Neighbor protecting neighbor: The raising of the Scott County Home Guard
“I remember old soldiers telling me that everybody of military capability was expected to go to war. It really did not make so much difference which side he fought. He had the privilege of selecting his own side, but he could not lie around the community, shirking and dodging. He had to go out and fight.”
Those were the words of Cordell Hull, the United States Secretary of State under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the man widely viewed as the father of the United Nations, speaking of his childhood in Pickett County, which neighbors Scott County to the west.
According to Paul Roy’s “Scott County in the Civil War,” there were more than 600 men from Scott County who served in some capacity during the war. The population of Scott County in 1860 was about 3,500, meaning the number of Civil War soldiers from this community almost 20% of the total population — which included women, children and enslaved people, in addition to military-capable men.
“While it wasn’t a mass exodus of every able-bodied man, it was a sizable drain on the male population of the county,” Roy wrote.
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As was the case in the rest of East Tennessee, the overwhelming majority of those who served in the Civil War from Scott County fought for the Union, many of them slipping north to join the Federal forces in Kentucky. It was serving as a pilot for some of these men from East Tennessee that had placed Hiram Marcum in the Confederate crosshairs and led to his Buffalo Creek farm being attacked by the Rebels in the fall of 1861. Other men from Scott County who helped East Tennesseans slip north into Kentucky had their homes burned by Confederate forces.
For many, service in the war began at home. Throughout the region, “home guards” were established as neighbors banded together to protect their homes, their families and their property from marauding guerrillas.
In Scott County, a group of men met at the county courthouse in Huntsville on December 28, 1861 to establish the Scott County Home Guard. No doubt, their action was spurred by the troubles at the Marcum farm, where 16-year-old Julia had been badly injured as she protected her home with an axe, and other farms that had come under attack by the Confederacy. In his writings, Roy speculated that this meeting may have been when members of County court voted to secede from Tennessee and form the Free and Independent State of Scott. Remember, the exact date that event occurred is unknown because court records were destroyed by Confederate soldiers who captured the town during the war.
The group of Home Guard men signed an oath in Huntsville that read in part, “We the undersigned agree and pledge ourselves to each other in a covenant and by our oaths to unite together in a company by the name of a home guard to protect our homes, family, property, and liberties and our neighbors and their property and liberties and also to protect the constitution and the union and not to interfere with any person or persons or their property or liberties that we do not consider interfering with us or ours and for our government we bind ourselves to be controlled and governed by any person who a majority of our company may select for a captain.”
By signing the oath, the 71 men present at the Scott County Courthouse that day also became marked men in the eyes of the Confederacy.
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Scott County remained steadfast in its support of the Union. Richard Hancock, a Rebel soldier who was assigned to a regiment that was stationed at present-day Winfield in northern Scott County, before the disastrous Battle of Mill Springs that caused the Rebels to essentially withdraw from the region, wrote this: “Scott was a rather poor country, as the people were mostly Union, they were not willing to divide their rations with ‘Rebs’; therefore we suffered more for want of rations while at Huntsville than anywhere else during the war, while in camp.”
In October 1861, William B. Carter — the Carter County minister who was authorized by President Abraham Lincoln to destroy railroad bridges in East Tennessee in advance of a Union invasion — wrote to Gen. George H. Thomas from Morgan County. He said: “I find our Union people in this part of the state firm and unwavering in their devotion to our government and anxious to have an opportunity to assist in saving it. The rebels continue to arrest and imprison our people. You will please furnish the bearer with as much lead, rifle powder, and as many caps as they can bring for Scott and Morgan Counties. You need not fear to trust these people. They will open the war for you.”
In April 1862, a Rebel soldier named John Offield wrote to his father about a skirmish his regiment had with the Scott County Home Guard on Brimstone Creek. He said, “The people here and everywhere we have been since we left Va. are almost entirely Union, but I believe they are more so here than any place we have been.”
For these Scott Countians and others in the Cumberland Plateau region, the War Between the States marked the first time that war had come to their doorsteps. The region was unsettled frontier land and Indian territory during the Revolutionary War, and the battles of the War of 1812 and the various Indian wars were fought far away. These frontier families responded in the only way they knew how: some packed up and moved away, but most stood their ground and fought. Thus, the home guard.
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The Battle of Mill Springs kicked things into high gear for the northern plateau region. If men hadn’t felt a duty to pick a side and join the fight before, as Cordell Hull would later allude to, they were certainly feeling it after the region’s Confederate army was dismantled and Gen. Felix Zollicoffer killed at Mill Springs. Tinker Dave Beaty, the Fentress County man who would become widely feared and respected during the war as a pro-Union guerrilla, would say after the war that Confederate Capt. Willis Scott Bledsoe visited his farm shortly after Mill Springs.
“About 10 or 12 days after the Mill Springs fight several of Bledsoe’s men came to my house and told my wife to tell me I must take sides in the war or leave the country. They took some of my property, some saddles and other things belonging to me, when they left and as they were going down to cross the creek I fired on them, wounding one man and a horse,” Beaty said.
That incident, along with Champ Ferguson’s repeated guerrilla exploitations in the region, spurred Beaty into action.
“I told my boys that before I would leave home or run away I would fight them to Doomsday and if they killed me, let them kill me,” Beaty said. “So I took my sons and raised a company of men to fight them. Sometimes I had as many as 60 men, sometimes as low as five.”
Beaty’s force was somewhat different from the Scott County Home Guard; it would later be designated Beaty’s Independent Scouts by Congress and listed as part of the federal forces. Nevertheless, it was something of a precursor to the Scott County Home Guard.
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Though the Home Guard included many men who would go on to become regulars for the Union army, it lacked formal training in the early part of the war. But that didn’t mean that it was incapable. The informal regiment was well-organized, and developed a system for alerting the community when trouble was suspected.
In April 1862, a Knoxville man — Edward J. Sanford, a successful businessman who helped finance Knoxville’s post-war industrial boom — was slipping north to Kentucky to join the Union army. Near Huntsville, he nearly met his fate by accident.
“Usually it is little more than a creek,” Sanford wrote of New River, “but at that springtime because of the heavy and steady rains, it was a formidable stream. When we arrived on its southern bank we could find but one small canoe; and knowing that it would be imprudent to wait until the whole company could be carried in it over the river, the guns and provisions were placed in the boat, and all who could swim jumped in and breasted the waters.”
Sanford and his fellow travelers could see a cabin on the opposite side of the river. Their pilot said the cabin was owned by a “Union man,” so they didn’t hesitate to approach it. But as they did, they accidentally discharged one of their guns.
“Immediately a man ran from the house to the stable, mounted a horse and rode rapidly up the hillside,” Sanford wrote.
The man was a member of the Home Guard, and he was going to alert others, fearing the intruders to be Confederate fighters.
“They would probably fire upon us from every convenient spot, or as it was commonly termed ‘bushwhacked’ us,” Sanford wrote.
But a woman from the cabin, upon learning that Sanford and his companions were Union men who were headed north to Kentucky to avoid conscription into the Confederate army, went ahead of them, to let the Home Guard members know not to fire on them.
“The wounds or death they would have inflicted upon us were averted,” Sanford wrote. “
Sanford said of the people he met in Scott County: “They were thoroughly loyal to the United States and both determined and active.”
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The number of Civil War soldiers from Scott County, placed by Roy as 600-plus, may have been a little exaggerated by the fact that soldiers were sometimes attributed to the county in which they enlisted, even if they weren’t actually from that county.
Also included in Roy’s 2001 Civil War book is a reprint from an August 2000 newsletter of the East Tennessee Historical Society, which examines the Union’s 4th Tennessee Cavalry. The author noted, “One of the main points I have uncovered is that the men of Company A, who are on record as originating from Scott County, in fact did not come from Scott County, although a large number of them did enlist there.”
The author went on to note that the cavalrymen from Company A came from 20 different Tennessee counties, mostly Bradley, Bledsoe, Greene and McMinn. A total of 55 men enlisted from those four counties, and were enlisted on Oct. 25, 1862 at Huntsville by Col. Meshack Stephens.
The author of the East Tennessee Historical Society’s piece asks: “The degree to which outsiders flocked (to Scott County) to enlist there in this case is puzzling. Were these men in Scott County for the specific purpose of enlisting as Union cavalry soldiers? If so, was it premeditated? Did they travel there specifically to enlist in the 4th, or did they instead impulsively heed the oratorical or persuasive powers of Col. Stephens? Was there a recent even that precipitated this flurry of enlistment, and if so, what was it? Were these men pre-recruited in their home counties prior to traveling to Scott County? Did Col. Stephens advertise, and if so, what methods did he utilize? And why did no native-born men of Scott County join Company A of the 4th Tennessee Cavalry?”
All of those questions remain a part of the mystery of the 4th Tennessee. Meanwhile, Roy noted in his book that a majority of Scott County’s fighting men served in the East Tennessee National Guard, the 7th Tennessee Infantry, the 12th and 30th Kentucky Infantry, and the 2nd Tennessee Infantry.
If the number of total Civil War veterans from Scott County was exaggerated, it wasn’t by much. Roy’s research included the laborious task of including biographies of many of Scott County’s Civil War soldiers. A total of 481 of them are included in his book.
Remember, a total of 560 voters from Scott County had participated in the secession referendum in June 1861, voting 541-19 to remain with the Union. It appears most of them — if not all of them — joined the fight.
Among the 71 members of the Home Guard who signed the oath three days after Christmas in 1861, at least 25 — and likely more — would go on to enlist in the Union Army. Several of them served in Company C of the 7th Tennessee Infantry, which was raised in Scott County, and several also served in Company C of the East Tennessee National Guard, enlisting as General Ambrose Burnside marched his sea of troops through Scott County later in the war.
The names of the 71 original members of the Home Guard: George Anderson, Berry Bowling, E. Chaney, John Choate, Pleasant Davis, Thomas Dyer, William A. Edwards, John Gabin, Jonathan Garrett, G.A. Garrett, E.J. Garrett, Hugh H. Garrett, James Goad, W.M. Goad, John Goad, Little B. Goad, Aaron Goad, James Goad Jr., Joseph Griffith, Andrew Griffith Sr. Joseph Griffith Sr., J.M. Hamby, Jury Hamby, Andrew Jackson, John Jeffers, Andrew Lawson, A.R. Lewallen, Michall Lewallen, E. Lewallen, Granville Looper, W.M. Looper, Thomas Looper, Michael Low, James McCartt, Sterling McDonald, Benjamin Solomon Newport, W.M. Newport, Calvin Newport, Ezekiel Newport, James Newport, James Newport Jr. E.J. Newport Sr., George Pennington, William Phillips, John Phillips Jr., Julius Reed, William Robbins, John Sandusky, Hiram Sexton, Fountain Sexton, Julian Sexton, James Sexton, Fielding Sexton, Solomon Sexton, John Stringfield, James J. Stringfield, W.M. Stringfield, James Stringfield, W.M. Todd, Samuel Walker, John M. Webb, Lewis Webb, James Wilson, W.M. Wilson, Elihu Wilson, Solomon Young, Matthew Young, Andrew Young, W.M. Young, and W.M. Young Sr.
The Home Guard was involved in several of Scott County’s more noteworthy skirmishes during the war. And the first major one was at hand: The Battle of Brimstone in April 1862.