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.22
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.23
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.24
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.25
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.26
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.27
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.29
Gibson: Ohio, July 1863
THE 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.30
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 Ha
rt’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.31
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.”32
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.33
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.”34
Federal cavalry rode in hot pursuit just miles behind. Gunboats patrolled the Ohio River, and tens of thousands of militia volunteers made “every bush an ambush.” The rebels’ horses wore out and had to be replaced every day. But General Morgan and his men never dreamed that their raid was doomed. They figured they could always outrun the enemy. They rode into the southeastern hills and headed for the West Virginia border, confident they would cross in the shallows near Wheeling. Instead, the river was running high, and on July 19 the brigade found itself facing a flotilla of gunboats with deadly artillery, with ten thousand federal cavalry and infantry closing in. While some men succeeded in crossing into West Virginia, seven hundred were captured. Gibson, General Morgan, and several hundred others escaped the trap and turned north, riding over steep hills to elude their pursuers. A week later, ninety miles south of Lake Erie, Morgan surrendered, nowhere left to ride.35
The general and his officers, Hart Gibson among them, rode by steamer to Cincinnati, then by train to Columbus, jeered by crowds along the way. Instead of being sent to a camp for prisoners of war, they were locked up in the state penitentiary. As guards and inmates watched, Morgan’s raiders were stripped naked and scrubbed by convicts with horsebrushes, their hair and beards shorn. On behalf of the men, Gibson wrote to Ohio’s governor in protest over being “subjected to the ordinary discipline of convicts.” The punishment was harsh, particularly the long stretches of solitary confinement, but a gentleman warrior could endure such hardships. What galled Gibson was the notion that other captives were living in much better conditions. Thinking like the lawyer he once had been, he came to believe that equal treatment was the hallmark of fairness. “Who are we,” he wrote, “how different from ordinary men, or of what crime are we guilty, that we are put beyond the pale of civilized warfare, the utmost limit of law overleaped to inflict upon us as a punishment at variance with and abhorrent to the moral sense of mankind?”36
CHAPTER EIGHT
CIVIL WAR
Wall and Gibson, 1863-66
Wall: Ohio, August 1863
O.S.B. WALL ADVANCED SLOWLY through the heat and dust. The hills of southeastern Ohio were simple country, a rolling progression of farmhouses, barns, orchards, and hedgerows, tens of thousands of sheep grazing on the hillsides, fields swirling with corn, flax, hay, and wheat at their late-summer heights. Wall was far from Oberlin. The area more resembled western Pennsylvania and the western Virginia counties that had opted to remain in the Union at the outset of the war, a border between plains and mountains, east and west, north and south. His brother-in-law John Mercer Langston had grown up in nearby Chillicothe, but Wall was more than a hundred miles away from any place that he knew well. He had to find his way directly from farm to farm and town to town; he could not rely on strangers to guide him.1
Just days earlier Morgan’s raiders had swept through the area. When Wall began his travels, hundreds of the Confederate cavalrymen had been cornered and captured trying to cross the Ohio River into West Virginia, but General Morgan and a remnant of his men remained at large. The signs of recent terror abounded, from trees felled along the roads to burnt bridges and buildings.2
Even without the fighting, the area was torn by conflict. Virginians had settled the Ohio hills and were staunch Democrats. For decades before the war, they had opposed civil rights for blacks, whom they viewed as economic competition and political foes. When the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in 1831 that anyone who was more than half white had all of the rights of a white man, whites in southern Ohio refused to enroll blacks in white schools and stationed themselves at the polls on Election Day to challenge the blood quantum of dark-skinned voters. In court they insisted, despite settled law to the contrary, that one drop of black blood made a person black, that “the term white, as applied to persons, has . . . been . . . applied as expressive of the pure white race.” As late as 1851 southern Ohioans at the state’s constitutional convention labeled as trespassers the tens of thousands of people of color who lived in their communities, presenting numerous proposals to restrict immigration and send blacks to Africa so that “this should be a State for the white man and the white man only.”3
When the South seceded, some southern Ohioans joined with Republicans to form a coalition Union Party, but many remained unapologetically opposed to the war. Their primary spokesman, Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham, supported secession, openly denounced Lincoln, and characterized the w
ar as an illegal invasion that would establish black rule over whites. In 1861 the Ohio legislature banned marriage and sexual relations between the races and entertained petitions to expel black residents. As long as the Union’s prospects for victory remained remote, supporters of Vallandigham—known as Copperheads or Butternuts—could find sympathetic ears. President Lincoln regarded them as serious threats to internal order. In May 1863 Vallandigham was tried by a military tribunal, sentenced to two years in prison for disloyalty and sympathy for the enemy, and then exiled across enemy lines on the president’s orders. The following year Ohio’s Democrats would nominate Vallandigham as their candidate for governor. In the hill counties the Butternuts were unintimidated, even energized, by recent events. Wearing pins that symbolized their political allegiances, they were spending the summer of 1863 breaking up Union Party meetings with fists and pointed pistols.4
Riding into unstable, contested country, following in the hot wake of Morgan’s raid, Wall had a delicate task. Although he was not a soldier, his business was war. Where Confederate sympathizers abounded, Wall had come to recruit volunteers for a new Union regiment composed entirely of colored men. His mission represented everything the Butternuts were fighting. They did not simply fear black men with guns—they knew that black men in the military would have an unimpeachable claim to equal rights. From the war’s outset, leaders of the race had sought to raise colored regiments for precisely this reason. “Once let the black man ... get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pockets,” wrote Frederick Douglass, “and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”5
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