A community changed

On April 12, 1861, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired when Confederate forces launched an assault on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. On April 9, 1865, just three days before the fourth anniversary of when it began, the war was effectively over when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union commander Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia. 

In his made-for-TV Civil War documentary, filmmaker Ken Burns noted: “By the Summer of 1861, Wilmer McLean had had enough. Two great armies were converging on his farm, and what would be the first major battle of the Civil War, Bull Run, or Manasses, as the Confederates called it, would soon rage across the aging Virginian’s farm, a Union shell going so far as to explode in the summer kitchen. Now, McLean moved his family far away from Manasses, far south and west of Richmond, out of harm’s way, he prayed, to a dusty little crossroads called Appomattox Courthouse. And it was there in his living room, three and a half years later, that Lee surrendered to Grant. And Wilmer McLean could rightfully say, ‘The war began in my front yard, and ended in my front parlor.’”

Lee’s surrender wasn’t an official end to the war, of course; he simply surrendered the 28,000 men remaining under his command in the Army of Northern Virginia after being forced out of Richmond and then surrounded by Grant’s forces. But Lee’s surrender triggered a series of additional surrenders across the south, first in North Carolina, then Alabama, and finally in Louisiana. 

The final battle of the Civil War wasn’t fought until May 12, 1865 — exactly one month after Lee surrendered to Grant. And it was actually a Confederate victory, as forces under the command of John “Rip” Ford attacked Union forces commanded by Theodore H. Barrett at Palmito Ranch in Texas. Over 100 of the Union troops were captured, and Pvt. John J. Williams, of the 34th Indiana Infantry Regiment, became the last man killed in the war.

But, for all intent and purpose, the war had ended in Wilmer McLean’s parlor at Appomattox Courthouse one month earlier. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had been captured two days earlier. And in Washington, President Andrew Johnson — the man who had visited Scott County as a U.S. Senator to rally against secession in 1861 — declared that armed resistance was “virtually at an end.”

On June 23, 1865, Stand Watie, a Cherokee Indian, became the last Confederate general to surrender his forces. That same day, President Johnson ended the Union blockade of the Southern states.

The Free and Independent State of Scott, as Scott County Court had declared itself in 1861, did not officially repeal its declaration of independent statehood until 1986, some 121 years after the war ended. It didn’t need to; Tennessee had never recognized Scott County’s independence, or even its attempt to secede, except for when Governor Isham Harris dispatched 1,700 Confederate forces with orders to march on Huntsville and squash the rebellion.

But even in Scott County, the war was over. On April 15, 1865, three days after Lee’s surrender to Grant, Pvt. Johnson Goad of the 9th Tennessee Cavalry — the only son of Sarah Goad, of Buffalo Creek east of Huntsville — became the last Scott Countian to die in the war when he succumbed to illness in Knoxville, where he had been hospitalized.

The guerrilla raids had ended. In October 1865, the notorious Rebel guerrilla Champ Ferguson would be hanged in Nashville. The following month, Henry Wirz — the “beast of Andersonville,” who had been chiefly responsible for the deaths of so many Scott Countians at the infamous Confederate prison camp — was hanged in Washington. 

It was time for healing.

* * *

On September 10, 1867, famed naturalist John Muir arrived on the northern Cumberland Plateau as he made his 1,000-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. He noted the sad condition of the isolated communities in the Cumberlands, writing in his journal: “Houses are far apart and uninhabited, orchards and fences in ruins — sad marks of war.”

At a stop in Jamestown — which he described as a “poor, rickety, thrice-dead village” — Muir came upon a log house. The woman there told him it was two miles to the next house, “but beyond that there are no houses that I know of except empty ones whose owners have been killed or driven away during the war.”

Muir’s writings offer one of the few descriptions of the northern Cumberland Plateau after the war, and a clear illustration of just how large a toll the war had taken on the ravaged territory along the Tennessee-Kentucky border.

On Buffalo Creek in Scott County, the farm of Hiram Marcum was one of those abandoned homesteads. In early 1862, a short time after his 16-year-old daughter, Julia, had mostly recovered from the devastating wounds she received in a fight with a Confederate soldier, Marcum had been forced from his home and his native Scott County by constant threats from the Rebels. Shortly after the Confederates killed his nephew, George, he moved his family north to Kentucky and joined the Union army, before dying of smallpox in Nashville on February 2, 1864. His wife, Permelia, would die in Pulaski County, Kentucky on February 6, 1865 — one year and four days following her husband’s death.

Marcum had been a prosperous farmer before the war, but lost everything he owned during the war. Shortly after the war ended, Scott County Court sold his land at a delinquent tax auction; his children were unable to redeem it from the sale in an appropriate amount of time, and the family never returned to Buffalo Creek.

It was a sad ending to one of Scott County’s greatest stories of heroism during the Civil War — the story that, perhaps, defined Scott County’s role in the war more than any other, except for the county’s declaration of independence.

* * *

All along the northern Cumberland Plateau were villages and settlements that bore the marks of war. In some cases, homes were abandoned because their owners had been driven away during the war — supporters of the Union and the Confederacy alike. In others, homes were abandoned or families left without the man of the house after their owners died in combat or in prison camps. Homes had been burned by guerrillas, crops had been decimated, orchards had been laid to waste. 

In Scott County, property values dropped 60 percent between 1860 and 1870 — a direct sign of the impact the war had on the region. Scott County’s properties were valued at $625,943 before the war, and only $252,671 after the war. In Fentress and Morgan Counties, property values dropped even further, by 71 percent. 

More than seven dozen men from Scott County — more than two percent of the total population — left for the war and did not return. Most died of illness in disease-ridden Confederate prison camps like Belle Isle and Andersonville. A few died in combat. Others were murdered.

The casualties began with Brimstone’s Fielding Griffith, the grandson of a Revolutionary War hero who was poisoned at Camp Dick Robinson in Kentucky in the Fall of 1861 and became the first Scott Countian to die in the war, and ended with Buffalo’s Pvt. Johnson Goad at the Knoxville hospital in the Spring of 1865.

In between, 83 Scott Countians died in the service. 

The rosters of the dead included Capt. William Robbins, the Brimstone man who was the first to sign the Home Guard oath in December 1861 and had his home attacked by Confederate forces who were looking to kill him in retaliation four months later. He had died of typhoid fever at a Union camp in Lexington, Kentucky in April 1863, just one year after the Battle of Brimstone was fought in his front yard.

There was Ambers Strunk, the Scott Countian who died in defense of Capt. Robbins and his home at the Battle of Brimstone, and was buried just across the Tennessee-Kentucky line on Union soil after his mother drove a horse-drawn buggy to Brimstone Creek to retrieve his body.

There was Pvt. Ransom Vanover, who was lynched by Confederate soldiers at Buffalo Creek while he was home on leave due to sickness.

There were the Chitwoods — father John H. Chitwood and his three oldest sons, Henry, Daniel and Andrew — who died, along with at least 15 others from Scott County, at Confederate prison camps after being captured at Rogersville shortly after the fall of Knoxville.

There was Cpl. Thomas Johnson, who drowned in the Cumberland River in 1862 as part of the Battle of Mill Springs. 

There was Pvt. William Turner Smith, who was killed in action while fighting with Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union forces in the Atlanta Campaign in August 1864.

There were the father and son of Sgt. James M. Wilson Sr. and Pvt. James M. Wilson Jr., part of Company G of the 2nd Tennessee, who died two days apart of typhoid fever at Camp Carter, Kentucky in February 1862.

There was John Newport, a Union captain who was shot in the groin and died at the Battle of Wierman’s Mill in Virginia. Following the war, Scott County’s war veterans named the county’s Union veterans organization, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) in Newport’s honor, calling it the John Newport Chapter of the GAR.

And there were the only two known Confederate soldiers from Scott County to die during the war, brothers Capt. James Gibson in 1862 and Capt. Henry Gibson the following year.

And still at least 70 others.

* * *

Then there were the survivors. In some ways, every person of the Cumberlands — man, woman, boy and girl — left standing after the war ended was a survivor. They had lost sons, brothers and fathers to the war. They had watched their livestock die from a lack of food that was due to pillaging armies, North and South alike. In some cases, they had their homes burned, like the family of Union soldier Dennis Trammell and his blind wife, Polly, who spent the winter of 1862-1863 in a cave near Jellico Creek after Confederate raiders burned their house. They had been forced to hide out in the forests and creek-bottom thickets to avoid vengeful guerrillas, or recruiters. They had gone hungry during the winter after having their food stores taken by soldiers. In some cases, they lost all they had as raiders invaded their communities time after time. On the Big South Fork River, the Burke family could no longer stand the thought of living in their cabin, with its blood-stained floors and bullet-riddled walls, after Confederate guerrillas were massacred at the Duck Shoals Skirmish that marked the last significant Rebel raid in Scott County. 

But the ultimate survivors were those who had gone off to war and had returned. Nearly one in five soldiers who enlisted would not return. Some of the ones who did would never recover from their wounds or illness. All had stories to tell.

While at least 19 Scott Countians died under horrible conditions at the Confederate hellhole known as Andersonville, one man who survived was Brimstone’s Daniel Walker. It was on the Walkers’ family farm where Brimstone and Indian Fork creeks meet that two columns of General Ambrose Burnside’s 16,000-man-strong Army of the Ohio met and reorganized during their march to Knoxville to seize East Tennessee from the control of the Confederacy. 

Several months later, on February 22, 1864, Walker — the 19-year-old son of Samuel and Mary Ann Hutson Walker — was captured by the Confederates at Cumberland Gap. He was initially confined at Richmond, Virginia, and then sent to Andersonville — the transfer that amounted to a death sentence for thousands of Union POWs. 

Walker was sick, but survived. When the war ended, he was freed and hiked hundreds of miles back to Brimstone Creek, sleeping under the stars and surviving by eating acorns. He married Almira Goad a year later, and they had at least 14 children. 

Sherwood Adkins was another Scott Countian who was captured at Rogersville and survived imprisonment at Andersonville. He married Minerva Adkins after the war. Still another Scott Countian who survived Andersonville was Joel Buttram, a 24-year-old who was captured at Rogersville. He served as Scott County Register of Deeds from 1866 to 1870. Others survived Andersonville with stories to tell, as well.

William Boyatt may have been the youngest Scott Countian wounded in the war. He served in the 30th Kentucky Mounted Infantry and was just 16 when he was shot in the ankle while on a picket line near Monticello, Kentucky. He credited his uncle, Elisha Boyatt, who served in the same regiment, with saving his life. The two are buried side-by-side at Foster Crossroads Cemetery west of Oneida.

After spending 30 days in a Monticello hospital after being shot, Boyatt was carried back to his Scott County home on a litter — a type of wheelless vehicle — by family and friends. They were required to carry the litter the entire route because their horses had been taken by soldiers early in the war.

Daniel Buttram may have been the only black person originally from Scott County to serve in the Civil War. Born in 1845, he was only about 16 when the war began, and was one of the slaves owned by Jane Buttram prior to the start of the war. At some point, he was granted his freedom, and enlisted in the Union army. He and his wife, Manda, lived in Glenmary in southern Scott County after the war. Other black Union veterans, James Dodson and Peter Mullin, lived in Glenmary after the war. However, it seems likely that they moved to the area for jobs; there were a number of black laborers who moved to the Glenmary area in the late 1800s.

There was Beaty Cecil, who at the age of 15 hiked from his home in Scott County to Nashville and lied about his age so that he could join the 7th Tennessee Mounted Infantry. He would go on to serve as Scott County’s sheriff and county judge after the war, and was also elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives and the State Senate.

There was John Fetterman, who was not originally from Scott County, but from Pennsylvania. He and his brother, William, were among the soldiers in Burnside’s Army of the Ohio who marched through Scott County en route to Knoxville in 1863. Fetterman was so impressed with the area that he returned with his family after the war and started a bowl factory on Smith Creek in the 1880s. That was what led to the community being named Bowl, Tennessee.

William Alexander Hembree, a member of the Home Guard, was shot 13 times and left for dead by guerrilla forces. According to oral legend, the Rebels attempted to get his horse to run over him. When the horse refused, they shot the horse, as well. Columbus Lowe carried Hembree to his mother’s house. According to historian Paul Roy’s “Scott County in the Civil War,” Hembree “lived to be an old man and was a kind and gentle person who loved children. He owned a grocery store, ran the post office and built the Hembree School. Two of his sons were teachers.”

First Lt. James McDonald was another of the Scott Countians who survived Rebel prison camps after being captured at Rogersville. Unlike so many of the others in his company, McDonald was not taken to Belle Isle, but was instead imprisoned at Libby Prison in South Carolina. However, Libby was just as notorious for its overcrowded and inhumane conditions as Belle Isle and Andersonville. 

McDonald escaped from prison, was recaptured, and then escaped again. Robert Huey, who escaped with him, later wrote that they were attempting to reach their company in East Tennessee, and survived by eating potatoes and corn that they took from farmers’ fields — often eating it raw to avoid discovery. After they began to suffer from diarrhea, they built a fire to cook their food, and the smoke was seen by a man who sounded an alarm and had bloodhounds put on their trail. 

In a deposition he signed years later, McDonald said that the man who saw the smoke had the hounds put on them because he believed they were his slaves. When he realized his mistake, he slipped a $10 bill to McDonald before he was led away by Confederate soldiers. McDonald later used that $10 to bribe a guard, and escaped from prison again. This time, he moved on foot to Georgia, reaching the city of Dalton after 26 nights of walking. Following the war, McDonald married Polly Burk in Somerset, Ky.

James Crawford Parker served as a captain during the war, then returned to Scott County and served as the county’s first superintendent of schools, and later as county judge.

Among the Rebel survivors was Francis Marion Chambers, who had left Scott County in 1857 after accidentally killing his brother, Jeremiah Chambers, in a knife fight. He fled on horseback to Missouri, and served in the Confederate army. He returned to Scott County in 1868, and served as postmaster at Bowl, the Smith Creek site of the Union veteran John Fetterman’s bowl factory.

James Granville Stephens was another of Scott County’s Confederate soldiers who survived the war. He was a lieutenant in Gen. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and fought alongside distinguished Rebel leaders like Longstreet, J.E.B. Stuart and Stonewall Jackson. He fought in the Battle of Antietam and Harper’s Ferry. He was decorated for his bravery in combat. Following the war, he returned to Scott County, and served as attorney general. Interestingly, his wife’s father and brother were both Union soldiers who died during the war.

There were hundreds of other wartime survivors from Scott County, as well. Not all of them saw combat action. Not all of them were captured or wounded. But all of them had stories that they passed down to their children and grandchildren. Many of their service records and life histories are documented in painstaking detail in Roy’s “Scott County in the Civil War,” which is published by the Scott County Historical Society.

And so the war was over. The men who had died could now be properly mourned. Those who hadn’t could set about the task of getting on with their lives. Some were reunited with their families. Some started new families. Some went on to lead successful lives in politics or in the private sector. 

But it would be a long time yet before Scott County — or any part of America that had been reached by the war — would be whole again. And that’s where the story goes next.