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

by Davis, William C.

  It was nighttime when the train finally approached Lexington. Rain threatened. The general sat quiet for several hours watching the familiar old places pass by his window, a thousand memories stirring. A passenger behind him heard Breckinridge repeating softly to himself, “nearly eight years ago, nearly eight years ago.” Then he was silent.

  Breckinridge might have had any political office the state could give him if he wished. He stood easily the most popular Kentuckian of the era. Yet he was tired. The war he had not wanted had exhausted him, broken his health, and perhaps left him somewhat skeptical of the profession of politics, which had brought on the war. He wished only to practice law and do what he could to rebuild Kentucky and the South. He took the vice presidency of the Elizabethtown, Lexington, and Big Sandy Railroad, overseeing its construction and financial affairs until the Panic of 1873 ceased its operations. He accepted the presidency of the Piedmont and Arlington Life Insurance Company. At every opportunity he counseled patience, moderation, reconciliation. He publicly denounced the Ku Klux Klan as “idiots or banditti.” He supported freedmen’s rights, including the acceptance of the testimony of blacks in courts. As the Democratic Party in Kentucky split into conservative and liberal wings, he became identified with the latter, more progressive faction. Some believed his opposition was the single greatest factor in putting down the Ku Klux Klan during his lifetime. And no matter how the Republican administrations seemed to ride over the South, he did not lose heart. He and his old foe Grant became friends, Grant even hoping that he might, as President, enable Breckinridge to take a governorship. When friends denounced the party of Lincoln, Breckinridge’s reply was, “Let the Republican Party do the worst it can; let the Republicans do fifty times worse than they are doing, and then we shall have the best government any people in the world ever had.” Like the Orphans he led over so many fields, he never lost his hope or his faith in his country. It was the very essence of a Kentuckian, and he its quintessential.

  The war killed John C. Breckinridge. He never recovered his health after the years of exposure and privation, and the mental anguish of seeing his country sundered and at war with itself. He lasted barely six years after returning to his beloved Lexington. His injury at Cold Harbor brought on a cirrhosis of the liver, and that, aggravated by his exertions in the war, damaged other organs. Death came quietly on May 17, 1875.4

  No one mourned the general’s passing more than the Orphans. Indeed, in the after years they took a great interest in all the brigade dead. Shortly after the war Charles Herbst of the 2d Kentucky visited the Chickamauga battlefield and erected headboards over the fallen Kentuckians. He later proceeded to most of the places in the South where Orphans lay buried, either marking the graves, or helping friends and family to arrange reinterment in Kentucky. For twenty years he continued the work, and in 1885 the veterans created a formal fund for the purpose. They managed to bring Helm’s body back to Elizabethtown in 1884. Hanson’s they already had in Lexington’s cemetery, just a few yards from the grave of Breckinridge. Annually these Orphan graves saw pilgrimage as the survivors came in silence to garland the sod and damp it with tears of remembrance.5

  Yet their duty to their fallen comrades seemed undone. Kentuckians, these in particular, felt a unique sense of their place in history. Posterity required more than tombs and monuments for the dead. It demanded living memorials. There was life in the word that could outlast the flesh, and in after years the Orphans took their pens and engrafted their epic upon the record of human memory. Theirs was a story worth remembering, worth repeating. Their example must be preserved for their future Kentuckians. The saga of the trials and drama of their service, their sacrifice, their triumph over physical adversity and emotional anguish, must not be forgotten.

  The echoes of war barely died before the Orphans began. John Jackman took the first small steps, now totally forgotten. In 1866 he worked and expanded most of his wartime journal into a series of articles called “Army Reminiscences” for the Louisville Courier. There once more came to life the host of characters of the indomitable 9th Kentucky, the aide who proudly stole the patent report, Private Gibbon lighting his pipe on guard duty, Leander Applegate shouting “Borodino” for all to hear. There too he retold of “Uncle Bob” Johnson’s attempt at drill, of the incredible food battle in the Canton hotel, the snowball fight at Dalton, the skirmishes with the firebrands and the Georgia Militia.

  Ed Porter Thompson never abandoned his intentions, postponed by the demands of the war, and in 1868 his dream finally came to life. That year he published his History of the First Kentucky Brigade. It was one of the very first histories of a Confederate organization to appear following the war, and remains one of the very best. Breckinridge, still in exile, gazed from its frontispiece. The dedication offered the work “to the memory of Kentuckians who fell in defense of the South.” His goal, he declared, was to do “more for the private soldier than was ever before the case in military annals.” That he was able to do so was thanks largely to the Orphans’ sense of history even before the war closed. Jackman had taken the brigade archives to Washington, Georgia, prior to the surrender. There Lewis detailed W. W. Badger to take charge of the books and papers, and after the parole Fayette Hewitt brought them home to Kentucky with him. When Thompson announced his intent to renew his work on a brigade history, Hewitt turned over the entire collection to him. In addition, Thompson corresponded widely with his former comrades. He even printed special envelopes for his correspondence, with an announcement of his project printed on the address side in case it might jog the memory of some Orphan turned postman. “It has devolved upon the present chronicler,” he said, “before time shall have dimmed the remembrance of them, to gather from a thousand living sources the multitude of facts relating to these men, and preserve them for posterity.”

  He gave barely a fourth of the 931 pages to a narrative history of the brigade, and devoted the rest to capsule sketches of virtually every officer and man associated with the command. It was an enormous undertaking. To be sure, Thompson’s bitterness toward the Federals evidenced itself, but there was a measure of forgiveness, too. Those who deserted he did not include, or else he simply did not mention their moment of weakness. Even poor Asa Lewis’ demise he described simply as “killed at Stone River.”

  After Thompson’s landmark book, George B. Hodge published his Sketch of the First Kentucky Brigade in 1874, chiefly a memoir of his own brief service with the Orphans. It, like Jackman’s articles, was soon forgotten, but the next printed efforts enjoyed far more success and, like the Orphans themselves, were entirely unique.

  In 1882 John S. Jackman, Captain John Weller, and John L. Marshall joined with two men who fought from other states to found a new monthly magazine. “This journal will be made up of reminiscences of the late war and incidents in any way connected with it,” they announced. They called it the Southern Bivouac. It was one of the very first veterans’ magazines following the war, and the only one devoted chiefly to the record of a single unit, the 1st Kentucky Brigade. The founders took no thought of profit. They hoped only to realize enough income from the venture to meet expenses, and thus guarantee the Bivouac’s future. After a year, though, they turned it over to professional publishers and they, despite hard times, made it successful enough that two years later the magazine was purchased by a large firm, and another Kentuckian and erstwhile Orphan, Basil W. Duke, assumed the editorship. Thus the Southern Bivouac endured for another two years, until sold again to the nationally acclaimed Century company.

  For all its career, but particularly during the first three years, the Bivouac was a splendid publication. Each month’s issue brought more stories and reminiscences from the pens of Jackman, Marshall, Weller, John Pirtle, Tom Owens, Dr. Tydings, and others. In the Bivouac, as nowhere else in the literature, the soul of the Orphan Brigade truly abides.

  Yet Ed Thompson remained to be heard from once again. His efforts did not end with his first book. For thirty years
after its publication, he continued his search for information to complete his roster of the Orphans, and to expand his history by the inclusion of anecdotal material that might illustrate, as his narrative did not, the real character of the Kentuckians in gray. Finally, in 1898, appeared his History of the Orphan Brigade, 1,104 pages of loving tribute to the heroism, devotion, and sometime rascality of his comrades in arms. It stood, and stands, unsurpassed.6

  Coincidental with the appearance of the first issue of the Southern Bivouac, the Orphans met in reunion on September 5, 1882, at Blue Lick Springs. They did so every succeeding September well into the next century. Buckner, Lewis, Preston, Withers, Pickett, and in ever-decreasing numbers the men in the ranks gathered at Lexington, Elizabethtown, Glasgow, Frankfort, and elsewhere. The generals and officers spoke and reminisced, the men supped and drank together, the inevitable committees and rules and commissions formed, the pictures of Breckinridge and Hanson and Helm adorned their meeting walls, and the final flower-laden march to the cemeteries brought the old veterans together in silent contemplation and remembrance. “I like these reunions,” Weller wrote in the Bivouac. “It is said with truth that war will bring out the character of a man quicker than any thing else. We were fortunate in finding so many good true men as we had with us. No wonder we love them and feel bound to them as if with ties of blood.” At the third reunion the Orphans formally adopted Ben Helm’s old 1st Kentucky Cavalry, and in that and later meetings they welcomed federal veterans to their fellowship as well.7

  And gradually over these years the parentless old soldiers performed an adoption of their own. With no formal action, but rather by gradual acceptance, they came to call and regard themselves as the “Orphan” Brigade. Few, if any, knew how they came by the name, though a number thought back to Breckinridge’s anguished cry at Murfreesboro. Thompson did not use the sobriquet in his 1868 volume, though in passing mentioning “Old Breck’s” reference to “orphans” at Stones River. Hodge did not use it at all in 1874. Yet by the time the Southern Bivouac commenced in 1882 the nickname had taken a firm hold. Immediately after the war the veterans liked to call their outfit “the old brigade.” They showed a predilection for pet names with their commanders even during the fighting, so it is natural that they settled upon one for themselves. Breckinridge first gave it utterance, and the tragic fittingness of it captured the imaginations of the Kentuckians as they looked back upon their war years. In all, over 4,000 of them had marched and fought with the old brigade at one time or another during the war. Not more than 600 were left to take parole at Washington, Georgia. They fought, bled, and died all across the Confederacy. For over 3 years they lived in exile from their native soil, yet their spirit and courage, their devotion to their duty and patriotism to their cause gave an example that other Confederates might emulate, yet few equaled. They took their distinctive civilization as Kentuckians with them wherever they went. The rowdiness, the penchant for organization and committee, the glee club and concert societies, the religious and social groups, their exaggerated individuality, and even their frequent self-importance were all to them matters of pride. Not war, nor death, nor even the anguish of orphanhood could rob them of their own sense of destiny, of who they were. That the rest of the world might know and applaud their record stood of little moment. What they knew themselves to be was what bound them together through war and on to posterity. They were Kentuckians, Americans.

  They were the Orphan Brigade, and no one knew better than they that theirs was, truly, “a kind of title of nobility.”

  Documentation by Chapter

  INTRODUCTION

  1. E. Porter Thompson, History of the First Kentucky Brigade (Cincinnati, O., 1868), pp. 13–17; E. Porter Thompson, History of the Orphan Brigade (Louisville, 1898), pp. 21–22.

  ONE

  1. “For His Own Side,” Southern Bivouac, II (Feb. 1884), p. 277.

  2. E. Merton Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1926), pp. 1–3.

  3. Ibid., p. 4; William C. Davis, Breckinridge: Statesman, Soldier, Symbol (Baton Rouge, La., 1974), pp. 6–7.

  4. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, pp. 8–14.

  5. Ibid., pp. 5–8.

  6. Ibid., pp. 18–20; Davis, Breckinridge, pp. 51–52; Thomas W. Riley to John J. Crittenden (Feb. 8, 1860), John J. Crittenden Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  7. Richard G. Stone, A Brittle Sword: The Kentucky Militia, 1776–1912 (Lexington, 1977), pp. 61–62; Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, pp. 82–83.

  8. Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 353–54; Stone, Brittle Sword, p. 62.

  9. Stone, Brittle Sword, pp. 63–64; Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, pp. 82–83; Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 408, 424, 429.

  10. Basil W. Duke, A History of Morgan’s Cavalry (Bloomington, Ind., 1960), pp. 36–37.

  11. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, pp. 83–84; Duke, Morgan’s Cavalry, p. 41.

  12. Thompson, Orphan Brigade, p. 408.

  13. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, pp. 86–87; Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 42–43; Frankfort, Commonwealth (May 11, 1861).

  14. Frankfort, Commonwealth (July 15, 1861); Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, pp. 88–91.

  15. U. S. War Department, War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, 1880–1901), Series I, Vol. 52, Part 2, pp. 106–7 (hereinafter cited as O.R.).

  TWO

  1. Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 43–44.

  2. O.R., I, 4, pp. 367, 374.

  3. Philip L. Lee, Compiled Service Record, Record Group 109, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereinafter cited as RG 109, NA); James W. Moss, Compiled Service Record, RG 109, NA; Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 396–97, 400.

  4. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, pp. 119–20; Basil W. Duke, Reminiscences of General Basil W. Duke, C.S.A. (Garden City, N.Y., 1911), pp. 84–86.

  5. James M. Hawes, Compiled Service Record, RG 109, NA; Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 396–97, 400, 594.

  6. Henry George, History of the 3d, 7th, 8th and 12th Kentucky, C.S.A. (Louisville, Ky., 1911), p. 19.

  7. John L. Marshall, “A Biographical Sketch of the Military Life of the Late Col. T. W. Thompson,” Southern Bivouac, I (Sept. 1882), p. 12; Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 485–86, 488–89.

  8. “Nondescript” [John L. Marshall], “Heel and Toe,” Southern Bivouac, I (Feb. 1883), pp. 255–56; Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 408–9, 485, 488–89; “Orphan Brigade Items,” Southern Bivouac, III (March 1885), p. 322; John H. Weller, “The Fourth Kentucky,” Southern Bivouac, I (May–June, 1883), pp. 346–47; Marshall, “Thompson,” p. 12.

  9. Robert A. Johnson to Leonidas Polk (Aug. 4, 1861); Robert A. Johnson, Compiled Service Record, RG 109, NA; Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 857–58.

  10. Thompson, Orphan Brigade, p. 858.

  11. Chapter VI, Volume 663, Medical Department. Register of Patients of 2d Kentucky Infantry Hospital and of Hospital at Tunnel Hill, Georgia, and Miscellaneous Data Pertaining to Other Hospitals, 1863–65 (Aug. 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 23, 31), RG 109, NA; Rice E. Graves, Compiled Service Record, RG 109, NA.

  12. Johnson to Polk (Aug. 4, 1861), Johnson Service Record; O.R., I, 4, pp. 370–71, 373–74, 376, 377, 378, 379–80, 389.

  13. Johnson to Polk (Aug. 4, 1861), Johnson Service Record; Thompson, Orphan Brigade, p. 400.

  14. Fred Joyce, “Chaplains of the Fourth Kentucky,” Southern Bivouac, I (Nov. 1882), pp. 116–17.

  15. O.R., I, 4, pp. 255, 405, 407; Frank Moore, comp., Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events (New York, 1862), III, documents, p. 129.

  16. O.R., I, 4, pp. 193–94, 407, I, 52, Part 2, pp. 148–49.

  17. “Taps,” Southern Bivouac, I (Dec. 1882), pp. 179–80; “Major Thomas H. Hays,” Southern Bivouac, III (Mar. 1885), p. 333.

  18. Thompson, Orphan Brigade, p. 51; O.R., I, 4, p. 414, I, 52, Part 2, pp. 150–51; Simon B. Buckner, “To the People of Kentucky” (Sept. 17, 18
61), University of Kentucky Library, Lexington.

  THREE

  1. John S. Jackman Diary (Sept. 26–Oct. 5, 1861), and undated clippings in the Jackman Diary, Library of Congress.

  2. O.R., I, 4, pp. 415–16, I, 52, Part 2, pp. 152–53, 154; John B. Castleman, Active Service (Louisville, 1917), p. 73; Special Orders 171 (Nov. 5, 1861), Chap. II, Vol. 306, Orders and Circulars Received by 1st Kentucky Brigade (Nov. 1862–May 1863), RG 109, NA.

  3. Mrs. George Marckmann Diary (Sept. 27, 1861), in possession of W. Maury Darst, Galveston, Tex.

  4. Unnumbered special order (Nov. 7, 1861), Chap. II, Vol. 306, RG 109, NA; William C. Davis, Breckinridge: Statesman, Soldier, Symbol (Baton Rouge, La., 1974), pp. 280–81; Basil W. Duke, A History of Morgan’s Cavalry (Cincinnati, O., 1867), pp. 88–96; George B. Hodge, Sketch of the First Kentucky Brigade (Frankfort, Ky., 1874), p. 6.

  5. “Coffee-boiler Rangers,” Southern Bivouac, I (July 1883), pp. 442–43.

  6. Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 876–77; “Sketch of Gen. B. H. Helm,” Land We Love, III (June 1867), pp. 163–65; Beriah Magoffin to Jefferson Davis (May 9, 1861), Ben Hardin Helm to Leroy P. Walker (May 16, 1861), Ben Hardin Helm, Combined Service Record, RG 109, NA.

  7. Thompson, Orphan Brigade, pp. 430–31, 448; Jackman Diary (Oct. 5–6, 1861); Albert D. Kirwan, ed., Johnny Green of the Orphan Brigade (Lexington, Ky., 1956), pp. 10–11.