The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home (6 page)

It could not last. Violations increased, as did the tension in the state. Finally it was a Confederate who precipitated the crisis. Both sides recognized the strategic necessity of controlling the western part of the state where it commanded transportation on three rivers, the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee. On September 3, 1861, acting on orders from General Polk, Brigadier General Gideon J. Pillow moved from Tennessee and occupied Columbus, Kentucky, on the Mississippi. The excuse was that the Federals had been recruiting for some time in the state, and were then marshaling troops across the river in Missouri, intent on taking Columbus themselves. Three days later Brigadier General U. S. Grant occupied Paducah at the mouth of the Tennessee with federal troops. Neutrality was now a shambles. On September 11 the legislature passed its resolution ordering Confederate troops out of the state.

For Simon Bolivar Buckner, this was the turning point. Both governments courted Buckner. As part of his attempt to arrange and maintain neutrality, the Kentuckian visited Washington in July, and met with Lincoln, who tacitly assured that he would honor the state’s position. On August 17, in an obvious attempt to lure Buckner’s support to the Union, Lincoln sent him an unsolicited commission as brigadier general. The Confederates, while less obvious, still made it clear that he could expect a good position if he “went South.” Buckner consistently declined both. “I have alike refused office from the North and the South,” he declared on September 12, “because the position of my state was respected.” With the increasing violations by Union men and with Lincoln’s assurances of support apparently hollow, it remained only for the legislature to abandon neutrality, for Buckner to choose his side. In Nashville, Tennessee, on the day that Confederates were ordered out of Kentucky, he advised the Confederate War Department that “No political necessity now exists for withholding a commission, if one is intended for me.” The next day
he issued a call for Kentuckians to defend their homeland against the northern invasion.
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On September 14 the new commanding general of the Confederate Army west of the Alleghenies, Albert Sidney Johnston, appointed Buckner a brigadier general. At the same time, regarding it as imperative that more Confederate troops occupy Kentucky to protect southern interests, Johnston decided to seize Bowling Green. Positioned on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad where the line from Memphis joined, it was the most important transportation junction in the southern part of the state. The task of organizing and commanding the movement Johnston gave to Buckner.

He moved quickly. The day after being commissioned, he sent to Mississippi for one thousand arms to equip the Kentuckians at Camp Boone. He would take fifteen hundred men and Byrne’s battery, still with only its three six-pounders. The soldiers were to have fifty rounds of ammunition and rations for a week. It would be a quick movement, by rail up the Louisville & Nashville in only a couple of hours. To achieve as much surprise as possible, Buckner did not advise the men and officers of the time of departure until just before leaving. He would take with him as well spare track and road tools should Federals try to cut the line, and several hundred spades, picks, and axes. Buckner planned on staying in Bowling Green for some time.
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In advance of the movement, Buckner had sympathizers in Kentucky ready to assist, many of them still in the State Guard. Thomas H. Hays captained the Salt River Battalion, which every Sunday drilled alongside the Louisville & Nashville line thirty miles south of Louisville, near Colesburg. One of the engineers of that line, Andy Clarke, delighted in watching the drill. If Hays and his men “went South,” Andy declared, he would join them with his locomotive. “Whinever ye want Andy and No. 27, jist tip me the wink an’ I’ll be with ye,” he told Hays. On September 17 came advance word from Buckner that now was the time to move; Hays should capture trains at nearby Elizabethtown and Lebanon Junction, destroy a bridge over the Rolling Fork River, then move toward Bowling Green. Word went to Andy Clarke, who was found on his engine with the steam up, but he refused rather loudly to go with them. The engine belonged to the railroad and he would not steal it. “Moind ye,” shouted the Irishman, “I’ll never desert and stale their property.” However, he whispered to one of the startled Kentuckians, should he be ordered to accompany
them at gunpoint, he would have no choice but to obey. The pistol pointed, Clarke threw up his hands and cried out—presumably for any L&N people thereabouts to hear—“Don’t shoot; I surrender to Gineral Buckner and the Confederacy. Let me run over and kiss my wife and darling babies and I’ll go with ye.” And go he did, proving invaluable to Hays in successfully carrying out his orders.
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On the morning of September 18, 1861, Buckner boarded the 2d Kentucky, and those armed portions of the 3d and 4th regiments. Flat-cars carried Byrne’s field pieces. The remaining unarmed Kentuckians he sent to Nashville, where they would soon be provided weapons. When the light was full, they blew the engine’s whistles and bade farewell to Camp Boone. They were going to Kentucky.

Buckner arrived first, reaching Bowling Green at 10
A.M.
Half an hour later Colonel Hawes brought the remainder of the command, and later in the day some regiments of Tennessee troops arrived from Nashville. The whole movement took place without opposition. Now was the time for the formalities. Buckner sent a telegram to Governor Magoffin informing him of his action, and declaring that it was only a “defensive measure.” Then Buckner printed for circulation a broadside dated the day before. Addressed “To the People of Kentucky,” it reaffirmed that the Confederates were acting only on the defensive, and launched into the history of federal crimes against the state. “Men of Kentucky!” he said, “are we indeed slaves, that we are thus to be dragged in chains at the feet of despotic power?” Of course not. “Let us rise, freemen of Kentucky, and show that we are worthy of our sires.” He was entering the lists for freedom, he said. Now he called upon them to “Join with me in expelling from our firesides the armies which an insane despotism sends amongst us to subjugate us to the iron rule of Puritanical New England.” On the very day of occupying Kentucky, the renewed recruiting of her sons began.
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J
OHN
S. J
ACKMAN
walked to the Bardstown depot to get the daily Louisville newspaper. He chanced to meet there an old friend who, without prior discussion on the subject, said, “Let us go to Bloomfield to-night and join the party going through to Dixie.” “I had scarcely thought of such a thing before,” Jackman recalled, but instantly his mind was decided. “All right,” he said, and so cast his fortunes with the Confederacy. Since Buckner’s entry into the state, hundreds of young Kentucky men formed this same resolve, though presumably upon a little more reflection. All of them made their way toward Bowling Green eventually, though not without mishap and adventure on the way.

Jackman went home and changed clothes, trying to slip out of the house without his parents noticing. Failing in that, he lied, telling them he would be back in a few days. With no baggage but a shawl, he mounted his horse, joined his friend and four others, and rode into the night. “Not one in the party was able to support a whisker, nor a visible mustache; neither was there a well-defined political idea in the crowd.” They were simply off for adventure. One of their number, standing six feet, seven inches tall, they elected their “captain,” and then they followed him into the moonlight. As they approached Bloomfield the challenge “Who comes there?” rang out. The “captain” replied that they were “Recruits for the Rebel army.” The voice commanded them to halt, and soon a soldier came into view bran
dishing a rifle and a bayonet. Satisfied of the strangers’ intentions, the Confederate sent them to the main camp, where they were challenged yet again, this time with cocked gun. “I thought this extreme vigilence,” wrote Jackman. Soon Captain John C. Wickliffe brought them into camp where a fire burned and the boys exchanged excited stories with other friends who preceded them. Weary from the ride, however, they soon retired, John Jackman rolling himself in his shawl and pillowing his head on the gnarled root of an old beech tree. “I lay a moment watching the ‘lamps of heaven’ as they twinkled through the foliage of the old tree, my thoughts busy contemplating the
sublimeness
of soldiering.” Then it was off to sleep.

He awoke the next morning with rain spattering his face. After a breakfast of cornbread and fat bacon broiled at the end of a stick, he explored this new place, called Camp Charity. The men enjoyed good clothing and shelter, and excellent food by later standards. He found about three hundred men in camp, among them the Lexington Rifles of Captain John H. Morgan, who was in overall charge of the recruits here assembled. Soon it was time to exchange his civilian clothing for a jacket of Confederate gray, Jackman noting with perverse pleasure that the largest trousers available extended little below the knees of his outsized “captain” of the day before, while his arms from the elbows down protruded beyond the jacket sleeves.

With the uniform came a rifle with a gleaming bayonet, and that night Jackman went on guard in a dense wood behind the camp. “How proud I felt as I paced to and fro on my beat,” he wrote, longing for an opportunity to issue the same stentorian challenge that he encountered just the night before. After midnight he heard two men approaching and crouched in hiding, hoping they would wander across the line of his beat. They did, and at once came Jackman’s prideful “Halt.” The men begged to be passed into the camp but, not to be done out of his grand moment, the guard refused, bawling into the night, “Corporal of the guard, post No. 8.” “Even the owls stopped hooting,” Jackman discovered, “either through respect, or being terror-stricken.” When the swearing corporal arrived, the strangers were brought into camp, and Johnny Jackman returned to his solitary beat, entirely satisfied with the glorious life of a soldier.

On the afternoon of September 28, the party, now 400 strong, left to join Buckner. The infantry took the lead, the cavalry acting as rear guard, while Morgan rode at the front of the column. The very first
day out Jackman was rudely disenchanted. Almost the entire party turned into a panicked, disorganized mob when it was thought there were armed Federals or Home Guard in their front. Briefly he toyed with taking “French leave,” abandoning the column, but thought better of it after a night’s rest. Still, the novelty and romance faded fast. The next night they were so tired that one man fell asleep on a pile of rails that some time before had been a campfire. He awoke in the morning to find his coat singed to cinders. The next day brought them to the L&N’s Green River crossing near Munfordville, and here they found Hawes’s 2d Kentucky, which Buckner had sent forward to guard the bridge. The veterans welcomed the recruits with band music and the salute of cannon—Byrne’s six-pounders. Amid the huzzas and the strains of “Dixie,” Jackman and his compatriots marched into camp and collapsed. They had walked nearly one hundred miles in the preceding thirty-six hours.

The next two days in camp took much of the remainder of romance out of soldiering. The “veterans” of the 2d Kentucky looked to Jackman “very ragged and dirty.” He was surprised at how quickly bright, gay uniforms became tattered and dingy. The men of the 2d guyed and teased the “tenderfeet,” but still Jackman and the 400 decided to enter the service formally. Morgan took his Lexington Rifles toward Bowling Green to enlist as cavalry, while the others were sworn into service by Major James Hewitt, their term three years. The veterans looked on, jeering “sold to the Dutch, sold to the Dutch” as Jackman took his oath. Finally, on the evening of October 5, the new companies entrained for Bowling Green. It was past dark when they arrived, seeing before them hundreds of campfires in the suburbs of the town. Jackman thought “the world was there encamped.” Now, at last, he was ready for war in an army that would whip the Yankees.
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Johnny Jackman’s was only one of hundreds of stories told by the men flocking to Bowling Green. Buckner’s call to arms was not ignored in the first weeks after his march into the state. The very day they took Bowling Green, he sent Hawes and the 2d Kentucky, with Byrne’s battery, forward to the Green River, both to cover the bridge as well as to “rally around your command as strong a force of Kentuckians as possible.” He empowered Hawes to muster armed companies into the service for three years, and further to communicate with sympathizers in the interior of the state to aid in their recruiting. Buckner authorized special recruiting agents to go to Lexington and elsewhere in the Bluegrass
to raise companies, placing Major Alexander Cassady in charge of enlisting men to the banner. They came in large numbers: 400 on September 19, 500 more six days later. Enlistment stations burgeoned at places like Cave City and Russellville, and the young “Southrons” flocked to them singly and in informal companies.
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They presented a motley aspect, these ardent Kentuckians, but most of the townspeople loved them. At Russellville the entire town, all southern in sympathy, turned out as the recruits entered, the townspeople bringing the best delicacies their larders could offer. Yet some were less than overwhelmed. “What a sad, beaten-down sight awaited our eyes,” wrote a lady passing through town. “They, in their tatters, partly barefooted, gave more the effect of a robber band than the corps of trained soldiers.” In the public square the town’s society ladies mixed with those of lesser reputation in preparing meals for the volunteers and mending their clothes. Amid blazing campfires and the comings and goings of couriers, officers mingled with civilians, standing aside as wagons bearing the sick passed by, stepping out to greet those who straggled in the last miles. A band played “Dixie,” and everyone in the square stopped to join in singing. It was a joyful yet sober occasion, and symbolic. These men were leaving everything behind. Their state did not support them, and in many cases neither did their families. They looked hungry. Many were ailing, already homesick. “Their whole outward appearance was sad, self-sufficient and serious,” recalled a witness. It was of these men that Buckner hoped to build his regiments. And in time a brigade.
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