Toward morning on the third day they came to the Ohio, a broad brown stripe of water a mile across on whose far shore they could see a fringe of trees and bits of what they knew were roofs. Fearing capture by one of the federal gunboats that chugged along the river, they waited until dark, stealing a fisherman’s skiff they’d found tied to a cottonwood tree in a backwater slough.
They crossed without incident, Jarom feeling each stroke of the oars that Patterson dipped in the swill of dark water as bringing him a yard or two closer to freedom he’d never valued so greatly. Though they heard voices and saw lights of a packet, they managed to cross without being observed, putting in at a place on shore where no lights were visible among the dark curtain of trees.
Outside Henderson they overtook a local boy leading a foundered mare. Barefoot, he stepped as gingerly as the mare, whose shambling reminded Jarom of a wounded man he’d seen slogging up the slope at Donelson, too tired, too drained to know or care about his destination. Hailed, the boy, maybe fourteen, stopped and turned around, his toes fidgeting in the dust as the two of them approached.
“Hallo,” said Patterson, “can you tell me which town we’re coming to?”
“Henderson,” the boy said.
“Are there Yankees about?”
The boy gave him a knowing look, not sure of his allegiance, and said noncommittally that he’d heard some had set up camp on the road just east of the town and that home guards were patrolling all the roads at night.
Patterson asked if he knew whether there was anyone about who sang rebel songs.
The boy looked puzzled, then calculating. “There may be, there may be not. Who wants to know?”
After professions of allegiance to the Southern cause, Patterson persuaded him of their loyalties and that they had just set foot on the soil of Old Kentucky after escaping from a federal prison. He said they were tired in the extreme, as famished as songbirds after a snow, and needed a place to lay up where they didn’t have to worry about being boated back across the river, where their former captors had determined to even scores.
That persuaded the boy, no taller than a hoe handle and nearly as lean. He said he reckoned he could direct them to a Southern man who would be sympathetic to their predicament. He gave them directions to a certain farmhouse up the road about a mile and parted company, his sorry specimen of a field horse limping off behind.
The Southern man, whose name was Johnson and whose two sons served under Braxton Bragg in Tennessee, welcomed them into his modest clapboard house, which covered a double-pen cabin. His tongue-tied wife fed them chicken and cornbread while her husband listened avidly to the details of their escape. Satisfied with their loyalties, he then led them to a camp near the river where he introduced them to Captain Adam R. Johnson, in the vicinity of Henderson recruiting cavalry to form a squadron called the Breckinridge Guards.
A Henderson native who had emigrated to Texas and started a ranch, Johnson was slight of build and, as Patterson put it, close to the ground. Jarom estimated that he stood about five-five or -six, his most conspicuous feature a cascading mustache that hung in twin tails badly in need of cropping. Jarom imagined him at table, constantly swiping at the buttermilk and crumbs from the drooping ends that engulfed his mouth and nested on his chin. Whether naturally disposed or trained with wax, its tips extended wider than his face, like whiskers on a cat, as if to warn him about places too narrow to back out of. Patterson later commented that they must have served him well because he too had been at Donelson and had been among the lucky few who slipped into the darkness with Forrest the morning before the surrender. Jarom quickly understood that Johnson’s daring escape owed more to pluck than darkness.
In the morning Jarom learned that their joining brought the number of Breckinridge Guards, counting their commander, to twenty-seven. The camp, situated in the low end of a cow pasture, consisted of a field tent and a mess wagon. All of the recruits slept under the stars, rolled in whatever they could improvise to shield them from chill night air and the inevitable dew. After a breakfast of johnnycake and a flitch of bacon, Johnson called them together in a powwow. From the same boy Jarom and Patterson had met on the road, Johnson had learned that Henderson’s garrison, consisting of eighty men, had withdrawn to Louisville to reinforce that city’s defenders against a threatened attack by John Hunt Morgan.
Johnson informed the company, most of them young men from that locality, that they would eat supper in Henderson and sleep, for that night at least, indoors. Since they lacked several horses of mounting everyone, Jarom and Patterson each had to ride double. Decamping, the band simply rode into the sleepy little river town and sought out the mayor, an accommodating man who offered no resistance. Johnson, with some awkwardness, accepted without a shot the surrender of his hometown. In the street he afterwards shook hands with old schoolmates, friends he hadn’t seen since he’d gone west. Jarom looked on as one of his new comrades in arms unfolded a flag and disappeared into the courthouse, emerging on a balcony to affix the stars and bars to what probably was a broom handle.
Jarom’s experience that euphoria is always brief was borne out later that afternoon. Across the river stood Henderson’s sister town of Newburgh, whose warm relations with Henderson had been strained, then ruptured, by the war. Johnson didn’t have to be told that Evansville, just north of Newburgh, garrisoned federal troops. Hearing that Henderson had been taken, the garrison’s commander had dispatched a gunboat, on its way to snip any stem of rebellion found in Henderson.
“Events are as fickle as weather in March,” Patterson said, quoting what Jarom recognized as one of Mary Tibbs’s folksy sayings.
That afternoon an envoy from Newburgh rowed over the river with a flag of truce lashed to the bow. He carried the message that Henderson would be shelled post haste if the offending flag was not immediately removed from the cupola of the courthouse. Intuiting the ultimatum more as a show of bravado than statement of intent, Johnson temporized and managed to stall the man until dark. He then reclaimed the flag and left town, not wishing to lose local goodwill in testing the resolve of whatever yahoos were on the gunboat, which continued to hover menacingly midstream. For his new campsite Johnson chose a farm a few miles outside of town belonging to a man named Soaper.
If the federals seemed well apprised of what went on in Henderson, information flowed in both directions. From undisclosed sources, Johnson learned that Newburgh contained a large cache of arms and ammunition issued by the state of Indiana to arm its home guard and protect the Hoosier state’s southern shores against imagined hordes of ravening graycoats massed to the south. Not one to miss an opportunity, Johnson assembled his twenty-six men and told them the Southern Confederacy needed those armaments and that he proposed to fetch them over the river. When he asked how many he could count on to help him, everyone nodded in the affirmative.
Located on a lane that led to what had been a small landing, the Soaper farm provided an ideal spot from which to launch the boats needed to carry the war across the river to Indiana. Johnson, familiar with Newburgh since childhood, described it as a little two-penny river town. It had grown up around a cluster of sheds and storehouses on a rise above some pilings and plank walkways that served as a dock. From what Johnson understood, a two-story building close by the landing housed the guns. Asked how many Union soldiers guarded them, Johnson said only some local home guards who would rather smell bacon than tussle. The place, as he reckoned, had no troops because it had no strategic value, though a detachment of home guards under a Colonel Bethel had been assigned to protect the guns. By coincidence, Bethel, an entrepreneur, owned the building in which the arms were stored.
Somewhere Johnson picked up a recent edition of the Evansville Journal, boasting that the citizenry of Indiana would not allow its sovereignty to be compromised for even a moment and that Hoosier fields and valleys would remain inviolate forever. Reading this statement aloud to Jarom and the others, he tossed it to the ground and spiked it wi
th the tapered heel of his western boot.
“Let’s put ’em to the test,” he said.
Next morning Jarom and the other members of Johnson’s little army assembled on the river bank in plain sight of Newburgh, some buildings and a steeple or two appearing dimly through a screen of trees. Johnson produced an ancient telescope through which he surveyed the shoreline and pointed out the building whose bricks shown salmon pink in the early light.
“When we cross,” he said, “we will be treading up to our buttocks on gunpowder. The merest spark will destroy us all, the merest show of cowardice or indecision.”
“We’re with you, captain,” said his young lieutenant, Robert Martin. “Tell us what you have in mind.”
Smoothing a place in the dust with his hands, Johnson scratched in the river, Newburgh, Henderson, the Green River ferry, and a building he referred to as the arsenal.
“We’ll split off into two groups,” he said. “First, I’ll cross the river with two men and take the storehouse. We will hold it until the rest of you, led by Martin, can cross by ferry, create some kind of diversion, and march the half mile or so from the ferry to join us. If Martin meets any opposition, we will create our own distraction by setting fire to the shingle-roofed building between us. Once we are joined, we will load the arms and row them back to Henderson. Martin’s men will stay at the storehouse until we safely reach the Kentucky shore.”
In the face of questions, he stressed speed and secrecy essential to the plan’s success because the telegraph connected Newburgh to Evansville, where the federals had gunboats and a large force of regular soldiers.
“Success,” he said, “depends on our playing out a hand of bluff. Since this war started, we’ve always needed to seem more than we are.”
In answer to the question how to expand twenty-seven men into an army, he outlined a trick or two about how to magnify their numbers. First, he ordered those with horses to bring them out of the trees at the appropriate time to make as big a display as possible. He directed Jarom and Patterson, whom he knew had some experience with artillery, to improvise two counterfeit cannons, using whatever materials they could locate in town.
They strode off down the main street to see what could be improvised. From a nearby blacksmith’s shop, Martin helped them scavenge two pairs of old wagon wheels still attached to their axles. Wheeling them to an exposed position in plain sight of Newburgh, he had several men lash a sizable log to one of the axles. To the other he fixed two sections of stovepipe requisitioned from a dry goods and hardware business farther down Henderson’s main commercial street.
“Add a stretch of water and two parts fear,” Johnson said, “and a dollop of imagination, and our army is equipped with artillery.”
Jarom felt low when Johnson told him and Patterson to stay behind and man the imaginary guns.
Once the plan had been rehearsed to everyone’s satisfaction, Johnson, Frank Owen, and Felix Eakins pushed off for Newburgh in the same stolen skiff that Jarom and Patterson had used a few days before. None of them wore uniforms, largely, Jarom learned, because only Johnson owned one. It being mid-July, the weather was sultry, and the river seemed more a lake, wide and placid. The mist had not fully lifted, and a grayish-blue haze hung along the Indiana shore. Jarom and Patterson stationed themselves by their makeshift artillery and settled in for a long wait.
From what he later learned from Frank Owen, a twenty-year-old with residual freckles whose father had determined he would be a typesetter, the three of them hid their weapons in the bottom of the skiff. If spotted, they hoped to pass for fishermen or sightseers. While Jarom and Patterson played their passive roles as cannoneers, Martin with eighteen or nineteen men went upriver and commandeered the ferry, a crude affair that resembled a floating corral.
Johnson crossed without mishap and boldly tied up to the dock without meeting a dockhand or any of the loafers who lie about such places. Arming themselves, the three of them went directly to the warehouse, which stood open and unguarded, where they barricaded the doors and shuttered the windows before settling down to wait for Martin. Since it was nearly noon, they assumed that most of the townspeople would be sitting down to dinner at home or the town’s one eatery, a rooming house next to the livery.
Johnson felt assured that things were going as planned until, glancing up the street, he saw five or six men dash into the hotel several doors from the boarding house. Telling Eakins and Owen to keep a lookout, that trouble was brewing, he picked up his two-barrel shotgun and walked casually up the street as a citizen might on an errand to post a letter or pay an account at the grocer’s.
“My purpose,” Johnson put it later as he patted his sidearm, “was to reason with them in terms they would understand.”
During his walk up the street, he spotted a man in one of the upper windows of a clapboard house holding a large cartridge box. When the fellow realized Johnson had seen him, he stepped back out of sight. Clearly, someone had alerted the town and at least some of the citizens had organized to fight. Not a child, not a woman, had been seen.
A large structure with three stories, the hotel was the most prominent building in Newburgh. As offhandedly as any guest, Johnson walked up the steps to the verandah. Without breaking stride, as Owen noted, he pushed through the large double doors that opened onto the small lobby, which consisted of a counter, a registry desk, and a few chairs. Now it contained sixty or seventy citizens armed with every description of weapon, from squirrel rifles and new Enfields to antique swords as well as a saber or two, pistols of every variety, and even a pitchfork. A few of those to the front carried their firearms cocked and presented, close enough, as Johnson put it, to tickle his chin. Johnson knew he had either to bluff his way out of this predicament or surrender. A mighty hubbub arose in the room, so he had to yell to be heard.
Pushing the rifles aside with his double-bore shotgun, he brusquely ordered the assembly to hold their fire, promising that if those present surrendered their arms, his men would harm neither them nor the town. His problem was that none of his men was yet visible. Johnson said he felt a tremor pass through the company like an electrical current. Some tense moments passed before all of them, like a congregation acting in unison to rise for a hymn or kneel in prayer, put down their arms. There followed a great clanking of metal as weapons clacked against the poplar floor. Relieved to a degree appreciated only by reprieved criminals and high-stakes gamblers, Johnson waved his shotgun like a baton to back them to the walls and into the corridor, ordering them to keep so silent they could hear their grandsires whispering from the grave.
Just as he thought the pendulum had swung in his favor, a large man dressed in an officer’s uniform burst into the room from a rear door, a horse pistol in his hand.
“What’s the meaning of this?” the man demanded.
Of course, Johnson immediately identified the stranger confronting him as Colonel Bethel, a hefty, athletic man in his forties whose every action, he later said, bespoke confidence and decisiveness.
“What are you doing with my guns?” he asked as a proprietor might speak to an interloper.
The room went silent.
Spotting Johnson, the shotgun swinging like a dial on a pressure gauge to stop on his buttoned chest, Bethel shouldered his way toward the front of the room, the company parting and closing in his wake like a puddle passed through by a wheel.
“Advance another step,” Johnson said, “and you will step into eternity on a load of buckshot.”
Bethel stopped. Speechless, defiant, he glared at Johnson. Recovering after a few moments, he said he couldn’t speak for the others but that for himself he would never surrender. Just then there came a commotion from the front of the room, and someone announced that a body of armed men were entering the hotel. Jarom shared Johnson’s relief when he saw six or seven of his little band parading into the room, weapons at the ready.
Acting as though this had been his plan all along, Johnson sent one of his men and
one of Bethel’s to fetch the muster roll so Johnson could parole Bethel’s men and put them out of contention.
The rest had been easy. Martin had left the hotel to see to the loading of the captured rifles onto two commissary wagons that he’d found behind the livery. This completed, he sent them upstream to the ferry so they could be transported across the river. Just as they were exiting town, word came that two hundred and fifty home guards from Evansville were approaching in an attitude of attack.
Johnson was forced to play his last card. He declared to Bethel that he knew the guardsmen were close and that if his men were fired on he would shell the town to rubble, blast it so completely that not one stone would stand upon another. Bethel, understandably flummoxed, said he saw no cannon and demanded that Johnson show him where they were positioned. Johnson marched him to a little rise by the storehouse, handed him the collapsible telescope, and pointed across the river, inviting him to see for himself. Bethel raised the telescope to his eye and scanned the Kentucky shore, the upraised cylinder hesitating when it came to Jarom and Patterson’s battery. He lowered the glass and looked to his storehouse, large and closest to the water. The tension broke when he asked Johnson for permission to send runners to call off the attack, a request Johnson readily granted.
As was later related to Jarom, by that time the cargo of guns was halfway across the Ohio. He and Patterson could see his comrades waving and dancing about the ferry. Saluting Bethel, Johnson returned to his skiff and took his place in the stern as Eakins and Owen, already at the oars, churned their way toward Kentucky. When they reached mid-channel, Johnson later said he noticed a dust cloud outside the town, marking the arrival of troops from Evansville. Before they touched shore, he beheld the storehouse and banks of the river aswarm with soldiers.
Looking downriver, he spied billows of smoke from a gunboat that was closing fast. From the shore Jarom and Patterson heard shots fired, though by mistake, he later learned, and not at either him or Johnson. In the excitement back at Newburgh the guardsmen had shot two of their fellow citizens by accident. For the benefit of anyone that might be watching, Jarom and Patterson performed the motions of loading and sighting their cannon, then stepping aside as though awaiting orders to level the toy town across the river with their make-believe guns. Fearing that they might be seen through a powerful lens, they kept somber expressions during the masquerade but broke into a fit of laughing when Johnson completed the crossing safely.
Sue Mundy Page 8