Kentucky Rebel Town: The Civil War Battles of Cynthiana and Harrison County

Kentucky Rebel Town

The Civil War Battles of

Cynthiana and Harrison County

WILLIAM A. PENN

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Copyright © 2016 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

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Unless otherwise noted, photographs are from the author’s collection.

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ISBN 978-0-8131-6771-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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To Leslie, Nancy Byrd, and Mary Hanna

Contents

Introduction

1. Neighbor against Neighbor

2. Guarding the Railroad

3. Lurking Rebels

4. United States v. Lucius Desha

5. The First Battle of Cynthiana

6. In the Path of a Confederate Invasion

7. Provost Marshals, the Federal Draft, and African American Enrollment

8. The Second Battle of Cynthiana: Covered Bridge

9. The Second Battle of Cynthiana: Keller’s Bridge

10. The Second Battle of Cynthiana: Kimbrough’s Hill

11. Rising from the Ashes

Appendix: Order of Battle, First and Second Battles of Cynthiana

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Photographs follow page 174

Introduction

When a Confederate officer scribbled in his journal after the Second Battle of Cynthiana that Morgan’s men were plundering & pillaging . . . the best rebel town of our native state, he was expressing a widely held perception that, in the Bluegrass, Cynthiana was a Rebel town. This reputation was earned in the early years of the war after a series of implicating events: the county judge, county clerk, sheriff, and newspaper editor were arrested for being southern sympathizers; one of the very first Kentucky Rebel volunteer companies was from Harrison County, marching off to war as a Confederate flag was displayed on the courthouse flagpole; and the majority of Harrison County recruits joined the Confederate army. At this divisive time, a citizen admitted: It is not safe for a man to talk about or in favor of the Union. The state representatives from Harrison County were known to be prosouthern by their speeches during the neutrality period. Rep. Lucius Desha fled behind Confederate lines to avoid being arrested, only to be indicted for treason on returning to the state. Cincinnati newspapers and a US representative from Bourbon County pointed to the arrest of about sixty citizens to support their contention that Cynthiana was full of lurking Rebels and described the town as a pestiferous Secession hole. A militia officer, writing state officials in October 1861, referred to Cynthiana, that infernal hole of rebellion. And in correspondence with President Lincoln about shipping guns through Harrison County, the clerk of the Kentucky state court of appeals warned, Cynthiana is a dark hole of traitors. Even after the war ended, complaints surfaced that some candidates for office in Harrison County were former stay-at-home rebels.¹

The actual support for secession in the county was more nuanced. A March 1861 petition to the governor signed by over five hundred citizens opposed a proposed state convention to consider secession. The next month, pro-Union candidates were elected from the county to attend a border state convention. Those who advocated staying in the Union, somewhat suppressed as prominent southern sympathizers swayed public opinion, later stepped forward, especially after vigilant home guards and Union soldiers silenced citizens backing secession through martial law and arbitrary arrests. Then, local government shifted into the hands of pro-Union candidates. Eventually, two Union companies were recruited, and many African Americans were enrolled as the war progressed, but their numbers still fell short of the Rebel enlistments.

Map 1. Most of the roads and villages on this modern Harrison County highway map existed during the Civil War. Adapted from General Highway Map, Harrison County, Kentucky, Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Department of Highways, Division of Planning, Frankfort, n.d. [ca. 1995].

One year after the Civil War ended, the editor of the Cynthiana News, A. G. Morey, wrote the following editorial to celebrate the resolve of Cynthiana’s citizens to rebuild the destruction caused by war. Although he exaggerated Cynthiana’s notoriety and military importance, he sensed the ordeal of the town’s peaceful inhabitants as unwilling participants and witnesses to a bitter sectional war:

No place in Kentucky attracted so much attention and so much interest, during the war, from both parties, as our little city of the maidens. No sooner had the telegraph communicated the news of an invasion of Kentucky either from the direction of the Ohio, or the Cumberland, than the minds of all were directed toward Cynthiana. It seemed to elicit the cupidity of the Federal as well as the Confederate soldier, and no raid in Kentucky was undertaken, or prosecuted to any considerable extent, that did not contemplate in its course, or its objective point, the town of Cynthiana.

Map 2. Map showing the area of military operations in the vicinity of Harrison County. Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1891–1895) (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1891–1895), 349.

We need not be surprised that a place, which had gained so enviable a notoriety, should, in the varying success of contending forces, be made the theater of actual war, and feel the horrors, which the collision of two hostile bodies of infuriated men, entails upon its peaceful inhabitants.

Not only were heard, at one time, within its once quiet streets, the din of trampling hoofs of cavalry, and the cries of the wounded and the dying; and the shrieks of terrified women and children; but the fierce flames of a devouring conflagration swept over the devoted little city, laying in ashes its stores and its dwellings, and burying beneath their ruins the savings of their industry, and their dearest hopes.

But the men of Cynthiana, though they had sustained most fearful losses by the ravages of the sword, and the still more terrible scourges of the devastating fire which encircled the town yet were not hopelessly discouraged. But little more than a year has elapsed, since the last page of the story of our great war was turned and already Cynthiana has exhibited signs of reinvigoration and restoration to its former prosperity. Where the fiery element raged the fiercest, now may be seen buildings, vying in magnificence of structure and costliness of material, some of the best houses, whose stone fronts and gigantic proportions, adorn the populous cities of the West.²

The Civil War scholar Charles P. Roland wrote that America’s fascination with the Civil War originated in part from the large-scale involvement of the society. This widespread participation held true in Harrison County, Kentucky, for, in some manner, the tragic events of 1861–1865, when the nation faced its gravest trial, seemed to affect everyone. Morgan’s famous Kentucky raids introduced the pain of warfare; Union occupation for much of the war, along with often overzealous enforcement of military orders and martial law, resulted in the arrest or harassment of many citizens, for both allegedly and actually aiding the Confederacy; the disintegration of slavery left blacks facing a promising but uncertain future; and the call to arms eventually reached over fourteen hundred men from Harrison County, who marched off to war leaving behind their anguished families. Unavoidably, some of the discord from these experiences lasted beyond the war.³

This book is a case study of a Bluegrass county during the Civil War. As has been the practice in recent Civil War studies, I have attempted to explore the effects of the war on all segments of the civilian population, linking military history and the lives of civilians, from state politicians and businessmen to Unionists, African Americans, and Confederate white men and women.⁴ This study also was intended to find out who were the Union and the Secession leaders in the county. I have researched elements of social, political, and military history. I have therefore organized this book thematically within an overall chronological framework.

1

Neighbor against Neighbor

There is nothing talked of but war, war, war in Cynthiana; it is not safe for a man to talk about or in favor of the Union.

—Henry H. Haviland, Harrison County Farmer (April 1861)

On April 19, 1861, within a week of the surrender of Fort Sumter, the Cynthiana, Kentucky, board of councilmen authorized two local Kentucky state guard units, the Hamilton Rifles from Paris and the McDowell Guards from Cynthiana, to fire a fifteen-gun salute in honor of the fall of the fort and the subsequent secession of Virginia. On April 22, Jo Desha’s fresh recruits marched to the Cynthiana depot, one of the first Kentucky volunteer companies to join the Confederate army. The soldiers boarded the waiting train cars as city and county officials cheered, flush with partisan excitement. A Confederate flag was raised on a pole in the Harrison County courthouse yard, very likely for the occasion. Within six months the secessionist flag was taken down, symbolizing the plight of the city and county officials, many of them Confederate sympathizers, who found their influence diminishing as local government control fell into pro-Union hands, where it remained for the duration of the Civil War, sustained by occupying Federal troops with the power to arrest disloyal citizens. Unionists lost this support for only brief intervals during John Hunt Morgan’s two raids and the Confederate invasion of Kentucky. Because of other factors explained in this chapter, Cynthiana’s reputation as a Rebel town endured.¹

Cynthiana, the county seat of Harrison County, is thirty miles north of Lexington and sixty-five miles south of Cincinnati, nestled in a bend of the South Fork of the Licking River. The 1860 census reported that Cynthiana had a population of 1,237 and Harrison County 13,779. The county had 586 slave owners with 3,289 slaves among them as well as 149 free blacks.² The town benefited from a new (since 1854) transportation link, the Kentucky Central Railroad (known until January 1, 1861, as the Covington and Lexington Railroad), which connected passengers, farmers, and retailers to major markets in Cincinnati, Lexington, and beyond. Cynthiana supported four churches, one academy, two weekly newspapers, one Masonic Lodge, one Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge, six distilleries, two wagon/carriage makers, bagging and woolen factories, and one tannery. Area stock farms bred prize cattle and saddlebred horses and supported the Harrison County Agriculture and Mechanical Association fairgrounds. Cynthiana’s downtown was lined with over twenty stores: dry goods dealers, a dressmaker, liquor dealers, a cabinetmaker, a boot- and shoemaker, druggists, a jeweler and watchmaker, a baker, a flour mill, a lumber dealer, a hardware store, blacksmiths, livery stables, physicians, and so forth.³

One visitor, a few years before the Civil War, described the Bluegrass region of central Kentucky and Harrison County:

From . . . Lexington and on to Cynthiana seemed like one beautiful park. Fields of hundreds and thousands of acres covered with a growth of most verdant blue-grass, with here and there scattered clumps of hickory, beech and sugar maple and other trees of magnificent proportions. Over these fields roamed herds of thoroughbred horses and cattle. The fences, instead of being built of split rails were all of limestone. You could ride all day between those stone fences. The roads were all turnpikes . . . covered thickly with broken rock.⁴

The turnpikes, bluegrass fields, and stone fences surrounding Cynthiana soon became the background for visiting armies. Most soldiers would stay a few weeks with their regiment, guarding the railroad, but others visited only a few days, long enough to fight a battle. The Federal government realized that the Kentucky Central Railroad from Covington to Lexington required close surveillance to prevent sabotage and allow the safe and timely movement of Union soldiers and supplies. The danger was real, for Confederates succeeded in burning railroad bridges and capturing locomotives on raids through Harrison County. Federal soldiers regularly patrolled the railroad, making its protection the central focus of military interest in Harrison County throughout the Civil War.⁵

The threat of war was of great concern to everyone in Harrison County. In a letter to his brother, William H. Stewart, a Harrison County farmer, indicated his belief that the events of the day were a forewarning of the Second Coming of Christ:

As it regards the condition of Ky, we all reason to fear that it will be . . . engaged in civil war, not with northern troops but amongst ourselves. [The] South [was] not satisfied with secession which is revolution but they shot the first gun. I say that both parties have done wrong and worthy of the most severe punishment but . . . [the South] commenced this unholy war. No telling where it will stop. Kentuckians is [sic] no coward. Times here is hard.

. . . This is a fast age in which we live. A fulfillment of holy writ speaking of a time of the approaching of the last day that should be perilous times. Once more there shall be war and rumor of war. Nation shall rise against nation, father against the son, son against the father. With this view of the subject we may believe that the second of coming of the Messiah is near at hand.⁶

In other words, Stewart was convinced that whichever side God was on would win: I feel at times that the last day is near at hand. . . . So . . . let us then put our trust in God and keep our powder dry.⁷ The war was an unnatural strife, he wrote shortly thereafter: You see the father and son divided and in battle array to slay each other . . . even though the Bible tell[s] me that parents should love their children. . . . [T]his is unnatural strife for they should love each other. Well what will apply to a family in this argument must apply to us as a nation.⁸

During the summer of 1860, the young men of Cynthiana were as interested in partying as politicking. There seems to be less excitement about the Presidential Election than ever I knew, wrote Joseph F. Scott of Cynthiana to a friend. The Breckenridge men seem to be rather down in the mouth while the Bell men are to the reverse. I attended one of the nicest ‘Pic nicks’ yesterday that you ever heard of, the girls all looked so neat and danced so sweet that I almost went into spasms about them; all of Cynthiana was there and Harrison County throwed in.⁹

When it came down to choosing sides in the sectional crisis, how did the men of Harrison County respond? There are several indicators that point to a majority supporting the Confederacy in the critical period 1860–1861: the percentage of soldiers who joined each side, the results of local elections, and many anecdotal accounts. In Kentucky in the 1860 presidential election, the Constitutional Union candidate, John Bell, won over the Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge; however, Harrison County supported Breckinridge with 55 percent of the vote, Bell receiving by contrast 41 percent. This vote led a Paris newspaper to assert: The Southern feeling is overwhelming in Harrison. As will be noted later, these percentages follow the breakdown in the number of enlistments from Harrison County, with a small majority joining the Confederacy.¹⁰ Although Breckinridge did not endorse secession, many Upper South secessionists supported his defense of slavery and the rights of southern states.¹¹

Further evidence of the county leaning toward supporting the South can be found in the two 1861 elections of June and August. In the June congressional elections, Unionists won seats in all but one of the ten state districts. But the State Rights Party (also called the Southern Rights Party) candidate, William E. Simms of Paris, a native of Harrison County seeking reelection to Congress, received slightly more votes from Harrison County than did the winner, John J. Crittenden, 1,157–1,010. Simms’s prosouthern views could not be mistaken, for he had delivered a fiery speech in Congress on the aggressions of the anti-slavery party in the north, supported Breckinridge for president, publicly encouraged Kentucky to secede, and later represented Kentucky in the Confederate Senate. Harrison County was one of only five central-eastern Kentucky counties giving a majority to this party, the other four being Owen, Scott, Anderson, and Morgan Counties. Southern supporters in Harrison County did not avoid the June elections, as some historians have argued they did elsewhere in Kentucky.¹² In the August election of legislators, Lucius Desha won as state representative from Harrison County’s district. Desha was a State Rights Party candidate and a supporter of Breckinridge in 1860. Considering that the majority of Kentucky legislators elected in 1861 were Unionists, it could be argued that Desha’s election pointed to a majority of voters in his district sympathetic to the Confederacy and secession. Voters knew his political party’s position on the sectional debate, which he alluded to in speeches, and his son’s Confederate recruiting a few weeks before the election was well publicized.

Desha’s predecessor in the legislature, William W. Cleary, shared his views and was a well-known southern sympathizer whose speeches advocated a state convention to consider secession. Cleary had in February 1861 sponsored prosouthern legislation that favored (1) asking Lincoln to withdraw Federal troops from the seceding states, (2) asking the Federal government to take no compulsory action against seceding states, (3) asking the governor to authorize a special vote for a state convention in Frankfort to make recommendations concerning Kentucky’s honor (or, in other words, whether the state should secede), and (4) convening that convention (if approved) by March 4, 1861. The resolutions failed to pass, but Cleary was thereafter associated with the secessionist movement and labeled a potentially disloyal citizen. A Unionist newspaper in Frankfort, the Daily Commonwealth, gave him a backhanded compliment while deriding his resolutions: This fellow made a very eloquent secession speech. . . . Mr. Cleary is an able man . . . the ablest man there [in the legislature] who is afraid of Lincoln and wants to secede before the 4th of March. Mr. Cleary favored a State Convention and a Southern Confederacy.¹³ On March 20, 1861, Cleary represented the Eighth Congressional District, along with Richard Hawes, the future Confederate governor of Kentucky, at the Frankfort State Rights Party convention. Desha and Cleary, two disunion politicians, contributed to Harrison County’s image as a den of secessionists.¹⁴ On March 21, however, there was an organized showing of Harrison County Union support when citizens countered Cleary’s resolutions by gathering 530 signatures on petitions presented to Governor Beriah Magoffin asking him not to call a state convention, labeling it illegal since the state constitution authorized only the legislature to take this action. With about twenty-four hundred white males over twenty-one in Harrison County, this petition cannot be considered a convincing presence of Union sentiment. Although public support for the Union while county sectional divisions were festering could have been dangerous to petitioners, this private correspondence to the governor was not published. Supporters of the state convention probably did not consider petitions necessary for their state representative had spoken for them by proposing it.¹⁵

Although the other state representative, Joseph Shawhan, was apparently less outspoken, he also voted in favor of a state convention. In the Senate race, Thornton F. Marshall, a former Breckinridge Democrat, won the Bracken-Harrison district; however, he broke with the party and was against a convention.¹⁶ In doing so he was probably representing the pro-Union feelings in his hometown of Augusta and other northern counties bordering the Ohio River.

As will be documented later in this chapter, initial recruiting in Harrison County resulted in seven Confederate and two Union companies. This indicates popular support for the Confederacy among white citizens early in the war. Union enlistments gradually narrowed the difference after drafts were imposed and African Americans permitted to join. The Harrison County historian Charles W. Feix has found that the county was generally divided between allegiance to the North or South along a line from Berry to Claysville, with the majority north of it joining the Union army and those south the Confederate.¹⁷ This line separates the county between hilly land in the northern portions and the gently sloping, deep-soiled southern section nearer Cynthiana and the river bottoms. Perhaps the wealthier landowners with better farmland, requiring more use of slaves, sided more with the South. An Oddville writer remembered: There were but few slaves in North Harrison.¹⁸ This was the historian Merton Coulter’s contention: It is generally true that the hilly country and the thinner soil was the stronghold of Unionism, while the level land and the more fertile soil bred southern sympathies. Coulter believed that this relationship generally held true both statewide and in single counties.¹⁹

Exceptions existed, of course. A Harrison County resident pointed this out, using as an example a village in the northern end of the county. He wrote: Take Antioch as the center; draw a circle with one mile radius and from within that circle there went forth . . . no less than twenty four men about equally divided between the blue and the gray, one of whom served on both sides.²⁰

One historian disagreed, insisting that there was no clear-cut distinction among different localities. James E. Copeland established an association between the number of slave owners in a county and the support given to secession based both on elections and on recruiting. Counties with great interest in slave owning would not be expected to aid the Union, he concluded, adding: Their influence . . . greatly exceeded their numbers. Although only 22 percent of potential voters in Harrison County were slave owners, ranking it thirty-first out of the state’s 109 counties, a majority voted for a southern supporter. Copeland also pointed out a relationship between past support for Democrats in presidential elections and later support for the Confederacy. He identified Harrison as one of the Kentucky counties in which the Democratic Party won an average of fifty percent or more of the popular vote during the seven Presidential elections 1836–1860.²¹

The historian Edward Conrad Smith disputed slavery’s influence on the vote, noting that Harrison and the others were not large slaveholding counties, whereas Woodford, with a high percentage of slaveholders, voted a majority to Union candidates. He suggested counties such as Harrison gave their votes to State Rights candidates because of the influence of outstanding political leaders. Simms was an incumbent currently serving in Congress, and Desha had been a state representative in prior years. Both were natives of Harrison County and popular politicians active in county affairs, all of which points to Smith’s view being at least one of several reasons citizens voted for the State Rights Party.²² As will be noted in a later chapter, only a small percentage of the masters of slaves who enlisted in the Union army qualified for a bounty under a government incentive program that rewarded owners who could give proof a slave enlisted, proof of ownership, a certificate of manumission freeing the slave, and proof of loyalty. Assuming that the first three conditions could be easily documented, it appears that as many as 80 percent of slave owners whose slaves enlisted could not meet the loyalty test. This indicates that a majority of Harrison County slave owners were southern sympathizers.²³

Union supporters expressed in their letters a belief that most people in the county were southern sympathizers. William W. Trimble, a prominent lawyer, a Union Democrat, and probably the leading supporter of the Union in Harrison County, wrote in his memoirs that the majority of the people [in Harrison County] were rebel sympathizers, and Henry H. Haviland, a Havilandsville farmer, merchant, and postmaster, had similar views.²⁴ Haviland recorded in a letter to his future wife in Woodford County, who favored secession, the political mood of Harrison County in April 1861 after Fort Sumter fell. He was visiting Cincinnati to sell a flatboat of farm produce when news of Fort Sumter was published. I never saw so much excitement in all my life, he noted. The town was alive with troops drilling all day and night. Returning to his northern Harrison home, he found the county divided but with a definite southern bias. The excitement is running high here; one company has left this country and there is now a cavalry or horse company being raised and there is nothing talked of but war, war, war in Cynthiana; it is not safe for a man to talk about or in favor of the Union. While traveling in northern Kentucky and Cincinnati he found the reverse to be true: If you are for secession [there] keep it to yourself. He attempted to rationalize Kentucky both staying in the Union, which he preferred, and supporting slavery. He thought that "every other man that loves the South and its institutions should not support the Black republican party but that Kentucky should nevertheless stay in the Union, the place to have our wrongs redressed: I am down on and will vote against secession [in the upcoming August elections]. Cynthiana’s reputation as a nest for southern sympathizers is apparent when, by September 1861, a Cincinnati newspaper was referring to the town as a pestiferous Secession hole, which has gained a great notoriety throughout the country, on account of the boldness of the rebels thereabouts."²⁵

An anomaly in this analysis was the May 4, 1861, vote for twelve delegates to a proposed border state convention. Unionist delegates won in Harrison County, reflecting the statewide results whereby the Democratic Union Party received 96 percent of votes cast. The State Rights Party, however, had withdrawn most of its candidates, desiring instead a separate state convention to consider secession. Voter turnout, therefore, was much lower for this election, and, in Harrison County, the total vote was only 37 percent of the 1860 presidential election totals, or 3,183. The historian James W. Finck argued that this was not as great a Union victory as the numbers indicate—for various reasons but primarily because secessionists failed to vote.²⁶

By the August 1863 elections for members of Congress and state offices, however, Union candidates replaced the secessionists. Cleary had left the state for the Confederacy, and Lucius Desha, having recently been cleared in a Federal treason indictment, did not run for reelection. This created an opportunity for Union candidates to be voted into office, with Francis L. Cleveland in the Senate and A. Harry Ward in the House of Representatives. But, as will be discussed in a later chapter, there were reports that Federal soldiers interfered with elections, preventing citizens from voting and candidates from running for office if they aided in the rebellion.

Fighting Has Commenced

The news of Ft. Sumter’s surrender on April 14 touched off a week of demonstrations by citizens supporting the southern cause. On April 26, Lucius Desha presided over a meeting in Cynthiana that, according to a Louisville newspaper, adopted resolutions urging Governor Magoffin to issue a proclamation calling a Sovereignty Convention, to pass an ordinance of secession. On April 20, in an attempt to lessen tensions, state senator James F. Robinson made a speech advocating armed neutrality, a concept that was soon challenged by Representative William W. Cleary at a crowded courthouse meeting. A strongly worded resolution was passed: Resolved, that Kentucky’s sympathies are with the Confederate States of America, and we denounce the doctrine of ‘armed neutrality’ as base and cowardly and utterly unworthy of Kentucky and Kentuckians. Afterward, a procession of Cynthiana ladies presented Captain Desha with a Confederate flag, and a fifteen-gun salute celebrating the fall of Ft. Sumter followed, as previously authorized. The tumultuous week ended with the disunion rhetoric escalating into Jo Desha’s call to arms.²⁷

As mentioned in Henry Haviland’s correspondence, Harrison County provided one of the first Kentucky companies to join the Confederate army.²⁸ From the ranks of the Harrison Rifles, a Kentucky State Guard unit, Captain Jo Desha recruited a company of 107 men that on the morning of April 22, 1861, gathered in the upstairs courtroom of the Harrison County courthouse, where the Reverend Howard Henderson addressed them in a fittingly patriotic manner and bestowed God’s blessing on their mission. Apparently this send-off was conducted while the court was in session, for that same day the resignation of Jo Desha as county surveyor was announced in open court. The courthouse bell was rung, and, possibly for the first time at a Kentucky courthouse, the first Confederate national flag (the Stars and Bars) was raised on a yard flagpole. After a formation and roll call on Main Street in front of the stately Greek-Revival courthouse, Captain Desha proudly marched the fledgling soldiers, waving a Confederate flag, through downtown Cynthiana to the passenger depot to board the Lexington-bound train cars. Some carried bowie knives and daggers made by William C. Fryman, a local blacksmith. This Salem gunsmith also built a double-barreled rifle and shotgun for Private Benjamin A. Taylor in Desha’s company. Another craftsman at Berry’s Station, William Slade, probably made knives for some of the men since he was arrested in October 1861 for making weapons for Rebel soldiers. Escorting the company were local militia units: the Harrison Rifles, the McDowell Guards, and the Silver Grays. The company carried the forty guns issued to the Harrison Rifles from the state arsenal.²⁹

Desha apparently made no attempt to conceal his recruiting activities, for a Lexington newspaper had reported a week earlier that a military company was being formed in Cynthiana and had already recruited fifty men. Since hearing about Ft. Sumter, Desha had been openly posting broadsides around the county stating: Attention, Soldiers! Captain Desha’s company is hereby notified to hold themselves in readiness to march at a moment’s notice. Fighting has commenced. Being the first to leave the county, the soldiers surely attracted a large crowd of both curious onlookers and well-wishers. The sight of Desha’s men boarding the railroad cars reinforced a perception that the incessant talk of war, war, war was not baseless.³⁰

During a stopover in Lexington, Captain John Hunt Morgan’s Lexington Rifles welcomed Desha’s company with a public meal at the Phoenix Hotel. But the highlight of the trip was a confrontation at Frankfort with a pro-Union crowd who probably received advance knowledge of the train’s military occupants. While there, Desha’s men shouted for Jeff Davis and the southern Confederacy and, as the train left the station, flaunted the secession flag brought from Cynthiana. The partisan crowd at the depot shouted back Union slogans and began to stone the train. This incited the Rebel recruits to fire their pistols, but no one was reported injured in the fracas.³¹ Apparently, there were some young boys in the crowd, for the Shelby News accused the Harrison men of firing their pistols at children.³²

While the train was stopped at another passenger depot before reaching Louisville, an eastbound train passed by with Governor Magoffin, James B. Clay, and Humphrey Marshall on board. The Governor begged Captain Desha . . . not to leave the state but to stay at home as their service would be needed here, a Louisville newspaper reported. All three men attempted to persuade Desha to remain, for the governor was planning to support neutrality resolutions in the legislature and needed an armed militia for Kentucky’s self-defense to keep both sides out.³³ Desha was unconvinced and continued on to Louisville, where the company was mustered in as Company C, 1st Regiment Infantry, on April 23, 1861, and joined three Louisville companies that left on April 25 for the Confederate army in Nashville.³⁴ Six more companies from Harrison County would follow Desha to join the Confederate army: four the same year and two more in 1862.

Lucius Desha and the Lincoln Guns

It was a railroad-related event that brought the first Civil War incident to Harrison County when supporters of strict neutrality interrupted the delivery of Union firearms. Governor Beriah Magoffin issued a proclamation of neutrality on May 20, 1861, forbidding any movement upon the soil of Kentucky by troops from either side, a position that the Kentucky House and Senate adopted in resolutions. But opponents to the policy believed that neutrality was as unconstitutional as secession.³⁵ Lincoln argued against neutrality in an address to Congress on July 4, 1861, and, while not specifically naming Kentucky, pointed out: Under the guise of neutrality it would tie the hands of Union men, and freely pass supplies from among them, to the insurrectionists which it could not do as an open enemy. . . . [It is,] nevertheless, treason in effect.³⁶ In a frequently quoted letter dated September 22, 1861, to the Cynthiana native Orville H. Browning, a senator from Illinois, Lincoln expressed Kentucky’s importance to the Union: I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.³⁷

In mid-May 1861, at the urging of former US representative Garrett Davis of Bourbon County, the Maysville native William Bull Nelson, and Secretary of War Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln ordered Federal commanders to distribute five thousand rifles (later known as Lincoln guns) in Kentucky for home guards and other Union men. Chase believed that this covert operation would help carry Kentucky into the Union while respecting the state’s controversial neutrality stance.³⁸ Part of the shipment, sent by rail overnight from Covington, was handled so secretly that the train reached Paris and Lexington May 18 without fanfare. But soon the clandestine mission was brought to light, and the news spread rapidly, compelling an outraged Representative William W. Cleary to call for an investigation of the legality of the gun delivery. A Louisville newspaper derided Cleary’s motion, calling him a secessionist, and believed that the motion did not carry only after Union legislators added the requirement that the investigation include the bringing of arms into Kentucky for Confederate sympathizers.³⁹

In neighboring Bracken County, two home guard companies received Lincoln guns, which upset a southern supporter in the same county who wanted equal access to the firearms. In a petition to Governor Magoffin, the man requested a waiver of the requirement to sign an oath of allegiance to the Federal government, noting that a third company composed of men who would not take the oath was disbanded for want of guns. He also complained that the guns could be turned against Kentucky if the state later joined the South.⁴⁰ But the decision as to who received the muskets was out of Magoffin’s hands, and the Federal agents were careful to bar them from persons potentially disloyal. The Lincoln guns issued to the Bracken County Home Guards were used against Morgan’s raiders in the First Battle of Cynthiana. Some of the weapons were obtained to arm Captain G. W. Berry’s home guard unit at Berry Station: They were armed by the U.S. Government, with what were called ‘Lincoln Guns’ furnished to Ky., through the kind offices of Garrett Davis, J. W. Menzies, and others.⁴¹

The State Rights Party candidate Lucius Desha also condemned the delivery of guns through Harrison, and neutrality became a campaign issue. Before he was elected state representative in August 1861, Desha had laid the groundwork for his later proneutrality stance when, according to an April 18, 1861, Frankfort newspaper, he proclaimed at a Cynthiana meeting that a Northern army should not pass through Kentucky to subjugate the South, except over his dead body.⁴² It was an embarrassment for the Harrison County neutrality proponents that the Lincoln guns passed through their county, in their view, illegally. As mentioned before, in August 1861, Desha, a supporter of John C. Breckinridge in the 1860 presidential election, was the candidate of the State Rights Party (also known as the Southern Rights Party) for representative of Harrison and Bracken Counties in the state legislature. This party, led by Governor Magoffin and composed largely of former Breckinridge Democrats, promoted the secession movement by advocating for a state convention in early 1861 to consider whether to secede. The Union men of Harrison County, supported by the Paris Western Citizen, approached Dr. Joel C. Frazer, a popular physician, to run against him. The Paris newspaper pleaded: We hope his patriotic impulses will induce him to be a candidate. Frazer, a neighbor of Desha’s, declined the offer.⁴³

The Cynthiana city attorney, Harry Ward, who was strongly pro-Union, did challenge Desha. That spring the two candidates spoke at various locations, including Oddville’s Temperance Hall, which had a thriving division with a large membership and weekly gatherings [that] were quite an interesting event. Observers could hear the strain in their voices caused by the threat of sectional division, which was reflected in uncharacteristically guarded language: Ward . . . was lacking in the scintillation of wit, humor and anecdote that always made him an interesting and popular speaker. Desha was practical and profound. He, naturally, inclined to the conservative southern view, and was no extremist.⁴⁴ The sectional controversy eventually divided at least one church in that community. Members of the Oddville Methodist Church who supported the Confederacy moved their membership to the nearby Mount Pleasant Methodist Church.⁴⁵ Henry H. Haviland assessed the election in a letter and described supporters of Ward and Desha holding political barbecues near his farm in northeastern Harrison County only 3 miles apart, one secession & the other Union: Both was largely attended; both parties are using every means possible to elect their candidate. General Desha is the States Rights candidate and Harry Ward . . . is the Union [Democrat] candidate; for my part I certainly will vote for Harry Ward and of course hope he will be elected for I think secession is only another name for ruin for Kentucky.⁴⁶ Lucius Desha won the contest and took his place in the Kentucky House of Representatives, filling a seat he had last held in 1850.

In mid-August 1861, after Lieutenant William Nelson had already established Camp Dick Robinson in Garrard County as a recruiting station for Kentucky Union volunteers, another shipment of guns, ammunition, food, and military clothing destined for that post departed by rail from Covington. But, while the Lincoln guns were kept secret, the news of this latest special cargo quickly reached Harrison County.⁴⁷ A large crowd turned back the thirteen-car train at Cynthiana when it arrived on August 15. A Frankfort newspaper accused Governor Magoffin of commissioning General Lucius Desha and his son Jo Desha to lead the protestors. It further alleged that the elder Desha demanded a guarantee that no more arms would be brought to Kentucky by the General Government, threatening that if it was done again the road would be destroyed.⁴⁸

Desha denied particulars of the article in a letter to the editor but admitted that the crowd at Cynthiana included a number of the best citizens of our county . . . who believed . . . sending Government arms to Government troops encamped in the State was in violation of the position taken by Kentucky of neutrality. He argued that a representative of the railroad who was at Cynthiana the day before the shipment was to pass through the county ordered the arms to be unloaded at Falmouth, not Cynthiana, and returned to Covington. The agent, according to Desha, had on his own accord resolved [that] no more [Federal government guns] should be carried on the road without proper guarantees to indemnify the company for losses. Desha wrote that, when the passenger train arrived at the Cynthiana depot in the evening, he simply asked the agent to allow a committee of two men to examine its cargo to dispel rumors that government guns and munitions were hidden on it. He also denied being commissioned by Governor Magoffin to monitor for illegal weapons shipments through Cynthiana.⁴⁹ A Cincinnati newspaper reported that the agent on the train was R. B. Bowler, a director and major investor in the Kentucky Central Railroad. Desha, too, was a director and stockholder. Possibly the two directors preplanned the handling of the shipment both to avoid a more serious brawl or the destruction of railroad property and to allow Desha to make a political statement. The newspaper, under the headline Mob at Cynthiana, stated that Bowler had no right to assure that military arms would not pass through Kentucky: The Government will not ask him or the Cynthianians either, whether arms shall pass over that road. Cynthiana appears to need special attention. It should be severely purged.⁵⁰

Desha’s explanation did not entirely disprove the essence of the newspaper’s accusations: a shipment of government arms was turned back because of a proneutrality (and secessionist) crowd gathered at the Cynthiana depot, with the participation of General Desha, who had previously threatened to turn the train back. It is apparent that the railroad official was aware of threats at Cynthiana to stop the train for violating Kentucky’s neutrality. Bowler’s actions protecting the railroad company from possible losses and Desha’s insistence on examining the train’s cargo demonstrated that Desha and the other citizens would have stopped the train with the guns and munitions if it had reached Cynthiana. Pointing out this incident while documenting in the Danville Quarterly Review examples of the secession conspiracy in Kentucky, Robert J. Breckenridge named Desha in a list of persons of secession tendencies who claimed and exercised the right of inspecting depots and burden trains. The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer published on August 21 an anonymous Cynthiana letter to the editor that attempted to downplay the support of citizens for the Southern cause. It stated that the few dozen followers and disciples of Jeff. Davis involved in the affair were ruining the town’s reputation and that they were only a Court-house clique of officeholders and office-seekers.⁵¹

Jo Desha could not have been involved in the affair, for he was with the Confederate army in Virginia. After later being notified of the incident, he elatedly wrote on August 25 to his brothers back home that the action of the Rebel sympathizers caused him to be proud to be from Harrison County.⁵² His brother, Ben Desha, who was recruiting a Confederate company about this time, seems to be a more likely suspect, for, in addition to preventing the distribution of the Union weapons, he may have wanted to seize them for his new recruits. During August 1861, five hundred rifles eventually reached the Harrison County Home Guards.⁵³

Leslie Combs, the clerk of the state court of appeals and a devoted Unionist, wrote President Lincoln the next day, suggesting that Bowler and Governor Magoffin orchestrated the affair: "[The] munitions were stopped at Cynthiana yesterday by a mob, set on, by the Governor, in my opinion. As further evidence, he described a Lexington meeting he had attended with Bowler and others that evening at which he found the Governor & his Secretary & many other secessionists . . . including Ex-Governor [Charles S.] Morehead. Combs wrote that the guns and munitions should have been shipped by rail or boat through Louisville, thus avoiding Harrison County: Cynthiana is a dark hole of Traitors."⁵⁴

The gun delivery was good news for the Union element of the county, which had unsuccessfully sought firearms through legislation. The city and county had earlier attempted to arm a local militia. At the Cynthiana City Council meeting on April 19, 1861, councilmen approved the formation of a committee to involve all white male citizens over 21 years of age into a police force subject to rules and regulations of the council.⁵⁵ A city militia was never created. Then, in May 1861, the Kentucky House of Representatives passed a bill authorizing the Harrison County court to borrow $20,000 for purchasing firearms, sabers, cannons, and war equipment for county use.⁵⁶ But court records do not mention actually borrowing the funds, and no weapons were purchased. As we will see, Cynthiana’s mayor and three of the seven council members, along with the county judge, were without question prosecessionists. In view of this, the efforts of the city and the county to get their hands on weapons may have been to arm volunteers heading south.⁵⁷

Two weeks after the affair involving Desha’s inspection of a train, a party of secessionists decided to delay military shipments into Kentucky by destroying Kimbrough’s Bridge a mile and a half south of Cynthiana. On the night of August 29, five persons set three fires under the structure. When two German railroad workers guarding the bridge ran to the scene, the guerrillas shot them, killing one and wounding the other. Major Kimbrough and his slaves, who lived on the adjacent farm, were credited with putting out the fire. After the wounded guard identified the attackers, the sheriff arrested Charles Fowler in connection with the shooting, but it was not until November that three more men were arrested at Lair’s Station—George Casey, I. N. Lair, and James Lair. Casey allegedly confessed to being in the party of five, and I. N. Lair was said to have offered a reward for burning the bridge. All three were taken to the Newport Barracks prison escorted by a deputy US marshal. The community was outraged by the murder, and the next day in the courthouse a public meeting was held at which resolutions were passed condemning the act and advocating mutual protection. On being notified of the affair, Governor Magoffin dispatched the state guard general T. L. Crittenden to Cynthiana to assess the protection required for the railroad.⁵⁸

The Lincoln guns episode and subsequent confrontations designed to stop the shipment of Union weapons could have provoked the beginnings of an internal Kentucky civil war as some had feared. There were two armed militias taking opposite stances on secession, with the state guards supported by the governor and the State Rights Party and the Unionists organizing and arming the home guards. There were several state guard companies in Harrison County at the time, but there were no reports that they played a role in attempts to seize the guns.⁵⁹

State Guard Troops Bid Farewell and Head to Dixie

In March 1860, the Kentucky legislature established an active militia, the Kentucky State Guard, and also provided for an inactive enrolled militia, which was simply a periodic listing by county clerks of men eligible for military service. Simon B. Buckner was appointed inspector general of the Kentucky State Guard, with each participating county having a regiment and colonel. There were several Kentucky State Guard and Home Guard units in Harrison County, and a state enrolled militia was organized, the latter being little more than a paper organization. The state guards were disbanded in September 1861.⁶⁰

In May 1861, soon after Jo Desha’s Confederate company left Harrison County, Colonel Roger W. Hanson, the commander of the First Regiment Kentucky State Guard, held an encampment near Lexington with companies from five nearby towns, including Cynthiana. The following month, on June 13–19, he ordered another encampment on the future site of Camp Frazer, a Federal army camp just north of Cynthiana. Among the units attending were John Hunt Morgan’s Lexington Rifles, the Hamilton Guards from Bourbon County, the Harrison Rifles (led by Dr. Hervey McDowell of Cynthiana), the Kentucky Rangers, the Ashland Rifles, and the Hanson Guards. Hanson ordered the officers to instruct their companies to leave their politics at home. . . . [and] resolve to be not the politicians but soldiers of Kentucky; leaving to others to settle the politics of the State while we fight for its defense. Contrary to Hanson’s appeal, politics no doubt dominated the evening campfire conversations, with the June 20 congressional elections approaching. As will be cited later, the home guards were politically associated with Union Democrats. With this in mind, one could conclude that the State Rights candidates William E. Simms and Lucius Desha pressured Hanson to hold the regimental encampment in Harrison County in order to influence the election. Hanson and Morgan joined the Confederate army later that year, taking along most of the men serving under them.⁶¹

The Kentucky State Guard Third Regiment held another encampment called Camp Garnett near Cynthiana between July 17 and July 23. The new Military Board of Kentucky, created in May 1861, had prohibited state guard meetings, but this event had already been planned. One unit attending was the Mason Rifles, whose trip, which started in Maysville, was delayed in Covington on July 15 after a rumor spread that its members would be carrying the Secession banner. A skeptical force of Union companies in that city let the men proceed by rail to Cynthiana only after their captain made assurances that it was a Union company. He admitted having a mixed company of Unionists and secessionists, but they would march under the stars and stripes.⁶²

The encampment was held in a twenty-acre pasture belonging to Thomas T. Garnett, on the South Fork of the Licking River at the mouth of Mill Creek between Poindexter and Robinson, near Garnett Station, six miles north of Cynthiana. A visitor described the scene: Surrounded with shade trees, the tents of the soldiers and the marquees of the officers intermingling forming a picturesque appearance. The stars and stripes and State flag were conspicuous. The commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel H. T. Buckner; he was assisted by Major George D. Allen and Major G. B. Harris. Other officers attending were Captain J. M. Curry, First Lieutenant P. Hall, and Second Lieutenant C. B. Woodson (Licking Rangers, Falmouth); Lieutenant Jenkins (Hays Rangers, Morgan Station); Captain W. C. Respass (Buckner Guards, Florence); Lieutenant Blackburn (Maderia Guards, Covington); Captain John R. Ashton (Washington Artillery, Newport); Captain J. M. Stansifer (Boone Guards, Union); Captain C. G. Cady (Mason Rifles, Maysville); Captain B. J. Beall (Campbell Rangers, Alexandria); Captain Ben Desha, First Lieutenant W. W. Cleary, Second Lieutenant T. W. Anderson, and Third Lieutenant A. G. Beall (Jackson Rifles, Cynthiana); and Captain C. DeMoss (Crittenden Guards, Newport). An estimated five hundred men were in attendance. Three other Harrison County companies were not present for they had already disbanded, with most joining the Confederate army. The Washington Artillery arrived without its two cannons because the mayor of Newport was afraid that secessionists would seize them. This mistrust was noted by a visitor to the camp who wrote: The impression which has got abroad that Camp Garnett is composed of Secessionists altogether is a mistake. They do not talk politics at all, even if the subject is broached by an outsider. If their sentiments are in favor of secession, they very wisely keep them locked in their own bosoms. These men were following orders to avoid all political discussions.⁶³

Daily activities were as follows: Reveille at four and a half A.M.; squad drill from five to six; company drill six to seven; breakfast at seven; tick [sick] call at eight; morning reports at eight and a half; guard mounting at nine; officers’ drill from ten to eleven; fatigue call at eleven; dinner at one P.M.; battalion drill at four; dress parade at six; supper at seven; tattoo at nine and a half; taps at ten. Bedding straw was provided for horses and for soldiers’ bed sacks. Rations issued included fresh beef, bacon, bread, beans, rice, coffee, sugar, vinegar, candles, soap,