ADVANCE OF BRAGG'S ARMY. ville and pursuing his route by Carthage, entered Kentucky the first week in September about the time the advance of his army under Kirby Smith, as we have seen, had gained possession of Frankfort. At Glasgow, on the 18th of September, like his predecessors Morgan and Smith, he issued an address to the people of the state, making a similar appeal, in the most inviting phraseology to the inhabitants. "We come," said he, "not as conquerors or despoilers but to restore liberty and guaranty the sanctity of homes and altars. Believing that the heart of Kentucky is with us in our great struggle for Constitutional Freedom, we have transferred from our own soil to yours, not a band of marauders, but a powerful and well disciplined army. Your gallant Buckner leads the van. Marshall is on the right, while Breckinridge, dear to us as to you, is advancing with Kentucky's valiant sons, to receive the honor and applause due to their heroism. The strong hands which in part have sent Shiloh down to history, and the nerved arms which have kept at bay from our own homes the boastful army of the enemy, are here to assist, to sustain, to liberate you. Will you remain indifferent to our call, or will you not rather vindicate the fair fame of your once free and envied state? We believe that you will, and that the memory of your gallant dead who fell at Shiloh, their faces turned homeward, will rouse you to a manly effort for yourselves and posterity. Kentuckians! We have come with joyous hopes. Let us not depart in sorrow, as we shall if we find you wedded in your choice to your present lot. If you prefer Federal rule, show it by your frowns, and we shall return whence we came. If you choose rather to come within the folds of our brotherhood, then cheer us with the smiles of your women, and lend your willing hands to secure you in your heritage of liberty. Women of Kentucky! Your persecutions and heroic bearing have reached 607 our ear. Banish henceforth, forever, from your minds the fear of loathsome prisons or insulting visitations. Let your enthusiasm have free rein. Buckle on the armor of your kindred, your husbands, sons, and brothers, and scoff with shame him. who would prove recreant in his duty to you, his country, and his God." On Sunday, the 14th of September, there was a sharp engagement between the advance of Buckner's division of Bragg's army and the brigade of Colonel J. T. Wilder, about two thousand men in all, stationed at Munfordville on Green river. An attack was made on the pickets on the south side of the river at daylight, the main works were then assailed, when the enemy, Mississippi and Alabama regiments, were repulsed with considerable slaughter. The rebel General Chalmers reciting his superior force and their disposition on both sides of the river, and announcing the army of General Bragg to be but a short distance in the rear, demanded an unconditional surrender, which Colonel Wilder refused. Colonel Dunham coming on the field with a reinforcement of about four hundred Indiana troops, took command as senior officer the next day which was devoted to working upon the entrenchments. Additional reinforcements came up in the evening, and the following day, Tuesday, the fight was resumed and continued with various skirmishing till late in the afternoon, when on the demand of General Bragg in consideration of the vastly superior force which he claimed, twentyfive thousand men and sixty pieces of artillery besides cavalry, the garrison surrendered. On Wednesday, the 17th, at six o'clock in the morning, the entire force, now about four thousand, marched out of the works with the honors of war, drums beating and colors flying, being allowed by the terms of surrender their side-arms and all private property and four days' rations. They were immediately paroled and departed for the Ohio.* * Reports of Colonels Wilder and Dunham, Rebellion Record, v. p. 449–453. Bragg now advanced to Bardstown, debarred from the renewal of former where, on the 26th, we find him issuing proposals for peace, because the relenta memorable proclamation to the people less spirit that actuates the government of the Northwest. After a brief pre- at Washington leaves us no reason to amble declaring that the Confederate expect that they would be received with government was waging war solely for the respect naturally due by nations in self-defence, it declared "that among the their intercourse, whether in peace or pretexts urged for the continuance of the war. It is under these circumstances war, is the assertion that the Confederate that we are driven to protect our own government desires to deprive the United country by transferring the seat of war States of the free navigation of the west- to that of an enemy who pursues us ern rivers, although the truth is that the with an implacable and apparently aimConfederate Congress, by public act prior less hostility. If the war must continue, to the commencement of the war, enact- its theatre must be changed, and with it ed that the peaceful navigation of the the policy that has heretofore kept us on Mississippi river is hereby declared free the defensive on our own soil. So far it to the citizens of any of the states upon is only our fields that have been laid its borders or upon the borders of its waste, our people killed, our homes tributaries,' a declaration to which our made desolate and our frontiers ravaged government has always been and is still by rapine and murder. The sacred ready to adhere. From these declara- right of self-defence demands that hencetions, people of the Northwest, it is forth some of the consequences of the made manifest that by the invasion of war shall fall upon those who persist in our territories by land and from sea, we their refusal to make peace. With the have been unwillingly forced into a war people of the Northwest rests the power for self-defence, and to vindicate a great to put an end to the invasion of their principle once dear to all Americans, to home; for, if unable to prevail upon the wit that no people can be rightly gov- government of the United States to conerned except by their own consent. We clude a general peace, their own state desire peace now. We desire to see a governments, in the exercise of their stop put to a useless and cruel effusion sovereignty, can secure immunity from of blood, and that waste of national the desolating effects of warfare on their wealth rapidly leading to, and sure to soil, by a separate treaty of peace, which end in, national bankruptcy. We are our government will be ready to conclude therefore now, as ever, ready to treat on the most just and liberal basis. The with the United States, or any one or responsibility, then rests with you, the more of them, upon terms of mutual jus- people of the Northwest, of continuing tice and liberality. And at this junc- an unjust and aggressive warfare upon ture, when our arms have been success- the people of the Confederate States. ful on many hard-fought fields, when our And in the name of reason and humanpeople have exhibited a constancy, a ity, I call upon you to pause and reflect fortitude, and a courage worthy of the what cause of quarrel so bloody have boon of self-government, we restrict our- you against these states, and what are selves to the same moderate demands you to gain by it? Nature has set her that we made at the darkest period of seal upon these states, and marked them our reverses the demand that the peo- out to be your friends and allies. She ple of the United States cease to war has bound them to you by all the ties of upon us, and permit us in peace to pur- geographical contiguity and conformasue our path to happiness, while they in tion, and the great mutual interests of peace pursue theirs. We are, however, commerce and productions. When the BRAGG'S APPEAL TO THE NORTHWEST. 609 passions of this unnatural war shall have lation. You are blindly following abolisubsided, and reason resumes her sway, tionism to this end, whilst they are nicea community of interest will force a com- ly calculating the gain of obtaining your mercial and social coalition between the trade on terms that would impoverish great grain and stock growing states of your country. You say you are fightthe Northwest and the cotton, tobacco ing for the free navigation of the Missisand sugar regions of the South. The sippi. It is yours freely, and has always Mississippi river is a grand artery of been without striking a blow. You say their mutual national lives which men you are fighting to maintain the Union. cannot sever, and which never ought to That Union is a thing of the past. A have been suffered to be disturbed by union of consent was the only union ever the antagonisms, the cupidity and the worth a drop of blood. When force bigotry of New England and the East. came to be substituted for consent, the It is from the East that have come the casket was broken and the constitutional germs of this bloody and most unnatural jewel of your patriotic adoration was strife. It is from the meddlesome, grasp forever gone. I come then to you with ing and fanatical disposition of the same the olive branch of peace, and offer it to people who have imposed upon you and your acceptance, in the name of the us alike those tariffs, internal improve- memories of the past and the ties of the ment, and fishing bounty laws, whereby present and future. With you remains we have been taxed for their aggrandize- the responsibility and the option of conment. It is from the East that will come tinuing a cruel and wasting war, which the tax-gatherer to collect from you the can only end after still greater sacrifices mighty debt which is being amassed in such treaty of peace as we now offer; mountain high for the purpose of ruin- or of preserving the blessings of peace ing your best customers and natural by the simple abandonment of the defriends. When this war ends, the same sign of subjugating a people over whom antagonism of interest, policy and feel- no right of dominion has been conferred ing which have been pressed upon us by on you by God or man." Such were the East and forced us from a political the terms,-a mingled appeal to self-inunion, where we had ceased to find terest, prejudices, and even to fear, safety for our interests or respect for with which General Bragg approached our rights, will bear down upon you and the men of the Northwest. It did not separate you from a people whose tradi- appear, however, that his arguments had tional policy it is to live by their wits much force in engaging the sturdy patriupon the labor of their neighbors. ots beyond the Ohio in any new admiraMeantime, you are used by them to tion of the Confederacy. Indifferent, fight the battle of emancipation-a bat- alike to his threats and persuasions, they tle which, if successful, destroys our needed no admission from a foreign powprosperity and with it your best mar-er of their right to navigate the Missiskets to buy and sell. Our mutual dependence is the work of the Creator. With our peculiar productions, convertible into gold, we should, in a state of peace, draw from you largely the products of your labor. In us of the South While such was the situation of affairs you would find rich and willing custom- in the central part of the state and on ers; in the East you must confront rivals the Ohio, the isolated outpost of the in productions and trade, and the tax- Union General Morgan, at Cumberland gatherer in all the forms of partial legis- | Gap, was cut off from its usual sources sippi. That, they felt, was in their own hands, and they were determined to assert it in their own way. In the meantime the invasion of Kentucky was to be repelled. of supply and its communications by Bragg's army of invasion. Though environed by the enemy, it had bravely held its own during the two months since the date of its occupation by General Morgan, who, on more than one occasion, on the 14th of July, at Wallace Cross Roads, and on the first week of August, in the vicinity of Tazelville, in reconnoitering and foraging expeditions, had shown the spirit of his command. In the latter affair the brigade of Colonel DeCourcey, Ohio and Kentucky troops, had successfully encountered the Georgia and Tennessee regiments of General Stevenson's division. "The enemy," says General Morgan in his dispatch to Governor Andrew Johnson, outnumbered DeCourcey four to one. They lost two hundred and twenty-five, and Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon, of the 11th Tennessee, was taken prisoner. We captured two hundred wagonloads of forage, one thousand two hundred pounds of tobacco, and thirty horses and mules. We lost three killed, fifteen wounded, and fifty prisoners. Two companies of the 16th Ohio were surrounded by the rebel regiments but two-thirds of them cut their way through." แ It was the intention of General Morgan to hold the position at Cumberland Gap at all hazards, but the fear of famine and of being finally compelled to surrender, determined him, while he had opportunity, to make good his retreat. Accordingly, on the 17th of September, he issued his order for the evacuation. The military buildings and all the stores that could not readily be carried away were burnt. Four heavy siege pieces, too heavy for transportation, were rendered useless. As the forced marches before the departing regiments, in face of the enemy, forbade the necessary care of the sick on the journey, they were left, with the necessary medical attendance and an abundant store of provisions. The escape of the brigade along a wild mountain track of two hundred and fifty miles, through the counties of eastern Kentucky, by way of Manchester, Hazel Green, West Liberty, and Grayson, to the Ohio at Greenupsburg, where they arrived on the 3d of October, was one of the most perilous adventures of the war, beset as the force was by the enemy, the divisions of Marshall and Smith, on whose flank they were moving. The troops suffered much from want of water, the dry season having exhausted the pools on which the country depended, or left but a scanty stagnant supply. The dust was at times intolerable. The force also felt the want of suitable provisions, when their rations were spent and they were obliged to depend upon chance aid from the inhabitants, or the crops growing in the fields. The men made graters by punching holes in their tin plates and thus "gritting" the corn which was too old for roasting and too new for grinding. In this way they obtained material for a palatable cake. The cannon were dragged the whole distance by oxen and mules. In this way ten thousand men with twenty-eight pieces of artillery and four hundred wagons marched in safety to the Ohio. Their arrival at Greenupsburg was celebrated in a general order from their commander :-" Comrades: At midnight ou the 17th of September, with the army of Stevenson three miles in your rear, with Bragg on your left, Marshall on your right flank and Kirby Smith in your front, you marched from Cumberland Gap, mid the roar of exploding mines and magazines, and lighted by the conflagration of the storehouses of the commissary and quartermaster. Since then you have marched two hundred and nineteen miles, overcome difficulties as great as ever obstructed the march of an army, and with your field and siege guns have reached the Ohio river. The rapidity of your marches, in the face of an active foe, over ridges regarded impassable, and through defiles which a hundred men ought to hold against a DEATH OF GENERAL NELSON. 611 thousand, will hereafter be regarded a considerable force of raw troops hastwith astonishment and wonder. Al- ily collected from Illinois, Indiana, and though on the retreat you constantly Ohio, under the command of Major-Genacted on the offensive, so hotly did you eral Nelson, who had recovered from his press the enemy sent to retard your wound at the battle of Richmond. A march, that on three successive days few days only after General Buell's aryou surprised the hungry rebels at their rival this officer was slain in a personal supper, and fed upon the hurried meals rencontre by Brigadier-General Jefferwhich they had prepared. With an son C. Davis, who after the battle of Pea effective force of less than eight thou- Ridge, in which he commanded a divissand men you had maneuvered against ion, had been engaged in the army of an army eighteen thousand strong, and General Halleck before Corinth, and had captured Cumberland Gap without the recently arrived in Louisville and been loss of a man. By your labor you ren- employed in the organization of the milidered it impregnable, and an enemy four tia. The following account of the cirtimes your strength dare not attack you. cumstances of General Nelson's death When Kentucky was invaded you sent was published in the telegraphic distwo regiments to aid in driving out the patches, the day of the event, to the invader, and such was your confidence Associated Press: "About a week ago in your strength, that while threatened Nelson placed Davis in command of the by a superior force you sent out five ex- home guard forces of the city. At night peditions, captured three hundred pris- Davis reported to Nelson the number of oners and killed and wounded one hun- men working on the intrenchments and dred and seventy of your foes. At enrolled for service. Nelson cursed him length, when it became evident that for not having more. Davis replied that your services were needed in the field, he was a general officer, and demanded you marched boldly from your strong- the treatment of a gentleman. Nelson hold, hurling defiance at the foe. One in an insulting manner ordered him to and all, you are entitled to the thanks report at Cincinnati, and told him he of your countrymen; and I pray you to would order the provost-marshal to eject accept the assurance of my profound him from the city. This morning, Govgratitude. In my official report your ernor Morton, of Indiana, and General services and your sufferings will be Nelson were standing near the desk in properly noticed. Although you have the Galt House, when General Davis done well, let it be your determination approached, and requested Governor to do better, and always remember that Morton to witness a conversation bediscipline is the life-blood of an army. tween himself and General Nelson. He Soldiers as a friend and brother, I hail demanded of Nelson an apology for the and greet you.' rude treatment he had received last week. Nelson, being a little deaf, asked him to speak louder. Davis again demanded an apology. Nelson denounced him and slapped him on the face. Davis stepped back, clenched his fist, and again demanded an apology. Nelson again slapped him in the face, and again denounced him as a coward. Davis turned away, procured a pistol from a friend, and followed Nelson, who was going up stairs. Davis told Nelson to To return to the movements of the main armies of Bragg and Buell. The latter, leaving Nashville in charge of General Negley, had followed the invading army closely on its route into Kentucky, reoccupied Mumfordsville on the route, and, while Bragg was making his way toward Frankfort, marched by the main road into Louisville, where the advance arrived on the 25th of September. General Buell found in and around the city |