#Enclave: Scott County’s ill-fated Union regiment

It was at nine o’clock on the morning of August 13, 1862 that Scott County’s largest Civil War battle began. 

That morning, Confederate forces under the command of Capt. T.M. Nelson approached Huntsville on River Road, southeast of the small village, where they engaged with Union soldiers under the command of Col. William T. Clift, who had raised an infantry regiment in Scott County.

At eight o’clock, Clift’s pickets — who had been stationed outside the breastworks that he had used to fortify a mountainside — were driven in by the Confederate troops. An hour later, the first shots were fired. The Battle of Huntsville was underway.

* * *

William Clift was a rich man: Chattanooga’s first millionaire; a slave-owner who had amassed thousand of acres of property in Hamilton County.

But when the Civil War began, Clift was staunchly pro-Union. He placed a cannon on his front lawn as a symbol of defiance towards the Confederacy. He offered refuge to Federal sympathizers who needed it. And, not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for him to capture the attention of Tennessee Governor Isham Harris.

On November 14, 1861, Harris — the pro-slavery governor who had pushed Tennessee into secession — issued an order: “Muster all the armed forces possible … and capture Clift and his men, dead or alive.”

By that time, Clift had moved his militia, which he called the “Seventh Tennessee,” to Sale Creek, a ways north of Chattanooga on present-day U.S. Highway 27. When the 6th Alabama Infantry arrived in the tiny village to capture him, Clift and his men had already broken camp. Some had joined another outfit and marched towards Kentucky. Some had dispersed and returned home. Clift and a few loyal supporters had taken to the mountains to hide.

By May 1862, Brigadier General George W. Morgan had commissioned Clift a colonel in the Union army, and ordered him to establish a regiment of federal troops in Scott and Morgan Counties in Tennessee, in order to “annoy the enemy’s rear.”

It was a dream come true for Clift, who despite being a millionaire and a successful businessman had long fancied the notion of raising an army to fight his Confederate enemies.

* * *

Clift, who had two sons serving in the Union army and two more serving for the Confederacy, arrived in Huntsville on June 1, 1862. There, he set up his headquarters, recruited men from throughout Scott, Morgan and Anderson Counties, including members of the Scott County Home Guard, and set about the task of fortifying the hill along River Road to the southeast of town.

William H. Robbins, the Brimstone man who had helped establish the Home Guard and, for his efforts, had been the subject of a Confederate attack months earlier, joined Clift’s company and was commissioned a captain.

Working from his Huntsville headquarters, Clift made several recruiting and scouting excursions into Morgan and Anderson Counties, all the while building a breastworks on the hill overlooking River Road to provide sanctuary for his soldiers.

By August 1862, Clift had 250 men under his command, serving in the 7th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry. But they were green, had little training, and were ill-prepared for a fight. Clift had repeatedly written to his superiors to urge them to send more supplies. 

Word reached Confederate forces in Knoxville that the Union army was being raised in Scott County. Within days, Nelson’s forces had crossed the Clinch River and begun the climb into the Cumberland Mountains, arriving on River Road on August 13.

• * *

The Battle of Huntsville wasn’t much of a fight. Clift estimated that Nelson had at least 1,500 men with him, and perhaps as many as 2,000. Other estimates placed Nelson’s army at half that size. Either way, the Confederates far outmanned Clift’s 250-man-strong, inexperienced company of soldiers.

Within minutes, Clift’s army had broken. Most of them fled the breastworks. They left “in wild confusion,” Clift said.

The entire company might have been captured, if not for a somewhat colorful turn of events. Clift was suffering from a bout of diarrhea, and could not flee with the rest of his men. A small force of about 50 men stood with him, and together they managed to hold the Confederate forces at bay for more than an hour and a half.

“I am proud to speak in the most honorable terms of a part of the officers and men that remained under my command,” Clift said. Specifically, he mentioned Major James S. Duncan, Captain William Robbins, and two other men — Wilson and Shelton, who may have been Corporal Fountain Wilson or Captain James Wilson, and Corporal George Shelton or Captain William Shelton.

The 90-minute firefight helped the fleeing men of the 7th Tennessee escape. But the battle ended in a rout, with Clift and his remaining soldiers fleeing the hill.

Following the end of the fight, Nelson’s Confederate forces descended on Huntsville, where they spent a couple of hours searching for members of Scott County Court who had voted to secede from Tennessee months earlier. At a minimum, the men would have been arrested. They may have been hanged. But none of them were apprehended. Instead, the Confederates ransacked the county courthouse, where they apparently took the written records of the “Free and Independent State of Scott.” Following the war, there was a reference made in court minutes to a couple of missing minute books that needed to be rewritten. They never were and, for this reason, the exact date of Scott County’s secession from Tennessee has never been conclusively proven. What became of the missing books is unknown. Because they were never found, it was assumed they were destroyed.

* * *

Clift’s 7th Tennessee was in disarray. Some of the men under his command were listed as deserters. It wasn’t until October 1, more than six weeks later, that the regiment was back in action again. On October 28, 1862, Clift wrote that “my position in Scott County, Tennessee has been very perilous until within the last few days; but I kept my men in the most obscure parts of the county, and posted my pickets from 20 to 25 miles from my camps and within a short distance of the enemy’s lines.

The Confederates did not believe that Clift’s regiment had been torn apart by the Battle of Huntsville. On August 23, 1862, 10 days after the skirmish, Assistant Adjutant-General Joseph F. Belton wrote to Colonel S.J. Smith, commanding officer of the Rebel forces at Loudon, Tennessee, and said that he had reason to believe Clift’s regiment was “awaiting an opportunity to attack at some vulnerable point — probably Loudon.” Belton directed Smith to have his cavalry scout the area around the nearby town of Kingston and keep pickets on the lookout for advancing Union soldiers from the area of Scott County.

However, the 7th Tennessee had no intention of leaving the northern Cumberland Plateau. Clift had become focused on rooting out the Confederate guerrillas that roamed the war-torn region. He wrote, “I deem it highly indispensable to break up these guerrilla companies as speedily as possible, as there can be no safety to the peach of the country while they are permitted to exist.” 

On its first patrol after reorganizing, Clift’s men captured some Rebel prisoners. Two weeks later, on October 15, another scouting party headed west and skirmished with Confederate guerrillas under the command of the infamous Champ Ferguson, killing four of them. And on Halloween day, yet another scouting party was dispatched from Somerset to travel to Monticello, then Jamestown and eventually into Roane County, to break up more guerrilla companies that were roaming the Cumberland Plateau region.

Clift wrote on October 28 that he had been “subsisting my troops on corn bread and beef since the fight at Huntsville, Tenn. at a cost to the government from about 10 to 15 cents for each soldier per day and about the same for about 50 horses for mounted infantry.” 

The aging colonel maintained that he could be successful against the region’s deeply-engrained Rebel forces despite being out-gunned. He wrote to U.S. Senator Andrew Johnson that “I am by the musket as David was by his sling.” And in a requisition request to the Union army, he said that “100 bold, dashing horsemen could hold off 4,000 Rebels in the mountains, if they were properly supplied.” He told his superiors that he had little trouble obtaining horses, but was having difficulty finding saddles and bridles, and again asked for more equipment.

* * *

The supplies would not come. Instead, Clift was relieved of his command. The men enlisted in the 7th Tennessee were ordered to transfer to other companies. Most simply deserted and went home. 

Some of the men from the 7th Tennessee transferred to the 8th Tennessee, under the command of Col. Felix A. Reeve. But Clift’s men had a reputation as being both untrained and undisciplined. Reeve complained, “at least one fourth of the Seventh regiment might be mildly denominated a drunken, refectory and lawless mob. Please relieve me of them! I am better off without them.”

Clift, meanwhile, sought an answer as to why he had been relieved of his command. He traveled first to Nashville, then to Lexington, to meet with Union commanders. At one point, even wrote President Abraham Lincoln. He did not receive a response.

One clue as to why Clift was relieved of his command might have been in the form of a dispatch from Brig. Gen. George W. Morgan, commander of the 7th Division of the Army of the Ohio, who was stationed at Cumberland Gap. Three days after the Battle of Huntsville, Morgan wrote to Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, who was by that time commander of the Union forces in the Western theater of the war, that he had received a telegram informing him that Clift’s 7th Tennessee regiment had been attacked by a force of 2,500 men. “He has twice disobeyed my orders to fall back upon Barboursville (Kentucky),” Morgan wrote.

Gen. Ambrose Burnside, who was in command of Union forces in Kentucky, did respond favorably to Clift, however. He reinstated the Chattanooga colonel’s command — only to revoke it again four days later. Then he sent an assistant to southern Kentucky, where Clift was encamped with the few men he had remaining with him. The assistant reported a state of disarray, writing, “Discipline and manners were entire strangers to the party.” He recommended to Burnside that the men “be permitted to remain as they are, unrecognized and unpaid.”

Based on that report, Burnside disbanded the 7th Tennessee once and for all. Clift’s days as a military commander were over.

* * * 

With Clift no longer in command and the 7th Tennessee no longer in existence, Huntsville was again something of a no man’s land. The breastworks on River Road that Clift had spent so many weeks building were simply abandoned; traces of the excavation for the breastworks can still be seen, some 160 years later. Officially, Scott County was under Confederate occupation once more, and would remain that way for a year yet to come. And with the 7th Tennessee disbanded, there was no official Union regiment engaged in a full-time effort to end the guerrilla raids that continued almost constantly throughout the region.

For his part, Clift was not finished with the war. He would continue to serve the Union army, and was captured in August 1863 as he attempted to deliver messages to Burnside. The Confederate regiment that took him prisoner was commanded by one of his own sons.