When the Civil War began, both Northerners and Southerners believed that they were the victims of aggression. The bombardment of Fort Sumter was to the North a clear example of Southern belligerence. The South considered itself under attack as early as 1854 when conflict arose in Kansas and the use of violence to end slavery became acceptable to certain parties in the North. Indeed, John Brown’s raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, with the intent of inciting a slave rebellion, and the acclaim of Brown as a martyr by some Northerners increased this sentiment. For Tennesseans, the idea that one side had attacked the other became the overriding factor when the voters cast their ballots on the issue of secession. In February 1861, this feeling was restrained by the possibility of peaceful separation between the sections; however, in June 1861, when another vote was held, the war had begun, and the only choice for Tennesseans was whom to join in attacking whom.
Public speeches by civic leaders and newspaper editorials in both the North and the South in 1861 called for retaliation against the aggressors, and the men who went to war in 1861 saw vengeance as a reasonable action to be used against the other side. Because the war was fought primarily in the South, this section would feel the hard hand of war more than the North. When organized armies met on the battlefield, luck, numbers, and skill might bring victory, but the opportunity for retribution was limited by the ability of the other army to defend itself. The civilian population was not able to shield itself effectively, and the desire for revenge against the society that had attacked the Union was directed at them. Civilians took what steps they could to strike back, often resorting to guerrilla warfare.
While it is appropriate for students of history to focus on the issues that moved governments to go to war, they must not neglect the motives that induced men to take up arms. Their reasons may well be different from those of the governments involved, at least in the beginning of the conflict. Indeed, in the years 1861–1865, and continuing to 1877, soldiers talked much about retribution. This clearly was the intention of many of the war’s participants, and Tennessee was one location where intent became action. This emphasis on the settling of scores contradicts the popular notion that the Civil War was a gentlemen’s war in which civilians were seldom molested. This claim also challenges the veracity of Abraham Lincoln’s statement in his Second Inaugural Address that the U.S. government held “malice toward none.” In truth, there was a great deal of malice toward the South in the hearts of many Northerners, for, in their minds, the South had initiated the war. This antipathy began to show itself almost as soon as the first Union soldiers set foot on Southern soil, and it continued until the last left at the end of Reconstruction. As early as 1861 and 1862, Northern enlisted men and low-ranking officers implemented a hard-war policy that sought to punish the Southern populace. By 1863, it was accepted as official policy endorsed by the White House and the War Department and carried out by the military forces of the United States. Thus, the economic infrastructure of the South, including homes and farms, was considered a valid military target. Civilian deaths, therefore, became inevitable. The home fires were in the line of fire.
Although there was some contact between civilians and Union forces in Tennessee as campaigns evolved, most Tennesseans would not find themselves near a battlefield or in the path of major troop movements. For the majority of the state’s residents, contact with Union soldiers was limited to small foraging parties or garrisons posted along the railroads. Discipline was lax in these small units, especially among those engaged in foraging. Northern troops behind the front lines were generally under the command of the provost marshal general. Documents detailing their actions are not a part of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion but, rather, contained in a separate collection called Provost Marshal Records of the United States Army. Sadly, these records have been largely neglected by historians.
The duties of the provost troops during the war included seeking out spies, capturing deserters, and arresting civilians suspected of disloyalty; investigating the theft or misuse of government property; controlling travel in the military zone by issuing passes and monitoring government transportation; maintaining the records of military parolees and those who took the oath of allegiance. Each army post had a provost officer who, in addition to carrying out these duties, could also convene military commissions to try cases involving violations of military orders, departures from the laws of war, and other offenses that arose under military jurisdiction. Since most of Tennessee was under martial law, the provost marshal handled all disputes that normally would have gone before a civil court. These included disagreements over property boundaries, ownership of livestock, fair market value of property, and disturbances of the peace. But the provosts also found themselves dealing with issues of rape, arson, robbery, and murder as well as with the activities of Confederate cavalry units and guerrillas operating behind Union lines.
In 1862, the Union Army of the Cumberland moved into Middle Tennessee following the victories of General U. S. Grant at Forts Henry and Donelson. The commander of this force, Gen. Don Carlos Buell, was dedicated to restoring the Union, an objective that Lincoln declared to be his primary focus in the early days of the war. The conciliatory attitude that Buell adopted toward secessionists alienated the commander from many of his troops who had come South to punish the Rebels.1 One Union commander, Gen. John Pope, disagreed with the Buell’s gentle approach, a position that he made clear in the behavior he allowed his men to pursue. Pope’s dedication to hard-war policies in West Tennessee won the approval of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and of Abraham Lincoln, who brought Pope east to command Federal forces in Virginia. In that theater, Pope made himself notorious by allowing his men to live off the land, take hostages, force civilians to labor for the army, and deport all those who refused to take the oath of allegiance, women and children included. This policy continued until Pope was soundly defeated at Second Manassas in the summer of 1862.
The Union advance in Middle Tennessee led to the occupation of the village of Wartrace in Bedford County, an area noted for Unionist sentiment. By the late spring of 1862, however, the Unionist citizens of Wartrace had filed a complaint with Buell alleging that numerous robberies had been committed by Northern troops, that homes were routinely looted, and that several women, both black and white, had been raped. The final straw that sparked the complaint was the attempted gang rape of the wife and daughter of the leading Unionist in the town, which was frustrated by the intervention of several male citizens. While these events were transpiring in Middle Tennessee, the western part of the state was being tormented by Col. Charles Jennison’s Seventh Kansas. The actions of Jennison’s Jayhawks were characterized by one Union officer as nothing short of “banditry, brutality, and cold-blooded murder.”2
In all Union-occupied areas of Tennessee, one response of the Confederate population was the organization of guerrilla bands. The prewar militia system provided a base for the organization of such bands since the men in each community had some rudimentary knowledge of military drill and military organization. Conscription had not yet been implemented, which left at home many able-bodied men who had seen no need to volunteer in 1861 but who now confronted the obvious need to defend their homes. Soon, Union boats carrying supplies along the rivers were being shot at whenever the channel brought them close to shore, forage parties were bushwhacked, marching columns were ambushed, and railroads were sabotaged. The rural nature of Tennessee gave guerrillas plenty of room in which to roam, while knowledge of the local countryside provided them a significant advantage. Union forces routinely retaliated against the local civilian population where the attack occurred, thus creating more guerrillas since those harmed by the retaliatory strikes often sought revenge. When the pro-Union elements of the population became involved, a true civil war ensued, leaving a bitterness that lasted for decades.
In the autumn of 1862, Gen. Braxton Bragg led a Confederate army through Tennessee in his invasion of Kentucky. This move forced the Union general Buell to withdraw most of his troops north to confront the Rebels. As the Federal troops retreated, local guerrillas sprang into action. The Union retreat through Lincoln and Rutherford counties saw men lost to guerrillas every day. These partisan bands took no prisoners, or, if they did, they held them only long enough to reach a place where they could kill them at their leisure. Retaliation from the Northern troops followed as a matter of course. Charles Anderson, a former vice president of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, recalled that, when Buell’s troops passed his home at Anderson’s Station near Murfreesboro, they burned his house, barns, and other outbuildings. The troops had first looted Anderson’s home, then took the portraits of his parents outside and ran sabers through them. Embittered by this destruction, Anderson decided to support the Confederate cause and joined the staff of General Nathan Bedford Forrest.3
On occasion, guerrillas joined together in large bands and served alongside regular Confederate troops in some military operation. Adam R. Johnson and T. G. Woodward participated in an effort to capture Clarksville, Tennessee, from Union forces. The Rebels even threatened the town of Dover, a major Union supply base. The Confederates, however, were unable to hold Clarksville in the face of an advance by Federal troops.4
It was during this time that Ellis Harper began to make life miserable for Northern forces around the “twin tunnels” on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad near Gallatin, eventually earning for himself the reputation of a fierce opponent of the Union and a dauntless guerrilla. Harper had enlisted in Company I, Thirtieth Tennessee Infantry, on November 22, 1861. His regiment made up part of the garrison of Fort Donelson when it surrendered in February 1862. A prisoner of war, Harper was sent to Camp Butler, Illinois, but escaped soon after. On returning to his home in Sumner County, he found C. A. Peddicord organizing a company of scouts. This service appealed to Harper, and soon he had raised his own band to fight within the organizational structure that Peddicord had established. When Peddicord and many of his men were captured, Harper became the leading partisan commander in the area north of Nashville. His career would last for the duration of the war.
In mid-to late 1862, civil life deteriorated in the Confederacy as more and more territory came under Federal occupation. The North’s official policy of conciliation was being questioned by the actions of the men in the ranks who had frequent contact with recalcitrant Southerners. Their desire for vengeance was reinforced by Confederate battlefield successes, which erased many of the gains made by the Union earlier in the year. Devastation of civilian property became widespread, and the organization of partisan units increased. The Union general James Negley complained of guerrillas around Columbia, Tennessee, while other bands sprang up near Union-occupied Fort Donelson, Memphis, and in the Jackson Purchase area of western Kentucky. The Union general Grenville Dodge reported from Trenton, Tennessee, that all nine hundred cavalrymen under his command were busy chasing guerrillas who “were determined to give us work.”5
Late autumn and early winter of 1862 were relatively quiet in Tennessee. Home fires burned peacefully, while the major armies maneuvered and fought in Kentucky. However, when these armies returned to Middle Tennessee to confront each other along the banks of Stones River, the civilian population again experienced the hardships associated with civil war. As the Union Army of the Cumberland and the Confederate Army of Tennessee fought to a tactical draw at Murfreesboro in the last days of the year, Confederate cavalry under Gens. Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Hunt Morgan, and Earl Van Dorn devastated Union supply lines in West and Middle Tennessee as well as in north Mississippi. Inspired by these raids, Southern civilians sought ways to participate in the war effort. One of these civilians was Mrs. Clara Judd, the widow of the Episcopal rector of Winchester, Tennessee. Judd’s parents lived in Minnesota, but her adult children were employed by a Confederate government factory in Atlanta. Learning of a projected Confederate cavalry raid in her area, Judd traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, where she purchased a sock-knitting machine. She returned to Tennessee with the machine and was intentionally captured during the raid. The knitting machine was then forwarded to Atlanta, where it was copied by machinists working for the Confederate quartermaster department. Judd was later apprehended by Union authorities and was tried before a military commission. She was sentenced and imprisoned at Camp Butler, where she remained for the duration of the war.6
The tedium of winter encampment caused a waning of discipline in Northern ranks. Foraging parties became more disorderly and often turned into robbing expeditions. Such actions brought the soldiers some excitement but also increased the hardship on civilians, sparking an increase in guerrilla activity. The inability of Andrew Johnson, the military governor of the state, to establish a functioning civil government only exacerbated the situation.
The beginning of the Vicksburg Campaign left West Tennessee as a secondary theater of operations while Gen. William Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland struggled to amass supplies and men before moving against Braxton Bragg. The success of Rosecrans in clearing Middle Tennessee of large bodies of organized Confederates increased resistance by Confederate guerrillas.
While foraging, Rosecrans’s soldiers often found opportunities to exhibit their contempt for Southern civilians. On July 8, 1863, the general noted that stragglers had been committing robberies and that quartermasters were foraging in violation of army regulations. He reminded his corps commanders that “disloyalty does not forfeit the rights of humanity.” At the same time, Chief of Staff James A. Garfield reported that “the lawlessness of our soldiers on foraging parties will make bushwhackers faster than any other thing.”7 These words proved to be prophetic.
The presence of the Federal army following the successful summer campaigns of 1863 created an opportunity for Tennessee Unionists to enlist in Union army units. One such unit was the Fifth Tennessee Cavalry, USA, sometimes referred to as the First Middle Tennessee Cavalry. As early as August 1863, the Union general W. C. Whitaker, commanding the First Division, Granger’s Corps, Army of the Cumberland, noted that the “cavalry of Colonel Galbraith, the 5th Tennessee, is giving me excessive trouble, and worrying and plundering throughout the country whenever they go out. They are under no control or discipline at all as far as I can learn. Several instances have come to my attention of their insulting females.”8
Such actions escalated the conflict with the guerrillas. Over a period of four weeks during the winter of 1863–1864, five men—William Lemmons, Cyrus Lee Cathey, Jesse B. Neeren, Thomas R. West, and Benjamin West—attacked Union supporters and soldiers near Boons Hill, Tennessee, a few miles west of Fayetteville. In this foray, the guerrilla band killed Irwin C. McLean, a Unionist citizen, and robbed him of his valuables. On the same day, another pro-Union man, Samuel J. Wakefield, was killed. Guerrillas also struck near Shelbyville, killing William White, a citizen, and Grey Hyde, a member of the Fifth Tennessee. William Smith, another trooper in the Fifth, escaped with his life but lost his horse and weapons. Newcomb Thompson, another Unionist, lost several mules in the same attack. On January 15, 1864, this same band attacked a Union foraging party consisting of two wagons and a small escort of soldiers. They drove off the escort, captured and burned the wagons, and made off with the horses. These guerrillas were captured in February, sentenced to death, and executed on June 17, 1864.9
At the same time, only a few miles away another band of guerrillas led by Burton Tolley assaulted Federal forage wagons near the village of Mulberry. On December 26, a foraging party of ten wagons and a guard of seventy men were sent to collect foodstuffs from local farmers. The officer in charge divided the wagons and guards into several parties on reaching his objective in order to speed up the expedition. One of the wagons and four men became separated from the others by a distance of approximately two hundred yards. They were subsequently bushwhacked by insurgents, who captured the soldiers, the wagon, and the horses. The guerrillas then retreated to a safe location near the Elk River, where they executed three of the soldiers. The survivor returned to his command with the story of what had happened.10 The army sent a detachment of mounted soldiers to Mulberry, but they returned empty-handed, for the guerrillas had taken to the hills. Since the guerrillas could not be caught, the soldiers arrested John Tolley, the father of the local insurgent leader, Thomas Baley, Dr. Philander Whitier, and Newton Whitier, even though none of these men was thought to have had anything to do with the attack.11 Frustrated, Union general George Thomas sent another detachment to Mulberry with instructions to seize $30,000 worth of property, to be used to indemnify the families of the dead Union soldiers. This mission was carried out, though the residents of the community filed a complaint that $60,000 had actually been taken.12 In current dollars, over $2, 400,000 worth of money, livestock, and household goods was removed from a town of only 150 people, leaving the residents destitute.
Such actions led Gen. Alpheus Williams, one of the Union heroes of Gettysburg and now in Tennessee with Slocum’s Corps of the Army of the Potomac, to comment in a letter to his daughter: “The making of fortunes I do not understand. I could have made one here if I had consented to have sold my self-respect and the good name of my children to the third and fourth generation.”13 Gen. Lovell Rousseau wrote in an official report dated December 31, 1863: “From impressments, legal and illegal, and from thefts, there are very few horses, mules, or oxen left on the farms, and those that are left are almost worthless. . . . Every mounted regiment that goes through the country takes what it pleases of stock, &c. . . . Between the loyal and the disloyal no discrimination is made. Unless an order be made preventing future impressments and protecting the farmers little or no crops will be produced.”14 With the end of the war nowhere in sight, Tennessee’s civilian population was already facing famine. The destitution of civilians in towns and cities caused the Union authorities to fear outbreaks of rioting, which would require troops to put down. This became one motive for setting up relief efforts in many towns where Federal garrisons were located. Such efforts existed in Nashville and other places in Tennessee.15 However, this control of the population’s daily bread was also a method of controlling behavior and punishing those suspected of continuing to harbor pro-Confederate sympathies. Shelbyville, Tennessee, was considered to be a loyal town, having even earned the title “Little Boston.” But, Lt. Col. P. H. Sturdevant, acting provost of the town, deemed the politics of some of the women to be disloyal. The colonel recommended that Mrs. R. W. Wallace, Misses V. and M. Matthews, and Miss Selica Whitthorn be denied access to the commissary and that their rations be stopped. General Slocum, commanding the Twelfth Army Corps, which occupied the area at the time, agreed with this suggestion and denied these women food.16
Soldiers serving in regular Confederate military units at times engaged in irregular warfare. One of the most effective opponents of Union occupation was John M. Hughs, a major in the Twenty-fifth Tennessee Infantry. Wounded at Murfreesboro in December 1862, he had been at home recovering from his injuries when Union forces occupied the area where his home was located. While home in the late summer of 1863, he organized recruits and other convalescing soldiers and began a campaign to disrupt Union garrisons in Tennessee and Kentucky. In the fall of that year, Hughs attacked Glasgow, Monticello, and Scottsville, Kentucky, before falling back into Tennessee, where he attacked Livingston, defeating the Thirteenth Kentucky Cavalry, USA. Although Hughs was a commissioned Confederate officer, Union authorities declared him an outlaw and threatened to hang him if captured. This did not happen, however, for he defeated all those sent against him, including the First Tennessee Cavalry, led by the son of Parson Brownlow, and the Fifth Tennessee, commanded by Colonel Galbraith and Lieutenant Colonel Stokes. By April 1864, this successful band of raiders left the mountains of Tennessee to rejoin the Confederate Army of Tennessee at Dalton, Georgia, taking with them ninety-five new recruits who were fully armed, and leaving thirty-five hundred arms in the hands of guerrillas.17
One of the high-ranking Union officers who enthusiastically embraced the hard-war policy toward Southern civilians was Gen. Eleazer A. Paine. An 1839 graduate of West Point, Paine had resigned from the army to practice law and had become active in politics in Illinois. He had been commissioned a brigadier of volunteers and had been placed in command at Cairo, Illinois. He saw combat at New Madrid, Island No. 10, and at Corinth. During his time at Cairo, Paine had gained a reputation as a “hanging officer” after he had ordered that, for every one of his men killed by guerrillas, two Confederate prisoners would be hanged. Because many in the Cairo area sympathized with the Confederacy, Paine exercised strict control of the civilian population.18 In the winter of 1863–1864, keeping with the general practice of U.S. Army officers commanding posts well behind the battle lines, Paine instituted a hard-war policy in an attempt to suppress guerrilla activity. Following a guerrilla attack in which the bridge across Goose Creek was destroyed, a fifteen-year-old boy, Lafayette Hughes, was arrested on suspicion of participating in the bridge’s destruction and executed. Seventeen-year-old Fleming Sanders was arrested and confined to the town jail for several weeks before being taken out of town some five miles and summarily executed.19 A soldier in Paine’s command wrote his sister: “We made a number of them bite the dust and we burned a lot of houses and distilleries.”20 A few days later, an entire company went to the house of a suspected disloyal citizen about fifteen miles from Gallatin. The man was taken into the yard and executed in the presence of his wife and children. The house was then burned, leaving the widow and three children destitute. Despite the lack of evidence regarding the man’s disloyalty, Paine approved of the act, saying: “It served the damned son of a bitch right.”21
This merciless attitude extended to military prisoners as well. Gen. John Hunt Morgan made life miserable for Union commanders in upper Tennessee and Kentucky, so much so that Union authorities were determined to eliminate the threat. Just before Christmas 1863, members of the Seventy-first Ohio, part of Paine’s command, executed a lieutenant and seven enlisted men from Morgan’s command who had been captured.22 Weary of war, the Confederate soldier Alfred T. Dalton returned home and professed his willingness to take the oath of allegiance to the United States. Before he could take the oath, however, Paine had him arrested at his home and executed on the spot. The same day, another young man, about sixteen years old, was given a drumhead trial in Gallatin and hanged that evening. Only a few days later, a Confederate soldier was removed from the post stockade and taken out of town on “a worn out horse.” Given a five-minute head start, the soldier was pursued by Union soldiers on fresh horses until caught, whereupon he was murdered. Members of Paine’s own staff and their wives participated in the chase.23
These acts were not unknown to Paine’s superior officers. Indeed, Gen. Ulysses Grant, the senior U.S. officer in the western theater, commented that Paine was “entirely unfit to command a post,” but he issued no orders restraining his actions or punishing him for violating the rules of war.24 Instead, Paine was transferred to Tullahoma to protect the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, which supplied Sherman’s move into Georgia. In Tullahoma, Paine continued his harsh treatment of the civilian population. Maj. Gen. Robert Milroy, Paine’s commanding officer, wrote to his wife:
General Paine has had about two hundred guerrillas shot since he has been stationed here. It is not often that his men bring in any that they capture, and if they do, and Paine ascertains them to be guerillas beyond a doubt he orders them quietly walked outside the pickets and shot and no report is made of the matter and nothing is said about it. Two of them have been shot that way since I come here. I would not have known anything of it had I not happened on their dead bodies in riding out.25
While General Paine was on his way to Tullahoma, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest was leading his cavalry north from Mississippi in a raid that would reach the banks of the Ohio River. During the raid, a confrontation between Confederates and U.S. provost troops occurred, creating a controversy that echoes in Civil War history to this day. As Forrest completed his incursion into West Tennessee, it was reported to him that the Union troops at Fort Pillow had been “robbing people of their horses, mules, beef cattle, beds, plate, wearing apparel, money and every possible movable article of value, besides venting upon the wives and daughters of Southern soldiers the most opprobrious and obscene epithets, with more than one extreme outrage upon the persons of these victims of their hate and lust.”26 When Forrest arrived at Fort Pillow, he found it occupied by members of the Sixth U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. After spending most of April 12 maneuvering against the fortified position and calling on the garrison to surrender, a demand that was refused, Forrest ordered an assault. The garrison of approximately 600 suffered 280 casualties. Immediately, Union authorities claimed that there had been a massacre of those who had surrendered. Confederates denied reports that there had been a surrender and maintained that the garrison had attempted to escape. Some things are seen quite clearly through the clouds of controversy that still surround the event—after two years of vengeful warfare, human life was a cheap commodity in Tennessee; retribution had become commonplace.27
As the spring of 1864 progressed, the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad became an important supply line for Sherman’s campaign against Atlanta. Every day, several trains loaded with military equipment and provisions left Nashville for Chattanooga. Recognizing the vulnerability of Sherman’s lines of communication, Confederate guerrillas swarmed the railroad. Although Sherman could forage for provisions if forced to do so, he had to rely on the railroad for munitions and equipment. The railroad bridges across the Duck, Elk, and Tennessee rivers and the twenty-two hundred-foot-long tunnel at Cowan were heavily guarded and safe from guerrilla attacks, but smaller bridges, culverts, and water tanks were easy targets. In an effort to prevent guerrilla attacks, the Federals forbade any civilian to live within eight hundred yards of the railroad except in villages and towns garrisoned by the Union army. Union authorities ordered all houses, farm buildings, fences, trees, and brush within this zone burned and anyone found in the cleared area shot on sight. Attacks persisted despite these measures.
Into this situation came the Union provost commander Maj. Gen. Robert H. Milroy. A native of Indiana, Milroy was a man frustrated in his desire to be a soldier. He had sought unsuccessfully admission to West Point and had been forced to delay his education until he enrolled in the Norwich Military University in Vermont at the age of twenty-four. He raised a regiment for service in the war with Mexico but arrived at the front too late to see any action. During the 1850s, he became an abolitionist and an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln. In 1861, he raised the first regiment from Indiana and served as its colonel. Assigned to western Virginia, Milroy participated in some of the early Union successes there but was promoted beyond his level of competence in early 1862. He was soundly drubbed by Stonewall Jackson in his Valley Campaign, was outperformed at Second Manassas, and was trounced by Richard Ewell at Winchester, Virginia, in the summer of 1863. A court-martial ruled that Milroy had made poor decisions at Winchester but found that he had not disobeyed any orders, so he was merely sent to the rear instead of being dismissed from the service. Using his political connections, Milroy received command of an occupied area and was sent to Tullahoma.
Soon after Milroy took command in Tullahoma, Robert Blackwell, a former sheriff and Confederate guerrilla, raided the nearby town of Shelbyville. Bottling up the small Union garrison in the fortified railroad depot, Blackwell and his nearly three-hundred-strong guerrilla band stripped the town of military supplies and looted the sutlers doing business with the U.S. forces. In an attempt to learn where Blackwell had his lair, Milroy sent Gen. Eleazar Paine to Fayetteville in Lincoln County on June 15, 1864, to collect information. Paine planned to seize hostages and announce that the men would be shot by 3:00 P.M. unless citizens provided information about Blackwell. His deadline having passed, Paine took the locals Thomas Massey, William Pickett, Franklin Burroughs, and Dr. J. W. Miller a short distance up the road from the county courthouse and ordered them shot. Dr. Miller was released by a sympathetic lieutenant who recognized him as a fellow Mason. John R. Massey, Thomas’s older brother, rode up to Paine just before the killings took place and volunteered to take the place of his younger sibling. Paine accepted the offer and then had the three men executed. He left their bodies lying in the road to serve as an example to other civilians.28
On September 27, Blackwell struck back. With eleven men, he entered Shelbyville, surrounded the Union garrison of twenty-one men, and convinced them to surrender. The captives were taken south a few miles to Fayetteville and there were divided into two groups. Paroling several of the “more respectable” men, the guerrillas took those remaining who had been identified either as deserters from the Confederate army or native Tennesseans to the top of Wells Hill and executed them. A note was affixed to the breast of each man that read: “Remember Massey.”29
Along the Nashville and Louisville Railroad, guerrillas led by Ellis Harper continued to harass Union soldiers. Like all guerrillas, Harper depended on the support and cooperation of the civilians in the area where he operated. If support was not forthcoming, silence at least was required. Harvey Travelstead of Simpson County, Kentucky, just above the Tennessee state line, informed Union authorities of some of Harper’s movements. Learning of this betrayal, Harper and a few of his men went to the Smyrna Cumberland Presbyterian Church where Travelstead was attending services. They took him outside and killed him. At about the same time, Harper went to the home of Hensley Harris near Pilot Knob in Simpson County to impress on him the need for silence. Harris refused to open the door, so Harper, or one of his men, fired through the door, killing Harris’s three-year-old son. Enraged, Harris armed himself and ran out the door, only to be shot down. Although severely wounded in the encounter, Harris was nursed back to health by his slaves and his wife. He survived the war and went on to serve in the Kentucky legislature in the postwar years.30
In response to these and similar acts, the Union provost, Brig. Gen. Stephen G. Burbridge, issued orders that, “whenever an unarmed Union citizen is murdered, four guerrillas will be selected from the prisoners in the hands of the military authorities, and publicly shot to death in the most convenient place near the scene of the outrage.” On August 25, 1864, the Louisville journal reported:
Charles Clary, Lieutenant of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry, who with a detail of ten men, on the morning of the 20th left the city in charge of four guerrillas taken from the Military Prison, with orders to proceed to Franklin, Kentucky, and there execute them in retaliation for the murder of Union citizens, reports to Col. Fairleigh that he has returned to Louisville, having faithfully obeyed his orders. He states that he arrived in Franklin at two o’clock P.M. and found Lieutenant Adams there with a detachment of twenty men from the 26th Kentucky Volunteers. Soon after he received a dispatch from headquarters in Louisville, directing him to defer the execution of J. H. Cave until further orders. At 6 o’clock in the evening he ordered the two remaining prisoners, J. Bloom and W. B. McClasson, to prepare to meet their doom. Both refused to make any confessions. McClasson claimed that he was innocent of any crime. Bloom was morose and spoke but little. . . . The Lieutenant placed Bloom on one side of the courthouse and McClasson on the other. Both of the doomed men appeared calm and collected. . . . The order was given to fire and the report of musketry rang clear and startling upon the air. The two prisoners fell forward, bloody corpses.31
As bloodthirsty as Harper’s actions had been, those of the provost were scarcely less so. Neither of the men executed had been part of Harper’s guerrilla band; indeed, J. H. Bloom was a member of Company I, Fifteenth Tennessee Infantry, and McClasson was enlisted in Company E, Second Kentucky Cavalry. J. H. Cave was a member of Company B, First Kentucky Cavalry, and was said to have been granted a reprieve because he was a Mason.32
The social chaos in the closing months of the war is reflected in the lists of “disloyal” persons turned in to the provost in every garrison town occupied by the Union army. The atrocities committed by both sides embittered local populations, prompting neighbors to turn against neighbors to seek revenge for wrongs both real and imagined. Much of this violence stemmed from Tennesseans’ divided loyalties, for pro-Union sentiment was found across the state, not merely in East Tennessee. Some of the hard feelings predated the war and reflected disagreements over property boundaries or other civil issues. Sometimes people were labeled disloyal simply because they were competitors in the same occupation. The informants knew that, for the most part, an accusation of disloyalty was enough to prompt Union authorities to act.
The example of Moses Pittman of Franklin County, Tennessee, illustrates this. In December 1864, Pittman sent to Gen. Robert Milroy a list containing the names of fifty-eight of his neighbors, male and female, whom Pittman charged with various acts of disloyalty. Milroy remarked that these people should have their farm buildings and houses destroyed and that many of them should be shot on sight.33 This became the basis of official action on January 7, 1865, when Milroy issued orders to Capt. William H. Lewis, Company A, Forty-second Missouri Volunteers, directing him to seek out these individuals, seize any of their property deemed useful to the military, destroy their homes and private possessions, and execute several who had been identified as guerrillas. A list of names was provided.34
Copies of these orders were sent up the line to departmental headquarters and were forwarded from there to the War Department in Washington. There they were reviewed by the secretary of war and by the president of the United States. It is important to note that no orders ever came back down the chain of command from Washington ordering that these killings cease. Occasional attempts to restrain Union officers and men were weak and ineffective. Thus, one could argue that the policy of targeting civilians in Tennessee, and throughout the South, had implicit approval from the highest levels of the U.S. government. Without extensive further study of the provost records, it cannot be estimated how many civilians in the Confederacy were killed, but the number is no doubt large. While the actions of Confederates who committed atrocities have long been the subject of historical discussion, the killings of Southern civilians by Union troops has largely been ignored. Yet the evidence of such killings was recorded by those who ordered the executions and is preserved in the archives of the U.S. government.
For Tennesseans, the Civil War was an uncivil experience. Both Union and Confederate supporters committed violent acts against each other. Atrocities committed against Tennessee’s civilian population by the Union army and its Union supporters only reinforced the feeling among the Southern populace that they were under attack, thus creating a burning desire for revenge. When they sought retribution, the cycle of vengeance escalated. The result was that, by the end of the military conflict in 1865, Tennessee was left in a state of social chaos. That chaos did not cease when the Confederate armies surrendered. Indeed, Reconstruction was a continuation of the wartime cycle of vengeance and should be understood as the final act of that cycle.
The quotation used as this essay’s title is taken from Maj. Gen. Robert Milroy, USA, to his wife, Tullahoma, Tenn., May 5, 1864, cited in Michael R. Bradley, With Blood and Fire: Behind Union Lines in Middle Tennessee, 1863–65 (Shippensburg, Pa.: Burd Street, 2003), xvi. Original copies of the Milroy letters are in the Renssaler Public Library, Renssaler, Ind., and can also be viewed at www.cwrc.org.
1. Larry J. Daniel, Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 99–100.
2. Union Provost Marshal Records (UPM), File of Two or More Citizens, Microfilm Collection (MC) 416, roll 23, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Stephen Z. Starr, Jennison’s Jayhawkers: A Civil War Cavalry Regiment and Its Commander (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 167.
3. Michael R. Bradley, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Escort and Staff (Gretna, La.: Pelican, 2006), 35.
4. Daniel, Days of Glory, 106; Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Fort Donelson’s Legacy: War and Society in Kentucky and Tennessee, 1862–1863 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 94–95.
5. Cooling, Fort Donelson’s Legacy, 75.
6. Michael R. Bradley, With Blood and Fire: Behind Union Lines in Middle Tennessee, 1863–65 (Shippensburg, Pa.: Burd Street, 2003), 25–27. This is the only book available that is based solely on the official records of the U.S. provost marshal troops.
7. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861–1865 (hereafter cited as OR), 70 vols. in 128 pts. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), ser. 1, vol. 23, pt. 1, pp. 521, 525; Michael R. Bradley, Tullahoma: The 1863 Campaign for Control of Middle Tennessee (Shippensburg, Pa.: Burd Street, 2000), 90.
8. Tennesseans in the Civil War: A Military History of Confederate and Union Units with Available Rosters of Personnel, 2 vols. (Nashville: Civil War Centennial Commission, 1964–1965), 1:331.
9. UPM, MC 416, rolls 34–35.
10. OR, ser. 1, vol. 31, pt. 1, pp. 623–24.
11. UPM, MC 416, roll 26.
12. OR, ser. 1, vol. 32, pt. 2, pp. 37–38; UPM, MC 345, roll 131.
13. Milo M. Quaife, ed., From the Cannon’s Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus Williams (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), 297.
14. OR, ser. 1, vol. 58, pt. 1, p. 269.
15. Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 82.
16. UPM, MC 416, roll 28.
17. OR, ser. 1, vol. 30, pt. 4, p. 144; vol. 31, pt. 1, p. 575; vol. 31, pt. 3, pp. 469, 591; and vol. 32, pt. 1, pp. 55, 416.
18. Walter T. Durham, Rebellion Revisited: A History of Sumner County, Tennessee, from 1861 to 1870 (Gallatin, Tenn.: Sumner County Museum Association, 1982), 112–13.
19. Nashville Dispatch, October 14, 1864, cited in ibid., 163.
20. Arthur H. DeRosier et al., eds., Through the South with a Union Soldier (Johnson City: East Tennessee State University, Research Advisory Council, 1969), 56ff.
21. Louisville Daily Journal, November 12, 1864, cited in Durham, Rebellion Revisited, 164.
22. OR, ser. 2, vol. 7, pt. 1, p. 792.
23. Durham, Rebellion Revisited, 189–90. Durham quotes from the diary of Alice Williamson, a young woman living in Gallatin at the time of these events.
24. Ibid., 187.
25. Robert Milroy to Mary Milroy, November 15, 1864, cited in Bradley, With Blood and Fire, xix.
26. Thomas Jordan and J. P. Pryor, The Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. N. B. Forrest (Dayton, Ohio: Morningside Bookshop, 1977), 422.
27. The identity of the units in the Fort Pillow garrison can be readily established by referencing any of the biographies of Nathan Bedford Forrest. The number of men in the garrison and the number of casualties vary, so I have used a figure that represents a rough average for both the numbers present and the numbers killed and wounded.
28. Bradley, With Blood and Fire, 76–79; Fayetteville Observer, April 6, 1915, April 6, 1919.
29. Bradley, With Blood and Fire, 80–82; UPM, MC 416, roll 27.
30. See the Harris and Travelstead papers in the archives of the Simpson County, Ky., Historical Society.
31. Louisville Journal, August 25, 1864.
32. Stewart Cruickshank, “Terror in the Bluegrass,” The Lost Cause: Journal of the Kentucky Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): unpaginated.
33. UPM, MC 416, roll 46.
34. The order reads:
Sir: You will proceed to the residences of the persons herein named and deal with them in accordance with the following instructions. In all cases where the residences of the persons are ordered to be destroyed you will observe the following previous to setting them on fire. You will first search the houses and premises to see if they have any articles belonging to the U.S. Govt or that are contraband of war, which you will bring away in case any are found. Also all or any of the following articles that may be found belonging to the aforesaid persons.
First All horses, hogs, sheep, cattle, and any other animals or articles of whatever description that may be valuable to the U.S. Govt especially those that are valuable to the Quartermaster, Commissary and Hospital Department.
Second All stoves and stovepipes of whatever description and all kitchen utensils, Queens ware, beds, bedding, knives, forks & etc also all chairs, sofas, sociable lounges and everything of the character of household furniture.
Third All windows, sash, glass, looking glasses, carpets, & etc.
Fourth Every article of household furniture which you do not bring with you must be destroyed or burned with the house.
Fifth All barns, stables, smoke houses, or any other outbuilding of any description whatsoever or any building or article that could possible be of any benefit or comfort to Rebels or Bushwhackers their friends or any person aiding, abetting, or sympathizing with Rebels, Bushwhackers & etc which could be used for subsistence for man or beast will be destroyed and burned.
Sixth All animals forage or other articles brought in by you will be turned over to Lieut J. W. Raymond AAQm on this Staff to be subject to the order of Maj Genl Milroy to be disposed of as he may think proper, taking a receipt therefore from Lieut Raymond.
Seventh The train accompanying will be subject to your orders, together with all the persons connected with it, whether soldiers or civilians and you will cause any of them who may be guilty of committing depredations upon Loyal citizens or their property to be arrested and you will not yourself suffer those under your Command to commit any trespass, or do any damage to Persons or property except those specified in this order.
Eighth You will burn the houses of the following named persons, take any of the articles named above that they may have, together with all forage and grains belonging to them that you can bring away which may be useful to the U.S. govt for military purposes or otherwise and will give no receipt of any kind whatsoever. [Seven names follow this section of the order.]
Ninth The following persons will be shot in addition to suffering in the manner prescribed in paragraph #8. [Four names appear in this section of the order.]
Tenth The following persons have committed murder and if caught will be hung to the first tree in front of their door and be allowed to hang there for an indefinite period. You will assure yourself that they are dead before leaving them also if at their residence they will be stripped of everything as per the above instructions and then burned. If Willis Taylor is caught he will be turned over to Moses Pittman and he will be allowed to kill him. (UPM, MC 416, roll 50)
The implications of paragraph 10 are chilling. If a person is hanged with a hangman’s noose, the fall snaps the third cervical vertebra, and death is instantaneous. People are left to hang for “an indefinite period” because they have been hanged with a slip knot and left to strangle to death. This slow, agonizing process was being witnessed by the wives and children of the victim since the execution was happening at “the first tree in front of their door.” Neither was this the only instance of such vengeance. On February 7, 1865, Milroy issued identical orders listing eighteen persons under paragraph 8, and thirty-four persons were ordered executed without trial under paragraph 9. Similar orders are to be found in virtually every area controlled by a Union provost officer in Tennessee. See UPM, MC 416, roll 50.