1
War Comes to Indiana
As July 7, 1861, dawned, talk of war was in the air in Lexington, Indiana. The county seat of Scott County was abuzz with the latest news about the Southern rebellion. The Madison Daily and Evening Courier told of skirmishes between Federal troops and “secesh” forces at Harpers Ferry and Falling Waters, Virginia. Closer to home, word had come that William A. Sanderson had organized a new regiment, the Twenty-third Indiana Volunteers, on June 24, and was recruiting across the second congressional district.1 A Captain Ferguson had been in town looking for strong young men. All takers were to meet him in Charlestown by sunset on July 8.
Jacob T. Kimberlin was a twenty-one-year-old farmhand, the eighth of ten children of Jacob J. and Elizabeth Kimberlin, of nearby Nabb. Unlike most families in the area, all of the Kimberlin children had survived early childhood. In the mid-1800s, one-half of all Hoosier children died before the age of four from such common causes as diphtheria in the winter and dysentery in the summer.2 The Kimberlin sons worked on the farm, or as coopers in town, while the three girls shared the household chores. Their mother had died in 1844.
We do not know Jacob T.’s thoughts as he decided to sign up for three years of military service, but if there is comfort in numbers, he had plenty of it. Jacob walked out of Lexington on the Charlestown road on July 8 with his older brother, John J., and his cousins, William H. H. Kimberlin, Benjamin F. Kimberlin, and James Stark.3 These five young men could not have known at the time that none of them would ever return home. They simply knew that the Kimberlins were going to war.
Posted at the start of the Civil War, this broadside urged young men to volunteer for military service at Camp Noble in New Albany, Indiana, for a regiment to be known as the “Indiana Snake Killers.” (Indiana Historical Society, DC014)
This is the story of the Kimberlin family that sent thirty-three fathers and sons, brothers and cousins, to fight for the Union cause during the Civil War. Ten family members were killed, wounded, or died of battlefield disease—a 30 percent casualty rate that is unmatched in recorded Scott County history. Of the 135 known deaths of Scott County soldiers,4 ten were members of the Kimberlin clan.5
While we know that the Kimberlins suffered disproportionately, our only clues to their feelings about the war come from forty letters to and from the battlefield that have survived. Were they fighting to save the Union or to free the slaves? How did they express grief over the loss of a brother? Did they keep up with their business and the women at home? And what did they think about “secesh” neighbors in southern Indiana who tried to undermine the Union cause? The answers to these questions will help determine if the Kimberlins were unusual in their patriotism or simply acting as any Union family would in an area of the nation that came to be known as Copperhead Country.
A Military Tradition
The Kimberlins were not new to adversity or to war. Their German-born patriarch, John Jacob Peter Kimberlin, and his wife, Sarah Clendenin, raised five boys on a small farm in Hampshire County, Virginia, in the mid-1700s. When hostilities between England and the American colonies broke out, the patriarch’s son, also named John, was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Bedford County, Pennsylvania, Second Battalion, by Assembly Speaker John Morton.6 Following the Revolutionary War, John and his wife, Ruth Jones, settled in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where they were neighbors with Thomas Hughes, another veteran.
Hughes and Kimberlin must have discussed opportunities in western Virginia (now Kentucky and Indiana). When the Clark’s Grant Board of Commissioners partitioned the 135,000-acre federal grant to officers who had served under George Rogers Clark, it awarded Captain William Harrod, founder of Louisville and brother of the founder of Harrodsburg, 3,000 acres.7 Hughes and Kimberlin cooperated in a deal whereby Hughes purchased Lot Number 264 from Harrod, and then resold the 500-acre plot to Kimberlin on April 16, 1804, for $1,600.8 In April 1805, just days after the Treaty of Grouseland opened up the land from the Ohio River to Rockford (north of Seymour),9 Kimberlin brought his sons, Daniel and Isaac, by flatboat from Redstone, Pennsylvania, near the present-day site of Madison, where they walked to Lot 264, one-quarter of a mile northwest of the present town of Nabb.10 There they built a white-oak cabin, which stood until 1876, on what is now known as Kimberlin Creek, and became the first white settlers of the area that fifteen years later became Scott County.11 Over the next four years, the other eight Kimberlin children and their mother came in small groups to fill their home on the frontier. They would make history again in 1812.
Pigeon Roost
Five miles west of the Kimberlin homestead, the Collings family from Nelson County, Kentucky, settled in 1809 at the juncture of the Three Notch Trail (now US 31) and the Cincinnati Trace. The trail was a well-used Indian path that connected the Falls of the Ohio River with the point where Fall Creek empties into the White River. The trace was a commercial road cut by Ephraim Kibbey from Cincinnati to Vincennes between 1799 and 1805.12 The settlement became known as Pigeon Roost.
In the late summer of 1812, while the able-bodied men of Pigeon Roost were fighting with American troops near Detroit, Shawnee and Pottawatomi Indians were told of a British bounty of five dollars per American scalp. On September 3, Indians attacked the Pigeon Roost settlement and butchered twenty-two residents, including a baby torn from the womb of Rachel Collings. The bodies were scalped, cut in strips, and hung from nearby trees. Some of the survivors ran to the Kimberlin cabin for protection.13
Within three days, 596 volunteers from Captain John Blizzard’s company of Kentucky Volunteers (including Isaac Kimberlin and John Williams) camped on the Kimberlin farm, preparing to search for the marauders.14 The cabin was ordered reinforced as a blockhouse and patrols were sent as far north as the Kankakee River, but no one was ever punished for what came to be called the Pigeon Roost Massacre.15 Nevertheless, John Kimberlin’s farm was trampled by the Kentucky troops, and the family’s livestock and grain were taken.
Twenty years later, the eighty-one year old Kimberlin, now blind, and his wife, Ruth, petitioned Congress for reimbursement with the help of their son, Daniel, himself a veteran of the Battle of Tippecanoe as a rifleman in Captain James Bigger’s Rifle Company.16 The petition read in part: “for three days during which time the corps above named pulled down my fences, out and carried off my corn, using it as forage for their horses, took many articles of provisions for the use of said volunteers while at said encampment. The value of articles thus taken is estimated to exceed one hundred dollars, for which no compensation has been given.”17 During the first session of the Twenty-Third Congress, U.S. Senator John Tipton of Indiana introduced Senate Bill 38, which the Committee on Claims approved on December 31, 1833. John Kimberlin was paid $150 on May 26, 1834, ten months before his death.18
As settlers flowed into Scott County, mainly from Kentucky, the Kimberlins intermarried with other settler families: the Whitlachs, Houghs, Starkes, and Williams. They lived on homesteads in the Nabb area, within a short walk from one another. They recorded several firsts—the first marriage in Scott County (Daniel Kimberlin to Ursula Brinton, May 7, 1812);19 the founding of the first Baptist church (by Sarah Whitlach Gladden in 1819);20 and one of the first schools (the Kimberlin School, located three miles west of Lexington on the Vienna road).21 The Kimberlins were also an integral part of the transformation of the Scott County economy from subsistence to a commercially based system.
General Jefferson C. Davis (left) in his tent with one of his officers. A veteran of the Mexican-American War, Davis later mortally wounded a fellow Union army general, William “Bull” Nelson. (Library of Congress)
Mustering In
When the four Kimberlin men reached Camp Noble, on the site of today’s Floyd County Fairgrounds, for mustering in on July 27, 1861, they were treated to the sight of Indiana’s first military hero of the Civil War, Jefferson C. Davis, second in command at Fort Sumter when Confederate troops shelled the island fort into submission in April 1861.22 After the fort’s surrender, the Clark County native was sent back to Indiana to serve as a mustering officer and to rally support for the war.23
For the Kimberlins, Camp Noble was where they met and made new friends such as James Royse and John Hardin, both from neighboring Washington County. It was also where they were divided into companies and received their military equipment. The Kimberlins stuck together in Company I. Royse joined Company C and Hardin was assigned to Company E.24 In a letter to his father, Hardin described Camp Noble as “crowded with about one-thousand soldiers in camp.”25 Hardin listed his supplies, with some editorial comment:
1. Bread, and plenty of it. 2. Bacon, some to sell. 3. Beef, some of its spoils. 4. Coffee, some to sell. 5. Rice, plenty. 6. Shugar, not so plenty. 7. Molasses, not so plenty. 8. Potatoes, plenty of them. 9. Dried apples, plenty. 10. Blackberries, sell bread for these. 11. Onions. 12. Pepper. 13. Salt.
Also, Tin cups, pans, knives and forks to eat out of.26
The Royse and Hardin letters complement the Kimberlin writings, and together they weave a common experience through individual recollections of boredom, constant marching, letters from home, intense battles, and more letters to sisters, girlfriends, cousins, and parents. As the Twenty-Third Indiana left for Saint Louis on August 17, 1861, it was the state’s second regiment to go off to war unarmed. The guns did not catch up to the regiment until it arrived at Camp General Smith in Paducah, Kentucky.27 John J. Kimberlin wrote to his cousin, Jacob R. Kimberlin, about the camp setup:
Jake, I would not come home if I could get a honorable discharge for the best two horsed in our Reg. Tell Milla that I found the regulations of the army altogether different from her predictions and if she has got a son in the service she may rest assured that he will get plenty to eat and to wear and his treatment otherways will depend upon his behavior. … I will tell you we are fixed just so that it will take arite smart little army to take us. We now about 9 thousand as near as I can find out and just as good as can be. … Our artillery consist of two sixty-four pounders and other peces too numerous to mention Jake if you was to see our flying artillery it would make your white eyes role worse than they ever did before Jake we have got all of our equipment and it is thought that we will move before many days.28
Paducah became home to the Kimberlins for more than six months. For the most part, it was six months of inaction, interspersed by orders to battle, then disappointment at missing the “fun.” In a November 10, 1861, joint letter to their brother, Jacob R., William, and Benjamin talk of weariness from marching, and send thanks for goodies:
We have been on a march three days. There was a battle at Collumbus on the 7th. We were first ordered to a little town called Mayfield, but before we got there we were ordered to Collumbus, but before we got there we heard the battle was over and we turned back to Paducah … tell our sisters [Polly Ann, Betsy, and Maria] that sent them cakes to us by Mr. Sullivan that they come to us in good order, we also recived some apples from Father and two pair of socks apiece and one pair for Jacob [T.] Kimberlin … you can tell the girls and Father that they was all very thankfully recived although we was not particularly in need for Uncle Sam has provided well for us so far … more than I expected when I volunteered.29
Cousin James Stark, also of the Twenty-Third, viewed winter camp at Paducah as a chance to rest and reflect on two overriding subjects of camp talk—women and “the cause.” In a letter to his cousin, Jacob R., who had stayed home to take care of the family farm, Stark talks of preparing to see “the elephant” (the Rebel army):
We have built a good sized fort. … we have several guns mounted but only two 64 pounders the rest is 32 artil. 432 cavalry landed this week . . . Jake I must tell you I haven’t spoke to a purty women since I left Indiana and I am almost froze to see some of the old Scott and Clark girls. Jake tell them my love is with them, if I live. Jake true love is sweet but love of country is sweeter … if I could sacrifice the last drop of my blood if it would put a end to the rebellion. I may lose it anyhow but I cannot spill my blood in a better cause.30
A print depicts Confederate soldiers firing cannons from an artillery battery, bombarding Fort Sumter, the federal sea fort in Charleston, South Carolina. (Library of Congress)
And on Christmas Day, 1861, Stark expressed his thoughts about women, embellished, as they were, by alcohol:
We have a fine Christmas hair. I am taking mine on guard. Our capton gave us a treat this morning. I wish that I was up thair today to make a set to some of them good looking girls for I have not seen any good looking one since I left home. I will be back some of these days and then I am coming to see them. Well you must excuse my nonsense and bad wrighting as I drank a little too much this morning. Wright and let me no how you get a long with all of the girls.31
Secesh
While the Kimberlin men were settling into camp routine in Paducah, emotions were stirring back home in Scott County. The initial reaction to the fall of Fort Sumter was a burst of patriotism, as expressed by Lexington, Indiana, teenager Sarah Waldschmidt Young Bovard in her personal diary: “Fort Sumter was taken today by the rebels or devils—the latter sounds the best. Everyone talks of War. Indiana begins to wake up.”32 Even the Democratic Indianapolis Sentinel initially backed the Union effort and Republican Indiana governor Oliver Morton proclaimed, “There is now no choice in the matter. The Government must be sustained.”33 But as news of the disaster at what came to be known as the First Battle of Bull Run zipped across the telegraph lines, the reality of what had occurred near that little town of Manassas, Virginia, began to settle in. Husbands and wives, families, and even entire towns debated the wisdom of taking up arms against the South. Most of the people of southern Indiana had “connections” in Kentucky and Virginia going back several generations. Cousins would be fighting cousins, and in some cases, brother would be fighting brother. In a letter from J. B. Otey to John G. Davis, Otey said, “I cannot take sides against the South. The bones of my ancestors lie mouldering there. My connections are there. Everything dear to me in the way of kindred is there, and I must and will be there.”34
Civilian onlookers and Union teamsters panic as the Confederates take control of the field during the Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861, near Manassas, Virginia. (Library of Congress)
Those Northerners who sympathized with the South quickly became known as “secesh” (short for secessionists). It became one of the most divisive labels that could be pinned on a Hoosier, as Sarah’s diary recounts: “Catherine and Ethe come awhile, then go to Mother’s. They all look at me as they would a thief because I am not a secesh.”35 The debate even encroached on church life: “Mother comes by going to meeting. Stops long enough to wish old Lincoln dead.”36 It also disrupted the local schoolyard: “A fight takes place at the schoolhouse. Three secesh and one Union man, of course.”37 The young chronicler of Lexington life rarely allowed a diary entry to pass without mentioning some incident or debate involving the war: “Yesterday was a day to be remembered. We went to Gilead [local church] to the soldiers meeting but the secesh feeling was too much for us.”38
Copperhead Country
During the latter half of 1861, two new names were given those who questioned the Union war effort: Copperhead and Butternut. Copperhead referred to the poisonous snake whose habitat included most of the South, and Butternut referred to the color of uniform that some Confederate troops wore. The names were used interchangeably but their definition, even today, escapes precision. Indiana historian Emma Lou Thornbrough captured the basic equation. According to her, “If one accepts a recent definition of Copperheadism as avid opposition to the [Abraham] Lincoln administration, and adds to it avid opposition to Governor Morton, the number of Copperheads in Indiana was large. Those who wanted to see the Union permanently divided and who were ready actively to help the Confederate cause were very few.”39 The Copperhead movement may have begun to smolder with the reluctance on the part of southern Hoosiers to fight their “connections” but it was given oxygen and fanned to a roaring fire by fear and economic hardship.
In 1850 one-half of all Hoosiers were not native to the state, and 39 percent (162,000) of these came from slave states.40 The bulk of Indiana’s immigrant residents were of German or Irish ancestry, and they naturally feared the competition that could come from the arrival of free black labor. The German language newspapers Indiana Volksblatt (Indianapolis) and Staats Zeitwag (Fort Wayne) even made appeals for bigotry.41 In 1851 Hoosiers overwhelmingly ratified the infamous Article 13 of the new Indiana Constitution that banned the immigration of “Negroes” into the state. This earned the state the moniker of “most conservative Midwestern state” in its treatment of African Americans.42
The attitude toward African Americans certainly was unsympathetic even thirteen years later. In a letter home from the Twenty-Third, regimental clerk Alt Perring wrote to a Mrs. Alderice: “In regard to contrabands on your farm, I do not know whether you are joking or serious, but I hope you will not establish a colony of African descent anywhere upon your premises.”43 During the 1861 legislative session, the Indiana General Assembly passed a resolution clarifying that the state’s resources should not be used to destroy slavery or the rights of the states.44 This sentiment toward African Americans is not surprising in the context of the times because southern Indiana was part of the Ohio River Valley economy. Prior to the railroads coming to the state in the 1840s, the bulk of the region’s goods were shipped across the Ohio River to the Southern states. Southern Indiana was for all purposes, a “southern economy.”
Chapter 1 Notes
1. A Chronology of Indiana in the Civil War (Indianapolis: Indiana Civil War Centennial Commission, 1965), 8.
2. Carl Bogardus, The Centennial History of Austin, Scott County, Indiana (Paoli, IN: Historical Committee of the Centennial Celebration, 1953), 78.
3. Muster Rolls of Indiana Civil War Volunteers, Indiana State Archives, Indianapolis, IN (hereafter cited as Muster Rolls). The Stark family name has also been spelled Starkes.
4. Lexington: A Pioneer Town (Scottsburg, IN: Lexington Historical Society, 1988), 69.
5. Muster Rolls.
6. Ruth Crim, “History of the Kimberlin Family of Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana,” Historical Marker File #72.2001.02, Indiana Historical Bureau, Indianapolis, IN.
7. Clark’s Grant Board of Commissioners (VA), “Proceedings, 1783–1846,” typescript, 57, William Henry Smith Memorial Library, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, IN.
8. Deed Record A-240, Indiana, Recorder’s Office, Jefferson County, IN.
9. Carl Bogardus, Pioneer Life in Scott County (Austin, IN: Muscatatuck Press, 1957), 4.
10. Crim, “History of the Kimberlin Family of Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana.”
11. Carl Bogardus, Early History of Scott County, 1820–1870 (Scottsburg, IN: Scott County Historical Society, 1970), 7.
12. Ibid., 15.
13. Lizzie D. Coleman, History of the Pigeon Roost Massacre (Mitchell, IN: Commercial Print, 1904).
14. Declaration of Soldier for Pension, War of 1812, Record Group 15A-SO 10690, National Archives, Washington, DC.
15. “Gibson’s Message to Colonel Hargrove,” in Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, Logan Esarey, ed., Indiana Historical Collections, vol. 9 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Commission, 1922), 70–71.
16. Memorial to Congress by Citizens of Clark County, HF: 12 Cong., 2 sess: DS, October 15, 1812, Congressional Record.
17. Record Group 217, Records of the General Accounting Office, File 1773/34, National Archives.
18. J. Thompson, third auditor, Treasury Department, 1834, ibid.
19. Bogardus, Early History of Scott County, 7.
20. Mary Wilson and Ann Asher, “Lexington” pamphlet, 88, Manuscript Collection, Indiana Historical Society.
21. Ibid., 37.
22. Arville Funk, Hoosiers in the Civil War (Chicago: Adams Press, 1967), 58.
23. Jacob Piatt Dunn Jr., Indiana and Indianans, 5 vols. (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1919), 2:608–9.
24. Muster Rolls.
25. John J. Hardin letter, July 21, 1861, John J. Hardin Papers, MS174, Collection L209, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, IN.
26. Ibid.
27. Chronology of Indiana in the Civil War, 12.
28. John J. Kimberlin to Jacob R. Kimberlin, September 24, 1861, Kimberlin Family Papers, private collection (hereafter cited as Kimberlin Papers).
29. William and Benjamin Kimberlin to Jacob R. Kimberlin, November 10, 1861, Kimberlin Papers.
30. James Stark to Jacob R. Kimberlin, December 1861, ibid.
31. Stark to Jacob R. Kimberlin, December 25, 1861, ibid.
32. April 13, 1861, Sarah Waldschmidt Young Bovard Diary, Ancestry.com (hereafter cited as Bovard Diary).
33. John David Barnhart, The Impact of the Civil War on Indiana (Indianapolis: Indiana Civil War Centennial Commission, 1962), 10.
34. Lorna Lutes Sylvester, “Oliver P. Morton and Hoosier Politics during the Civil War” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1968), 48.
35. July 28, 1861, Bovard Diary.
36. September 22, 1861, ibid.
37. September 24, 1861, ibid.
38. November 21, 1861, ibid.
39. Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1989), 181.
40. Marjorie Perry, “Opposition to the Civil War in Indiana” (MA thesis, University of Washington, 1931), 2.
41. Frank Klement, Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 32.
42. William G. Edison, with Vincent Akers, “Attitudes in Johnson County during the Civil War: The Demaree Papers,” Indiana Magazine of History 70 (March, 1974): 64.
43. Alt Perring, letter, April, 20, 1864, Alderice Family Papers, MS124, Collection L209, Guide to the Indiana Sesquicentennial Manuscript Project: Part 1, Indiana State Library.
44. Barnhart, Impact of the Civil War on Indiana, 11.