All the guards developed loose trigger fingers when prisoners walked anywhere near the deadline, which was eighteen feet inside the fence. During one severe cold spell water hydrants froze and prisoners were forced to use snow, soon clearing all of it away up to the deadline. The veteran prisoners suffered thirst rather than risk reaching across the line, but some of the new arrivals were less cautious. “After being cooped up in the cars four or five days, they were nearly dead for water. The poor fellows would lie down close to the deadline and reach their arms through and pull the snow to them. I saw one of the guards standing twenty-five steps from a prisoner thus engaged shoot at him three times.”
From this web of miseries which entangled them, this ordeal which seemed to have no ending, they were suddenly delivered in March, 1865. Yielding to pressures from Northern families with relatives in Southern prisons, Federal authorities reopened the exchange cartel.
The 2nd Kentucky boys, being among those with the longest periods of confinement, were ordered east for exchange at City Point, Virginia. “The visions of the green fields of Kentucky with its rippling waters and genial clime,” one of them wrote, “were soon to be realized after nineteen months of hardships and denials.”
But even though Appomattox was only a few weeks away, most of these veterans of more than three years of cavalry raids and prison life would not see the Bluegrass until they had endured one more long march. Ahead of them was Virginia in the turbulence of defeat, and then the dusty roads of the Carolinas, and a final surprising adventure in the pine forests of Georgia.
15
No More Bugles
I
IT SEEMED PROVIDENTIAL TO the 2nd Kentucky boys in southwestern Virginia that Basil Duke should have been exchanged in the same week they lost John Morgan. “I hear this morning Colonel Duke is exchanged,” one of them wrote from Abingdon. “If so, we are all all right.”
Duke joined the brigade at Jonesboro, Tennessee, immediately following John Morgan’s death. Colonel D. Howard Smith graciously offered to relinquish command of the 2nd Kentucky Battalion and other elements of the old Morgan regiments, and once again Duke was leading the alligator horses. There were not many of the veterans left, less than three hundred—most of them so poorly armed he wondered how they had been able to fight at all, the calibers of their rifles so varied that it was impossible to keep enough ammunition in supply.
During the two weeks they camped outside Jonesboro, he devoted most of his time to collecting weapons, supplies and equipment. Private George Mosgrove, who was serving under him at this time, described him as being nervous and impatient, “restlessly turning in his saddle, his dark eyes flashing.”
General John Echols, now in active command of the department, suggested that the fragmented Morgan regiments be brought together and reorganized along new lines, a move which Duke agreed would bring more efficiency to his command. In the new organization, most of the 2nd Kentucky boys ended up under their commander of the Indiana-Ohio raid, Major Thomas Webber. On official rolls they were listed as 4th Battalion, Kentucky Cavalry, but in all private communications they continued to call themselves 2nd Kentucky Cavalry.
The entire brigade was now officially Duke’s Cavalry, the young commander receiving his brigadier general’s commission late in September. By October he had brought his command to a strength of five hundred and seventy-eight officers and men present for duty and was ready to march against the enemy in eastern Tennessee.
But this last autumn and winter of the Civil War was not to be a season of victories for twenty-six-year-old General Duke. In his first fight at Bull’s Gap, November 13, he won the decision but lost too many men; and men lost now could not be replaced. It was a night attack, fought on foot in the mountains. “The night was cloudless,” he wrote, “and the moon at its full and shedding a brilliant light. The dark lines of troops could be seen almost as clearly as by day. Their positions were distinctly marked, however, by the flashes from the rifles, coming thick and fast, making them look, as they moved along, bending and oscillating, like rolling waves of flame, throwing off fiery spray. When my brigade had moved far around upon the left, and had taken position, obliquely toward the enemy’s rear, it suddenly opened. The Federal line recoiled, and closed from both flanks toward the road, in one dense mass, which looked before the fighting ceased and the rout fairly commenced, like a huge Catherine wheel spouting streams of fire.”
Duke’s men captured all the enemy artillery, a wagon train, and an ambulance filled with much-needed medical supplies. They also took three hundred prisoners, but the Federals’ firepower, improved considerably since Duke had last faced the enemy, had riddled his brigade. Major Webber, for instance, leading twenty-eight men in one charge, had sustained fourteen casualties.
They withdrew with their wounded to the base camp at Abingdon, and began a winter of defensive operations, fighting off enemy patrols probing for weaknesses in the lines guarding the salt and lead deposits. On December 21, the Federals under General Stephen Burbridge massed their forces and broke through the Confederate lines, wrecking the vital salt works at Saltville, demolishing buildings, kettles, machinery, pumps, wells and stores.
(That very same day General Hardee was evacuating Savannah; Sherman had completed his march to the sea, cutting the South in half.)
Duke’s brigade, brought up as reinforcements, drove Burbridge’s cavalrymen out of Saltville and pursued them through a blinding snowstorm all the way to the Kentucky line. Major William J. Davis, who had been captured in Indiana after his command was split at Twelve Mile Island, had recently been exchanged, and was a member of the pursuing expedition. “As we ascended the steep mountain road leading from Saltville,” he wrote, “the cold intensified so as to test the greatest power of endurance. Men beat their breasts to promote a more vigorous circulation, or, dismounting, limped on benumbed feet beside their hobbling horses. The necks, breasts and forelegs of the horses were covered with clinging sheets of frozen breath or blood that had oozed from the fissures in their swollen nostrils. Often their lips were sealed by the frost to the steel bits, or protruded livid and rugged with icicles of blood. Soon we met indications of the still greater suffering of our foes. Horses dead from cold were seen along the road, frozen stiff in every imaginable attitude; some leaned against the perpendicular cliff on the right, with legs swollen to an enormous size and split open to the bone from knee to hoof; some knelt with muzzles cemented to the hard earth by blood; others lay prone but with heads upraised.…These corpses actually impeded our pursuit; sometimes six or eight lay in one heap; once I counted two hundred in one mile.…You may think the sight of hundreds of horses, dead, as I have said, horrible; what think you—you who have never seen war, but have read of its ‘pomp and pride and circumstance,’ and perchance have glorified the butchery of it—what think you of men lying on bed or floor, some of them in the article of death, frozen, as were their dumb beasts by the road side? The hands of some of these gallant men were swollen and cracked with bleeding fissures a quarter of an inch wide. Their legs, from which pantaloons had been ripped, looked as if affected by elephantiasis; their feet, from which boots had been cut, were a shapeless mass; legs and feet seemed red like the shells of boiled lobsters and were split into bloody cracks like the hands.”
Returning from this ordeal, the brigade settled into winter quarters at Abingdon. The men built huts against the continuing cold, but most of the time they were half-famished and half-clothed. “Many men are badly in need of clothing,” Duke reported on New Year’s Day of 1865, “and all are clamorous for their pay. Guns, saddles, and cartridge boxes are also needed.”
In worse condition than the men were their horses. Southwestern Virginia had been stripped of fodder and grain, and as the South’s transportation system had virtually collapsed no supplies could be shipped in. Duke could not bear to watch the last of his horses die of starvation; reluctantly he ordered the brigade dismounted and sent the animals overland to North Carolin
a. One of the men assigned to this horse detail was Sergeant Henry Stone, who had returned on a blockade runner from his Canadian exile. From Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, young Stone reported briefly: “I am now for the first time at a convalescent camp; not for the improvement of myself but for the health of my horse. Weather pleasant.”
(About this same time, General Sherman, after reorganizing his army around Savannah, was starting north through the Carolinas.)
At Abingdon the icy winter dragged on through February, keeping the enemy away but making life miserable for the boys cooped up in their wooden huts. An army inspector reporting on the condition of Duke’s Brigade, February 15, noted that “about one-fourth of the men need arms and one-third lack accouterments. There were present at the date of my inspection 328 men and their discipline seemed better than that of the other commands of the department.”
This favorable military comparison, however, did not mean that morale was especially high among the Kentucky boys; it merely indicated that their morale was not quite as low as that of some of the others.
For doom was in the chill winter air; no one could deny it. It was foreshadowed in the lack of arms and ammunition no longer replenished, in their rations of worm-eaten peas, rancid mess pork, and unbolted corn meal. It showed itself in the fluttering rags they wore for uniforms, their soleless boots, the thin bedding blankets taken from horses sent southward, in the absence of the horses themselves. It could be heard in songs they sang in the huts of evenings—no more rollicking ditties of carefree cavaliers, but sad songs of lost Lorenas, of angels marching in the sky, of grief-stricken mothers and sweethearts. Basil Duke composed no more lilting poems of galloping raiders, no poems at all. The chivalry they cherished was gone with the old world of their youth, a world dying with each passing day.
Yet not one of them spoke of defeat, or dared think of it in the loneliness of the winter nights. “Two strange features characterized the temper of the Southern people in the last days of the Confederacy,” Duke would recall a year or so later. “Crushed and dispirited as they were, they still seemed unable to realize the fact that the cause was utterly lost. Even when their fate stared them in the face, they could not recognize it.”
In the first warm days of spring the exchanged prisoners of war began returning from Camp Douglas, pale-skinned and soft-muscled, in sharp contrast to their lean and weathered comrades. But there was something in the spirit of these returned men that was communicated to the others, a mood of desperate revenge. By the first of April, Duke’s Brigade was at its highest strength, more than six hundred men—almost half of them former prisoners who had seen their last fighting during the Indiana-Ohio raid of 1863.
They arrived just in time to help stand off Federal columns moving out of east Tennessee. Although they were disappointed at having to march and fight on foot (the horses were still in North Carolina) they complained less than those who had not been in prison, and were the last to yield ground when ammunition ran out.
Duke’s men held on stubbornly to their little corner of southwestern Virginia, but every day the news was bad. Sherman was already into North Carolina, and Lee’s thinning lines were retreating in Virginia. After Richmond fell on April 3, the Confederacy’s last hope was for Lee and Johnston to effect a junction of their forces at Danville, Virginia. As a part of this strategy, Duke’s Brigade received orders to march eastward and join Lee’s crippled army.
They marched out toward Roanoke—cavalrymen without horses—but with an occasional plume still thrust into a ragged slouch hat. Boots and shoes were cracked and worn through to the rocky road on which they marched, and before the first day’s ending some had thrown away the worthless shells of cheap leather, walking barefooted.
En route up the valley toward Roanoke on April 9, Duke received the news of General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. “If the light of heaven had gone out,” he said, “a more utter despair and consternation would not have ensued. When the news first came, it perfectly paralyzed every one. Men looked at each other as if they had just heard a sentence of death and eternal ruin passed upon all.”
During the next twenty-four hours, General Echols struggled vainly to hold the troops of his department together. Entire companies of infantrymen threw down their arms and walked away, heading for home. But most of the cavalrymen—mounted and dismounted—clung together, and at Christiansburg on April 12, Echols held a final council of war. He announced that he would take all the mounted men to North Carolina to join General Joe Johnston and continue the fighting. He would issue sixty-day furloughs to infantrymen and dismounted cavalrymen; if the war was still going on at the end of that time, these men would be recalled to duty.
Only about ten of Duke’s dismounted men elected to take furloughs. With Duke’s approval the others mounted themselves on mules taken from abandoned infantry wagons, determined to ride these slow-footed, barebacked animals with blind bridles and rope halters to the Mississippi River, if necessary, rather than surrender.
The march south began at four o’clock that afternoon in a torrent of April rain, four generals leading about twelve hundred men. Echols was in command, the others being Duke, George Cosby and John C. Vaughan. “The gloomy skies seemed to threaten disaster,” wrote Duke. “But braver in the hour of despair than ever before, my men never faltered or murmured. The trial found them true. To command such men was the proudest honor that an officer could obtain.”
2
Not all the Morgan men who had been in Northern prisons were exchanged in time to reach Duke’s Brigade before the fall of Richmond. Among these were Lieutenants Winder Monroe and Leeland Hathaway, and Private Jack Messick—three young men who were about to enter upon their most exciting adventure of the war.
At the time of their capture at Buffington Island, they were with Dick Morgan’s 14th Kentucky, but Monroe was one of the original members of the 2nd Kentucky, both he and Jack Messick having served with Tom Quirk’s scouts. Hathaway had been transferred from the 11th Kentucky immediately before the raid.
Released in northern Virginia early in April, Monroe, Hathaway and Messick found themselves cut off from Richmond. Taking a roundabout route, they started on foot for southwestern Virginia, hoping to find Duke’s command. After crossing the James River they were caught up in the stream of Lee’s retreating columns. The three returning cavalrymen were shocked by the appearance of these ragged troops—their anguished yet resolute faces, their utter fatigue. “No man saw them,” Hathaway noted, “except with uncovered head and reverential greetings.”
At Danville where they had been told they might find Duke, they found instead another Kentuckian, General John C. Breckinridge, acting as Secretary of War. “We were worn out with our tramp of 150 miles,” said Hathaway. “My boots had lost their soles and I had walked barefoot for the last fifty miles. Altogether we were in rather a sad plight. We walked into the General’s office, Monroe, Messick and I. General Breckinridge rose to meet us, calling me and Winder by name.”
After they learned that Duke was marching his troops south to join General Johnston’s army, they told Breckinridge they would like to offer their services for this same venture. “General Breckinridge called an aide, gave him verbal orders to have our requirements met. I soon had a pair of red leather Confederate shoes—we all had bridles and saddles and a written order to take such horses as we could find.”
The only horses apparent in all Danville were some blind coach animals, but they mounted up and started for North Carolina, exchanging the blind horses a day or so later for better ones.
For three days they rode steadily, finding no trace of Duke’s outfit. Several times they sighted Federal patrols moving on the roads, but managed to elude them, dodging into bushes and woods. “Winder Monroe told us that his grandfather, Judge Thomas Monroe* and family were at Abbeville, South Carolina, and suggested that we head for that place. We agreed to go.”
On April 28, the three adventurers rode into Abbeville. It was a
sunny, summery day, the air lazy and fragrant with honeysuckle, yellow jasmine and wisteria winding over the fences and galleries of the houses. After their long months of prison life and the rains and grim events of Virginia, it was like entering into Heaven.
“We found the Judge and his family as we expected very hospitable and much pleased to see Winder. They were living on the barest necessities. Not to burden them we drew the rations of musty meal and salt meat (very little of either, too) to which as soldiers we were entitled and this proved a very welcome addition to their scant larder.”
Abbeville was filled with rumors that Johnston had surrendered his army to Sherman in North Carolina, but no one could be certain of anything. The boys decided to wait and see what would happen next.
Two days after their arrival in Abbeville they learned that President Jefferson Davis’ wife, fleeing from Richmond, had just reached the town and was in need of assistance. “After consulting with Winder and Jack,” Hathaway recorded, “I went to see her and found her very much disturbed and at a loss what to do.”
Varina Howell Davis, according to young Hathaway, “was then a rather heavy dark woman about forty years old—not at all handsome or pretty, but very bright and entertaining.” Her traveling party consisted of herself; her four children; her sister, Maggie Howell; two servants; and Burton N. Harrison, the President’s private secretary. Harrison, who was in charge of the little caravan, did not impress the Kentucky boys with his capabilities. “Harrison was sick and utterly demoralized,” Hathaway said.
Mrs. Davis was impatient to leave Abbeville and start for the Florida coast where she hoped to board a ship and take her children to safety. Her plans were quite vague; she had no exact point of departure or any certain vessel in mind. She told Hathaway that nobody seemed to have authority or the discipline to give her transportation out of Abbeville.