A marked man: The Battle of Brimstone
For their loyalty to the United States, several of Scott County’s Unionists became marked men by the Confederacy during the Civil War. Some were harassed into leaving the region. Some had their homes looted and burned. Some were killed.
It was his loyalty to the Union, and offering refuge to East Tennesseans who were slipping north towards Kentucky to join the Union army, that made a marked man of Hiram Marcum, the Buffalo Creek farmer who was hunted and ultimately chased from his home; his daughter badly wounded in an attempt to defend the family farm. It was their loyalty to the Union that made the members of Scott County Court marked men after they voted unanimously to secede from Tennessee and form the Free and Independent State of Scott.
And it was his loyalty to the Union that made William H. Robbins a marked man. His primary transgression was helping to form the Scott County Home Guard, which had been established three days after Christmas in 1861. He was one of the 71 men present at the Scott County Courthouse in Huntsville to sign an oath of allegiance to the Home Guard that December day, and then he assumed a leadership role within it, alerting residents as far away as Morgan and Fentress Counties to send word if Confederate raiding parties showed up in their communities.
On April 1, 1862, some three months after the Home Guard was formed, a company of Confederate soldiers showed up at Robbins’ home on Brimstone Creek. Maybe they intended to hang him; he certainly wouldn’t have been the first Unionist to suffer that fate. Maybe they just intended to arrest him. Either way, they were there for him. And what resulted was the first of several Civil War skirmishes to occur in Scott County.
The Battle of Huntsville, the Battle for the Bacon, and the Battle of No Business would all come later. This was the Battle of Brimstone. The Confederates were in the midst of a loosely coordinated campaign to stop pro-Union resistance in East Tennessee. And William Robbins was on their list.
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It was a Tuesday morning — April Fools Day on the calendar, though no one was laughing in the United States, where the bitter war was beginning to hit home. In less than a week, also in Tennessee but far west of the Cumberland Plateau, nearly 24,000 casualties would be suffered over the course of two days at Shiloh — more than all the casualties in all previous American wars combined. But on Tuesday, April 1, many — including Union General Ulysses S. Grant, the hero of Shiloh — clung to the idea that the war would soon be over.
That morning, a Confederate regiment from Alabama, under the command of Col. John C. Vaughn, arrived at Brimstone Creek with orders to find the home of Robbins. Historian H. Clay Smith wrote that “Captain Robbins” was a regular in the Union army. That was likely an error on Smith’s part; Robbins was indeed commissioned as a captain later that same year, but did not enlist in the army until July 1, 1862, according to historian Paul Roy. His will, dated August 27, 1862, stated that he was leaving for the army that same day and feared he would not return — a foreshadowing that turned out to be true.
But regardless of whether he was yet enlisted in the Union army, he was an organizer of the Home Guard, the very first of the 71 men to sign the oath of allegiance three days after Christmas.
Vaughn was a Confederate cavalry officer from East Tennessee, born near Sweetwater. He had served in the Mexican-American war, and was serving as the elected sheriff of Monroe County when Tennessee seceded. He raised Tennessee’s first regiment of Confederate soldiers, and played a key role at Bull Run, the first major battle of the war.
The Confederate soldiers didn’t find Robbins at his Brimstone Creek home that morning. He was encamped on top of the ridge that separated Huntsville from Brimstone, a strategic move that would allow him and other members of the Home Guard to be in either community — the county seat of Huntsville or the farming settlement of Brimstone — in just a few minutes’ time if trouble showed up.
Smith wrote in his book, “Dusty Bits of the Forgotten Past,” that the Rebel soldiers surrounded Robbins’ home. Inside, his wife, Lucinda Lewallen Robbins, was awoken by the noise the soldiers made.
“The raiders took everything the lady had to eat and began to make fires and prepare breakfast for themselves,” Smith wrote. “After breakfast, they sent out scouting parties to bring back food or information on the whereabouts of Robbins. This resulted in their staying over for a day or two, so they continued to assemble the loot, in food stuffs and storage, to take back with them together with the body of (Robbins) if found.”
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Unbeknownst to the small Confederate regiment, Robbins and other Home Guard members were formulating a plan of attack. During the predawn hours of the following morning, the Home Guard attacked, flanking the cabin on both sides while also mounting a frontal attack.
“It was still dark, and Vaughn’s men again became confused, keeping on firing on each other until the time they had begun to see daylight, they had dead and wounded all over the mountainside,” Smith wrote.
Smith’s account stated that the Rebels dragged their dead to an abandoned house that was located on the hillside above the main Robbins home, setting it afire to cremate the bodies before gathering their wounded and making an escape.
One member of the Home Guard, Ambers Strunk, was dead. He was the first Civil War soldier from Scott County to be killed in action.
The Home Guard had won the battle, forcing the Confederate regiment to retreat and saving the Robbins home. The pro-Union forces wouldn’t win all of the small skirmishes that were fought in Scott County during the war, but they had won that first one.
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The Confederates told a much different version of the battle. As they told it, the Battle of Brimstone, as it later came to be known, would have been the bloodiest single day of the war for Scott County, with dozens of local men killed or captured.
In a letter to his father, Confederate soldier John Offield — who had written that Scott Countians were more pro-Union than any other community he had traveled through after leaving Virginia — said that there were two Rebels killed and four wounded, while he and his comrades killed 15 Scott Countians and wounded 20 more.
There were only 27 Confederate soldiers present, Offield wrote, compared to about 120 “yanks.”
That story was backed up by an account given by Confederate Lt. Crockett R. Millard, one of the four Rebels who were wounded in the fight. Millard provided an account of the skirmish to the Athens Post, which wrote that the Confederates had four men killed and 11 wounded, one mortally, while the Scott County force had 30 killed and 18 taken prisoner. The newspaper wrote that the Confederates made off with 30 horses, 200 cattle and all the bacon they wanted after winning the fight.
The Athens newspaper quoted the same names of the Confederate dead and wounded as Offield mentioned in his letter to his father.
Still another account came from the Knoxville Register, which stated that four Confederates were killed and 10 were wounded, while “30 to 40 of the jayhawkers were killed” and another 15 to 18 taken prisoner, some of whom were killed during an escape attempt.
The Knoxville newspaper recounted a tale of Col. Vaughn himself narrowly avoiding death after mistakenly riding into a group of the Home Guard, then throwing himself from his horse and down a steep embankment as they leveled their guns on him.
The newspaper’s account stated that there were 150 horses taken from Scott County by the Confederates, along with as much bacon as they were able to carry.
“The victory seems to have been a most complete one and as usual the Federals greatly outnumbered our forces,” the Knoxville Register wrote. “If the reports of this affair are confirmed by the official accounts, the gallant Vaughn has added new laurels to those he achieved at Manases (sic).”
The pro-Confederate newspapers made no mention of the Rebels being in Scott County to search for a Home Guard leader, but instead painted a picture of local “jayhawkers” firing on the soldiers as they traveled along Brimstone Creek.
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So which version of the story was true? The Confederates’ version, which indicated that dozens of Scott Countians were killed or captured before the Rebels made off with the spoils of their victory? Or the local version, which stated that one Home Guard member was killed and the Confederates forced to flee after suffering heavy losses?
In all likelihood, the truth lay somewhere in the middle. But with regard to the Home Guard’s losses, Smith’s account was probably much more accurate than the Confederate newspapers in Knoxville and Athens.
It was confirmed that Strunk died in the fight. His mother and other relatives drove a horse and buggy from McCreary County, Kentucky to retrieve his body. He is buried on the Kentucky side of the state line. His headstone reads, “Kiled by the Rebbls in the Brimstone Battle.”
No other Scott County Home Guard members were identified as dead in the fight. It seems extremely unlikely that in a county of 3,500 people, dozens would have been killed or captured without a much more extensive record of the incident.
Furthermore, the newspaper accounts list as many as 150 horses being seized, along with a considerable amount of bacon. It’s unlikely that there would have been anywhere near that number of horses for the Confederates to take. And there almost certainly would not have been a significant amount of bacon on hand. This was an irregular group of untrained volunteers, not a regular army, and they would not have had provisions of those sorts on hand.
While it would not have been surprising for a group of untrained volunteers to be out-battled by Confederate regulars despite having a significant advantage in terms of the number of men engaged in the fight, the newspaper accounts appear to have been Confederate propaganda aimed at destroying pro-Union morale that persisted across East Tennessee.
Likewise, the local accounts of the Confederates’ losses were probably overstated. It seems probable that two Rebel soldiers, Henry Haley and Samuel Jones, were killed, while four others — including Lieutenant Millard — were wounded.
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As the Confederates withdrew from Brimstone Creek, they took much of what William and Lucinda Robbins owned — including bed linens they found inside the home, which they used to make horse blankets, according to Smith’s account of the skirmish.
Vaughn told Lucinda Robbins that he “‘hated’ what had happened to her and her family,” Smith wrote. “She replied, ‘If you do, why are you taking my good bedspreads and other valuables?’”
Lucinda Robbins also told Vaughn that her children were crying for something to eat, which prompted the Confederate colonel to give her back some of the meal and meat that he and his men had taken. She then told him that she didn’t have anything with which to cut the meat, because the soldiers had taken all her silverware. He gave her his personal knife so that she could cut the meat to feed her children.
“Mrs. Robbins gave the knife to a little, 12-year-old Newport girl who had ridden up on her way to the mill to get a ‘turn of meal ground,’” Smith wrote. “Her instructions to the girl were that, if she overtook Capt. Vaughn, she was to return him the knife. But the girl had it taken from her by one of the rear guardsmen; and, all the rest of her life, Mrs. Robbins wondered if the captain ever got his knife back.”
In Smith’s account, Lucinda Robbins spoke of “what a gentleman” Vaughn was for not killing her family and burning her home, “as he did that old house and his own men.”
The first skirmish of the war had been fought in Scott County. It would not be the last. Before 1862 ended, the sounds of gunfire would echo through the hills and hollows of central Scott County once more.