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

by Davis, William C.

  As the Orphans marched through town to their bivouac, the federal 13th Tennessee Cavalry entered from the opposite direction. “It looked strange not to see them commence shooting at each other,” said Jackman. Instead, Lewis camped the brigade for the night in a pleasant grove of beech and oak trees. As on any day before in the past four years, the bugles called out for details and duty, and at dark the campfires licked with their flames into the night, the light climbing the tree trunks to glisten among the leaves. The horses munched at their fodder while the men themselves spread out on the ground to talk in low murmurs, smoke their pipes, and walk among the campfires saying farewells to the friends of four years and a hundred fields. Lewis had spoken to the men a few days before, advising them to submit to the Union, though he said that in laying aside the gray uniform, he never expected that he would wear the blue. That was more reconciliation than he could handle. By now the irrepressible spirit of the Orphans had returned, and Phil Lee wandered the camp declaring, “The General speaks of not wearing the Yankee uniform. Now, as for Phil Lee, my opinion is that henceforth he’ll wear no uniforms of any sort!”

  That evening details carried the brigade’s arms to Lewis’ headquarters, piling them in a heap. Jackman prepared the papers for paroling the 9th Kentucky, and it was done the next morning at 2 A.M. The remainder of the brigade took parole later that morning, May 7. “We ‘broke up housekeeping,’ ” said Jackman, “every fellow being free to wander off, as his inclinations led him, with his horse, saddle, and bridle.” Their inclinations led them first to Lewis’ tent. There the Orphans bid “Old Joe,” their final adopted father, the long farewell. They shook his hand and said their good-byes, tears streaking every bronzed face. They would see each other again in happier times, to be sure, but never again as they had known each other for four years, never again as comrades of the “Old Brigade,” the “Cheerful Brigade,” the 1st Kentucky Brigade. They were going back to their homes, and the Orphan Brigade would be no more.17

  THIRTEEN

  “A Kind of Title of Nobility”

  FOR MANY the journey home seemed as long as their wanderings of the war, and for some it proved longer than they might ever have imagined. The Federals gave them their horses, and before Breckinridge left Washington he disbursed the remainder of the Confederate Treasury to the men there, about $2.50 per man. It was not much for the journey, but their former enemies did make things easier by offering free rail transportation to Kentucky for those who took the oath of allegiance. Lewis himself went immediately to Nashville and gave his oath, yet encountered over a month’s delay before his pleas to be allowed to go home to Kentucky and his family met reward.

  Johnny Jackman went to Augusta two days after parole, and there the bulk of the old 9th Kentucky gathered a few days later. At first they thought of going down the Savannah River to Savannah, and there taking a steamer to New Orleans and up the Mississippi and Ohio to Louisville. But that proved too ambitious. Instead they boarded a train for Atlanta. Jackman fell ill again and had to separate from his friends to spend several days recuperating with a friend near Greensburg. He fished and walked and rested until able to join three other passing Orphans late in May. They went on to Atlanta, found the railroad from there to Chattanooga out of operation, and bargained with a federal wagonmaster to take them to Chattanooga. They left the wagon when they reached Dalton, and there, where the old brigade passed that long winter of 1864, Jackman camped out on the ground for the last time. The next morning they boarded a train and reached Chattanooga. They stayed the night at a boardinghouse where “Yank” and “Confed” ate from the same platter and cracked jokes at each other, “as though they had never met in many a mortal combat.” Two days later, May 29, found them in Nashville, and that evening the federal provost notified them that they could not proceed farther without taking the oath. “We were ‘galvanized,’ ” as Jackman put it, and then boarded a train for Louisville. At 7 P.M. that night he got off at Bardstown Junction and, rather than wait for a train home the next morning, immediately started walking toward Bardstown. At 10 A.M. the next morning, May 30, 1865, John S. Jackman walked up the steps of his home for the first time in three years, eight months, and four days. Another Orphan was home.

  And slowly they all came home. Johnny Green, momentarily bitter that the war ended before he could become a commissioned officer, threw away his sergeant major’s sword and then rode toward Alabama with a couple of friends. All along the way he met with kindness and hospitality from the people of the defunct Confederacy. What little they had they shared with the brave men who so long had battled for their independence. Whenever he offered to pay for food or lodging, his benefactors declined. “This is all we can do for them & they certainly are welcome to it.” Finally Green reached friends in Florence, Alabama, just in time to help them defend their property against the bands of renegade Federals and Confederates who preyed upon the rural South for months after the surrender, looting and robbing.

  After some weeks, Green finally took himself to Nashville, too, and there learned that he would be denied passage to Kentucky unless he gave his oath. That he would not do. He found a steamboat captain who would hide him aboard his vessel. “Pay your passage & keep your mouth shut & you can travel on my boat without taking the oath,” said he. This Johnny Green did, and the next day he left the boat at Henderson, Kentucky, and rejoined his father, an Orphan no more.1

  By midsummer 1865 most of the Kentuckians were home again, or at least those who wished to be. What they found in their beloved old Kentucky seemed fully to justify the anguish they had felt for the state during all those years in exile, for the Bluegrass suffered as few other places in the country during its occupation by federal forces. Trade and industry were much retarded. Agriculture suffered terribly. The Emancipation Proclamation enraged slaveholding Kentuckians, and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that coming December would free over 200,000 slaves, wiping out a capital investment of at least $115,000,000. Kentuckians, though never formally in rebellion, were treated by occupying authorities with a rigid military rule. As always, they felt different from other Americans and entitled to different treatment. Instead the Lincoln administration dealt with them as felons. Add to this the unhappy fact that the Union command frequently assigned its most brutal and incompetent officers to serve in the commonwealth, and a high degree of civil unrest became inevitable. Guerrillas and irregulars roamed the mountains preying upon people of both Union and southern sentiment. Free elections were inhibited, and group and individual violence plagued the state for years. It would be said later that Kentucky waited until after the war to secede, and there is some truth in the statement. The bitterness engendered by the war in this state, where friends and families divided against each other, did not dim until long after many of the actual Confederate states had returned to relative tranquillity.

  The returning Orphans coped with the change in their homeland in varying ways. Gervis Grainger, released from prison, took the direct route to vengeance by attempting to assassinate General Stephen G. Burbridge, perhaps the most hated Federal of all in the state. Friends prevented him from succeeding in his design, but Burbridge later left the state for his own safety. Others took more lawful means of reconstructing themselves and their state. That December the legislature removed all indictments against Kentuckians who served the South, and quickly the men of the Orphan Brigade became the crème of state society and government. Indeed, Kentucky very quickly passed into the hands of ex-Confederates, and remained there for years even while some of the actual Confederate states were ruled by transplanted Yankees. In time, the 1st Kentucky Brigade’s ranks provided the state with a governor, three Cabinet members, six militia leaders, two Supreme Court justices, superintendents of public instruction, United States district attorneys, auditors, Treasury officials, four congressmen, two foreign consuls, five circuit judges, untold county legal officials and judges, three commonwealth’s attorneys, a mayor for Louisville and several lesse
r municipalities, many state legislators, county, district, and municipal officers beyond counting, and one nominee for Vice President of the United States. Nowhere else in the reunited nation did the veterans of a single military body of men so virtually control the destiny of a state in the years after Appomattox.2

  The individual Orphans themselves met varying fates. “Old Joe” Lewis returned to his law practice in Glasgow, then spent a term in the state legislature and three terms in Congress. In 1880 he took a seat on the Kentucky Court of Appeals, and the next year succeeded Martin Cofer as chief justice. There he served for eighteen years before retiring. To the last of his days, on July 6, 1904, he remained ever loyal to the men and memory of his old brigade, an active supporter and participant in veteran affairs.

  Simon B. Buckner, too, retained a devotion to the Orphans’ memory that only died with his own passing. He took the editorship of the Louisville Courier for a time after the war, then entered politics. In 1887 he won the governorship, and in 1896 a faction of the Democratic Party nominated him for Vice President. Ironically his running mate, John M. Palmer, was also a Kentuckian, a one-time federal general who commanded a division that besieged the Orphans at Corinth and battled them in the great charge at Murfreesboro. They ran a poor third in the ballot, but achieved a grand gesture of reconciliation. Buckner himself lived on until January 8, 1914, when he had outlived every other Confederate general of his rank.

  Of the regimental commanders from the old brigade who survived the war, all were lionized in the years following the conflict. Light-hearted Phil Lee of the 2d Kentucky returned to the law, married, and won a position as commonwealth’s attorney for Louisville in 1868, but his untimely death at age forty-two cut short his promising career. Tom Thompson, last commander of the 4th Kentucky, fared little better. He, too, won political office, clerk of the chancery court when he, like Lee, died early, at the same age. Hiram Hawkins broke the pattern, fortunately. He settled in Alabama with his new wife, became a college president, served two terms in the legislature, and for ten years thereafter acted as executive officer of the National Grange organization. Cofer of the 6th Kentucky went back to the law as well, took a judgeship on the circuit court at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and died in 1881 while chief justice of the Court of Appeals. And Colonel John Caldwell of the 9th Kentucky also became a judge, of the Logan County Court, then won a seat in Congress. Twice his constituents returned him to Washington, and then he retired to Russellville, where on Independence Day, 1903, he joined in death those comrades he led on the battlefields of the South.

  Jolly Cripps Wickliffe, like Jackman, returned to Bardstown and eventually assumed a circuit judgeship. In 1885 President Grover Cleveland appointed him United States attorney for the District of Kentucky, and eight years later he became brigadier general and adjutant of the state militia. Fayette Hewitt took the quartermaster generalship of the militia in 1867 and at once entered the tender business of recovering from the United States Government the money it owed to the state for Kentucky’s expenses in arming and equipping her Union soldiers. He held the post successfully for nine years, later served as state auditor, and finally retired as president of the National Bank of Frankfort.

  John Weller followed the lead of so many other Orphans by filling an office in the state civil service, but in 1893 the governor appointed him a commissioner to locate the positions occupied by the Kentucky brigade at Chickamauga, preparatory to the dedication of a national park on the site. Later he sat in the state senate, and devoted his declining years to writings historical and poetic. He composed a song, “Oh! Lay Me Away with the Boys in Gray,” which became a funeral elegy for countless Orphans as they journeyed to join that final Father. George B. Hodge returned to Newport, Kentucky, at war’s end, practiced law, and served in the state legislature, but later removed to Florida, where he died in 1892. Captain Bob Cobb and Frank Gracey both went into business after the war, and General William Preston, after a time in exile in England and Canada, returned to Lexington to finish his days in Democratic politics and die at his home in 1887.

  The men in the ranks of the old brigade did not all achieve the positions their officers enjoyed, but they basked nevertheless in the glory of having been members of that unique organization. “I teach my children to honor the men of the Orphan Brigade above all others,” said Lycurgus Reid of the 9th Kentucky. “I point them out as we meet them as men on whom the country can depend in time of need.” Squire Helm Bush, brother-in-law of Martin Cofer, tried his hand at the law, but suffered to the end of his life with pain from his Chickamauga wound. He lived on until August 13, 1925, sixty-three years after he made the long trip from Louisiana to Murfreesboro. Gervis Grainger spent more than forty years after the war, first in Kentucky, then in Gallatin, Tennessee, a few bare miles from Hartsville on the east, and the now overgrown site of Camp Boone on the west. He stayed bitter against his enemies to the end of his life. John Jackman became a lawyer at the Louisville bar and dabbled at publishing, but he never recovered entirely the health that the war damaged. Elder Joseph D. Pickett took a professorship at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and became superintendent of public instruction in the state before he retired to Illinois.

  Another holder of the latter office was Ed Porter Thompson. He wrote widely after the war, young people’s texts and mathematics books. He served as state librarian, private secretary to Governor Buckner, and president of the Frankfort Board of Education. His mourners were legion when he died on March 5, 1903. “He could dream,” said his eulogists. And the mourners were equally saddened at the loss of Johnny Green of the 9th Kentucky. He became a banker in Louisville, and a successful one, then went into a brokerage firm, staying in that business until 1920. That spring arthritis vengefully attacked his body, and neuritis brought an agony of pain to his head. For two weeks he stood the most intense pain. Then on Sunday morning, June 13, 1920, the telephone in the hall outside his room rang and his wife answered it. While she was out of the room, Johnny rose from his bed, pulled a pistol from a drawer, and put a bullet through his brain. He died two hours later without regaining consciousness.3

  Ironically, the last of the veterans of the Orphan Brigade to return to Kentucky was the first man to step across the state line in the retreat from Bowling Green. For John C. Breckinridge, his adventures had only begun when he left Washington, Georgia, on May 5, 1865. For the next month he and a small band of followers, including James Wilson, endured a harrowing escape that paled the best Victorian romance by comparison. They rode through Georgia into Florida, sailed and rowed the Indian River on the Atlantic Coast, lived from turtle eggs and inedible slop bartered from local Indians, turned pirate by taking at gunpoint a larger boat from some federal renegades, engaged in a running gun battle between their boat and that of another party of guerrillas intent on robbery and murder, played fox and hounds with enemy patrol boats, and finally made the passage from Florida to Cuba in an eighteen-foot open boat during the worst storm at sea in several years.

  After some weeks in Cuba, where he issued a final plea for all Confederates to surrender and accept the clemency of the United States, he journeyed to England, and then on to Canada to join Mary and his family, who awaited him. He lived in Toronto for a time, still concerned with the affairs of the defunct Confederacy, including paying off its legitimate debts and obtaining a good defense for Jefferson Davis in his coming treason trial. In the spring of 1866 he moved his family to Niagara on Lake Ontario. It was a pleasant place, and here he could look across the narrow waters of the Niagara River to New York, Fort Niagara, and flying over it, the Stars and Stripes. It was a comfort to him “with its flag flying to refresh our patriotism.” He never wanted to leave that flag. All he wanted now was to return to it, and to Kentucky.

  A considerable movement arose, first in the Bluegrass, and then nationwide, to pardon Breckinridge, or at least grant him leave to return home unmolested by the treason indictments. Even old political enemies like the irascible
George Prentice called for his pardon, and Horace Greeley began an interest in the general’s case. The animosities were still too strong in 1866, however, and that summer Breckinridge took his family to Europe for a year and a half to tour, to recuperate their health, and to wait for time to heal the wounds that kept him from home.

  He enjoyed himself abroad, in company with a host of other exiled Confederates, many of them, too, under indictments at home. In time Breckinridge came to be a symbol for all the exiles. As a result, even though friends assured him that they could get him a special dispensation to return, he refused to consider coming home until all Confederates were free to return. His became the test case, and the matter finally reached the White House and the Kentuckian’s old friend President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. On Christmas 1868, Johnson finally issued a universal proclamation of amnesty. All Confederates could come home free of fear. Breckinridge had won.

  He lost no time in returning. By early February he was back in Niagara, and a few days later crossed the river into New York. He went to New York City, where Greeley and other influential northern men met with and congratulated him. Then to Washington, then to Lexington, Virginia, for a last visit with Robert E. Lee. The two formed a close bond in those last months of the war. Lee regarded the Kentuckian as the best of the Confederacy’s War Secretaries, “a lofty, pure strong man,” he said—“a great man.” Breckinridge went on to Cincinnati for a few days with friends. So many Kentuckians wanted to see their old leader that railroad stations along the routes from Cincinnati to Lexington, Kentucky, thronged with onlookers. Wishing to avoid any demonstrations, Breckinridge gave a false departure time to mislead the well-wishers, and then at dawn of March 9, 1869, he and Mary boarded the train that took them to Lexington. As they passed station after station, some people still knew he was aboard this train, and at several stops they called him out to the rear of his car. He spoke once or twice, quietly, asking their patience. “I am glad to get to my home once more,” he told them. “It is nearly eight years since I was here.”