On this point it is interesting to note that when the South fired on Fort Sumter, beginning the war, there were eight slave states in the Union and only seven in the Confederacy. But when Lincoln called for an invasion of the South, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas left the Union.
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Even the states with Scots-Irish heritage that remained in the Union reacted to this call with outrage. The governor of Kentucky contemptuously replied that his state would furnish no troops “for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States.”
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Claiborne Fox Jackson, Missouri’s governor, sent a wire claiming that such an idea was “illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with.”
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Perhaps the best proof of this rather idiosyncratic truth is to examine what happened when it was applied in reverse. At the outset of the Civil War, Kentucky’s sympathies were with the South, but when Lincoln guaranteed the continuation of slavery in the Union, the state decided to remain neutral. In the early months of 1861 the governor and both houses of the state legislature announced that Kentucky would defend her borders against invasion by either side.
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Then on September 4 of that year the Confederates occupied the Mississippi River town of Columbus, Kentucky, in a move actually designed to prevent a Union force under Ulysses S. Grant from moving into the town. Although the Union followed suit by occupying Paducah, forty miles farther north along the Ohio River, the Confederates had moved into Kentucky first, and the political reaction was immediate. On September 11, the Kentucky legislature demanded that the Confederates withdraw. When they had not done so by September 18, Kentucky tossed aside its neutrality, joined the Union, and authorized the creation of a military force to expel the Confederates.
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Even the arrival of famed Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston in mid-September to take over the Army of Tennessee failed to sway most Kentuckians. With the war now on in Kentucky, Johnston pushed his forces along a line in the southern part of the state, reasoning that he would provoke an upsurge of support for the Confederate cause. Johnston’s logic was well considered and his credentials were beyond question. A native Kentuckian who had later settled in Texas (and is thus claimed by both as a favored son), at the outset of the Civil War, Johnston was ranked above even Robert E. Lee as the greatest general to align himself with the Confederate cause. Confederate president Jefferson Davis, two years behind Johnston at West Point, idolized him. Mexican War hero (and later president) Zachary Taylor called him the finest soldier he had ever commanded.
Johnston’s skills as a combat leader were so valued by the South and so feared in the North that when he decided to leave the Union Army and join the Confederacy, the Union attempted to hold him in confinement in California. His escape and two-thousand-mile journey over the desert to link up with the Confederates is the stuff of legend, and ended with a train ride from New Orleans to Richmond where thousands cheered his passing along the way. His death while commanding the Confederate attack at Shiloh in April 1862 turned that battle to the benefit of the Union forces led by another general of Scots-Irish descent, Ulysses S. Grant, and in many eyes changed the complexion of the entire war in the “Southwest theater.”
Johnston was growing an army from scratch in Tennessee, and he needed soldiers. He gambled that his personal charisma would swell the ranks in his native state and possibly even pull Kentucky into the Confederacy. Indeed, one of the thirteen stars on the Confederate battle flag had been reserved for Kentucky. In the months before Shiloh, Johnston made his move into southern Kentucky. But the reaction to his invasion was again the opposite, as many Kentuckians considered the Confederate presence to be a further violation of their sovereignty.
Kentucky remained in the Union, and eventually two-thirds of its soldiers fought for the North. Among these Union soldiers was one of my great-grandfathers, Asa William Hodges, who enlisted in Company B, 12th Kentucky Cavalry, on August 22, 1862, and fought as a sergeant continuously for three years, including at the battles of Resaca, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw, and ultimately, Atlanta. Indeed, the only time his military records show him away from his unit was when he returned home briefly in 1863 to bury his wife.
Asa Hodges was the great-grandson of Samuel Cochran, who as a soldier in the Virginia Line during the Revolutionary War had crossed the Delaware with George Washington, spent the infamous winter at Valley Forge, and fought in many key battles of that war. A typical Scots-Irish Southerner, he was born in Sumner County, Tennessee, north of Nashville, where his father’s family had moved from the Blue Ridge Mountain region of southwest Virginia. The family of his mother, Mary Ann Murphy, had migrated to Sumner County from the mountains of western North Carolina. World War II hero Audie Murphy’s family also originated in this region of North Carolina, and given the paucity of traditionally Irish Catholic names in those communities, it is likely that they were collateral kin.
And so Asa Hodges should by all logic have fought for the South. But his farm was near Beaver Dam in Ohio County, just up the road from the town of Bowling Green where Albert Sidney Johnston had sent several regiments. This put Asa Hodges’ home flush in the middle of the Confederate lines that extended westward from Bowling Green to Columbus. One can never reconstruct the full story for human motivations, but it is not difficult to assume that Asa Hodges fought against the Confederate Army for the same reason that many Confederates fought against the “Federals”—because they had crossed over from another state and invaded his home.
Or—just as compellingly—one might examine the concept from the perspective of those who probably had never even met a slave, but who fought bravely and well for the Confederacy. As one whose family by this time had been “sown like the apple seeds” along the ridges and hollows of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and even into the fat river delta lands just north of Memphis, I could offer up a number of examples. But let us return, just for a while, to the harsh and unforgiving soil of Big Moccasin Gap. My great-great-grandfather David Webb could neither read nor write. The 1880 census, taken when he was sixty-three years old, indicates that he owned no land and that his total net worth in personal property was ten dollars. Although he had four children and was in his mid-forties, David enlisted and served as a private in the Confederate Army. In 1871 at the age of fifty-four he fathered his seventh child—back in Alley Hollow they still like to call this capacity the “Webb drive”—and named the boy Robert Lee Webb. And every generation from that point has followed suit. My great-grandfather named my grandfather Robert Lee Webb. My grandfather named one son Thomas Lee. My brother became Gary Lee. And my son is James Robert.
Do we honor slavery? No, we honor courage, as well as loss. And let us now speak of both.
William John Jewell, my great-great-grandmother’s brother, did not live long enough to father children of his own, so let me claim him. Another Big Moccasin Gap native who probably had never seen a slave, Jewell served in Company D of the Davis Rifles of the 37th Regiment, Virginia Infantry, under the leadership of the incomparable Gen. Stonewall Jackson. This regiment was drawn exclusively from Scott, Lee, Russell, and Washington Counties in the southwest corner of the state. The percentage of mountaineers who were slaveholders was approximately zero. Many of them were not even property owners. Few had a desire to leave the Union. But when Virginia seceded, the mountaineers followed Robert E. Lee into the Confederate Army.
Official records show that 1,490 men volunteered to join the 37th Regiment and that by the end of the war only 39 were left. Company D, which was drawn from Scott County, began with 112 men. The records of eight of these cannot be found. Five others deserted over the years, taking the oath of allegiance to the Union. Two were transferred to other units. Of the 97 remaining men, 29 were killed, 48 were wounded, 11 were discharged due to disease, and 31 were captured by the enemy on the battlefield, becoming prisoners of war. If one adds those numbers up they come to more than 97, because many of those taken prisoner were already wounded. A few were wounded more than once, including William Jewell, who was wounded at Cedar Mountain on August 9, 1862, wounded again at Sharpsburg (Antietam) on September 17, 1862, and finally killed in action at Chancellorsville on May 3, 1863.
The end result of all this was that, of the 39 men who stood in the ranks of the 37th Regiment when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox—meaning that only 3 percent of the original regiment survived—none belonged to Company D, which had no soldiers left.
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The Davis Rifles were not unique in this fate. Such tragedies were played out repeatedly across the landscape of the South. To my knowledge, no modern army has exceeded the percentage of losses the Confederate Army endured, and only the Scottish regiments in World War I and the Germans in World War II come close. A generation of young men was destroyed. One is reminded of the inscription so often present on the graves of that era: “How many dreams died here?”
The lesson regarding William John Jewell’s death, plus the hundreds of thousands of others in this war, is far more complex than those who simplify his service into racial slogans wish to make it. He and his fellow soldiers took an oath and then honored the judgment of their leaders, often at great cost. Intellectual analyses of national policy are subject to constant reevaluation by historians as the decades roll by, but duty is a constant, frozen in the context of the moment it is performed. Duty is action, taken after listening to one’s leaders and weighing risk and fear against the powerful draw of obligation to family, community, nation, and the unknown future. We, the progeny who live in that future, were among the intended beneficiaries of those frightful decisions made so long ago. As such, we are also the caretakers of the memory, and the reputation, of those who performed their duty—as they understood it—under circumstances too difficult for us ever to fully comprehend. No one but a fool—or a bigot in their own right—would call on the descendants of those Confederate veterans to forget the sacrifices of those who went before them or argue that they should not be remembered with honor.
And that notion extends to the soldiers of both sides in this peculiar and tragic war. The two great defining characteristics of the Scots-Irish culture—a loyalty to strong leaders and an immediate fierceness when invaded from the outside—brought odd battlefield combinations that sometimes defy logic. The far-western counties of Virginia, which eventually became West Virginia, were heavily Scots-Irish, but they listened to their leaders and went with the Union, as did pockets of eastern Kentucky and even Tennessee. The northern counties of Missouri, which had been heavily settled by Scots-Irish migrations from Virginia and eastern Tennessee, saw many soldiers fight for the Confederacy. The Scots-Irish population of Pennsylvania largely honored its own leaders and provided thousands of soldiers to the Union. Indeed, the war became a jumble, with the raw, recent immigrants of the Irish brigades fighting alongside Scots-Irish Pennsylvanians whose ancestors might have faced theirs at Derry or the Boyne, and against Confederate soldiers whose grandfathers might well have suffered through Valley Forge alongside the ancestors of the Pennsylvanians.
But the bulk of the Confederate Army, including most of its leaders, was Scots-Irish while the bulk of the Union Army and its leadership was not. Even here an irony abounds, however, when one considers that President Lincoln finally found “his general” in the hard-drinking Ulysses S. Grant, who was indeed of Scots-Irish descent. Confederate generals of Scots-Irish descent totally dominated the battlefield. Among others they included the doomed Albert Sidney Johnston; the famed raider Jeb Stuart; the unparalleled Nathan Bedford Forrest, a semiliterate who proved to be a master of maneuver and improvisation, and who defeated every West Point general he faced; and the brilliant Stonewall Jackson, whose death at Chancellorsville—the same battle in which William John Jewell, who served in Jackson’s brigade, finally perished—deprived Robert E. Lee of his most adept battlefield innovator. And although Robert E. Lee himself was a scion of Virginia’s lowland Cavalier aristocracy, his mother was of Scottish ancestry, and it was widely reported that he was a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce, the victor at Bannockburn.
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The end result was that on the battlefield the Confederacy, whose culture had been shaped by the clannish, leader-worshiping, militaristic Scots-Irish, fought a Celtic war while the Union, whose culture had been most affected by intellectual, mercantile English settlers, fought in an entirely different manner. At bottom the Northern army was driven from the top like a machine—plodding, systematic, drawing from a far larger manpower pool and bleeding out the South in a brutal and unending war of attrition. By contrast, the Southern army was a living thing emanating from the spirit of its soldiers—daring, frequently impatient, always outnumbered, often innovative, relying on the unexpected and counting on the boldness of its leaders and the personal loyalties of those who followed. The Northern army was most often run like a business, solving a problem. The Southern army was run like a family, confronting a human crisis.
One learned commentator professed that “Southerners lost the war because they were too Celtic and their opponents were too English.”
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But in actuality the reverse was true. The South lasted for four horrific years with far fewer men, far less equipment, far inferior weapons, and a countryside that was persistently devastated as the Leviathan army worked its way like a steamroller across its landscape. It is fair to say that the Confederate Army endured as long as it did against such enormous odds because it was so wildly and recklessly Celtic that it did not know when to stop fighting. And its opponents pressed steadily on to win, and in its aftermath sowed the seeds for a century of hatred and resistance, because in a sense they were so English that they thought victory on the battlefield was the equivalent of conquering a region—and, more important, a culture.