© Jerry F. Couch

[This article first appeared in the Clinch Valley Times in early 2013. No part of this article may be used without the written permission of the author.]

SALTVILLE, VIRGINIA was crucial to the Confederacy during the waning days of the Civil War.  One of the South’s few functioning rail lines passed through Saltville and was being kept open at great sacrifice so the Confederacy would not lose its salt supply.  In the days before refrigeration, salt was the sole means of preserving the meat which, along with cornmeal, typically comprised Confederate soldiers’ scant rations.  The railroad also formed a tenuous, highly vulnerable link between strategic areas where battles were still taking place.  Saltville was a thorn in the side of the Northern military leaders.  It had to go.

            General Stephen Gano Burbridge was a Union officer from Kentucky who had achieved his rank primarily

due to political connections.  Before the war he had practiced law and operated a plantation.  As time passed, Burbridge’s military reputation and his unpleasant personality began to undermine his ambitions.  Like many an unsuccessful leader before and since, he focused on the post-war political role he expected to play and not on the job at hand.  He took foolish chances in order to be noticed and made errors of judgment which cost the lives of men under his command. 

            One such attempt at grandstanding was the Battle of Saltville which took place on October 2, 1864.  In theory, Burbridge should have succeeded.  Union forces outnumbered Confederate soldiers by about 2 to 1.  Burbridge disdainfully declared Saltville’s defenders to be little more than a group of “old men and boys.”   However, the attack was a failure, partly due to geography and luck but primarily due to Burbridge’s lack of military competence. 

            Having failed to capture Saltville, Burbridge’s direct command was turned over to General George Stoneman.  On December 20 and 21, Stoneman accomplished what Burbridge could not.  Union forces captured Saltville and blew up the salt works.  The resulting explosions could be heard on the other side of Clinch Mountain by residents of Lebanon, Virginia.

            Following the destruction of the salt works, the Union regiments split up and began a march to Tennessee and Kentucky where they would be safe from ambush by Confederate reinforcements.  The Confederates had assumed Burbridge would choose the route through Scott and Lee Counties to the Cumberland Gap.  Instead, he went through Hayter’s Gap to Lebanon, Wheeler’s Ford, Gladeville (now Wise) and Pound Gap.  Along their way the Yankees were harried by Confederate troops (also from Kentucky) under the command of Brigadier Gen. Basil Duke.  An ice storm quickly turned the journey into a nightmare for both men and horses.  Here is what Duke had to say concerning the incident:

            There is no word in the English language which adequately expresses how cold it was.  Our horses, already tired down and half-starved, could scarcely hobble.  Those of the enemy were in worse condition, and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for ten miles a man could have walked on dead ones.  They lay dead and stark frozen in every conceivable revolting attitude, as death had overtaken them in their agony.  Saddles, guns, accouterments of all kinds strewed the road like the debris of a rout.  We picked up many stragglers.  Some pieces of artillery were abandoned but not burned.  When we reached Wheeler’s Ford, fifty-two miles from Saltville, I had left, of my 300, only fifty men.  Here we had our last skirmish with the enemy, and gave up the pursuit.  More than one hundred prisoners were taken, many of them unable to walk.

            At the beginning of the war, the Russell County Board of Supervisors had appointed William C. Jackson to construct a ferry on the Clinch River near present-day St. Paul to facilitate the collection of food and supplies for the war effort.  Robert Boyd and Stephen Banner were placed in charge of having the ferry boats constructed.  The county’s ferry probably operated just above the point where Lick Creek flows into the Clinch (now known as Boody).  The river makes a sharp bend at this point and is deep and narrow.  However, it is likely the ferry boats had been destroyed earlier in the war and were no longer in operation by late 1864. 

            At Wheeler’s Ford, the Clinch River is wide and shallow.  It was (and is) possible for wagons, horses, and humans to ford the river there without much difficulty…except during a flood.  To escape the pursuing Confederates, Burbridge ordered his troops into the flooded Clinch River.  Some of them made it across.  Many others drowned in the icy water and their bodies were swept away by the rushing current.  Those who survived were only slightly better off than those who perished, for there was even worse to come.  F. H. Mason of the 12^th Ohio Cavalry left the following record of the living hell of that winter day: 

            At dark the column again moved on, and made that night one of the most terrible marches on record during the war.  A furious gale froze the heavy rain as it fell and the road was soon covered with a thick, slippery coating of ice.  Horses could no longer walk with certainty, and after a dozen falls, most of the men dismounted and led their animals as best they could.  The terrors of the march from the Clinch River to Pound Gap eclipsed all the previous sufferings of the expedition.  Horses fell by dozens and many men were walking over the frozen road with their feet wrapped only in shreds of cloth.  Scores of men had their feet and hands frozen, many requiring amputation of one or both feet.  Of the forty-four hundred animals which carried Burbridge’s men into Tennessee a month before, only eight hundred lived to re-cross the Cumberlands.

            This was the reality of war.  Today, the blue bell flowers which bloom so abundantly each spring on Blue Bell Island are perhaps a fitting memorial to the soldiers in blue who met such a tragic end at this usually peaceful place in 1864.  But what about Burbridge; what became of him? 

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MORE ABOUT GEN. STEPHEN BURBRIDGE

(Originally presented as Part II of the article in the 2013 printed edition of the Clinch Valley Times)

Gen. Stephen Burbridge’s exhausted troops desperately scrambled over the ice-covered road between Wheeler’s Ford (near St. Paul) to Pound Gap in late December of 1864.  There, they planned to cross the Kentucky border and continue on the state road which led to Mount Sterling.  To do this, they had to pass through the rugged Cumberland Mountain region.  This rough road was not suited for winter travel.  It was primarily used by Kentucky farmers to drive their livestock to eastern markets during the warmer months.  Soldiers had already raided Gladeville (now Wise) and the surrounding area several times that fall.  There was little to no forage available for either man or beast – unless you happened to like acorns. 

            After the Confederates had ended their pursuit of Burbridge’s army at the Clinch River, Confederate soldier Edward O. Guerrant wrote in his journal that it was “good riddance” and he would trust the tender mercies of Pound Gap to finish taking care of Burbridge’s Union intruders.  That’s more or less what happened.

            Burbridge was a man with a lot on his mind.  Four months prior to his Saltville raid, he had been given military command of Kentucky.  Kentucky had become the scene of increasing Confederate guerrilla campaigns which threatened to prolong the war and stir up endless civil strife.  Despite Kentucky’s position as a “neutral state” and the fact it never seceded from the Union, President Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation #113 established martial law in Kentucky and also suspended habeas corpus.  Students of history and government will recall that Chief Justice Roger Taney had declared Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus to be unconstitutional.  However, Lincoln was the Commander in Chief of the Union Army, and as such he had troops to enforce his executive orders.  Roger Taney’s only weapons of enforcement were a gavel and an old jurist’s superior knowledge of Constitutional Law up to that point in history.  It was a pivotal time, to say the least.

            For those of you who haven’t read the Constitution lately, habeas corpus works like this: In America, persons who are arrested have the right to challenge the reason for their incarceration in open court in the presence of a judge.  This is to prevent people who hold unpopular views or who criticize the government from being rounded up willy-nilly, then being incarcerated and silenced – perhaps permanently because they “disappear.”  Unfortunately, this is exactly what did happen under Burbridge’s authority. 

            On July 16, 1864, Burbridge issued his infamous Order #59 which stated that “Whenever an unarmed Union [Kentucky] citizen is murdered, four guerrillas will be selected from the prison and publicly shot to death at the most convenient place near the scene of the outrages.”  One example of this order took place at Midway, Kentucky  on November 5, 1864 when several men were executed without benefit of trial while people of the town were forced to watch. 

            Prior to the 1864 elections, Democratic voters as well as candidates who opposed the Radical Republican agenda in Kentucky were arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges of treason or other high crimes.  Executions followed and, significantly, the property of those who had been executed was confiscated.  The opposition press was muzzled and threatened with the same fate as those accused of treason.  Burbridge was illegally influencing the outcome of the Presidential election by suppressing supporters of Gen. George B. McClellan.  He did this to ingratiate himself with those he believed would receive the lion’s share of the postwar victory spoils.  People were afraid to vote.  Turnout was suspiciously low during the election.  

            Anger was mounting among Kentucky‘s citizens.  Soon, government officials in Washington received word of the explosive downward spiral.  Governor Bramlette telegraphed Secretary of War Stanton that “This unwarranted assumption of power by an imbecile commander is doubtless instigated by those who have long sought to provoke an issue with the State, and which I have prevented.”

            Meanwhile, incidents of “bushwhacking” by marauders and deserters continued to multiply and spill over the border into Virginia.  Homes were robbed and people were killed.  In an area where food and other supplies were already scarce, these incursions added greatly to the distress of the civilian population.  The pioneer spirit was not completely dead, however.  Some women, left to head their families during the war, took matters into their own hands.  Marauders who posed a threat to them were dealt with, laid to rest in unmarked graves under cover of darkness, and never spoken of again.  It was a terrible time; probably the worst anyone had experienced since the last year of Benge’s raids in the 1790‘s.

            In February of 1865, Major General John M. Palmer replaced Burbridge as military commander of Kentucky.  The Louisville Journal expressed the sentiments of the majority of Kentuckians in this statement:  “Thank God and President Lincoln.”   Burbridge’s resignation from the army followed later that year.  He was a disgraced man.

            In 1868, the Kentucky Legislature began an investigation into Burbridge’s activities with an eye toward prosecution for crimes committed during the war.  Having already been socially, politically, and financially ostracized, Burbridge could see the handwriting on the wall.  It was high time to get the hell out of Kentucky.  He whined that “My services to my country have caused me to be exiled from my home, and made my wife and children wanderers, while the Government for which I fought seems to care little whether they have bread or not.”  The Burbridge family subsequently moved to Brooklyn, New York where they lived quietly. 

Stephen Gano Burbridge, known to history as “The Butcher of Kentucky” died December 2, 1894.