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

by Davis, William C.

  Caldwell continued to skirmish with Potter for several days, meanwhile dispatching word of the Federals’ presence to Lewis. The intrepid colonel faced perhaps 4,000 Federals with less than 200 Kentuckians, but still slowed his advance sufficiently for Lewis to reach Camden first. He brought the brigade by way of Columbia, and shortly afterward the dismounted contingent followed. “Did the mounted Kentuckians pass through here?” asked a horseless Orphan. “Yes,” said a citizen, and another added, “They were the only gentlemen who have passed through here since the war began.” The citizens showed a high regard for the Kentucky brigade and its general, asserting to passersby that at Camden it was Lewis and his men “who are doing the fighting, and they’ll stick to it as long as they can find a foe to shoot at!”14

  Lewis found about 300 militia manning works a few miles south of Camden, and at once assumed command, putting his Kentuckians into line with them. It was April 14, 1865. Scouts reported that Potter was retiring in their front, and so Lewis took his mounted men forward. That afternoon he met the federal rear guard and skirmished with it until nightfall. That evening Caldwell finally rejoined the brigade. There had been few casualties that day, the worst probably being poor Eli Lonaker of the 6th Kentucky, who accidentally killed himself with his own rifle. The Orphans could not know that another Kentuckian was dying that night hundreds of miles north of them. Abraham Lincoln had been to the theater. He never saw the end of the play.

  The next morning Potter turned and advanced against Lewis. The Confederates were too few, their line too short, and steadily the enemy pushed them back toward Camden. Lewis sent Phil Lee and the 2d Kentucky on a raid to stop a flank march by some enemy cavalry, and in this the ever-ebullient Lee proved successful. He set a perfect ambush for the bluecoated horsemen, killing several and driving back the remainder. It put him in a good humor for the return to the brigade. On the way back, he passed through a hamlet and saw an old black man whom he asked, “Say, uncle, are there any Huguenots about here?”

  “Well, I declare, where be you ones from?” asked the black.

  “From way up in old Kentucky.”

  “Well, I thought so,” said the old slave. “Why, in Tennessee they call ’em peanuts, in Georgia they goes by the name of goobers, in Alabama they is penders, here in South Carolina we call ’em ground peas, now you fellows way off dar in Kentucky call ’em hugonuts. Well I do declare.”

  Lewis did his best to fortify Camden and protect the railroad cars stored there, as well as locomotives and some considerable government supplies. He sent the militia to do the work while he tried to retard Potter’s progress, but by April 18 “Old Joe” and his Orphans were driven into the town’s defenses. And when he saw that Potter intended to envelop his flanks instead of attacking, Lewis knew he had no alternative but to destroy whatever he could not take with him and abandon the city. The skirmishing continued while the work of arson commenced, and here in South Carolina, so far from home, the last Orphan died in battle. A scout of ten men felt Potter’s movements and rode accidentally into a squad or more of Federals. Pius Pulliam of the 2d Kentucky was in the lead, and almost at once he took a severe wound. A. T. Pullen of the same regiment felt thirteen bullets tear at his clothes, but not one touched him. He wheeled his horse and raced for the rear, but at once saw John Miller of his regiment standing on the ground beside his horse. Asked if he was hurt, Miller said not, but seemed disoriented. Pullen helped him to mount, put the reins in his hand, and then turned to continue the retreat. When he looked back, however, he saw Miller riding straight toward the enemy. Upon later reflection, Pullen believed that Miller had already taken a death wound and, almost unconscious, had no idea what he was about. Yet perhaps, just perhaps, Miller, in his delirium, knew what he was doing. Nothing could be more appropriate than that John Miller of the 2d Kentucky Infantry, the last Orphan to die in battle, should do so facing the enemy.

  Lewis, too, faced the enemy for the next two days, joined now by Young. On April 21 Young formed Lewis and another brigade for an attack on Potter. Behind the line as they formed, the Orphans saw grave diggers at their work preparing a hole for a recently fallen South Carolinian. Ahead of them they heard Potter’s axes felling trees for breastworks. Young rode along the line ordering out the skirmishers, and promising, “Boys, bring in the prisoners, and I will give you the furloughs.” They cheered him, but Emory Speer of Hawkins’ Company K saw that “the veterans around me seemed hopeless.” The men in the ranks realized, he thought, that by now the Confederacy had lost everything, and that their continuing resistance was only a charade. Yet, when Young gave the order to advance, forward they went with all the old verve. It was the last charge of the Orphan Brigade.

  After a few yards the enemy artillery sent solid shot toward the Kentucky line. Speer saw one cannon ball bounce along the ground like a child’s toy straight toward his company. It struck a man on his right, but not killing him. Soon thereafter the brigade skirmishers accidentally fired on another of Young’s brigades, and there was “much angry and some profane expostulation on their part.” This last advance was not well managed. The Orphans and other Confederates knew how heavily the enemy outnumbered them. Already there were rumors of the collapse of other southern armies. Everyone seemed confused.

  Yet on the Orphans moved. Suddenly there came an order to halt. Johnny Green believed that a bugle sounded retreat. Some said they saw a white truce flag pass from Potter’s lines to Young. Whatever happened, General Young soon rode to Lewis and handed him a dispatch from Joseph E. Johnston. In it “Old Joe” read that General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to the Orphans’ old foe, U. S. Grant, at Appomattox on April 9. Further, on April 18 another old enemy, Sherman, finally compelled Johnston to sign an armistice. All troops under Johnston’s command, including Young’s division, were to be surrendered. The war was over. Lewis’ eyes filled with tears as he finished reading the order. In a voice quavering with emotion, he cried, “All is lost!” Then he turned to order his brigade to retire. They had fought their last.15

  “The saddest hours that ever fell on human hearts were the first few of that evening,” said John Weller. Some could not believe it. Many who did wanted to get drunk. “I would like to go out in the woods & die drunk,” said Bill Fox of the 9th, “& bury all my sorrows.” For Johnny Green “This was the blackest day of our lives.” He saw gloom on every face. “All was lost & there seemed to be no hope for the future.”

  Young informed Potter of the armistice—for the Federals did not know of it—and then withdrew his command to Augusta once more. There, on May 2, he issued a final address to the men and officers of the 1st Kentucky Brigade. Johnston had surrendered them, he said, “the last hope of success has vanished.” He advised them to accept the result, to take Sherman’s generous terms of parole, to go home and accept the laws of the United States once more and abide by them. “Let me thank you, my brave men,” he concluded, “for your suffering and your fortitude in the camp and your gallantry on the field of battle.”

  Orders called for the Orphans to proceed to Washington, Georgia, to surrender their arms and take their paroles. It was not far, just fifty miles northwest of Augusta, and Lewis sent notification that he would have the brigade there by May 6 to Major General James Wilson, commanding Sherman’s cavalry. Lewis asked that Wilson have an officer there on that date to receive his arms and parole the men. By doing so, Lewis almost unwittingly betrayed the Orphan Brigade’s oldest and dearest friend.16

  There were a number of Kentuckians in Washington already, men of the unmounted detachment. When Young ordered the men without horses to join him in South Carolina in April, Johnny Jackman and another man of the 9th Kentucky were too unwell to make the march. Instead, Fayette Hewitt detailed the two to take charge of all the brigade archives, over twenty volumes of record books, morning reports, letter-copy books, and the like, as well as thousands of individual orders and reports. They were to conduct the archives to Washingto
n and there await further orders. Jackman and his friend carefully boxed the mass of documents and on April 17 boarded a train to make the circuitous journey to Washington. Along the way they traveled briefly with General Hood. “He must have known of Lee’s surrender,” thought Jackman, “for he looked very ‘blue.’ ”

  On the afternoon of April 19 they reached their destination, and went at once to the building where Captain Bosche and his detail were still making saddles for the brigade. There they stored their precious cargo, and Jackman, perhaps sensing the importance now of historic documents, took time to revise and recopy his old journal. Shortly Lee’s paroled men started passing through the town on their way home, and Jackman knew that the worst had happened. Then came word of Johnston’s surrender. “We knew then,” he told his diary, “that we had ‘gone up.’ ” Soon Johnston’s men, too, marched through, many of them rampaging and looting the quartermaster supplies stored in Washington’s warehouses.

  On May 3 Jackman saw President Jefferson Davis pass through Washington, escorted by some old friends, Basil Duke, and part of the 2d Kentucky Cavalry. Davis and his Cabinet, following the fall of Richmond the month before, fled South, taking the government with them. Now, with his two major armies surrendered, Davis hoped to reach the Trans-Mississippi Department and the last small Confederate armies under E. Kirby Smith and Richard Taylor. He wore a broad-brimmed felt hat, black crepe encircling the crown, and a plain gray military-style coat. He looked to Jackman a sad figure, symbolic of the collapse of the South. In a week Jefferson Davis would be a federal prisoner.

  The next day another familiar face appeared, this one a visage that any Orphan associated with ill omen and bad news. Braxton Bragg arrived in the morning to join the President, and together they rode out of town. Here Davis separated from his Cabinet, leaving them to go their separate ways. The government had dissolved, most of his ministers losing heart, realizing as Davis could not that all was truly lost.

  Yet this afternoon there was one, and only one, member of the Confederate Government still functioning, and when he rode into Washington, Georgia, the war came full circle for Jackman and the other Kentuckians there to greet him. Here was the Confederate Secretary of War, the man who oversaw the evacuation of Richmond, who guided the flight of the Cabinet, who strove constantly to persuade Davis to accept an honorable surrender rather than ignoble dissolution into guerrilla warfare, and who advised Johnston in his surrender negotiations with Sherman: Major General John C. Breckinridge.

  It had been a full war for Breckinridge after he left the Orphan Brigade at Dalton more than a year before. The department he commanded in southwestern Virginia was no plum. Understrength and overextended, his forces had to contend with one federal raid after another, yet did so successfully on every occasion but one. When a federal army threatened the Shenandoah Valley and the vulnerable left flank of Lee, then facing Grant at Spotsylvania, Breckinridge marched his scratch force to New Market and defeated a numerically stronger foe in a set-piece battle that captured the hearts and imagination of the South. It would remain for years the best-known engagement of its size in the war. Then he joined Lee in his operations for a time, repulsing his old foe Grant’s terrible attacks at Cold Harbor in June, and being himself injured when his horse was killed under him. Yet, when another enemy threat appeared in the Shenandoah, he went on his sick litter to organize the defense of Lynchburg, then took command of a corps in General Jubal Early’s Army in its raid on Washington, D.C. There, in July, Breckinridge came within sight of the capitol dome where once he sat as Vice President.

  There followed the engagements in the Shenandoah where Early tried to stop the ravages of Philip Sheridan to no avail, and then Breckinridge returned to his old department. In February 1865, in response to widespread dissatisfaction with war policy, President Davis made two important changes: He appointed Lee general-in-chief of all Confederate armies, and he offered Breckinridge the portfolio as Secretary of War. Despite the calumnies of Bragg, the Kentuckian was one of the most popular generals in the South, and he had political and executive qualifications exceeding even those of Davis himself. The move met with universal approval, and some in the Confederacy took heart. “Breckenridge has been made Sec of War,” wrote a North Carolinian. “He has always been successful & ‘prestige’ is a great element in military affairs. Napoleon believed in Luck & Breckenridge is not only able but lucky.”

  But Breckinridge knew that luck would not be enough in his new post. Indeed, what he saw when he assessed War Department affairs in his first week in office only confirmed what he predicted nearly four years before. The Confederacy was doomed. Consequently, almost from the date of taking office, he made his goal a peaceful and honorable end for the dying nation. It was a great task, for Davis no longer thought with reason in the matter, wishing to fight to the last extremity. Slowly and diplomatically the secretary persuaded the President, but it was only the day before Davis reached Washington that he finally gave in to Breckinridge’s arguments. And while he worked to see the Confederacy to a fitting end, the secretary also kept his beloved Kentuckians at the front of his mind. Shortly before the evacuation of Richmond, he called together congressmen from Missouri and Kentucky to discuss the welfare of soldiers from those states when the South fell. If the armies simply disbanded without formal surrender, soldiers from the cotton states would be able to go to their homes and remain probably unmolested. But Missourians and Kentuckians, whose home states were well within federal lines, would be denied that opportunity. They would be orphaned yet again, and if they did manage to get home without a surrender and formal parole, the reception awaiting them in their states might be hostile.

  “Our first duty, gentlemen, is to the soldiers who have been influenced by our arguments and example,” he concluded. “What I propose … is this: That the Confederacy should not be captured in fragments, that we should not disband like banditti, but that we should surrender as a government, and we will thus maintain the dignity of our cause, and secure the respect of our enemies.” He concluded by exclaiming, “This has been a magnificent epic. In God’s name let it not terminate in a farce.”

  That it did not end in farce is largely due to Breckinridge’s efforts, and with Johnston formally surrendering and paroling his men, the Orphans included, the Kentuckians would be able to return to their homes without fear of prosecution or proscription. Now Breckenridge, too, hoped to reach the Trans-Mississippi, not, like Davis, wishing to continue the struggle there, but rather to guide Kirby Smith in obtaining for his forces an honorable surrender. Some of the Orphans here in Washington took heart when they saw their old father. They believed he would lead them to the west to continue the fight. But Breckinridge came only to oversee their surrender, and try to aid in Davis’ escape from the enemy.

  Here, on May 4, 1865, Breckinridge formally disbanded the War Department. Fittingly, the majority of the troops here to witness the demise of the Confederacy were his old Kentuckians, men never formally citizens of that dying nation, who yet gave their all for it. The Confederate States of America never really adopted the Orphan Brigade. They adopted it. And in that irony so dearly beloved of history, Breckinridge’s last act—the last formal act of the Confederate Government—was to accept the resignation of Second Lieutenant James B. Clay, Jr., a Kentuckian, an unofficial Orphan, and the grandson of that great Kentuckian who strove so long and hard to avert the calamity now entering its last act, Henry Clay.

  Breckinridge, too, had to flee, and here is where his old comrade and subordinate Joseph H. Lewis nearly betrayed him. Having been Vice President of the United States before the war, Breckinridge was regarded as the most heinous traitor of all in the North. He and Davis and a handful of others stood under indictment in the Union, and could expect imprisonment at least if captured, and perhaps even execution. This is why he wanted to see Davis safely out of the country and why, after assisting Kirby Smith, he expected to go into foreign exile himself. Yet the Federals followed close
ly at the fleeing government’s heels, and now Lewis’ dispatch to Wilson asking for someone to parole him at Washington on May 6 coincidentally brought Breckinridge’s would-be captors right to him. He escaped by only a few hours, leaving on the morning of May 5, with an escort of Kentuckians including old Orphans James Wilson and “Cub” Howard, and his own son Cabell. That same afternoon a squadron of federal cavalry rode into Washington. The next day, as Lewis led the rest of the brigade into town, Breckinridge and his escort were only seven miles south, having just encountered another federal patrol. While Colonel Breckinridge and his cavalry faced the enemy and parleyed, the general and a few followers melted into the forest to begin their bid for escape. But out of the woods the Kentuckian sent a last message to his cousin, to Duke, and to all the others it might reach. It was folly to risk the lives of the men any longer, he said. Go home. Go home to Kentucky, to their homes and families. They could do no more for the Confederacy and, much as they wished to, they could do no more for him. “I will not have one of these young men to encounter one hazard more for my sake,” he said, then rode off toward oblivion.

  It was quite a sight for Jackman and the others when Lewis led the 1st Kentucky Brigade into Washington, Georgia. The Orphans marched down the streets in closed column, flags flying in their tatters, arms at the parade position. The townspeople came to the boardwalks to watch them as if on review. “Steadily they marched,” wrote Jackman, “the very horses seeming to vie with the riders in keeping up the military to the last. The Spring breezes gently waved the banners—banners that bore the marks of the contest, and that had the names of many fields written upon their folds—and the evening’s sunlight, on the eve of fading from the hills, danced and quivered upon the long trusty Enfields, thus smiling pleasantly upon one of the last scenes of Southern pageantry.”