Border Wars

The Civil War in Tennessee and Kentucky

Kent Dollar, Larry Whiteaker

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781631011306
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

North and South fight for control of a vital region

Kentucky and Tennessee share a unique and similar history, having joined the Union as the fifteenth and sixteenth states in 1792 and 1796, respectively. During the antebellum period, Kentuckians and Tennesseans enjoyed a common culture, pursued a largely agricultural way of life, and shared many values, particularly a deep-seated commitment to slavery. However, the people of these two sister states found themselves on opposing sides at the most critical time in American history, as Tennessee sided with the Southern states seceding from the Union, and Kentucky, after a brief period of neutrality, remained loyal to the Union. Each state assumed enormous importance to both the Union and the Confederacy, for whichever side controlled them commanded vast quantities of resources desperately needed by the South. Perhaps most important, control of this strategic region would determine where much of the fighting in the West would take place, either on northern soil or farther south. Both states felt the hard hand of war as the conflict visited them early and often, and Kentuckians and Tennesseans suffered the same hardships while war was waged within their borders.

Surprisingly, the Civil War in the Volunteer and Bluegrass states has not garnered the attention by scholars that it deserves, and few works have dealt exclusively with both of these states. In Border Wars, prominent Civil War historians Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Stephen D. Engle, Earl J. Hess, Jack Hurst, and Wiley Sword, along with other distinguished scholars, explore the military contests in this vital region.

There were several wars taking place simultaneously along the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. There was, of course, the war between the Union and the Confederacy, but there was also fighting between the Union occupiers and the pro-Southern civilians they encountered. Hostilities even existed between the Federal army and local Unionists in some areas, and there was conflict among some Union generals and among Confederate commanders in the region. With its unique exploration of these wars and conflicts and the individuals involved, Border Wars adds an important chapter to our nation's history.

Part I

Battles, Skirmishes,
and Soldiers

The Militia Spirit

Lexington and Clarksville Militias and the
Making of Civil War Armies

AARON ASTOR

At Camp Quarles on the outskirts of town, a group of “Clarksville ladies” presented a flag to Capt. Frank Beaumont’s company. Beaumont’s men, along with hundreds of others from Montgomery and nearby counties, had been drilling in the July heat and waiting for instructions to march to Virginia. In her address to the captain, “Mrs. G” proclaimed, “In all this mighty rush for freedom, none have shown more alacrity than the Clarksville Ninety-Ones, none have made greater sacrifices upon the altar of their country.”¹ In thanks to the “fair hands” of Clarksville that assembled the mighty flag, Captain Beaumont signaled that the “ladies of Clarksville have given to the ‘Ninety-Ones’ an additional incentive to deeds of patriotic valor.”² In short order, Captain Beaumont’s Company K of the 14th Tennessee Regiment under the command of Col. William Forbes marched off to the distant hills of western Virginia. The 14th would serve the rest of the Civil War as one of the few Tennessee regiments in the Army of Northern Virginia.

Scenes like this one occurred all across the North and South in the summer of 1861 as officers in the Union and Confederate armies quickly assembled legions of volunteers into what became the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia, the Army of the Ohio, and the Army of Tennessee. But one piece of this particular exchange—the reference to the “Ninety-Ones”—is noteworthy for what it reveals about the men who assembled at Camp Quarles. The “Ninety-Ones” did not mark the number of a regiment in the Army of Northern Virginia or the Army of Tennessee. Nor did the “Ninety-Ones” refer to the short-lived Provisional Army of Tennessee created by Gov. Isham G. Harris in May 1861. The “Ninety-Ones” were a Tennessee militia company based in Clarksville and only organized as such in January of that year.

Why would Captain Beaumont and the citizens of Clarksville refer to his unit by its militia number, especially as the state militia was essentially moribund less than a year earlier? Even more remarkably, the same newspaper touting the gallant soldiers of the “Old Ninety-Ones” viciously mocked the reorganized militia just a few months earlier. One of the candidates for lieutenant colonel of the Ninety-First, James Neblett, was an editor of the Clarksville Chronicle. And either in a spirit of self-deprecation or downright belittlement of the whole militia system, Neblett joked, “Insane, indeed, would be the temerity of any set of fellows who would set hostile foot on this dirt, when they know that we are Lieutenant-Colonel of the bloody Ninety-First. They ain’t a-goin’ to do it! No, sir; nary time! Lincoln knows US; and ah! The dread perturbations of that miserable man’s day-visions and night-dreams when he shall learn that we are running for Lieutenant-Colonel of the Ninety-First!”³

The Chronicle’s mixed characterization of the militia—from laughingstock to encomium—reveals the conflicted nature of military readiness in the spring of 1861. But it also begs the question of the legacy of the militia itself. What role did militias like the Ninety-First play—as an organizational force of citizen-soldiers or merely as a symbol of service to the defense of the community—in the organization of companies and regiments in the Confederate armies? Did militias actually prepare civilians for military life? Did they stoke a community pride that could be transferred to regiments in the official Confederate and Union armies?

An equally intriguing political question emerges. Did the late-antebellum and secession-era militias politicize and mobilize Tennesseans still reluctant to secede? And what about the Kentucky militias, which were more organized and politically galvanized in the year-old Kentucky State Guard than were the newly reorganized Tennessee militias? After all, members of the “Old Ninety-First” were not the only ex-militiamen to gather near Clarksville en route to formal enrollment in the Confederate Army. Hundreds of Kentuckians had arrived for the same purpose, with many of them belonging to militias led by prominent men like John Hunt Morgan, Roger Hanson, and W. C. P. Breckinridge. The famed Kentucky Orphan Brigade would organize just outside Clarksville, as would numerous other Kentucky Confederate units drawing from secessionist State Guard militias.

Adding to the complication was the question of loyalty. Some of the late-antebellum Kentucky militias would send leaders and men to both sides, drawing howls of “traitor” and “Tory” from beleaguered citizens. A year after the fall of Fort Donelson, Nannie Haskins Williams of Clarksville recounted in her diary: “Well upon Christmas day Colonel Bruce with his ‘whiskey jug’ and several regiments took possession of this place and here they have been ever since. And here I am too still writing in my journal and about those detestable blue coats for whom I have such a disgust.”⁴ Col. Sanders Bruce was another former Kentucky militiaman, and a veteran of the State Guard. A member of Lexington’s antebellum elite centered around Gratz Park, his social circle included a neighbor, John Hunt Morgan, who married Bruce’s sister in 1848. Bruce’s militia, the Lexington Chasseurs, once competed with Morgan’s Rifles for attention from the adoring throngs of parade-goers and well-heeled ladies and gentlemen of the Bluegrass aristocracy. In 1861, Morgan’s Rifles would go, almost as a unit, into the Confederate Army of Tennessee, becoming the 2d Kentucky Cavalry Regiment. Bruce’s Chasseurs would send half its men to camps around Clarksville to enlist in the Army of Tennessee along with Morgan. But Bruce and many of his fellow Lexington Unionists from the Chasseurs would occupy the town of Clarksville a year after Fort Donelson and the Lower Cumberland Valley fell to the Union.

For all the bluster about defending homes, rights and the Republic, very few Kentuckians and Tennesseans were militarily prepared to do so. Social elites from Lexington and Clarksville built regiments in the Confederate Army of Tennessee and the Union Army of the Ohio (and later the Cumberland) without any real military training or experience. In many ways, it would be the preparation for and the battle of Fort Donelson where so many men from Tennessee and Kentucky would truly become soldiers—and for many, prisoners—for the first time. With the exception of a handful of Mexican War veterans, the militias would prove to be the only experience that could have prepared the civilians of Lexington and Clarksville for a life of soldiering.

But militias were, in many ways, relics of the Old West. As quasi-military agents of public order, militias were typically called up to defend the community against Indian attacks and “domestic insurrections,” especially those led by slaves. As the Kentucky and Tennessee frontier settled, the militia system transformed into a theater for social performance and entertainment. While slave patrols continued in importance—and were organized along military lines—they were legally separated from the state militia.⁵ As a military system, Tennessee’s and Kentucky’s militia had withered by the mid-1850s, with Tennessee officially dismantling its system in 1857. A historian of Tennessee’s antebellum militia system concludes, “The men who mustered for the Civil War in 1861 were militiamen in name only, with no meaningful connection to the traditional militia.”⁶

Still, the militia ideal persisted during the key recruitment months of 1861, even if the formal bureaucratic structure of the state militias was largely incapable of training citizen-soldiers for community defense. Alas, the militia came in for mockery, even from those charged with its stewardship and promotion. But as later dispatches from the field revealed, the militia ideal continued to infuse the great recruitment drive in Lexington and Clarksville. And it may have even sustained regimental morale in the Confederate Army of Tennessee in the wake of poor corps leadership and a succession of battlefield defeats.

In his classic study of the Army of Tennessee, Thomas Connelly identified a paradox at the heart of the great Confederate Army of the West. With no Lees or Jacksons to fire the imagination or sustain morale, and few victories to cheer on the boys, how was it that the Army of Tennessee survived intact as long as it did? The predecessor organization—the Provisional Army of Tennessee—was rent with political favoritism, incompetence, and poor coordination with overall Confederate leadership. After a succession of inept commanders like Gideon Pillow, John Floyd, and Leonidas Polk, the army’s great savior, Albert Sidney Johnston, died at Shiloh before having a chance to turn the western army into a feared fighting force. Subsequent leadership from P. G. T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, Joseph Johnston, and John Bell Hood led the army toward nothing but disappointment and defeat. The only success stories were cavalry units led by men like Morgan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Joseph Wheeler. Legendary as those units were, they could do little to maintain morale in the infantry regiments of the Army of Tennessee. And yet, regimental accounts reveal an army keeping up the fight until the bitter end.⁷ What was the source of its continued morale and commitment? As Connelly argues, the answer lay at the junior officer and regimental level. “Unlike the Virginia army, which depended for its morale upon a few individuals such as Lee or ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, the men of the Army of Tennessee never attained a real esprit at a corps level. Instead,” Connelly maintained, “the peculiar western morale was usually most evident at the regimental or brigade level.”⁸ In fact, as Captain Beaumont and Mrs. G revealed, this junior-level morale drew, at least partly, from the recently reorganized militia system.

An examination of prewar militias in Lexington and Clarksville and their conversion into formal regiments, especially in the Confederate Army of Tennessee, sheds light on just what these new warriors thought about the life of soldiering, and what their home communities thought of the soldiers recruited to protect them. The preparation, social standing, organization, and transformation of late-antebellum militias reveal both the contours of social and political life in Kentucky and Tennessee and the extent to which local leadership was prepared for a major war. As the sister cities of Lexington and Clarksville became enemy cities, local citizens transformed themselves into armed, trained, and organized soldiers prepared to fight. The militias, for all their weaknesses, were the only institutional bodies capable of preparing the citizens of the two cities for war before the Confederate Army of Tennessee and the Union armies of the West were formally developed. Company and regimental morale in the Army of Tennessee, decimated by defeat, death and poor leadership, nevertheless sustained itself for four long years of war. The unit cohesion and élan that emerged at the company and regimental level in the Army of Tennessee had its roots in the late-antebellum militia organizations—and in particular the militia spirit and ideal—in places like Lexington, Kentucky, and Clarksville, Tennessee.

Militias garnered a proud tradition in the Old West. As historian Richard G. Stone makes clear, “The Militia of Kentucky not only preceded the formation of the commonwealth, but was the midwife at its birth. The state could never have been created without its citizen-soldiers.”⁹ From the earliest treks of Daniel Boone and his followers down the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap to the War of 1812, the Kentucky militia stood as the vanguard of white settlement in the Trans-Allegheny West. After protecting early settlements around Boonesborough and Harrodsburg, the Kentucky militia fought British-aligned Indians at Blue Licks in the Revolutionary War and over the course of the next few decades. In response to Congress’s 1792 Uniform Militia Act, the newly independent state of Kentucky organized and mustered militiamen for service against actual and potential raids by Native Americans. Kentucky militiamen helped secure peace for white settlement in the commonwealth after victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and continued to defend the Western frontier into the new century. Its crowning moment may have been its role in the defeat of British forces at River Raisin in Michigan during the War of 1812. Not surprisingly, most of the state’s early political leadership, including governors Isaac Shelby, Richard M. Johnson, and John Adair, were prominent leaders in the Kentucky militia.

Tennessee’s early militia earned equally significant praise during and after the Revolution. The famed “Overmountain Men,” guarding the settlements along the Watauga River in what was then western North Carolina, helped turn the tide of the Revolutionary War at King’s Mountain. In subsequent wars against the Chickamaugas—a faction of Cherokee who rejected treaties to turn over valuable hunting lands to encroaching white settlers—Tennessee militia leaders like John Sevier would secure the state’s growth through the Tennessee and Cumberland River valleys. Eagerness to serve in these militias culminated in the War of 1812, where Tennessee Gen. Andrew Jackson led his legions of Tennessee volunteers against the Creek Indians in 1813 and the British at New Orleans in 1815. The state nickname—the Volunteer State—reflects the importance of militia service in Tennessee’s early state identity.

In the decades after the War of 1812, Kentucky and Tennessee developed more settled agricultural economies and built growing cities along the Ohio, Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers. With little threat from Indian attack or British, French, or Spanish invasion, Kentucky and Tennessee militias began to wither in importance. Planters and merchants replaced frontier citizen-soldiers in the political leadership class of Kentucky and Tennessee. The Kentucky militia system transformed from a universal system of citizen-soldiery into a more selective, volunteer-driven outfit. The Mexican War briefly reinvigorated the spirit of the “Corn Stalk Militia,”¹⁰ with several Kentucky Civil War leaders gaining military experience in Mexico. Included among these veterans were future Union leaders like Robert Anderson, John Reynolds, Theophilus Garrard, Thomas Crittenden, and Speed Fry. Future Confederate Kentuckians cutting their military teeth in Mexico included John C. Breckinridge, William Preston, Humphrey Marshall, and George Crittenden. Simon Bolivar Buckner, future commander of the Kentucky State Guard, performed exceptionally well at the battle of Molino del Rey. Also in the militia tradition, Roger Hanson served as lieutenant in an Independent ...