The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home (15 page)

“T
HIS DAY WILL LONG BE REMEMBERED
,” Jackman wrote in his diary on April 6, 1862. Indeed it would. The men roused from sleep at 3
A.M
. that morning. No bugles sounded the reveille in order not to alert any lurking Federals that an army stood poised to attack them. Instead, orderly sergeants shook the men of their companies to awaken them. They started fires and boiled water for their morning coffee. Just then Breckinridge galloped along the line yelling, “Boys, fall in. You have better work before you than eating.” Minutes later they heard the roar of cannon as the battle opened just over a mile from their camp.

The Kentuckians formed in the road, the other brigades of the reserve corps taking place behind them. Officers spoke quietly to the men, calming their nerves. Others harangued their privates, trying to excite their martial ardor. Captain D. E. McKendree of “Old Joe” Lewis’ Company D addressed his men briefly in the road. He was a jolly sort, one used to making his rounds of a camp, visiting everyone briefly before moving on to the next group or tent, always saying, “Well, men,
I must let my light shine around
!” Now he shone as he told his nervous charges: “Boys, we are about to be engaged with the foe for the first time. It will pain me to see any man falter; and for heaven’s sake don’t let it be said, by those whom we love at home, that one member of Company D disgraced himself.”

Soon the brigade stood ready to move, “Old Trib” Trabue at its
head. When Breckinridge gave the order, the Orphans marched up the road at the double quick, some of them still munching the hardtack from their interrupted breakfast. They were twenty-four hundred strong, reasonably well armed, and as ready for a fight as they would ever be. This was the battle that would drive Grant out of Tennessee, out of Kentucky, and return them to their homes. Thus it was fitting that at least one member of Hanson’s 2d Kentucky marched with the brigade today. John Mahon, an Irishman of Company G, took a wound at Donelson and thus left before the surrender. He was back in the ranks now for his revenge.
¹

Marching in the darkness toward the sound and flash of the big guns, the Kentuckians found their advance slowed by Polk’s corps in their front. Finally, still before light, they drew close enough to the battle line that Trabue ordered them to unsling their knapsacks in a pile and leave a guard for them. Trabue called for volunteers, but no one wanted to be left behind and miss the battle. The man finally ordered to stay tried bribing another to take his place with extra pieces of hardtack, to no avail. Indeed, even men of the brigade who had been in arrest begged release long enough to take part in the fight. One of Breckinridge’s teamsters, in the guardhouse for some infraction, talked the general into freeing him just for the battle.

The men seemed lighthearted. To a captain of the 4th Kentucky it seemed incongruous. “Why did we not be more serious, and shake each other by the hand and bid fond
adieus
?” For a time even, the brass band of the regiment played martial airs, until too near the battle line. Then they “melt away into thin air and are seen no more.”
²

The battlefield ahead of Breckinridge and his Orphans was already a mess. Pittsburg Landing lay on the western bank of the Tennessee River, amid a hilly, wooded terrain crisscrossed by small creeks and forest roads. The left of Grant’s thirty-three-thousand-man army rested about four miles below the landing, against the river. The Federals’ right extended perpendicular to the river and almost six miles from it, its right center intersected by the Corinth road. It was upon this road that Johnston’s corps advanced. He hoped to press back Grant’s left, past Pittsburg Landing, almost two miles to Snake Creek, thus denying the possibility of federal reinforcement by way of the river landing. To make the attack, Johnston intended to send Hardee’s corps against Grant’s right, while Bragg’s corps would do the work of
driving back the Federals along the Tennessee. Breckinridge and Polk, of course, were to assist where needed.

The plan went awry immediately. Johnston achieved a tactical surprise that sent the enemy army into absolute consternation. Yet the Unionists speedily began organizing themselves for a defense, hoping to hold out long enough for twenty-five thousand reinforcements, led by Major General Don C. Buell, to reach them from downriver. As Hardee first struck, and Bragg soon after, it became apparent that Johnston’s plan would not work. The generals and their men were green, and the two corps soon became largely intermingled. Indeed, for the rest of the day officers would lead not so much their own commands as just any group of soldiers who came to hand. It would be a learning battle.

As they neared the field, Breckinridge ordered Trabue to move forward in readiness for easy deployment behind Polk, and soon thereafter he told “Old Trib” to form in line of battle. He put the 3d Kentucky on the right and the 4th Kentucky on the left, the other regiments in the center, and Byrne’s and Cobb’s batteries in the rear. Morgan and his squadron were already out in front, and Helm guarded the right flank. In this fashion they moved forward until sometime after 8
A.M
., when Breckinridge received an order to take the two rear brigades of his corps and move to the right to assist Bragg. It meant that, in its very first battle, he had to leave his Kentucky brigade on its own, but there was no choice. He told Trabue to keep on Polk’s left rear, continue advancing, and tend toward the left. Trabue would be moving almost directly toward Shiloh Church. Then Breckinridge bade him farewell, and both marched toward their fate.

The first sight the Orphans had of the effects of the fighting was a nearly demolished federal battery, “dead men, dead horses, and broken gun carriages, all lying in a mingled condition.” About 9
A.M
. Trabue encountered Morgan’s resting men. “Cheer, boys, cheer,” sang a cavalryman, and the foot soldiers responded in kind. They filed down a wooded slope and into a swampy area along the Shiloh Branch. There sat a large open field before them with enemy camps on the opposite side. The Federals stood in line in the woods near their camps, and over to his left Trabue saw two more enemy campsites occupied by bluecoats. At the same time he could see none of his own troops, being separated from Polk’s left by a rise of ground. Trabue appeared to be at the very end of the Confederate line, somewhat
isolated, and had discovered a substantial body of the enemy who might hit Polk’s unsuspecting flank with ominous results. Trabue would have to attack.

Just before reaching this position, Trabue lost the 3d Kentucky, Byrne’s battery, the 4th Alabama, and Crews’s battalions, when Beauregard ordered them to the right in support of another brigade. So now his command stood reduced to less than two thousand, and already the enemy was forming to meet him. The federal artillery opened on the Kentuckians first. A shell killed two of Cobb’s gunners and severed both hands of a third, who stood looking at the bleeding stumps and cried, “My Lord, that stops my fighting.” Another shell passed less than two feet in front of Johnny Green and killed three men of the regiment and carved a leg from a fourth.
³

At about this time an unidentified advance Confederate regiment in the fighting withdrew, and its line of retreat brought it straight back through Trabue’s line. This, combined with the heavy fire and confusion already reigning, would have disrupted many green regiments. But as these withdrawing Rebels broke through the 4th Kentucky, Nuckols kept his men in hand. He even tried to halt and rally the other unit, but with no success. Then, when the Kentuckians’ own bugler sounded the recall, so that the regiment could join in meeting the threat from the Federals to their left, the men of the 4th at first would not respond. They feared it would be thought they were retreating with that other demoralized regiment. Finally Major Tom Monroe had to give a verbal order to get the 4th to withdraw.

Trabue seemed to be everywhere steadying his men before the fight. He rode calmly along the line, speaking in low, soothing tones to the men, “apparently as free from excitement as when on review.” Every regiment saw him; most of the men heard him as he casually remarked upon the course of the battle. Here, for the first time, a superior officer appeared on the field, Major General Hardee. Since fighting had taken place here well before Trabue’s arrival, the ground lay littered with dead. Thus he found it difficult to form a perfectly straight line, though he compelled the Kentuckians to stand even astride the dead in the attempt. Hardee smiled, perhaps because of this, and offered his compliments to Trabue.

“General, I have a Kentucky brigade here,” said the colonel. “What shall I do with it?”

“Put it in where the fight is the thickest, sir,” Hardee responded,
then rode away. Such was the degree of command being exercised even by professional soldiers this day.

Left to his own discretion, Trabue moved Hunt’s 5th Kentucky farther to extend his own left, completed turning the brigade to face the Federals in their front, and attacked. “In a few minutes we were in the thickest of the fight,” wrote Johnny Green. Several color corporals of Hunt’s regiment fell dead in the first few minutes, and Green himself took a wound. When litter bearers readied to take him from the field, he told them, “There is too much work here for a man to go to the rear as long as he can shoot a gun.” Fortunately, as Johnny put it, the bullet that hit him “glanced off my hard head.”

Most of the 4th Kentucky carried Enfields now, and used prepared cartridges that allowed relatively rapid fire. “The ground in front of us was heaped up with dead men,” wrote John Weller of the 4th, but their own men fell as well. Captain John B. Rogers saw his own brother killed on the skirmish line and soon after fell himself. John Marshall took a bullet in the breast pocket that only missed snuffing his life thanks to burying itself in a Testament given him by a woman in Kentucky.

Trabue estimated that he battered the Federals in his front for an hour and a quarter. He put the 4th Kentucky on his left, Lewis’ 6th Kentucky in the center, and Hunt’s 5th on the right, holding the 31st Alabama in reserve. He no longer had Cobb’s battery, it having been ordered to the right shortly before. “The enemy appeared to outnumber us greatly,” he reported. After a time Trabue put the Alabamians on his left to extend it, and then finding portions of two of Bragg’s brigades in his rear, he put them in line, ordered bayonets fixed, and charged. He said it was a “complete success.”

The regiment immediately fronting the 4th Kentucky was the 46th Ohio. As Nuckols readied his regiment to charge them, giving the order to “change front forward on 8th Company,” the Ohioans, too, changed their front to meet them, maintaining a steady fire as they did so. Finally the two hostile regiments stood little more than fifty yards apart when, at the command, the Kentuckians delivered a volley that threw the Buckeye outfit into utter confusion. When Nuckols charged, the enemy did not stand at all, but withdrew without looking back. Another federal regiment tried to take its place without being able to stop the Orphans’ charge. Lewis and his 6th Kentucky met with lesser resistance in his part of the assault, though an enemy bullet killed his
horse under him. As for Hunt, his regiment, only eight companies strong and still under temporary organization, suffered heavy casualties. Captain Caldwell took sixty-four men into the fight in his company and lost 64 per cent of them, himself suffering a broken left arm. They, too, succeeded in their advance. When Trabue’s line passed the first enemy camps in their path, some of Hunt’s men found a beautiful silk banner with the goddess of liberty and the motto “We will die for our country” on one side, and “Victory or death” on the other. Considering that the owners of the banner left it without a fight, Hunt quipped that “the entire command was killed, for they surely could not have thrown away their colors after going in to win or die.” The flag they would give to Breckinridge as a souvenir, while its staff they appropriated to themselves to replace their own banner’s flagstaff, shot in two earlier in the day.
⁴

So far the men and officers acted superbly for untested volunteer soldiers. Until now, Trabue noted, no part of the brigade faltered or fell back at any time. The 4th Kentucky engaged in assaulting a second encampment, called on Lewis and the 6th for assistance, and the regiment moved smartly to its aid. Hunt, Breckinridge would later say, “conducted himself with the utmost coolness and courage.” At this point even civilians took a hand. Governor George W. Johnson, who had been acting as a volunteer aide, found his services curtailed when his horse fell dead. Without hesitation he took a musket and joined the 4th Kentucky as a foot soldier.

Byrne and Cobb had been busy too this day. Most of the artillery on the left side of Johnston’s line concentrated against a division of Federals led by Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss. In all, eleven batteries, including Cobb and Byrne, took part in the bombardment of Prentiss’ position, which continued for hours during the morning and afternoon. Byrne sat on his horse giving orders, while members of Bragg’s staff looked on admiringly. At one point a colonel raised a cheer for Byrne, a shout taken up by his gunners and passed on along the line. Bragg doffed his cap in salute. Furiously the artillerists worked their guns, pouring scores of shots into Prentiss’ besieged position. The enthusiastic colonel, so enraptured with what he saw, dismounted and put his hand to the barrel of one of Byrne’s guns, saying that he just “wanted to feel it.”
⁵

After his initial success, Trabue found that he had to move forward slowly due to the broken terrain. At the same time a confusion of
colors slowed his advance thanks to a Louisiana unit to his left whose blue uniforms gave him pause. He sent an aide to determine their identity, but not before some of the Orphans accidentally gave them a volley. This produced speedy results, the soldiers quickly turning their blue coats inside out and raising their Confederate battle flag well into view.