrality. To keep the peace, the local court banned the flying of any flag, United States or Confederate, in a public place. Although the county had long voted by overwhelming margins for Democrats, most of its people remained loyal to the Union. With so few slaves, Johnson County had very little stake in the rebellion; some residents placed
Uncle Tom's Cabin
next to their Bibles.
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In the fall of 1861, the rebels started calling for volunteers in the mountain counties. Whether or not George Spencer believed that he was serving “the cause of civil freedom,” as Confederate recruiters said, the rebel army provided a change from the daily toil of the farm. As the leaves were turning, he had walked a dozen miles from Rockhouse Creek to Prestonsburg. Volunteers crowded the main road by the Big Sandy River, along with central Kentucky cavaliers riding to Richmond for their officer's commissions. More than a thousand men reached Prestonsburg in October 1861 and organized the Fifth Infantry Regiment. In homespun clothes and bare feet, with so few guns that Robert E. Lee suggested that they be issued pikes, the Fifth Kentucky became known as the Ragamuffins.
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George Spencer had two sticks for weapons. Assigned as one of his company's musicians, he woke his comrades every morning with a drumroll. As fall turned to winter, he tapped out orders as the men drilled, tallest to the right, shortest to the left, loading and unloading and aiming their weapons—shotguns, hunting rifles—and fixing bayonets. Issued new boots and a cheap cotton uniform that their brigadier general—Humphrey Marshall, a fat Louisville lawyer and former Whig congressman—had assured the men was wool, Spencer kept the pace as they marched through streaming rain and high mud. In November, when Union forces moved up the Big Sandy River to push the rebels from eastern Kentucky, Spencer survived shelling. At Ivy Mountain, near Prestonsburg, his regiment had fired on the enemy to a fife's whistle and rattling drums, as an officer shouted, “Put it to them, my brave boys!” During and after battle, drummers often served as stretcher bearers and orderlies. It was work for someone who was too young to fight but also for those who did not entirely fit in. His cousin George Centers, the son of George Freeman and Clarissa Centers, served in the Union army, also as a musician. Although he was old enough to be a soldier, Centers assumed a role often reserved to his race, playing music because he was too dark to fight in a white regiment.
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In December 1861, after retreating to Pound Gap and the Virginia border, the Ragamuffins marched back down the Big Sandy Valley. They brought the war to their home counties, taking food from local farmers, causing families to flee their cabins for points downriver. The people of Catlettsburg, where the Big Sandy empties into the Ohio River, contemplated a mass removal to southern Ohio. Shortly before Christmas the Ragamuffins set up camp with several cavalry and artillery regiments below Paintsville, dug rifle pits, cut down hundreds of trees to establish clear lines of sight for their artillery, and established pickets around the town. General Marshall attempted to recruit more volunteers and establish rebel governments in eastern Kentucky's mountain counties but was disappointed, finding the locals “perfectly terrified or apparently apathetic. I imagine most of them are Unionists, but so ignorant they do not understand the question at issue.” While Marshall complained about their neighbors and kinsmen, the Ragamuffins were waiting to fight Union troops from Kentucky and Ohio who were slowly marching upriver under the command of a thirty-year-old colonel “who had never heard a hostile gun,” future president James Abram Garfield.
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By the new year, the opposing armies were just a few miles apart. Although outnumbered, Garfield ordered his troops forward. On January 6 a small force of infantry and cavalry attacked rebel pickets near the mouth of Paint Creek at the Big Sandy River. Two hours later a second force attacked a rebel position three miles west at the mouth of Jenny's Creek. And two hours after that a third force attacked down the middle. When the Union soldiers encountered the enemy, the engagements were brief—hills echoing with rifle shot, hoofbeats, and screams, muddy roads littered with overcoats, guns, and equipment dropped by fleeing rebels. Some Union troops paused to look at the few men shot dead or trampled by horses—their first corpses of the war.
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The Union cavalry chased the rebels up the narrow rain-swollen creek valleys but could not get far, finding themselves in crossfire from enemy soldiers who had climbed into the hills and were shooting down. As the pickets ran back to camp with reports of the attacks, General Marshall sent a thousand troops to the river, only to order them west two hours later. Convinced that the Union army would outflank his position from Jenny's Creek and trap his soldiers against the Big Sandy, Marshall ordered the troops to retreat to camp. The next day he decided to abandon it and move upriver to Prestonsburg before Garfield could cut off their path of escape. The Union soldiers swept through Paintsville and up Jenny's Creek, victorious. Within days their Colonel Garfield was promoted to brigadier general. Hailed in the Republican press as a hero, he was elected to Congress that fall, beginning his ascent to the White House.
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While Jordan and Malinda Spencer and their children were close enough to hear the gunfire—Garfield had sent some cavalry past their farm on Rockhouse Creek to determine whether the rebels were retreating west—their oldest son was running away with the rest of his regiment. The rebels burned what supplies they could, but the retreat was so frantic that when Garfield and four hundred men reached the abandoned camp on the night of January 7, they found food still bubbling in large kettles. A few days later, just south of Prestonsburg, the Ragamuffins suffered a more decisive defeat and headed for southwestern Virginia; many of the Kentucky volunteers deserted rather than leaving the state. Spencer endured freeze and flood; the civilians whom his regiment encountered in the Virginia hills were starving. For three days in May 1862 the Ragamuffins fought at Princeton Court House, in the western Virginia hills, and finally shouted victorious huzzahs, leading charges and relieving the Union dead of boots, watches, and anything else that turned up in their pockets. That summer the Army of the Mississippi invaded Kentucky from the south. Spencer's regiment spent the month of September marching west with more than four thousand other Confederate troops, all the way to Lexington—the first time the drummer boy had seen the world beyond the mountains. After coming within earshot of a battle west of Lexington that left eight thousand killed or wounded, the regiment turned around and retreated the way they came.
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As the Ragamuffins' one-year enlistment was nearing an end, the regiment voted to serve the Confederacy for the rest of the war, on one condition: they wanted to bring their own horses along and fight as mounted infantry. After they had marched until their boots were tattered, the prospect of riding instead of walking had enormous appeal. And for mountaineers who prided themselves on their horsemanship—a feeling shared by Jordan Spencer's son—it may have also been a question of dignity. General Marshall denied the request.
²⁸

On October 20, the day their term expired, the men were back in eastern Kentucky, within reach of their cabins and hollows. As the drums beat and the sergeant major shouted orders, they woke and refused to line up. Although the Confederate Congress had enacted a statute requiring soldiers to serve an additional two years, the men knew that the law was unenforceable in Kentucky, which had no Confederate government. Seven hundred out of a thousand men stacked their weapons. George Spencer put his drums down, walked into the hills, and left the rebellion behind.
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T
HE HOT SUMMER AIR, the dust of long country roads, blasted Hart Gibson, filled his eyes and lungs, coated his teeth, turned his skin and magnificent black beard brownish red. He could hear nothing, not his heart beating, over the furious shifting rhythm of hoofbeats. With every steady breath, he smelled hundreds of horses—a fog of earth, grass, sweat, and filth. Riding day and night, sleeping on his horse, Gibson had no time to remember even recent events, and it was impossible to think about what awaited him. All that mattered was the ride. As long as he had a horse, as long as he kept moving, there was hope. He could not see the beginning of his column and could only guess how far back it went.
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For two weeks, Gibson had been advancing east through Ohio as a captain in Morgan's Cavalry, a brigade of Kentucky horsemen. If Hart's brother Randall had devoted himself to learning the science of war, Morgan's men embraced the dash and honor of the Southern cause. Being a cavalry officer fit Hart's position in Kentucky society. After reading law for a semester at Harvard and studying philosophy and sociology at Heidelberg, he had settled into the life of a gentleman farmer and horse breeder at Hartland, the estate he had inherited in the bluegrass country outside Lexington. In Morgan's brigade every day promised to be a grand adventure. In fine uniforms, on strong steeds, they covered vast distances, continually surprised the enemy, saved their comrades from death and defeat, turned the tides of battles, and won despite improbable odds. Their leader, John Hunt Morgan, “irresistibly reminded one of the heroes of romance,” one of his officers would remember—tall, handsome, and strong, more loyal to his men than to his superiors, able to ride for days without rest, only to gallop another fifty miles to see his ailing wife.
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In 1861 and 1862 the Confederacy delighted in the horsemanship and derring-do exhibited by Morgan's men, the raids and mad sprints, the gun- and swordplay. For most of 1863, though, the brigade had been guarding and scouting along a 150-mile front in Middle Tennessee, tedious work, quietly demoralizing. It seemed, according to one officer, that “the glory and the
prestige
began to pass away from the Southern cavalry.” Infantry had attained more strategic importance, and as the war ground on in seeming stalemate, the costs of maintaining cavalry had become increasingly daunting to the Confederacy. Cavalrymen were finding themselves short on ammunition and guns, food, tents—they were expected to live off the land, beg and steal from the civilians they encountered, or capture what they needed from the enemy. There was no forage to keep their horses strong; they simply had to take fresh animals where they could find them. They were passed over for promotions. Most galling, even common infantry “webfeet,” cannon fodder simply “fattened . . . for the sacrifice,” sneered at warriors who did not have to march to battle, dismissing them as “buttermilk rangers.”
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As the weather grew warm, Morgan sought bolder adventures for his brigade. He asked for and received permission to invade Kentucky and raid Louisville. But he was making far grander plans that he kept to himself. Through the end of June 1863 they cut through Kentucky, skirmishing with federal troops who maneuvered vainly to try to stop them. The raiders burned and plundered towns, destroyed railroads and telegraph wires, and even robbed a train. After General Morgan's adjutant general was murdered trying to discipline a captain for stealing a civilian's watch, Hart Gibson was promoted to the position, with the responsibilities of chief administrator for the brigade.
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In early July, as news of General Robert E. Lee's defeat at Gettysburg crushed them, Morgan's men came within sight of the Ohio River at Bradenburg, Kentucky. Instead of turning east to take Louisville, Morgan disobeyed his orders and sent advance parties to the docks to capture steamboats. On July 8 the cavalry crossed the river into Indiana, beginning what became known as the “Great Raid.” They dashed across southern Indiana, through villages that still streamed with banners celebrating the Union victory. Entering the homes of people who had fled to nearby limestone caves, they found pots still bubbling and tables set for dinner. Day after day they shot their way through barricades and militia stands. As they rode into southern Ohio, they burned bridges and robbed banks, confiscated fresh horses, and liberally raided local larders. In one officer's words, they “pillaged like boys robbing an orchard,” stringing hams and bolts of calico to their saddles, slinging ice skates around their necks, filling their pockets with horn buttons from general stores. Decades later an Ohioan would remember how the raiders “exhibit[ed] abnormal appetites for pound cake and preserves.”
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