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

by Davis, William C.

  Despite representation by good counsel, Lewis heard the court find him guilty as charged. The sentence was death. When the court passed their findings to Bragg, he approved the sentence. “The said Asa Lewis,” he said, “will be executed by shooting in the presence of the troops of the Brigade to which he belongs.” Bragg set the date for December 26, between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, and ordered that Hanson direct the proceedings.26

  Now the Kentucky officers began a campaign to get Lewis’ sentence commuted. They pled with Bragg to relent, but to no avail. Most of the Kentucky officers signed a petition that they delivered to the commanding general on Christmas, begging that he reconsider. Breckinridge personally visited Bragg, who now despised him, but the general would not move. Kentucky blood was “too feverish for the health of the Army,” Bragg reportedly said. He was sick of the Kentuckians’ grumbling and troublemaking. He would put a stop to it if he had to execute every Orphan in the brigade. Obviously he sought to make Asa Lewis an object lesson, a test of his strength of will over the Kentuckians whom he thought sought to bring him to ruin. Breckinridge became furious. Kentuckians were not slaves, and Bragg would not treat them as such. Shooting Lewis would be murder. Bragg stood firm.27

  Christmas came and despite Lewis’ predicament, most of the Orphans enjoyed it as they could. “Christmas day was a real Christmas,” wrote Grainger. Several boxes of good things from Kentucky arrived through the lines. Johnny Green’s mess obtained eggs and onions, and even a goose, buying them for a change, and Johnny himself baked a pound cake which, though it fell in the center, did not dampen their spirits. Some of the captured Hartsville brandy enlivened the holiday for them as well. Squire Helm Bush, of Company B, 6th Kentucky, saw that several men of his company “got a little funny & enjoyed themselves,” many staying the night at a ball in Murfreesboro.

  And the mysterious scribe of Company C, 4th Kentucky, once again took a pen to the company’s clothing account book. “December the 25th 1862,” he wrote. “Another Christmas has come and still we are engaged in the Bloody Struggle to be free … for more than two years we have been combating with the Vandal horde—to Day our army is stronger and more thoughroly [sic] equipped than ever before.” He still found hope.28

  Asa Lewis did not. On Christmas night Breckinridge visited him in the Murfreesboro jail and frankly told him that his efforts had been fruitless. Lewis took the news with composure, and then gave the general all his worldly possessions, a pocketbook and a comb, and a few letters. “Old Joe” Lewis came soon after dawn the next morning, and yet again he and Breckinridge tried to sway Bragg without success. In Kentucky it was rumored later that this morning several companies of Orphans ran to their arms threatening mutiny before they were calmed.

  A general order called for the field officer of the day to select one lieutenant, one noncommissioned officer, and three men from each regiment in the brigade for the firing detail. Three rifles were loaded with blank charges. Then arose a problem. The field officer selected at least two, and perhaps three, lieutenants to command the detail, but each refused. When he ordered Lieutenant G. B. Overton of the 2d Kentucky to perform the task, Overton said, “I’ll give up my sword before I’ll command that detail!” Finally another officer agreed to take the distasteful task, and the brigade formed on the parade ground, making three sides of a hollow square.

  At 11 A.M. a wagon bearing Lewis appeared and stopped on the open side of the square. Behind it lumbered another carrying a coffin. There followed the officer of the day, and most of the brigade commanders on horseback, Breckinridge among them. Thompson recalled of Lewis, “As the wagon passed near me I could see the pale but firm countenance; the somewhat unnatural glare of his eyes when he looked upon those fellow-Kentuckians.” The detail stood Lewis facing the brigade, his back to the open side of the square, and bound his hands behind him. Thompson said he asked not to be blindfolded. Johnny Green said he asked for the mask so that he would not have to recognize the comrades who soon would kill him.

  Breckinridge dismounted and walked to the condemned man. They spoke in hushed tones for a moment, then the general remounted and rode aside. Lewis addressed the Orphans, telling them not to be distressed. “I beg of you to aim to kill,” he closed, “it will be merciful to me. Good-bye.”

  The lieutenant ordered “ready.” The firing squad, just ten paces in front of Lewis, brought their rifles to their shoulders. In the pattering of a heavy rain the condemned man heard the metallic clicking of the hammers being drawn back.

  “Aim.” Every rifle pointed to the Orphan’s heart.

  “Fire.”

  A host of images followed, which the Kentuckians never forgot. Ed Thompson remembered how the “sudden crash reverberated over the field.” Others closed their eyes and felt only the rain. Some looked toward Breckinridge who, when Lewis fell dead, pitched forward on his horse’s neck “with a deathly sickness,” and had to be caught by his staff before he fell to the ground.

  Asa Lewis was past remembering. The detail placed him in the coffin, and buried him the same day in Murfreesboro next to a cousin who died there the year before. Then, said Johnny Green, “a gloom settled over the command.” As for Breckinridge, he recovered his composure and placed Lewis’ few belongings with his own things for safekeeping. He would carry them with him for the next seven years in keeping his promise to the condemned man. Finally, when he received a letter in 1869 stating, “I am the widowed mother of the unfortunate young man who was killed (or rather butchered) at Murfreesboro,” the general redeemed his pledge and sent the comb, and letters, and pocketbook to Sallie Lewis.29

  Braxton Bragg won this little battle with the Orphans, but it came at great price. “It created a profound sensation,” wrote one observer, “and incensed Hanson’s Kentucky brigade beyond measure.” In protest, they declined to pass sentence on future Kentucky soldiers convicted of desertion. In the soldiers of the brigade, the commanding general now had hundreds of enemies, and their officers proved instrumental in the campaign to replace him in command of the Army. Breckinridge apparently never mentioned the matter to Bragg again, for other grievances would soon arise between them to supplant the death of this one poor Orphan now gone home. A federal army was on the move, and soon Bragg, Breckinridge, and the Orphan Brigade would pass through fiery hell. With the earth covering Lewis still moist, Bragg and the Kentuckians approached the watershed of their stormy career.30

  EIGHT

  “My Poor Orphans”

  “I NEVER SUFFERED SO FROM COLD in any one day in all my life,” Squire Bush wrote in his diary on December 30. It was not only the cold that set him shuddering that winter day. As well it could have been from the prospect of a great terrible battle that would commence at any moment, for facing Bragg’s Army at Murfreesboro this day stood forty-one thousand well-equipped Federals and General William S. Rosecrans, ready to fight.1

  Four days before, as Asa Lewis went to his grave, Rosecrans moved his army south from Nashville. Bragg’s cavalry delayed his advance but still, by December 29, Federals approached Murfreesboro. Rosecrans would drive Bragg and his thirty-five thousand Confederates from Tennessee, he hoped, and he could do it here at Murfreesboro, along Stones River.

  The river ran north to south in a crooked path a mile east of Murfreesboro, and was easily fordable at several points. Bragg placed the bulk of his army across the stream, while Breckinridge’s division he situated on the Murfreesboro side, on a group of hills that commanded the entire field. There he could cover the town and, as well, be in a position to make a wide flank attack against the enemy should Bragg see the opportunity.

  On the morning of December 29, Breckinridge sent Lewis and Hunt’s regiments, with Cobb’s battery and the 41st Alabama, to occupy a particularly prominent hill in his front, which overlooked the river. From this eminence his artillery commanded virtually the entire enemy line when the battle began. The rest of his division had taken their place the day before, Jackman watching th
e stream of glittering bayonets as they passed through Murfreesboro toward the field. “Uncle Tom” Hunt returned from a furlough just begun in order to be in the coming fight. Adjutant Henry Curd of his regiment felt an overpowering premonition of death, and left messages and effects with Jackman and others. A near-freezing rain drizzled all that day (the twenty-ninth) and into the dark, yet no fires burned that might reveal the Confederate positions. Midnight passed before the men received their rations of beef and cornmeal, cooked in the rear and carried forward still warm.

  They heard cannon in the distance all day, and Jackman thought he could smell the saltpeter in the air. Then, just before dark, Bragg ordered a large brick house in their front set ablaze to deny its shelter to enemy sharpshooters. It was a “gloomy sight at such a time as this,” thought Jackman. That evening the Orphans’ skirmishers, Company D of Hunt’s regiment, unexpectedly saw a body of Federals coming at them in the darkness, and a firefight ensued in which the Kentuckians withdrew up the slope of the hill toward Cobb’s guns. The enemy pursued, overrunning some of the skirmishers, and advancing right to the muzzles of Cobb’s field pieces. Jackman heard one of them yell, “Boys, here is a cannon, let us get away from here.” At the same moment the 6th and 9th Kentucky advanced and fired a volley into the darkness surrounding the bluecoats. The enemy withdrew in haste.

  As the Federals retired, they passed once again a few of the Orphan skirmishers whom they overran on the way up the hill. One was Irishman Mike McClarey, who struggled to help a wounded comrade hit in the leg. Finally he carried him into friendly lines again. “Sure are you trying to kill your own men,” he asked as he sat his friend on the ground. Then he saw that his comrade was dead, a second bullet through his head. “I thought you said it was your leg you were shot in,” said Mike. Soon the whole brigade withdrew some distance, leaving only a strong skirmish line in advance of the hill. Breckinridge did not know what might be behind the enemy, who nearly reached Cobb’s guns, and would not chance a surprise attack in the night.2

  The next day, Tuesday, December 30, the day so cold to Bush, Cobb’s guns reoccupied the hill in their front, supported now by Trabue leading the 2d and 4th Kentucky. Hanson gave Trabue orders to hold the hill at all hazards, but no enemy attempt at capture came. Instead, the only real action was seen by Cobb, who the next day turned his guns to the left, to where Bragg and Rosecrans battled back and forth west of the river. All day long the Orphan gunners sent their shells into the attacking Union columns, and all day the enemy artillery replied in kind. Hanson had to move the infantry supports at least once to protect them from the enemy fire. “First a shell would tear up the ground in front of us,” wrote Jackman, “then we would go a little slow; then a ball would plow up the ground in rear of us; then we would quicken our pace.” When the Orphans finally huddled just behind the crest of the hill where Cobb and now two other batteries did their work, they saw enemy cannon balls strike just in front of them and jump over their heads. Twenty or thirty Kentuckians did not get the benefit of the bounce, and casualties mounted, so that Hanson moved them yet again.

  Cobb himself lost eight men in the day’s artillery duel. Poor Adjutant Curd was hiding behind a small thicket about sundown when a cannon ball bounded out of the brush and passed straight through him. Just a moment before he gave Jackman some tobacco and laughed at his premonitions of death. At nearly the same moment another federal ball struck Captain Jo Desha of the 9th Kentucky in the head. An ambulance rushed him to the field hospital of Dr. John Scott, now returned from Hartsville. Taking him to be dead, or nearly so, Scott prescribed only a cold compress for Desha, then went to his more promising patients. When Scott returned after an hour, Desha was gone. He recovered his senses, sat bolt upright, grabbed his sword, and stormed out of the tent, having just remembered that he had charge of the picket line that night. The men of his company stared in surprise when their captain, thought dead, appeared like an apparition in the night, his head swathed in white bandages, and took command of the picket as if nothing had happened. Desha’s head was a good deal harder than Corporal J. F. Hawes’s of Cobb’s battery, alas. Detailed to serve with Dr. Scott, Hawes begged, “Doctor, I must go to my gun. If I get killed, tell my sweetheart that I died like a hero.” Two hours later a cannon ball hit him in the head, too, and tore it from his body. Sergeant Richard Whayne of Cobb’s command saw his leg shot off by an enemy ball, then died before his bleeding could be stopped. That night the gunners buried him on the spot, and called the scene of their bloody day’s work Whayne’s Hill.3

  The old year, too, died that night. As if in its memory, the antagonists lay relatively quiet on January 1, 1863. “Both armies seem to be taking a ‘blowing spell,’ ” thought Johnny Jackman. By standing idle, Bragg lost an opportunity to hand Rosecrans a signal defeat, having steadily driven the enemy before him on December 31. The problem was, he believed he already had a victory, and spent New Year’s Day waiting for the Federals to retire. They did not. Instead, Rosecrans massed his artillery on the west bank of Stones River, roughly opposite a large hill in Breckinridge’s front, and then crossed one of his divisions during the night to occupy the hill. Late that evening Bragg began to suspect that something other than a retreat was taking place, and he ordered Hanson to send his skirmishers across the river to see if the Yankee artillery was there. When “Bench-leg” protested that the movement could not be made in the dark, Bragg relented and withdrew the order.

  That night Breckinridge sent a note into Murfreesboro to tell Mary he could not leave the front. His son Clifton brought coffee to him that she brewed, and a letter as well. “I hope God will answer my prayers,” she wrote, “and I feel that he will.”4

  With the dawn of January 2, the Orphans could be thankful that they had suffered very little in the first three days of the battle. All the infantry fighting of any consequence took place west of Stones River, and they had been spared the bloody work that severely mangled the rest of Bragg’s Army. Yet with the light came the realization that Rosecrans had not retreated as expected. This battle, in Bragg’s eyes, was not done yet. Today would be the Orphans’ turn.

  That morning Breckinridge sent Captain William P. Bramlette of the 4th Kentucky to make a reconnaissance of the enemy position in his front. Bramlette found the federal division placed on the hill in their front but, more disturbing, he saw as well some fifty-seven field pieces massed on the bluff across Stones River. Bramlette believed them to be set in a trap to destroy Breckinridge’s division should he advance to drive the bluecoats from his front, and so reported to the general. Another officer sent in reconnaissance brought the same intelligence. Then Breckinridge himself rode forward to see it with his own eyes. The reports were true.

  Between noon and 1 P.M. that afternoon, Bragg summoned Breckinridge to him for orders. Breckinridge met him under a large sycamore near the river. The commanding general wanted artillery placed on that hill now occupied by Federals, and directed the Kentuckian to advance and take it. He told him that, since his command had been spared so far during the battle, it was natural that now he should take this hill. Others would later believe that, in fact, Bragg hoped Breckinridge and his men would be killed in the attempt. Whichever the case, the Kentuckian now argued strongly against such an attack. Sketching the relative positions on the ground with a stick, he showed how the massed enemy artillery would destroy any force trying to hold that hill. Bragg remained adamant. “Sir, my information is different. I have given the order to attack the enemy in your front and expect it to be obeyed.”5

  Infuriated, a helpless Breckinridge galloped back to his division and discussed the order with his officers. He first met Joe Nuckols, who the night before had commented that the hill they were to take would be a good artillery position. “Ah! Colonel; this is a pet measure of yours, I believe,” said Breckinridge. “Do you desire as much as ever to place the Fourth there?” Nuckols now realized what they faced, and demurred. “Well,” said the general, “we must take it anyhow.
”

  The other officers received the news with less aplomb. Trabue “denounced the project as impractical madness.” Breckinridge rode to General Preston, now commanding another brigade in his division, and told him, “General Preston, this attack is made against my judgment, and by the special orders of General Bragg. Of course we all must try to do our duty, and fight the best we can. If it should result in disaster, and I be among the slain, I want you to do justice to my memory, and tell the people that I believed this attack to be very unwise, and tried to prevent it.” It was the only occasion of the war when Breckinridge spoke of death before a battle.

  Hanson was even less restrained. Clifton Breckinridge recalled that he “denounced the order as absolutely murderous and felt so infuriated at the men being ordered to do an impossible thing that he wanted to go at once to headquarters and kill Bragg.” It was hardly out of character for Hanson, but Breckinridge and Preston restrained him. “Old Flintlock” complained that it was “simply murder to carry out the order.” Now he, too, felt a premonition. Minutes later he said with a sadness entirely uncharacteristic of the man, “I believe this will be my last!”6