Felix Zollicoffer’s fatal mistake
On January 17, 1862, the Civil War changed for East Tennessee. That’s the day Gen. Felix Zollicoffer mistakenly rode into the midst of Federal forces at the Battle of Mill Springs and was killed, becoming the first Confederate general to die in the Western Theater of the war.
This is the first installment of this series — and may well be the only one when all is said and done — that does not tie directly to Scott County. But the death of Zollicoffer, the newspaperman-turned-soldier who had been assigned by Tennessee Gov. Isham Harris to put down the Union uprising in the state’s eastern grand division, had an indelible impact on Scott County.
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In Chapter 6, we focused on Scott County brothers Fielding and Hamilton Griffith, who were among the thousands of Union soldiers training at Camp Dick Robinson near Danville, Kentucky for an invasion of East Tennessee. U.S. Senator Andrew Johnson and U.S. Representative Horace Maynard, both Unionists who did not resign their seats in Congress after Tennessee seceded, had pressured President Abraham Lincoln to liberate East Tennessee after more than seven in 10 voters in the region voted against secession.
Fielding Griffith would never get to take part in the planned invasion of East Tennessee; he died in October 1861 after being poisoned by a woman who was selling pies to soldiers at Camp Dick Robinson. As it turned out, neither would Hamilton Griffith; the invasion was canceled in November 1861 by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who was in command of the Union troops in Kentucky and feared the build-up of Confederate troops in the southeastern portion of the state.
But Sherman, who suffered a mental breakdown, was relieved of his command and reassigned to an obscure military post in Missouri. His successor, Don Carlos Buell, was pressured by Lincoln to resume the operation to liberate East Tennessee. Whatever might have become of that effort was preempted when Zollicoffer went on the offensive, leading his Confederate troops north to Mill Springs, near present-day Somerset, in January 1862.
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Born Felix Kirk Zollicoffer in Maury County, Tennessee, Zollicoffer was the grandson of a Revolutionary War captain and the son of a Bigbyville plantation owner. He married the daughter of Capt. John Gordon, who fought alongside Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812.
Zollicoffer was a newspaper editor and an army volunteer who served as a lieutenant in the Tennessee militia during the Second Seminole War in Florida. He was a Whig, and in 1843 became editor of the Whig’s propaganda organ in Tennessee, the Republican Banner. He served as state comptroller and was later elected to the state senate and then to Congress before retiring and returning to private life in 1859.
Zollicoffer’s politics were complicated. He was a slaveholder, and a strong proponent of states’ rights. But he was a Whig, and had supported Gen. Winfield Scott — the man for whom Scott County had been named — in the 1852 presidential election. He was opposed to secession, and was a delegate to the 1861 peace conference in Washington that attempted to prevent the Civil War.
However opposed Zollicoffer may have been to Tennessee’s secession, he was more loyal to his state than he was to the Union. In 1861, after Tennessee Governor Isham Harris raised the Provisional Army of Tennessee as he pushed the state’s voters to secede, Zollicoffer volunteered his service. He was appointed brigadier general by Harris on May 9, 1861, less than a month before East Tennesseans would vote overwhelmingly to remain with the Union.
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If anyone was understanding of East Tennesseans’ reluctance to leave the Union, it might have been Felix Zollicoffer, the former Whig who himself had been opposed to secession. So, as delegates from throughout East Tennessee met at the Greeneville convention in the Summer of 1861 and petitioned Nashville to let them leave and form their own state, Harris and Zollicoffer attempted to gently persuade the region’s Unionists to stop their resistance and stand with the rest of Tennessee.
Even when Scott County boldly declared itself the Free and Independent State of Scott, in effect seceding from Tennessee in a move that apparently greatly angered Harris, Zollicoffer didn’t appear too eager to intervene.
But on July 26, 1861, Harris sent word to Zollicoffer that he was ordering 4,000 new recruits to Knoxville to be ready to suppress the secession resistance in East Tennessee. On August 8, 1861, Harris was re-elected governor of Tennessee. Ten days later he wired Zollicoffer again: Pro-Union leaders were to be arrested — banished from the state, if necessary. The policy of leniency was officially being changed to a policy of force.
The drastic change in tactics came as Johnson and Maynard were successfully petitioning Lincoln to liberate East Tennessee. Then came the raising of a 10,000-man-strong army at Camp Dick Robinson — the one that included multiple Scott Countians — and Lincoln’s authorization of railroad bridge-burning throughout East Tennessee as a precursor to the invasion.
When the invasion did not happen, due to Gen. William T. Sherman’s indecisiveness, Zollicoffer — the man formerly opposed to secession — became the Confederate enforcer that he would be remembered as. Dozens of men accused of planning and carrying out the bridge-burnings were arrested by Zollicoffer’s forces, and Confederate district attorney J.C. Ramsey vowed that they would hang at the sites of the bridge-burnings.
But Confederate judge West H. Humphreys threw out many of the cases, citing a lack of evidence. Zollicoffer was enraged. On November 30, 1861, he suspended habeas corpus and declared martial law throughout East Tennessee. The accused men were tried by court martial, and several were hanged over objections that the executions were illegal.
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William T. Sherman’s estimations of the Confederates’ strength in southeastern Kentucky, which prompted him to cancel the invasion of East Tennessee, were wildly exaggerated but not without some merit. In September 1861, Zollicoffer had seized the Cumberland Gap, believing that would be the route through which Union forces would move if and when they invaded East Tennessee. Zollicoffer’s forces then captured the town of Barbourville before being forced to retreat to Tennessee after marching on London, Ky.
In November 1861, Zollicoffer decided to move the bulk of his army west, to near Somerset, where he intended to meet reinforcements and drive Gen. Thomas’s Union troops from the region once and for all. By December, Zollicoffer’s men had established an encampment at Mill Springs, on the north bank of the Cumberland River.
Zollicoffer’s plans might have worked if Sherman — who had been so put off by the growing Confederate forces in the region that he requested to be relieved of his command — had still been in charge. But the change of command had reinvigorated the Union forces in Kentucky, which out-numbered the troops at Zollicoffer’s disposal.
Meanwhile, Confederate President Jefferson Davis had appointed a new military leader in East Tennessee — Maj. Gen. George B. Crittenden — to lead an invasion of eastern Kentucky. He was unaware that Zollicoffer was already doing just that.
But the Confederate troops in eastern Kentucky were poorly trained and poorly equipped, in no position to leave the relatively safe confines of their encampment to take an assault to Thomas’s Union army. So Zollicoffer and his men spent Christmas 1861 on the bank of the Cumberland River, waiting through endless days of rain.
On January 18, 1862, Crittenden finally ordered an advance. Zollicoffer led the first brigade. His men marched eight miles in the pouring rain, attacking Union pickets just south of Somerset.
Confusion reigned. In addition to the driving rain and the mud, it was foggy, and some of the Confederate soldiers were wearing blue uniforms. A regiment of the Confederate troops mistook a Union regiment for blue-clad Rebel soldiers. Zollicoffer, who was near-sighted and couldn’t see well anyway, rode his horse directly into the Union lines and began discussing the situation with Union Col. Speed S. Fry, believing him to be a Confederate officer.
Realizing his mistake, Zollicoffer turned his horse and began riding away. But a Confederate soldier fired on the Union troops. The federals returned fire, and Zollicoffer was shot and killed.
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The Battle of Mill Springs was a crippling blow for the East Tennessee Confederate army. Crittenden lost Zollicoffer, the man who had been responsible for enforcingGovernor Isham Harris’s commands to squelch the secession resistance in East Tennessee. He also lost 500 men in the fight, along with most of his arms, equipment, and supplies.
Zollicoffer had been a key player in the early days of the war. Gilbert Wilson, administrator of the Mill Springs Battlefield Association, once said: “Today people have forgotten about Gen. Zollicoffer, but he was well known at the time … In fact, I would say he was better known at that time than Robert E. Lee.”
So well-known was Zollicoffer that Union troops took souvenirs from his dead body, including locks of his hair.
The fallout from the Battle of Mill Springs would extend well beyond the loss of Zollicoffer, however. Many of the men from Scott County and neighboring counties who were joining the Union army were doing so in Kentucky, which was a border state that had remained loyal to the United States. If Zollicoffer had been successful at Mill Springs and the Union forces were driven out of the region, it would have become much more difficult for many of the Unionists from Scott County and other parts of East Tennessee to join the fight — at least until the Union army was able to recapture eastern Kentucky.
Meanwhile, the complete and thorough defeat of the Confederate army that Zollicoffer had built caused the Rebels to essentially abandon the area. The descent into guerrilla warfare, which would persist for much of the rest of the war, began quickly. With the Confederate soldiers gone, pro-Union residents of the region were reinvigorated; the few Confederate sympathizers essentially became outcasts. That gave rise to men like Champ Ferguson, the Confederate guerrilla who murdered many Unionists throughout the region, and Tinker Dave Beaty, Ferguson’s counterpart on the side of the Unionists, and to home-grown militias, like the newly-established Scott County Home Guard, which would soon see its first action in the Battle of Brimstone.