It was hard to be a Rebel in Union land

When the Battle of Huntsville broke out on August 13, 1862, Elizabeth “Suki” Massengill was in labor. Through her contractions, she heard the muskets begin to roar as Col. William Clift’s regiment of Scott County infantrymen was attacked by Confederate soldiers on River Road. She knew her brother, Tommy Duncan, was there. She feared what that meant for him.

So Suki Massengill began to pray.

“She was praying for him to be saved and not be killed in his sins,” her niece, Jemima Duncan Robbins, said in a 1960s oral recording. 

Duncan survived the battle, and he survived the war, although he was shot in the neck at one point before he was mustered out of the service in 1865. But he was an “awful wicked man,” Robbins said. So his preacher continued to pray for him. He prayed, and prayed, for years — until one day, Tommy Duncan began to call people from miles around to come and talk to him. They were people he had wronged, and he was seeking forgiveness.

One of those who the old Union war veteran called upon was Sally Chiles Duncan.

Earlier in the way, Tommy Duncan had approached Sally at her home. “I’ve come today to kill you,” he told her. When she asked why, he said, “You’ve got an uncle in the Rebels that’s a colonel and he’s fighting against us Duncans and I’m going to kill you.”

Sally’s husband, Elijah Frost Duncan, just happened to be nearby. “Tommy, don’t you lay your hands on my wife,” he said. “If you do, it will be bad for you.”

Tommy Duncan was no fool. He knew if he hurt Sally he was a dead man. So he walked away. But he didn’t leave the property immediately.

“He knew that they had a pretty red and white heifer that was fresh in May,” Robbins said. “That was their supply of milk for the summer, so he killed the heifer.”

That was what life was like in Scott County — indeed, in most of America — in the 1860s. Your home could be burned, your possessions looted, your livestock killed, your very life taken, simply because of your loyalties to either the North or the South — or, worse still, because of the loyalties of someone in your family; someone you had no control over.

Most of the Civil War stories from Scott County are about pro-Union residents who suffered at the hands of Confederate sympathizers. That’s because the people here were overwhelmingly Unionists; their stories are plentiful. But life was even harder during the war for the few people from Scott County who were Confederate sympathizers. In a county that was the most loyal to the Union of any in Tennessee, there was simply no room for Rebels. Just ask Sally Chiles Duncan, who wasn’t a Rebel but who had lost her milk cow because her uncle sided with the Confederacy.

It was hard to be a Rebel in Union land, and Scott County was Union land.

* * *

Not all of the stories of resentment fueled by loyalties to one side or the other during the war ended badly. 

When Tommy Duncan went to Sally Chiles Duncan all those years later and asked her forgiveness for threatening to kill her and killing her milk cow, simply because she had a family member who was a Rebel, he found that forgiveness had already been given.

“Oh yes,” Sally told him. “Tommy, I forgave you years ago and I still pray for you.”

The weight of what he had done still weighed on Duncan. He told his wife, Cynthia, that he was going to the woods. He was going to stay there until he found God.

“If I find the Lord, I’ll be back, and if I don’t find the Lord, I’ll never come back,” he told her.

Cynthia waited. And Tommy Duncan came back, jubilant, a changed man. He had already found forgiveness from Sally for killing her milk cow. But now he had found forgiveness from a higher power. He said that he was ready to die, but he asked God to give him one year so he could share the transformation that had taken place in his heart. And 12 months later, he died.

* * *

Many of the stories of neighbor being pitted against neighbor, and family member against family member, didn’t have a happy ending. Isaac Griffith could’ve attested to that.

Griffith, born and raised at Brimstone, was the grandson of a Scott County Revolutionary War hero. His grandfather, Joseph Griffith, was personal bodyguard to Gen. George Washington the day Lord Cornwallis handed over his sword at Yorktown in 1781. After the war, Joseph Griffith moved his family to Scott County and settled on Brimstone Creek, where his descendants still live today.

Isaac Griffith’s nephews, Fielding and Hamilton Griffith, were in the Union army. His brother John’s sons had headed to Camp Dick Robinson in Kentucky to train with the forces who were intended to invade East Tennessee and wrest control of the region from the Confederacy.

Even Griffith’s own brother, Andrew, who was two years older than him, was a Union man. Andrew joined Col. Clift’s 7th Tennessee regiment in Huntsville.

All the rest of the Griffiths at Brimstone Creek, more distant relatives of Isaac’s, sided with the Union, as well.

But Isaac was a secessionist. He sided with the Confederacy.

Isaac Griffith was a Rebel in Union land.

Twenty-five years old at the time of secession, Griffith worked as a blacksmith. His family owned 375 acres of property on Brimstone, which he estimated to be worth up to $4,000 — more than $140,000 in today’s value. But he lost everything in the war.

Griffith enlisted in Company D of the 5th Tennessee Cavalry in Jacksboro on New Year’s Day in 1862. At the time, he estimated that he was one of only 36 Confederates in all of Scott County.

It didn’t take long before Griffith “saw the elephant,” as Civil War soldiers liked to refer to new recruits seeing their first action. The site of his first combat? April 1, 1862, just a few miles from his home on Brimstone Creek. 

Isaac Griffith was one of the Rebels fighting to capture William Robbins of the Scott County Home Guard. 

“A fight with the bushwhackers,” is how he put it. He lost his horse in the fight, which saw the small Confederate force defeated by the Home Guard.

Griffith would later estimate that he had two horses, a wagon, seven cattle, 14 sheep, 60 hogs, blacksmith tools, carpentry tools, “a lot of household furniture,” and 600 bushels of corn when the war began. He lost it all.

Griffith saw quite a bit of action between the Battle of Brimstone and the day he was discharged in 1864. His regiment won some and lost some. But the last time he was in battle, he was in Georgia, fighting Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman on Sherman’s March to the Sea that brought the Confederacy to its knees.

Griffith was a Rebel, but he didn’t hold animosity towards the Union. During the evening of one of his last days on the battlefield, he came across a wounded Yankee soldier from Michigan. He built a fire, gave the Yank some water, and covered the man with one of his blankets.

The Union soldier, gravely wounded, asked Griffith to write to his mother and fiancé, to tell them that he had died an honest and brave soldier.

When Griffith had to leave to rejoin the fight, the dying Yank asked him to shake hands, “and promise him to meet in a better world where there would be no more fighting and wars.”

Griffith said he wasn’t a Christian at the time, but he intended to keep that promise.

“I hope and pray that we will all meet in heaven where there will be no more wars, where all will be peace and happiness,” he said.

When he was discharged from the service, Griffith returned home to Brimstone Creek with only the horse he was riding, $2 in cash, and part of a suit of clothes.

And then, “I had been home only two days when some Yankee came and took my horse from me,” he said.

Brimstone was no place for a Rebel.

“We had to get out the best we could,” Griffith said of himself and the 35 others from Scott County who sided with the Confederacy.

And, so, get out he did. He moved to Bradley County in southern Tennessee, where he would live for the remainder of his life, never returning to join the rest of his expansive family at Brimstone Creek.

It was hard to be a Rebel in Union land.

* * *

As the war progressed, a number of Scott County’s Confederate sympathizers left for good. Many of them moved to Wayne County, Ky., near Monticello, to escape persecution.

One of those who left was John L. Smith, who had been appointed Scott County Clerk and Master in 1858. It was supposed to be a six-year term. But then came secession in 1861, and everything got turned upside-down.

John Smith was a well-off property owner in Huntsville, a former elected official (he won election as Scott County’s first Circuit Court Clerk in 1850), and a trustee of the Huntsville Academy. He had five town lots. According to historian H. Clay Smith, his property was the most highly-assessed property in the county seat. But he was no longer welcome, and moved to Missouri.

John L. Smith’s son, Calvin Edward Smith, enlisted in the Confederate army. During the war, he decided to pay a visit home. He feared what the reception would be like, but hoped he could enter, visit with friends, and leave before most people even knew he was there.

He was wrong. It seemed that folks knew Callie — that’s what his friends called him, before the hostilities began — was coming even before he got to Huntsville. And when he got there, they made it clear that he wasn’t wanted there. Callie decided to leave, to make his way to his uncle’s home on Smith Creek and then escape over the mountain. He feared his life might be in danger if he tarried in Scott County.

His fears were well-founded. According to Smith in “Dusty Bits,” members of the Home Guard took up positions on Buffalo Creek, east of Huntsville. Among the members who intended to kill the Rebels in their midst was the county sheriff at the time, Jim Sharp.

As it turned out, Callie Smith wasn’t the only Reb who was home on leave. Another man, W.H. Sewell, was there as well, and there were others. They traveled together towards Smith Creek. After all, there’s strength in numbers. But the Home Guard had set up an ambush.

How great was the hatred that the Unionists harbored for the Confederates? As Smith tells it in “Dusty Bits,” the Home Guard had decided that two men — Jackson Smith and Jesse Roysden — would fire the first shots. How were they selected? Because they were Callie’s family. One would shoot Callie, and the other would shoot his horse.

There was a fly in the ointment. Callie Smith had been wearing a bright red shirt when he left Huntsville. Along the route, he switched shirts with Sewell. So when his family members who were hidden in the trees took aim at the man in the red shirt, they were firing at Sewell, not Smith. They killed both Sewell and his horse.

“Callie was raging mad!” H. Clay Smith wrote. “He had thought, all along, that this might happen if he continued to wear that red shirt, and that it would be his folks who would most like to get him!”

A while later, they were burying Sewell’s body. Someone asked if anyone wanted to say something on Sewell’s behalf. “Yes,” spoke up a preacher in the group, Whig Duncan. It was Duncan’s brother, Oliver Duncan, who had been with the two men who the Rebels shot and hanged nearby, Larkin Cross and Ransom Vanover. Oliver Duncan had just barely managed to escape.

The men placed Sewell’s body in the shallow grave, face-down in the dirt. After the last shovelful of dirt had been placed on top of it, the preacher, Whig Duncan, danced on the grave. Then he said, “Now, dance your way to hell face down, as fast as you can!”

It was hard to be a Rebel in Union land.

* * *

At Oneida — though it wasn’t known as Oneida at the time — John L. Smith’s father, Callie’s grandfather, had received a land grant and settled down in 1837. Originally from Virginia, Isaac Smith was a Methodist minister who had come to Tennessee as a circuit rider, following a mountain trail that passed through the present-day Verdun area to Ponderosa. He was so impressed with what he saw that he secured a land grant for a large tract that included all of what is Ponderosa Estates today, extending eastward to Tunnel Hill.

Smith established Oneida’s First Methodist Church in 1840, holding services at the home of his son-in-law, Jim Terry, who lived at Tunnel Hill. Later, a permanent church was built where the clubhouse now stands at Oneida Municipal Golf Course at Ponderosa.

Smith was a well-liked preacher. But he was also a Confederate sympathizer, one of the 19 from Scott County who voted to secede in 1861. Battle lines were being drawn.

When Smith used the pulpit to preach his sympathy for the South, frictions grew within the church. Some of his own family members left the church to join the Baptist congregation. But not all. Several of Smith’s family shared his sympathies for the South. His son, John L. Smith, was one of them. He had another son, Ewell, a deputy sheriff, who enlisted in the Confederate army. And he had two grandsons in the Confederate army, Callie and Daniel.

One night, a group of Union loyalists showed up at Rev. Smith’s house. They arrived just before nightfall, according to H. Clay Smith, “appearing to be intending to attack him and some of his sons, especially Onvie, as the latter seemed to be the one they wanted.”

They called on Onvie to leave the home. Onvie answered by firing on one of the Unionists, Jeff Pemberton, striking him in the leg. The raiders fled, but threatened to return.

Onvie left home. Rev. Isaac Smith left, too, returning to Virginia. Services at the First Methodist Church ceased for a time, although Rev. Smith would return to Scott County after the hostilities died down. But by that time he was an old man, and he died in 1867. 

It was hard to be a Rebel in Union land.