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

by Davis, William C.

  The cold, perhaps forgotten in the fight, returned with renewed bitterness. The men started pitiful little fires atop the hill and huddled around them for warmth, sulking moodily over the failure of the day, or else looking with equal gloom toward the bloody work that dawn must surely bring. A few managed sleep, only to be aroused at 3 A.M., February 16. Hanson formed them in line and led them to the left again, in the direction of the road along which they attacked so successfully the day before. Yes, certainly, they would go into action here again. Most believed they knew why. Grant heavily outnumbered the Confederates at Fort Donelson. They were surrounded, everyone knew. Obviously they could not withstand more siege, as demonstrated by the federal gains on the right on February 15. Now the Confederates were going to attack down this road again and cut their way through to safety, perhaps to Nashville.

  Hanson halted the regiment in a ravine near the scene of its success of yesterday. He had passed a sleepless night, as usual, yet he never let himself relax in his effort to keep the men ready for the fight. He was earning his $195 per month colonel’s pay. The regiment stood in line for an hour, perhaps two. A. G. Montgomery of Company B was not with it, doing some volunteer duty for Buckner. Then a message came to Hanson. He spoke to the men, “said to us in a husky voice,” one recalled, “Go to your places, boys, and cook something to eat.” Then he added, “The war is about over for us!” There would be no attack, no breakout, no escape. Private Montgomery had carried a flag of truce to Grant. Floyd and Pillow, with Forrest’s cavalry, had escaped from the encircling enemy during the night. Buckner had refused to go with them. “For my part,” he said, “I will stay with the men, and share their fate.” Their fate would be captivity, for the message Private Montgomery bore to Grant was a request for terms of surrender.

  Dejection overpowered the command. All of the Orphans, Hanson included, believed that they had taken an avenue of escape that would have saved most of the Army, had Pillow not called them back on the day before. Now to be told that they were prisoners, soon to be captives in some northern cell, while Floyd and Pillow had escaped to safety, was bitter news. Many would never forgive the generals for escaping. None would ever forget the loyalty and self-sacrifice shown by Buckner in remaining to stand by them.

  Soon federal guards appeared and the Orphans were disarmed, and Graves relieved of his field pieces. It was a humiliating experience, yet one with ironic overtones. Men from the 7th Iowa mingled with Hanson’s Kentuckians in disarming them and took particular note of the Mississippi rifles carried by some of the captives. One soldier saw an inscription on the stock of a rifle and shouted out in surprise. It indicated that this was one of the rifles with which old John Brown of Kansas armed his followers in their raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. When Brown’s men surrendered, their weapons went into the Virginia arsenals, and when Virginia seceded, these same weapons were given to the Confederate service. Among those thousand rifles that Governor Letcher so kindly sent Breckinridge last fall, then, were some of the very same rifles that had fired what many regarded as the first real shots of the war over two years before. Having carried these rifles for a couple of months now, it came as some surprise to the Orphans that they were using John Brown’s guns to spit lead back at the abolitionists.

  There was time to count the wounded and tally the dead. Reports conflict, Hanson’s own being lost not long after he filed it. Of the 2d Kentucky, Hanson had a total strength of 618, and Graves’s battery numbered another 113. Hanson’s losses were 13 killed, among them Lieutenant Hill. Lieutenant Keene would die soon from his wound as well. Four other officers of his regiment lay wounded, among them Captain Charles Semple of Company K. Indeed, brother officers at first thought Semple killed, and led their men into the last charges yelling “Forward, men! Avenge Charlie Semple’s death!” He would recover, however, as would most of the 57 wounded in the regiment. All told, Hanson lost almost 12 per cent of his regiment as casualties. Graves fared far better, with 5 wounded and none killed.

  Some of the wounded actually escaped capture. Major Jim Hewitt, to whom the regiment must have been thankful for its overcoats during the cold nights at Donelson, took a painful but not serious wound in the nose early on February 15, and joined other wounded aboard a steamboat that managed to escape Dover and steam up the Cumberland to Nashville. A few other wounded were dropped at Clarksville along the way. Private Washington Taylor of Company F was wounded in the head during the last day’s fighting. The next morning his sister in Harrison County, Kentucky, told their mother about the nightmare she had during the night. She saw him in her dream, she said, “coming from the yard gate to the house with the front of his coat all clotted with blood.” Taylor’s wound was not serious. He would recover to fight again. But on that night of February 15, thanks to his wound, the breast of his coat was covered with his own blood.11

  The next day Hanson and the Kentuckians went aboard federal steamboats for the trip to a northern prison, Buckner among them. They were going farther from home than ever, farther from their brothers and Breckinridge, to an orphanage with sentinels and bars.

  The news came to “Old Breck” when he and the other Orphans marched through Nashville. It was not a surprise. Indeed, with that extra sense of soldiers in any war, the men in the Kentucky regiments knew that something had happened at Donelson. At first they created and told stories of great battle and victory. But then reality crept into their musings. By the morning of February 16 the whispers stole through their lines, first among the officers. Donelson and every man in it surrendered, they said at first. “Rumors of the wildest nature flew from regiment to regiment,” wrote Hodge. The Federals were even then on their way to Nashville, would be there within the day, there was no hope, and the like. Later in the day, as the brigade bivouacked below Nashville, confirmation of the actual siege and surrender reached Breckinridge. Bleak news, to be sure, but not so hopeless as the rumor.

  To add to the Orphans’ gloom, the rain poured incessantly that night. Dejected from word of Hanson’s fate, the Kentuckians gave little attention to pitching their tents, with the result that the next morning they found them flooded. They huddled around smoldering fires, heaps of soaking blankets and clothing futilely expected to dry nearby, the brigade animals braying and whining, all under a sky filled with ominous clouds and dropping a steady drizzle. “All combined,” said Ed Thompson, “to complete a picture of half-despondent wretchedness that cannot be described.” Johnny Green, less eloquent perhaps, characterized the scene with equal description. “It was,” he wrote in his diary, “the muddiest, most dismal place in the world.”12

  There came small cheer the next day when the wagonmaster of the 2d Kentucky reached Breckinridge’s headquarters with fourteen empty wagons, which he had stolen away from Donelson. In view of the panic still gripping Nashville, “Old Breck” loaded them with necessary articles for his command, food, dry clothing, and medicines before all such items were either destroyed or plundered from the city. He spent hours on the northern bank of the Cumberland overseeing the movement of the cattle herd he brought from Kentucky to provide his men beef. The retreat would continue, and he would be certain that his Orphans had as much comfort as he could provide. It was a father’s duty.

  The march continued on February 20, and Breckinridge once again had to reprimand his Kentuckians for their behavior. Despite locating their night bivouacs near abundant forests, they persisted in vandalizing farmers’ fences for firewood. Worse, they stole animals and practiced not a few other acts of petty thievery. “They are acts of naked plunder,” their general told them. General Johnston himself brought it to Breckinridge’s attention, “to my great mortification.” Furthermore, by his own observation, not one man in eight carried his knapsack with him on the march, the rest depositing them in the wagons. All this would stop, he said in a stern order to the men. “This Brigade at least shall preserve the good name it has heretofore maintained.” Yet, in the spirit of dejection and disappointment the
n abroad among the Orphans, the general faced a rugged adversary. Circumstances, the weather, and now whisky again, conspired against him.

  When the brigade halted at Murfreesboro for several days while Johnston reorganized his army, several Orphans set to guard a commissary depot managed not to observe their messmates boring a hole in the bottom of a wagon. Once the gimlet passed through the floorboards, it ground its way up through the bottom of a barrel of whisky. As the liquor poured, the thirsty soldiers caught it in buckets. The next morning none of them could stand to answer roll call. The guards, protesting that they had seen nothing of what happened, found themselves standing extra tours of duty. Johnny Green believed that “it is quite probable that they took good pains not to see any one.” Captain Philip Vacaro took a few drinks himself, and then, perhaps out of guilt, stove in the head of the remaining barrel of whisky and poured it on the ground. The men of the 5th Kentucky—Hunt’s 5th—did not think too highly of Vacaro’s gesture. Henceforward, when he passed by men of the regiment, they would cry out in unison, “Pour it Out, Pour it Out.”13

  In Murfreesboro Breckinridge’s own command underwent some reorganization. Certainly Hanson and Graves and their units were no longer a part of the 1st Kentucky Brigade. He still had the 3d, 4th, 5th, and 6th regiments, however, Byrne’s and Lyon’s and Cobb’s batteries. Formally attached to him as well now were Morgan’s squadron, Ben Helm’s 1st Kentucky Cavalry, a battalion of Tennessee infantry under Charles C. Crews, the 4th Alabama Battalion led by Lieutenant Colonel J. M. Clifton, a company of cavalry, and another Alabama battalion of infantry. The object was to build Breckinridge’s command into substantial size after the loss of his largest regiment, the 2d Kentucky. Johnston’s intent now was for Breckinridge’s command to be a “Reserve Brigade,” a sort of floating support for any one of the three divisions that composed his army. Breckinridge’s own military family underwent change here as well. The month before, his adjutant, George Hodge, won a seat in the Confederate Congress. Now Breckinridge replaced him with an old friend from Kentucky, Theodore O’Hara, one of the more colorful—if erratic—Kentuckians of his time. His chief notoriety sprang from having composed a stirring poem about Kentucky’s fallen men in the war with Mexico, The Bivouac of the Dead. Fittingly, he took his inspiration for the poem from hearing Breckinridge deliver an oration at their state funeral. Another addition to his staff was the grandson of an old friend who, thankfully, was not alive to see what his America had come to. He was young Lieutenant James B. Clay, Jr.; his grandsire—Henry Clay.14

  Then it was on the march again. On February 28 they left Murfreesboro and withdrew farther into the Deep South. Eighty miles they trudged straight south to Huntsville, Alabama, then on toward Decatur twenty miles farther. “History records no example of a retreat conducted with such success under such adverse circumstances,” wrote Hodge, still with the Army. The rain fell without pause. The entire countryside lay flooded from swollen streams and saturated soil. The roads were “literally a river of liquid mud,” Hodge found. “For miles at times the wagons would be submerged in ooze and mire up to the hubs of their wheels.” Ascending a modest plateau a distance of two miles took the brigade a full day. Respite came at Huntsville, but only briefly. Ladies of the town kindly gave the 6th Kentucky a battle flag of silk, but Lewis would have been foolish to let it fly in the rain as they continued the march toward Decatur.

  By March 10 Breckinridge and his Orphans stood within three miles of Decatur. Ahead of them lay the flooded Tennessee River, absolutely impassable, out of its banks for miles on both sides. Fortunately, a railroad crossing had been built with this sort of weather in mind, the rails laid atop a fifty-foot embankment that ran for two miles either side of the river. With the rails still above the flooded plain, Breckinridge could march his men across. Only seven feet wide, the passage did not admit of speed, but it was safe. Except for Johnny Green, that is, who borrowed Colonel Hunt’s horse before the brigade crossed. In riding the embankment he had the ill fortune to encounter a locomotive coming in his direction. With twenty feet of water on either side, “the tussel I had to keep that horse from jumping into the river or getting under the train was indeed strenious.”

  On the night of March 14, just before the Orphans reached Decatur, they camped in a pasture. The sky told that there would be rain during the night, so the men pitched their tents, and secured the cattle herd nearby but out of the way. They cooked the evening meal, and some had retired when “a low sound, at first as of falling rain, then of approaching wind, arrested attention.” The sound quickly grew louder and then, with a mighty blow, something akin to a hurricane, it grasped the Kentucky camp and “created such a stir as no one who was present can ever forget.” Men and officers alike sprang at once to their tent poles trying vainly to hold them against the wind. Within seconds every tent in the camp lay ripped apart or blown hundreds of yards from its site. “Some thousands of men were uncovered at once to the fury of a Southern hurricane,” Thompson recalled. Blankets, hats, every bit of unworn apparel, and all the camp and mess equipage of the brigade flew about the pasture in a mad carnival of tin, canvas, and denim. Now the cattle panicked. The noble beasts raised a fearful noise, then charged directly toward the huddled Orphans. “No one relished the idea of dying by the inglorious means of either a bullock’s horns or his hoofs,” wrote a Kentuckian. They were diverted somehow and thundered along the edge of the encampment.

  As for the men, they took what shelter they could. Green and some of Hunt’s regiment just squatted on the ground and held scraps of what had been their tents over them “& took the storm as best we could.” Others found shelter inside and under the brigade wagons. Some of the more calm souls—Thompson thought they were really just “opposed to violent exertion”—simply stood and took it until the storm was spent, then returned to their camps, erected a modest shelter, and went to sleep.

  A number took refuge in nearby “gin houses,” burrowing under the bales and loose cotton as if to hide from the violently flashing lightning. They looked like snowmen the next morning, their clothing covered with tiny bits of white cotton. Others made their way into Decatur itself, where they found another sort of gin house. They straggled back to camp the next morning with stories of hospitality so fine that it would have been ungentlemanly of them to refuse it. When at last they did return in the premorning darkness, stumbling along the railroad line, they left several behind in holes and cattle culverts. It seemed they were too drunk to discover the hazards ahead except by sending a man in advance. When his comrades heard him fall in the water, they knew there was a hole. These Orphans would never miss a chance to “wet up,” and this night they wetted inside and out.15

  The Orphans won the hearts of the people of Alabama. “Waving of handkerchiefs, cheers, words of welcome and encouragement, met them from the time they entered” the state, wrote Ed Thompson. Had the men remained in Decatur long enough to become rowdy, the welcome might have waned. They did spend nearly a week in its environs, but then one night Breckinridge put the brigade aboard a train bound for Corinth, Mississippi, one hundred miles west. There Johnston was marshaling his army to move north against Grant.

  The Kentuckians reached Corinth on March 19, and three days later occupied their assigned bivouac at Burnsville, about twelve miles southeast. Here, as in Johnston’s other camps in the vicinity, Breckinridge rigorously drilled and trained his brigade to bring them back into trim after the depressing retreat from Kentucky. The whole Army sensed that a big battle approached. For almost all of them it would be their first. General P. G. T. Beauregard, the hero of Bull Run, arrived to join forces with Johnston in the move against the Federals. Grant himself lay camped just twenty miles north of them at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee. Breckinridge sent a screen of cavalry north to monitor the enemy’s movements, not knowing how many old friends from better days now peopled that hostile army. The colonel of a federal Kentucky cavalry regiment out there, James Shackleford, had been a privat
e in Major Breckinridge’s regiment in the war with Mexico. On the march to Mexico City the private was so weary and broken down that Breckinridge dismounted and gave him his horse, while he walked instead. There would be less courtesy should they meet in this war.16

  On March 29 Johnston reorganized his army once more, now into three corps led by Major Generals William J. Hardee, Leonidas Polk, and Braxton Bragg. A reserve corps, smaller than the others, he created as well, to include Breckinridge’s Kentucky brigade. Command of the reserve corps Johnston assigned to George B. Crittenden, but on March 31 he was relieved of his position for alleged drunkenness. This left Breckinridge the senior brigadier in the corps and, automatically, he assumed its leadership. Johnston may have felt some hesitation in this. Breckinridge was the only corps commander not a West Point graduate with battlefield experience. Yet he had performed well so far as a soldier. Furthermore, if the Confederates could push Grant back into Kentucky and follow him, Breckinridge would be invaluable in rallying the state to the South, a vain hope that the Confederacy would never entirely abandon. And Johnston’s popularity lagged badly after the loss of Henry and Donelson. Some clamored for his relief, and a few in Richmond even suggested that Breckinridge should replace him. Kentucky lobbyists in Congress were already at work trying to secure a major generalcy for Breckinridge. With Johnston losing favor, they wanted another high-ranking Kentuckian handy to fill the possible void. When advised of these machinations, however, Breckinridge refused to countenance them, deciding, “I will not move in the matter.” However much he sought advancement in political life, he would never in this war politick for command or promotion.