Brimstone man was Scott County’s first Civil War casualty

On Oct. 16, 1861, Fielding Griffith became Scott County’s first known casualty in the Civil War when he died at Camp Dick Robinson, Ky. He died less than 24 hours after contracting an illness of the “head and stomach,” according to an affidavit that would later be filed. The truth was apparently significantly more sinister: Griffith was poisoned.

Fielding Griffith and his brother, Hamilton Griffith, were just two of hundreds of Scott Countians who enlisted in the Union army after the outbreak of the Civil War, and they headed off to training at Camp Dick Robinson in central Kentucky.

For every intent and purpose, Scott County’s first known casualty of the war was 16-year-old Julia Marcum, who lost an eye and a finger while defending her family’s farm on Buffalo Creek on Sept. 7, 1861 — about five weeks before Fielding Griffith’s death. Confederate soldiers had raided the Marcum farm on a mission to find and kill her father, Hiram Marcum, a Unionist who had made himself a marked man by providing aid to East Tennesseans who were slipping north through Rebel-occupied territory and into Kentucky to join the war.

But Griffith was the first known casualty of the war among enlisted men, though he did not die in combat.

* * *

The full story of Griffith’s death might not have been revealed if his niece, Elzada Maughan, had not come forward for an interview with newspaper editor and historian Paul Roy in 2001. Elzada and her brother, Fred Griffith, were born to Hamilton Griffith late in his life, and survived until 2010 and 2008, respectively. Roy, who authored “Scott County in the Civil War,” had asked for descendants of Civil War veterans to step forward with information about their ancestors. Fred Griffith submitted a photo of his father and, when Roy had difficulty believing it was possible that the son of a Civil War veteran was still living in 2001, Fred had Elzada accompany him to Roy’s office for an interview.

During that interview, Elzada recalled a conversation she once had with her father, who died when she was just seven years old.

“They bought some pies from a woman and Fielding ate his while my daddy was feeding part of his pie to a little dog that was following them around,” she said.

It was Hamilton Griffith’s love for animals that saved him that day. The dog, after eating the piece of pie, fell over dead. Fielding Griffith, meanwhile, became violently ill and died the next day.

The full story of Griffith’s murder — who was the woman selling the pies? What became of her? — was never written about. That is somewhat strange; one would think that if it were known that a civilian was poisoning United States soldiers with her pies, she would have been arrested and summarily executed.

But Elzada Maughan’s story wasn’t the only account of Fielding Griffith’s death. A.H. Cross, a captain of Company 2, 2nd Tennessee Infantry, later wrote in an affidavit that he was present during Griffith’s sudden illness and death, and he “supposed he was poisoned from eating pies” that were being sold at Camp Dick Robinson.

* * * 

The Griffith brothers were the sons of John and Sarah Griffith, the great-grandsons of Joseph Griffith — Scott County’s Revolutionary War veteran who served as personal bodyguard to General George Washington when Lord Cornwallis handed over his sword at Yorktown. 

The Griffiths came from a poor family in Scott County. Their family was so poor, in fact, that Fielding saved his coffee ration while he was enlisted in the service so that he could send it back home to his parents in Tennessee. After her husband’s death in 1875, Sarah Griffith applied for and received a mother’s pension from the U.S. Government. She was receiving $12 per month when she died in October 1901.

Fielding Griffith, the older of the two brothers, had enlisted in the service at Montgomery — then the capital seat of Morgan County — on Aug. 9, 1861. That was two weeks after the First Battle of Bull Run, or First Manassas as it was called in the South, and it was becoming apparent that the war was going to be a drawn-out affair. Any hopes the Lincoln administration may have had of quickly squashing the rebellion had been dashed by the string of Confederate victories that began at Bull Run. But Shiloh, the brutal Tennessee battle that shocked the senses of the nation and signaled once and for all that this War Between the States was going to be a long and bloody conflict, was still seven months away.

Upon his enlistment, Fielding Griffith was assigned to Camp Dick Robinson, which played a critical role in the war as a training camp for loyalists from East Tennessee and parts of Kentucky. The base was located near Danville, Ky., some two hours northwest of Scott County by modern modes of transportation. 

Following the Bluegrass State’s vote to remain in the Union, which came in June 1861, Garrard County Judge Allen Burton traveled to Washington and urged President Abraham Lincoln to organize Union men into regiments. While there, he met U.S. Senator Andrew Johnson from Tennessee, who was attempting to persuade Lincoln to send federal troops into East Tennessee to free the heavily pro-Union region from the Confederacy. It was Johnson who had delivered a fiery anti-secession speech in Huntsville on June 4, four days before Scott Countians voted against secession by the largest margin of any county in the state.

Later, Johnson met with Burton and others to formulate a plan to support the loyalists in East Tennessee. And U.S. Navy Lt. William “Bull” Nelson was dispatched with instructions to enlist a force of 10,000 men to lead an exercise into East Tennessee. That was the start of Camp Dick Robinson, which became the first military base south of the Ohio River.

Brothers Fielding and Hamilton Griffith were among those 10,000 men.

* * *

Did Hamilton Griffith avenge his brother’s death before he left Camp Dick Robinson? It seems possible. 

In her 2001 interview with Paul Roy, Elzada Maughan related something her father had told her early in life. 

“And then he said something strange,” she said. “He said, ‘That woman never poisoned no one else.’ Reckon what he meant by that?”

Reckon what he meant, indeed.

Hamilton Griffith died in 1929 and is buried in Helenwood. Any secret he harbored of what might have became of the woman who poisoned his brother at Camp Dick Robinson went to the grave with him.

* * *

Meanwhile, the Union liberation of East Tennessee, which had been lobbied for by Andrew Johnson and was supported by President Abraham Lincoln, and which the Griffith brothers and others at Camp Dick Robinson were training for, never came to fruition. 

On Nov. 8, 1861, pro-Union men under Rev. William B. Carter of Carter County burned five railroad bridges in East Tennessee, which was supposed to be a precursor to an invasion by federal forces, led by General George Thomas. Carter had met with Lincoln and gotten the president’s blessing for the insurgency; Lincoln even provided $2,500 — the equivalent of almost $90,000 today — to support the arsonists, who were successful in burning railroad bridges at Bluff City, Lick Creek, Hiwassee, and Chickamauga Creek outside Chattanooga.

But the effort was for naught; unbeknownst to the Union guerrillas, the invasion had been canceled one day earlier by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was become increasingly afraid that a build-up of Confederate forces in southeastern Kentucky were too much for his Union army to overcome. General Thomas had advanced to within 40 miles of Cumberland Gap in early November 1861, pleading with Sherman to give his go-ahead to the invasion. Sherman refused and, finally, on November 7, called it off completely.

With no invasion by the Union army, East Tennessee loyalists paid a heavy toll for their bridge-burning exercises. General Felix Zolicoffer, the former newspaper editor who had been placed in command of stopping a Union uprising in East Tennessee by Gov. Isham Harris, declared martial law. Confederate forces rounded up and hanged several men charged with participating in the bridge-burnings. Hundreds more Union sympathizers were arrested and many died at a Confederate prison in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

As for Sherman, the man who would become a Union hero for his scorched-earth campaign through Georgia that brought the Confederacy to its knees in 1864, his military career nearly ended before it began. He was accused of drastically over-estimating the strength of Confederate forces in southeastern Kentucky. Newspapers said he was “insane.” He was relieved of his command and transferred to an obscure military post in Missouri.

Don Carlos Buell replaced Sherman, and was pressured by Lincoln into ordering General Thomas to renew his advance into East Tennessee. But East Tennessee would not be liberated. Thomas’s small army was attacked near modern-day Somerset by a Confederate army led by Zolicoffer. Ironically, Middle Tennessee and West Tennessee — the parts of the Volunteer State where voters were overwhelmingly in favor of secession — were seized by the Union; Harris, the governor who had successfully convinced Tennesseans to approve secession, forced to flee. And, all the while, East Tennessee — the portion of the state that was loyal to the Union — was left to fend for itself for two more years.