The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home

by Davis, William C.

  This new 5th Kentucky was cut of the same cloth as the other regiments at Bowling Green. Its colonel was John S. Williams, called “Cerro Gordo” thanks to his Mexican War service, a balding, mutton-chopped, overweight fellow marvelously adept at lauding his own achievements. His regiment was formed largely of companies from the eastern part of the state, the men furnishing their own guns. Some were hardly men. Jimmie South of Company D stood tall for his age, lied, and enlisted at fourteen. So did Johnny Foster of Company B. He was thirteen.

  Like many other companies in these regiments, the men of the 5th Kentucky often had quite a time leaving home, and quite a time afterward. Hiram Hawkins provided a good example. “I was among the first to raise the standard of rebellion in eastern Ky,” he boasted proudly. Gathering several men along the way, he led his own former State Guardsmen to Prestonburg and there established the first recruiting camp in the area. He took command, and soon filled and armed several companies, many of them with fine Enfield rifles. But then Williams appeared on the scene with authority from Richmond to muster Hawkins’ men into service as a regiment, and Hawkins began to perceive that there was no place in the regiment for him, after all he had done. He resigned as camp commander and tried to raise a mounted company to act as cavalry, but Williams would hear none of it. Frustrated again, Hawkins finally entered himself and his men as private soldiers. He did not stay down for long. Three days later his men elected him captain of their company, and on November 14, when the 5th Kentucky formally organized, the regiment voted almost unanimously to elect him major. Thus was patience, and ambition, rewarded.9

  Still Kentucky could offer enough of her sons for one more regiment. When Buckner entered Kentucky he ordered Joseph H. Lewis to establish a camp at Cave City in Barren County, thirty miles northeast of Bowling Green. At the same time Buckner authorized Martin Cofer to recruit, hoping that both men would raise enough men to form two additional regiments. They proved energetic. On September 20 Lewis established his camp and three days later issued the obligatory broadside addressed “To the Public,” in which he set forth the wrongs done to southern men in Kentucky. Lincoln was as corrupt and despotic as the Austrian or Russian monarchs, he declared. “Where is the honor of Kentucky” that her people should stand idle in their subjugation? Their only hope was to unite and show that they would defend themselves. “Then let every man come to the camp,” he concluded. “Come at once. Delay is sure destruction.”

  This Lewis was a handsome fellow, blue-eyed, fair-complected, nearly six feet tall. He was a native of Barren County, and would turn thirty-seven while enlisting his men in October. He practiced law professionally until 1857, when he made an unsuccessful bid for Congress, then ran again in 1861, not expecting to win, but hoping to raise southern sympathies by publicizing his view of the issues. It worked. Defeated for office, he still won enough support to start the enlistment of several hundred men for his regiment. It was a support that his temperament alone might not have earned for him, for Lewis was not the friendliest of men. Ed Thompson said he was “as far removed from obsequiousness as any man living.” Outwardly he displayed a scornful nature, irascible, begrudging, sometimes offensive. Once having made an enemy, he rarely did anything to heal the breach. Yet within lurked a compassionate, caring man, ever solicitous of the welfare of his men, one of those natures that, in spite of themselves, win the undying loyalty of those who follow.

  Through late September and into October the recruits appeared. In some cases Lewis even sent agents to lead them out of Louisville. Cofer worked at his enlistments as well, but neither, by mid-November, produced enough men to organize regiments. Another compromise seemed in order. Lewis and Cofer agreed to consolidate their commands, just as Trabue did with some companies of his 4th Infantry, and on November 19 they formally organized the 6th Kentucky. Eight days earlier Lewis was commissioned its colonel, and Cofer lieutenant colonel. On November 27 Cofer consolidated the last two companies, defeating “the expectations of one or two men who had expected office.” Still, as in almost every case in the formation of these Kentucky regiments, the idea of compromise for the good of the command took precedence over personal ambitions. Certainly the spirit of Henry Clay did not entirely go to dust with him.10

  Meanwhile the artillery expanded. Byrne added a field piece captured at Bowling Green to his battery, and with it joined the 2d Kentucky at Green River. At the same time H. B. Lyon and Robert Cobb recruited a battery, with Lyon as captain and Cobb his first lieutenant. The Confederate Government furnished them with their complement of field pieces, but for some time they suffered with horses unfit for the arduous duty required. The battery was, at least, well supplied with ammunition, 1,032 rounds by mid-November.11

  Just as Lyon’s battery completed, yet another formed. On November 7 Buckner learned of an understrength battery available that might be attached to his Kentuckians, and that the 2d Kentucky was willing to provide the necessary men to fill it. Buckner got the guns, and on November 16 sixty-six men detailed from among the 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th (Hunt’s), and 6th regiments. Early in December more men were provided, the entire Company B of the 4th Kentucky while, at the same time, the 2d Kentucky added twenty of its number to Byrne’s battery. To captain the new battery Rice E. Graves was selected, an enormously popular young man, just twenty-three, who left West Point at the outbreak of war, leaving behind an almost spotless scholastic and deportment record.12

  With Graves’s battery, the recruiting of Buckner’s Kentucky units was done. Even before some of the regiments were organized, they had been loosely combined into a brigade, for the time being commanded by Colonel Roger W. Hanson. Hawes resigned his commission on September 3, thus giving Hanson command of the 2d Kentucky and Hanson, as senior colonel, thereby naturally took over the informal brigade then forming. Here was a peculiar man in many ways, yet distinctly a Kentuckian.

  He stood medium high, five feet, nine inches, a bit heavy, and frankly of rather a sinister aspect. Just thirty-four, he packed a good deal of living into his years. When barely twenty he went to Mexico in a company led by “Cerro Gordo” Williams, and conducted himself with a wild recklessness that quickly attracted notice. Yet there was sparkle to him as well. Campmates found that he had a sense of humor that “turned discomfort, difficulty, danger, absence from home and friends—everything—into sources of laughter and amusement.”

  There was a serious side to this Hanson, dead serious.

  Just returned from the war, he apparently fell in love with a young lady who soon thereafter announced her engagement to Mr. William Duke. An embittered Hanson called on her and rather intemperately denounced Duke as a coward entirely unworthy of her. Naturally Duke asked for redress, and in January 1848 the two met in a secluded spot just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, near Vevay, Indiana. Hanson practiced with the pistols daily, as did Duke, both being pronounced excellent marksmen. Yet in their meeting they went three rounds of firing before blood flowed, a graze on Duke’s knuckles. This satisfied neither, and a fourth round was called. Hanson missed his mark, but Duke’s bullet shattered his opponent’s right thighbone, causing Hanson to walk with a peculiar gait for the rest of his life. Duke married the young lady and Hanson immersed himself in the practice of law, with time out to go to California briefly during the Gold Rush.

  Returning to Kentucky, Hanson ran for the legislature against his old captain, Williams. Here was a race, and here Hanson once again displayed his singular ability for denunciations. Williams campaigned on his Mexican War record, boasting proudly of the captured cannon he brought back to the state and of his being the first to plant the Stars and Stripes on the heights at Cerro Gordo. Well, Hanson had been there too, and he told a different story. The cannon had been spiked and abandoned to the Americans, not won from them in hand-to-hand combat, as Williams attested. And as for the heroism at Cerro Gordo, Williams’ company broke and ran for cover at the first fire from a masked Mexican battery. Hanson told how he broke ranks and ran as fast
as his legs would carry him when the enemy opened on them. He was six feet, three inches at the start of that run, he said, but in trying to keep up with Williams he lost six inches! He was certain he would be the first of the command to reach cover at the bottom of a hill, “but, by God, when I got there I found that Capt. Williams had preceded me and had the rest of the company already drawn up on dress parade.” Meanwhile, other troops took Cerro Gordo. Relating this on the stump, Hanson would turn on his opponent and “with the utmost contemptuous gesture and insulting sneer designate him as ‘Cerro Gordo Williams.’ ” Hanson lost the election by six votes, the irony of it being that Williams carried the derisive sobriquet Hanson gave him for the rest of his life, using it proudly and advantageously in furthering his political career.

  Hanson finally won a seat in the legislature, and in 1860 vigorously supported the Union against the state’s “fire eaters.” Increasingly, however, his fears of federal encroachments persuaded him in another direction, first for neutrality, and finally toward the Confederacy. On August 19, 1861, he was commissioned a colonel and shortly thereafter took command of the 2d Kentucky. “He had, almost to perfection,” wrote Ed Thompson, “that rare power of individualizing.” Hanson called it “horse sense.”

  With his wit and perception and intelligence, there was also a measure of forgiveness. When his fellow officers from Kentucky raised money to buy him a fine horse and saddle, his old enemy William Duke—now riding with Morgan—contributed substantially, and the two became fast friends. It was appropriate that Duke should assist in having Hanson ride in comfort, since he had done so much to make it hard for him to walk.13

  Hanson was in the saddle when General A. S. Johnston formally organized his Army of Central Kentucky on October 28. He brigaded the Kentuckians together, informally attaching the cavalry commands of Morgan and Helm to them. Buckner hoped to have the command of the outfit, now officially designated the 1st Kentucky Brigade. Johnston assigned him instead to command of a division, even though Buckner “indicated my preference to be limited to the command of the Kentucky troops with whom I felt peculiarly identified.” The decision saddened him, but he acquiesced. The loss was made less hurtful, as well, by the news that the man who would get command of the brigade was a good friend, perhaps the most popular Kentuckian of his day, and a person who just eight months before had been Vice President of the United States, John C. Breckinridge.14

  Surely here was the most magnificent Kentuckian of them all and, as well, a man who represented within himself all of the turmoil that his state and her sons suffered in this year of the beginning, 1861. He was of the most distinguished blood in the Bluegrass. Grandfather was Jefferson’s Attorney General. Father was Secretary of State of the Commonwealth before an untimely death ended his political rise. The son, John Cabell, was born January 16, 1821, in Lexington. Orphaned at an early age, he grew to manhood largely under the guidance of his uncle, Robert J. Breckinridge, a nationally known Presbyterian divine and an ardent friend of emancipation. John took to the law, as did all the Breckinridge men, and moved West for a time, toying once with the idea of settling in Jacksonville, Illinois. The irony is that two other members of the bar in that county were Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, both his opponents in the presidential election of 1860.

  Back in Kentucky, Breckinridge identified officially with the Democratic Party, breaking with the family’s Whig antecedents. When war came with Mexico, he did not immediately enlist, biding his time for a good position, which came in 1847, when he was made major of the 3d Kentucky Volunteers. Significantly, his appointment was the only one given to a Democrat by Kentucky’s then Whig governor. It foretold things to come, for when Breckinridge returned from the war and entered politics, he displayed from the first a remarkable ability to win the votes even of those in the opposition.

  The young major saw no action in Mexico, but he met many influential and later important officers—Robert E. Lee, U. S. Grant, John S. Williams, Roger Hanson, and perhaps Braxton Bragg. Once home in Lexington, he found his law practice too enervating to hold his interest. Politics seemed more his fare. In 1849 he won a seat in the legislature even though his district was predominantly Whig. Two years later he electrified the nation by winning the congressional seat in Henry Clay’s old Ashland district. Many even believed that Clay himself privately supported the young Democrat. Once in Congress, Breckinridge quickly attracted attention for his oratorical abilities. Tall, over six feet, muscular, handsome to a fault, with deep-set blue eyes and gestures of infinite grace, he spellbound audiences. Breckinridge won re-election in 1853, and was offered various appointments, an ambassadorship, a territorial governorship, before he “retired” in 1855 at the age of thirty-four. Politics had almost ruined his personal finances, and he had to look to his family.

  In 1856 he went to the Democratic convention as a delegate, and came home the vice-presidential nominee. No one expected it less than he. He was only five months past the constitutionally required minimum age. With his running mate, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, Breckinridge won election in November, setting a precedent in the process by being the first executive candidate to campaign actively. He set another precedent when he took the oath of office in March 1857. He became, and remains, the youngest Vice President in his nation’s history.

  It was a troubled administration, little helped by Buchanan’s being the oldest and weakest President in his country’s career. The two did not get along. Breckinridge was not consulted at all during the critical days leading up to secession. Frequently spoken of himself as a probable President, Breckinridge had no wish to be involved in the election of 1860. He saw that, whoever got the vote, no one could really win in the current climate. When the Democrats met in convention, he gave strict orders not to place his name in nomination. Yet when the party split and a northern faction nominated Douglas, the Southerners—with large northern backing-selected Breckinridge. Determined to decline, he changed his mind when friends—among them Jefferson Davis—persuaded him that, by accepting, he would force Douglas and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell to withdraw. Then Breckinridge himself might withdraw, and the party reunite on a single candidate who could defeat Breckinridge’s old friend Lincoln. The strategy did not work. Realizing from the outset that he was leading a “forlorn hope,” Breckinridge accepted defeat in November. He polled second to Lincoln in the electoral college, and was the only candidate whose popular vote came almost equally from both sections of the country.

  The Kentuckian was widely attacked as a secessionist and a friend of slavery. Both charges were false, yet he was strict in his construction of the Constitution. Elected to the Senate when his vice-presidential term expired, he spoke repeatedly for calm, for compromise, for federal recognition of the individual rights of the states. He espoused neutrality wholeheartedly, and worked and spoke widely to encourage the state to maintain its position. When his own son went to Camp Boone to enlist in the 2d Kentucky, it was against his father’s wishes. In Lexington, he was chiefly responsible for preventing violence when Morgan wished to take “Lincoln guns” meant for the Home Guard. Breckinridge planned a series of “peace picnics” at which he would speak for neutrality and moderation. By the end of August, however, events got out of control. Though Breckinridge was no secessionist, many of the more powerful Union men were convinced that he was. And even if not, they wanted Kentucky for the Union, and someone of Breckinridge’s force and popularity stood in the way. Consequently, they determined to arrest him early in September. The attempt failed and was not renewed, probably for want of charges that would hold. But Breckinridge was now on the defensive. He went to Frankfort to consult with friends, many of them good Union men. The Confederacy could not succeed, he told them. He knew as well that if he spoke out in favor of the Lincoln administration and its policy, he could expect to be rewarded amply with at least an important command in the United States Army, and probably with the presidency three years hence. But of course he co
uld not do this. He must continue to stand for neutrality to the end. Friends pleaded with him to change his mind, but he could not. He was, he said, “already over the dam.”

  For the next ten days Breckinridge went unmolested, but the abandonment of neutrality on September 18 untied the hands of federal military men. The next day they issued orders for Breckinridge’s arrest. The senator was warned in time to plan his escape. Forced out of the Union he loved since birth, he saw no other home for him but the Confederacy. Even now, he hoped secretly that somehow the two antagonists might compromise and reunite. His influence in Kentucky might help achieve the balance of power necessary to get the two sides talking as equals. But if compromise could not be met, he had no illusions. “I go where my duty calls me,” he said in making his farewell. “It is a hopeless cause.”

  Accounts conflict on how Breckinridge eluded his would-be captors. Apparently he and a friend who accompanied him could find nothing better than a broken-down gray mare, which the two of them had to share. Breckinridge, one of the finest horsemen in a state of excellent riders, and his friend, a noted horse breeder, thus presented rather an ironic aspect bouncing along the road north of Lexington. Soon Breckinridge and his friend, Keene Richards, changed to a buggy and, accompanied by a slave boy, turned the horse toward the mountains to the east. At several points they were seen. “One of the figures was closely muffled,” wrote one who believed Breckinridge was in the buggy, “and, whenever they were about meeting anyone, the negro boy raised himself so as to cover the muffled figure.” Several members of the State Guard followed the buggy to act as bodyguard for Breckinridge, and when they reached Prestonburg enlisted with Hiram Hawkins. Behind him Breckinridge’s enemies gloated over the fact that they had seemingly been right all along. By his flight, the senator confirmed the belief that he was a secessionist. None seemed to care that they had, in fact, forced him to flee. “John C. Breckinridge escaped from Lexington,” blasted one editorial, “by skulking in a buggy behind a small nigger.”