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

by Davis, William C.

  With Tom Hunt in command of the rear guard, charge of the 5th Kentucky temporarily rested with Robert “Uncle Bob” Johnson. He missed capture with his regiment at Donelson and, Lieutenant Colonel Caldwell of the 5th being wounded at Shiloh, Johnson was filling his place. “Uncle Bob is a clever brave man,” thought Johnny Jackman, “but utterly ignorant of military tactics.”

  The Orphans stood in line awhile as Hunt and the others tried to reach a consensus, and then several of them sat. Johnson gave a loud oath and ordered them back on their feet, saying they “didn’t know the first principle of drilling.” He gave the order to right face, but no one moved. “He grew purple with rage, thinking he had a little mutiny on hand.”

  “Why don’t you move?” he shouted.

  Someone reminded him that they had to have the order to shoulder arms first. He cooled slightly, mumbled something about everyone being able to make a mistake now and then, and gave the proper order. “The boys were full of laugh,” said Jackman, “and knew that he would make other mistakes, and resolved to show them to him.” Johnson marched them about for a bit until they halted where he wished, and gave the order to face the front. They did, but in the opposite direction. “Why in the h—–I don’t you turn around this way?” he shouted, but all he got in reply was a laugh from five hundred throats.

  Johnson was saved further embarrassment when Hunt ended his council of war. The other commanders could not agree what to do, and finally Hunt told them to fend for themselves, that he would take his regiment straight through Booneville, enemy or no enemy. As “Uncle Bob” sheepishly moved to the rear of the 5th Kentucky, Hunt took the lead and marched south, the remainder of the rear guard deciding to follow him. Fortunately, the Federals in their front felt too weak to stop them and retired with only slight skirmishing. That night Hunt led his Orphans back into Breckinridge’s lines to join their siblings. The general himself seemed overjoyed. Hearing that the enemy held Booneville, he feared that Hunt had been captured. That night, having successfully conducted yet another rear-guard action, Hunt’s Kentuckians took a much-deserved rest. Johnny Jackman hardly understated when he wrote, “We were a tired set of boys.”10

  It was June 7 when the Orphans, still divided between two brigades, reached the rest of the Army at Tupelo. Here they might have thought to rest. It was oppressively hot, unaccustomed as these Kentuckians were to the rigors of summer in the Deep South. They might have hoped to spend a few weeks doing nothing more than seeking shade and trading with the farmers for food, though the latter proved something of a battle in itself. They asked outlandish prices for every kind of fowl from spring chickens to tough old ganders, and as for vegetables, Jackman declared that the enterprising tillers of the soil would charge “50 cts for peeping over the fence into the garden!”

  Of course it could not last. Already it appeared that the Orphans and their general would not be allowed to rest or stand idle when there was a need for good men. Certainly the Confederacy would always be short of soldiers in this western theater, yet with notable regularity henceforth, when the call went out, the Kentuckians would be sent to answer. Now the call came from Vicksburg.11

  Breckinridge left the command for a brief leave on June 9, Preston taking the reserve corps in his place. On June 19 the order came to proceed with the corps to Abbeville, Mississippi, to meet an anticipated move by the enemy against an important railroad bridge. Yet this was only a brief stop. Four days later, on June 23, instructions arrived to bring the brigades to Vicksburg and report to the Confederate commander there, Major General Earl Van Dorn. The Orphans found the march, and the ride from Jackson to Vicksburg by train, sobering. “Armies, whether friend or foe, desolate a country,” wrote Jackman after viewing the waste of Mississippi. When he tried to buy his supper in a hotel in Canton, he had to stand in line to buy a ticket, then crammed into the dining hall with scores of other soldiers. He found too little food, too few of the young black waiters, and not nearly enough patience. Soldiers shouted for soup or beef, one threw his cornbread like a cannon ball, exploding it against a waiter’s head. Someone else sent a roast potato “à la solid-shot” against the other side of the poor black’s battered pate. Handfuls of onions and radishes rained like shrapnel, and soon steaming collards flew with the dispatch of grenades. Jackman pitied the waiters. “There were guests to the right of them, guests to the left of them, guests in front and rear of them.” Finally the dark brigade charged under the tables for cover, only to be driven out the back door with a volley of hard crackers. The enemy routed, Jackman and the other Orphans captured the kitchen, where he finally got a piece of beef so tough his teeth “could not even make a print.” He dined that night out of his own haversack.12

  It was on June 30 that the Orphans caught their first sight of the environs of Vicksburg. They made camp under the bridge trestle of the railroad to Jackson, in a beautiful dell that unfortunately afforded no fresh water. Except when they went into the city itself, where cisterns held rain water, they relied upon stagnant pools here and there whose sweet, unpleasantly warm beverage contained a host of contaminants. No wonder that more of them feared catching yellow fever than an enemy bullet. Yet here they would stay for the next four weeks, though hardly idle.

  Vicksburg, always a prize in federal strategy, controlled passage down the Mississippi to New Orleans, which the Yankees had recently captured. Should Vicksburg fall, then Lincoln’s minions would enjoy unrestricted use of the Father of Waters, and thus split the Confederacy in two. To this end, a small army led by Brigadier General Thomas Williams moved toward the city from New Orleans, while a fleet of gunboats commanded by David G. Farragut steamed upriver to bombard the river fortress. To counter this threat Van Dorn needed the Kentuckians.

  Breckinridge rejoined the command on July 1, the same day that the Orphans marched into the heart of the city. For many this was their first view of the Mississippi, and they found it impressive, the more so because of the enemy gunboats in plain sight below the city, and the smoke from others visible upriver. That night they went on picket duty on the riverbank, and for the next several days acted as guards for the river batteries. Here the Kentuckians encountered a real shelling for the first time, and they met it with varied reactions. “There can be no dodging of mortar shells,” Jackman found. “One has to stand bolt upright, like a duck in the rain, and take the consequences.” Some men dove into sink holes to escape, but ran the risk of being buried alive if the shell burst too near. They heard the deep boom of the mortars three miles away and soon saw the shells whirling high in the air before “they would come shrieking down.” If one burst in the air, they first saw a little tuft of white smoke, then heard the explosion, and then a bizarre symphony as each of the jagged pieces of iron hummed on their way to the earth, “the different sized pieces making the different notes in the demoralizing music.”13

  For the next two weeks the shelling continued with little abatement, the Orphans alternating between duty on the river batteries and resting in their camp by the bridge. Finally on July 15 they received orders to move their permanent camp into the city. It came as a great relief. Already the bad water took its toll, and the sick list grew daily. In Vicksburg they would have good cistern water. The mosquitoes, too, would be less troublesome in the town. The gunners on the batteries slept under insect netting, which the Orphans did not have. “I had often heard that Mississippi mosquitoes were large enough to carry a brickbat under their wings upon which to whet their bills,” Jackman wrote one night after the insects enjoyed a good feed at his expense, “but I was never so impressed with the truthfulness of the story.” In the city, too, Breckinridge got better rations for his men. The beef sent them at the bridge spoiled before it arrived, but here he could requisition fresh bacon.14

  Other changes of more importance took place. Van Dorn reorganized Breckinridge’s command, making it no longer a corps but instead a division within his own Army. To this the Kentuckian readily agreed, for at first he and Van Dorn g
ot on famously. Indeed, early in the shelling they even played together, manning one of the guns in a battery personally and firing away at an enemy gunboat “to amuse themselves.” Yet it did not take long for Breckinridge to find Van Dorn’s blatant egotism offensive, and thereafter their relations became very formal. The Orphans, too, resented Van Dorn’s demeanor. One day one of the Kentuckians chanced to be near headquarters when the two generals appeared together. He found himself appalled. There he saw “the finest-looking man in the Confederacy, and that man a Kentuckian, subordinate to one so apparently inferior in every way.” His blood seethed, and he exploded in rage when he returned to his mates in camp. “Coxcomb, dandy, fop, ball-room beau,” he called Van Dorn, “and such a thing of paint, perfume, and feathers to command our Breckinridge—and us!”

  While they simmered over Van Dorn, the Orphans did find encouragement in another new commander for them. Ben Hardin Helm, his illness behind him, so to speak, reported for duty on July 8, and Breckinridge assigned him to replace Hawes in command of the brigade containing the 4th and 5th Kentucky regiments. The Orphans themselves, of course, were irrepressible as usual. Tommie Conelly, Company I of the 4th, always seemed to have a dozen or so cartridge belts around his neck. He repeatedly proved unsuitable as a soldier despite all his officers’ efforts, and when it came to marching in time, he was utterly useless. “Ah, Captain, I am not the height for a soldier,” he said in his heavy brogue, “I’m not the height.” The Irishman more than once demonstrated himself an able hand at raising a glass, however, and one night here in Vicksburg he was probably well anesthetized when “Vicksburg lamp-posts,” as they called exploding federal shells, started their trip to the city. Just as Tommie passed through a railroad cut, one of the “lamp-posts” came shrieking overhead and Conelly jumped for cover. “Be jabers, boys!—faith, and why don’t ye get out of the way?” he cried. “Don’t you hear the locomotive coming?” Hunt’s regiment, not to be outdone for the ridiculous, organized a race between two soldiers riding wild hogs. Grabbing them firmly by the ears, the Orphan riders held on for dear life as the race began and their comrades cheered. The enemy heard the cheering, however, and sent a few shells their way to dampen spirits. One burst close enough to the hogs to scatter them with dirt, hurting no one, but putting such a fright into the swine that they bolted at a frantic pace. One threw his rider, but Charley Edwards, just three months with the company, held on to his mount. The hog rushed straight for a fifty-foot bluff. Despite the efforts of those present to stop it, the animal ran off the edge with Edwards still astride. The hog survived, but the fall broke Charley’s back and in a few minutes he died. “This cast a gloom over all,” wrote Johnny Green. As a measure of revenge, they slaughtered and dined on the late Edwards’ noble steed.15

  Of course, the Orphans were here for action, and they saw some almost from the first. It seemed their lot to encounter the unusual in this war. Here at Vicksburg, after two weeks of suffering the intermittent bombardment, several of the men turned sailor for a time. On July 15 the Orphans heard the thunder of firing upriver and rushed to the banks to learn its cause. Soon they saw a new Confederate ironclad ram, the Arkansas, passing through the federal fleet unscathed to dock at a wharf below the city. Thousands cheered the feat of daring, though it came not without cost. The ship took some casualties, and now Breckinridge called on Helm for twelve Kentucky volunteers to turn webfoot. They should be experienced seamen if possible and, if not, then artillerists who could work the vessel’s guns. Helm got Lieutenant R. B. Mathews and five men of Cobb’s battery who volunteered, as well as Cabell Breckinridge, and several others. They reported to Captain Isaac Brown, commanding the Arkansas, and served a gun during that evening’s fighting with Farragut’s gunboats. “We worked the gun throughout the engagement to the best of our abilities,” Mathews reported. That night they left the ship when the firing ceased, Captain Brown giving thanks for their services in what Mathews afterward called “our aquatic expedition.” To Preston, Mathews proudly reported that his men acted “as Kentuckians have always and will continue to act before the enemy, whether on land or water.” This did not end the Orphans’ service with the vessel, however. Four days later Breckinridge called again for volunteers, preferably sailors or artillerists, this time adding that those who volunteered would be permanently transferred to the Navy. Several stepped forward, at least one, Caleb Allen from Lewis’ 6th Kentucky, making the transfer and winning distinction in his service aboard ship. Several others, including four men from the 3d Kentucky, liked the Navy less, and deserted the ship the same day. On July 22 Breckinridge called for sixty more volunteers. By this time there was less enthusiasm. When Johnny Jackman thought he was destined to join the Arkansas’ crew, one man in his company ran away, and he noted, “We all objected to such a fate.” The ship looked like a death trap. The lieutenant in charge of the sixty-man detail said that if that was the sentiment of all the men, then he would resist the order.

  When morning came, however, the lieutenant took the men to the ship just the same, having learned that they were only wanted as a work detail. That night they spent many laborious hours recoaling the ironclad. Then they were done.16

  While the Orphans served aboard the ship, or guarded it at night from ashore, all of the Kentuckians suffered mightily from the disease incident to the climate. Almost daily John Jackman complained to his diary of feeling tired, feverish, unfit for duty. Johnny Green noted the same thing. “Sickness has been playing great havoc,” he wrote. The problem was chiefly the water. That from the river was thick with mud, while well water “is almost milk white from the soapstone soil.” Green himself went into hospital and became delirious. Twice he took a pan in hand and wandered away from the tent to a nonexistent spring his fevered mind could see but his feet not reach. Jackman, too, reported sick and the surgeons confined him to the hospital for several days.

  The main disease was malaria, but diarrhea and dysentery took their portion from the ranks. Breckinridge tried relieving the Orphans from duty during the hottest part of the day, but it availed little. In the 4th and 5th Kentucky regiments the number on the sick list doubled by the end of July. On the 22d of that month, 628 men out of the five Kentucky regiments stood on the hospital report, and this did not include many sent away from Vicksburg for their illness. Even if the enemy could not defeat the Orphans at Vicksburg, the climate would.17

  Thus, the timing could not have been worse for Van Dorn to send the Kentuckians on an ill-advised expedition against the Federal Williams and his command, now downriver at Baton Rouge. Yet on July 25 Van Dorn gave the order. At his own request, Breckinridge led his troops and commanded the campaign. Thanks to the illness and exhaustion among the men, it took three days before the Kentuckian put his Orphans and the rest of his division aboard the train. Always thinking of their wants, Breckinridge sent overland a herd of beef cattle and managed to coax a few new uniforms from the quartermaster. Alas, poor Jackman could not go. He was too ill. And Johnny Green, even though he arose from his cot and grabbed his rifle, telling the surgeon, “I would not stay away from my regiment when they were ordered to battle,” returned to the hospital under threat of arrest. “I was mad enough then to cry.” When the train bearing the soldiers left on the evening of July 27, it left a number of saddened Orphans behind. But it left as well with the people of Vicksburg a high regard for these men of the Bluegrass who abandoned their homes to defend a country their state did not recognize. Just before leaving the city, Breckinridge received a letter from one citizen who declared, “I like your gallant band of Kentuckians, and now in exile from … home.”18

  The route led first to Jackson, then south to Camp Moore, Louisiana, not far from Tangipahoa, fifty miles east of Baton Rouge. Here Breckinridge joined other troops awaiting him, and bivouacked on July 28 while he organized his small Army into two divisions. Helm’s brigade he placed in the 1st Division, and Preston’s brigade—now led by Colonel Albert P. Thompson of the 3d Kentucky—in the 2
d Division. Even before he could march, the sickness followed him to Camp Moore. “The climate and exposure are reducing regiments to companies,” he complained to Van Dorn. Then there were the rattlesnakes. In Gervis Grainger’s 6th Kentucky, one snake put five hundred men to rout. “Evidently we feared a rattlesnake more than the bluecoats.” Breckinridge tried to delay for a day here, hoping that Van Dorn would cancel the attack, but on July 30 came a peremptory order to proceed.

  That same day they started the march, fifty miles of nightmare. The heat became so intense that the men, many without shoes, could not bear to walk on the sandy road. Their thirst drove them in flocks to every stagnant pool of murky green water, ensuring more dysentery. They fell out of ranks in numbers. “Almost every farm-house on the roadside was converted into a hospital,” wrote a newspaper reporter who accompanied the march. The wild razorback hogs caused them misery as well, stealing into their night bivouacs and making off with the Orphans’ haversacks of cornmeal rations. Faced with all this, Breckinridge decided to cancel the attack on his own unless Van Dorn would send the Arkansas downriver. With the ironclad to attack Baton Rouge from the rear, the Kentuckians’ reduced numbers of infantry might still have a chance against Williams’ soldiers. Van Dorn agreed and dispatched the ship. It would arrive, he said, at dawn on August 5.19

  By August 3 Breckinridge’s command reached the Comite River, just ten miles from its objective. The march cost him 600 men. To cheer the Orphans now, he made a speech. “My brave, noble, ragged Kentuckians,” he began. He promised to lead them personally in the coming battle, then gave them a day of rest. “We enjoyed the luxury of a plunge and a swim in the bright, beautiful water,” recalled Grainger. Ordered to prepare two days’ rations, the Orphans foraged—or plundered—in the countryside thereabouts. Ganders and potatoes were cooked to carry, and the men each received a portion of vinegar to add to the water in their canteens. It did not improve the water’s taste, but might kill whatever lived in it. The general was still losing men to the climate. “The sickness had been appalling,” he reported. He started from Camp Moore with perhaps 3,400 men. When they marched toward Baton Rouge at 11 P.M. on August 4, he had less than 2,600.20