Ohio History Journal

FRUIT OF THE RESTLESS SPIRIT

OHIO'S CONFEDERATE GENERALS by CHARLES M. CUMMINGS The restlessness and constant mobility of the American have impressed a legion of students before and since de Tocqueville,1 and to these fac- tors much has been attributed in the story of the nation's development. Generally, interpreters have turned their inquiries westward in the di- rection taken by the bulk of the emigrants. Less attention has been given to an offshoot, the strong North-to-South movement of the three decades from 1830 to 1860, evidenced in the 355,811 northern-born who were listed in the 1860 census as living in the South.2 Impelled by a variety of motives, often other than economic, this stream of Yankees, originally from the Atlantic seaboard, first mean- dered, later swelled as a modest flood, into cheaply acquirable, worn-out tobacco lands in Virginia, Kentucky, and middle Tennessee, thence into the lower South cotton areas, where the removal of Indians in the 1830's made available great tracts of new and fertile lands.3 These northerners fitted easily into the relatively fluid social structure of the South, precisely as they had done a few years earlier in Ohio or western Pennsylvania.4 Soon accepted and assimilated, they rapidly lost their northern qualities and identities and assumed a parochial loyalty to a new southern home at the terminus of their travels. When the day arrived in 1861 to stand up and be counted, they merged indissolubly with the character, aspirations, and conditions of southernism. Such a climax to this characteristic vagrant unrest is nowhere more forcefully exemplified than in the stories of the families of seven Ohioans, six of them native and one adoptive, who became general officers in the Confederate army. From the eastern coast some of these nomads drifted westward to the foothills of the mountain barricade, thence across it, and later into the new Northwest for a season, but they were seldom permanently rooted, except by intervening death. While life endured, never unheeded was the beckoning of far away cheaper land, nor the glowing promise of new surroundings more compatible with ethical princi- ples--as in the diaspora of the antislavery Quakers which encompassed some of the families. The transient parents bequeathed their restlessness NOTES ARE ON PAGES 197-200

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OHIO'S CONFEDERATE GENERALS                                  145

 

to the seven sons, who in their own time took up the ceaseless quest and

rode, instead of westward, to the south. Two went into politics, two be-

came ambitious lawyers, and three were graduates of the United States

military academy who resigned from the army to make a life in their

adopted region.

These are the principals who looked below the Ohio River for the

security they felt had not been fully attained above it in the shifting of

their ancestry;5

Charles Clark (born May 24, 1811, in Hamilton County). His grand-

father Jacob Clark came from England to eastern Maryland, fought

briefly in the Revolution, moved to western Maryland, on to western

Pennsylvania, and then to eastern Ohio prior to 1800. Charles's father,

James, a gunsmith, migrated to Cincinnati, thence to Lebanon, Warren

County, and in the 1830's followed Charles to Mississippi, where the son

became a successful lawyer, wealthy slaveholding cotton planter, Whig

legislator, Mexican War colonel, and governor of Mississippi, 1863-65,

after a shattered hip in the battle of Baton Rouge ended his Confederate

military career. Lawyer and judge after the war, he died in 1877. Family

descendants are still prominent in Mississippi society and politics.

Johnson Kelly Duncan (born March 18, 1827, in York, Pennsylvania).

He came with his parents to Hancock County, Ohio, in 1839 while other

kinfolk took up land near Bucyrus and Xenia. A graduate of the United

States Military Academy in 1849, he resigned from the army in 1855

to become Louisiana public works board engineer. His younger brother,

William Patterson Shaw Duncan, preceded him from Ohio to Kentucky

to Mississippi and Louisiana, and married a daughter of John Anthony

Quitman, a New Yorker who found fortune and political fame in Missis-

sippi. Both brothers died of fevers in 1862 while in the Confederate army.

Robert Hopkins Hatton (born November 2, 1826, in Youngstown). His

father, the Rev. Robert Clopton Hatton, born in South Carolina, went to

Kentucky as a child, became an itinerant Methodist preacher in Ohio,

western Pennsylvania, and western Virginia, then joined the Cumberland

Presbyterian church and moved in 1835 to Nashville, headquarters of the

sect. The younger Hatton grew up in middle Tennessee, became a lawyer,

slaveholder, and member of congress. He was killed at Fair Oaks (Seven

Pines), May 31, 1862.

Bushrod Rust Johnson (born October 7, 1817, in Belmont County).

His Quaker ancestors had moved from the Philadelphia area to Loudoun

County, Virginia, thence in 1804 to Union Township, Belmont County.

Subsequently the parents shifted to Muskingum County, then back to

Belmont. His older brother, a physician, moved to Wayne County, Indi-

ana, about 1840, probably because of local opposition to his outspoken

abolitionism. Bushrod was graduated from West Point in 1840, served

in the Third United States Infantry until 1847, when he was permitted

to resign in lieu of dismissal after involvement in a "black market" bribe

offer. He taught in a military school in Kentucky and Tennessee, had a

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146                           OHIO HISTORY

 

variegated record in the Confederate army, returned to Tennessee in 1866,

and died in 1880 on a Macoupin County, Illinois, farm.

Daniel Harris Reynolds (born December 14, 1832, near Centerburg,

Knox County). He came into a family which had drifted from eastern

Pennsylvania and Maryland into western Virginia, thence to Muskingum

and Licking counties in Ohio, and finally to Knox County. He attended

Ohio Wesleyan University, spent nearly a year in Iowa, studied law in

southern Tennessee, and began practice in Chicot County, Arkansas. His

left leg was shattered in the battle of Bentonville in 1865, but he resumed

his Arkansas law practice, acquired wealth in extensive cotton operations

in the 1880's, but lost much of it before his death in 1902.

Roswell Sabin Ripley (born March 14, 1823, in Worthington, Franklin

County). His father, Christopher, descended eleven generations from

Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, was born in Connecti-

cut, served in London, England, as a consular agent prior to the War of

1812, in which, as an infantry captain, he was on duty on the New

York-Canadian border. He came to Worthington soon after the war, ap-

parently associated with the enterprises of James Kilbourne. Roswell's

mother, Julia Caulkins, also Connecticut-born, moved to Delaware County,

Ohio, with her family in 1809. The Ripleys left Ohio in 1826, going first

to Massachusetts, then to St. Lawrence County in upstate New York by

1828. Roswell was graduated from West Point in 1843, a classmate of

U. S. Grant, served with distinction in the Mexican War, of which he

wrote a semi-official history. His post-war assignments in the Second

United States Artillery were served almost entirely in the South. He

resigned in 1853 after marriage to a South Carolina heiress, and engaged

in the munitions business in England and in the South until 1861. His

Confederate service was mediocre, marked principally by quarrels with

superiors and subordinates, and was spent almost totally in Charleston,

South Carolina. After the war he returned to England until the mid-

1880's, and he died in New York City in 1887.

Otho French Strahl (born June 3, 1831, in Malta Township, Morgan

County). His Quaker ancestors had followed the path from Pennsylvania

and Maryland to Loudoun County, Virginia, and then to Ohio, where they

lived consecutively in Jefferson, Belmont, and Morgan counties. He at-

tended Ohio Wesleyan with Reynolds and accompanied him to Tennessee

to study law. He practiced in the western Tennessee cotton area, 1858-61.

His war record was notable, and he was mortally wounded at Franklin

in 1864. In 1871 his parents departed Ohio for Crawford County, Kansas,

where an older son had settled before the war.

The most successful, extensive, and enduring of the family transplanta-

tions among the seven Ohioans was that of the Clarks. James Clark,

the gun artificer, fortuitously married Charlotte Alter, whose brother

James operated a steamboat in the Ohio-Mississippi trade in the 1820's

and 1830's.⁶ This vessel furnished the Clarks with a readily available

and cheap means of mobility. James made several trips into the South

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OHIO'S CONFEDERATE GENERALS                    147

 

to peddle his handmade rifles. His eldest son, James, Jr., once conveyed

the family horse and buggy to a buyer in the Cotton Kingdom, and after

he learned dentistry from an itinerant practitioner, spent six months in

northern Alabama, making a profit of $450 above expenses in extract-

ing, filling, and making teeth.7

His Uncle James's boat brought nineteen-year-old Charles Clark, newly

graduated from Methodist Augusta College in Bracken County, Ken-

tucky, to Natchez, Mississippi, in the summer of 1830, to seek the money

desperately needed by the brood of ten children dependent upon a gun

shop whose output was being replaced by factory-made products with

interchangeable parts. Charles grubbed through two lean years of teach-

ing school in Natchez, Benton, and Fayette, Mississippi, meanwhile study-

ing law. By the summer of 1833 he had begun a lucrative law practice

under the patronage of General Thomas Hinds, a hero of the War of

1812, had made an unsuccessful race for the state legislature as a Whig,

and had married Ann Eliza Darden, the daughter of a wealthy and in-

fluential cotton family.8

Charles's burgeoning success drew the whole Clark family from Leba-

non to Mississippi in 1836. Only Dentist James remained behind. Younger

sons William and John became prosperous lawyers, and the unmarried

daughters made alliances of varying degrees of wealth and social position.

After the Mexican War, in which Charles served as the colonel of the

Second Mississippi Infantry,⁹ most of the Clark family moved again from

Jefferson County, Mississippi, 150 miles north to Bolivar County into

vast and fertile cotton lands Charles had acquired as a fee in a famous

1837 case involving title to land taken from the Choctaw Indians.10 His

co-counsel in the litigation was Sergeant S. Prentiss, a Maine-born gradu-

ate of Bowdoin, student of law in Cincinnati, and Mississippi attorney

and politician until his death in 1850.

By 1861 Charles Clark had amassed one of Mississippi's largest for-

tunes in land and slaves and to all intents and purposes had become as

southern as one to the manner born.11 He supported Breckenridge in

1860. Upon Mississippi's secession, he became a major general on the

state's military board.12 In the Confederate army, as a senior brigadier

general, he fought at Shiloh, and in the abortive attack by Breckenridge

on Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in August 1862, his right hip was shattered.

Forced by his wound to resign, Clark was elected governor of Mississippi

in 1863 and presided over the state's fading fortunes during the balance

of the war, often in sharp conflict with the Richmond government over

conscription, state troops, supplies, and equipment.13

Imprisoned for four months in 1865 with other Confederate leaders in

Fort Pulaski by order of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Clark

returned to his plantation, "Doro," near Rosedale, Mississippi, and re-

sumed law practice. He had not suffered financially to an unrecoverable

extent, and the family had generally recouped its losses by 1877, when he

died.14 Descendants of Clark and of his sisters still occupy the property,

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148                                              OHIO HISTORY

 

and a great-nephew, Walter Sillers, in 1963 was speaker of the lower

house in the Mississippi legislature.

Religious insecurity motivated the meandering of the family of the

Rev. Robert Clopton Hatton until the late 1830's. He and his fourteen

South Carolina-born brothers and sisters grew up in the Lexington, Ken-

tucky, area but most of them had moved on to Missouri by 1805.15 Inspired

by the "Great Revival," he joined the Methodist Church and at seven-

teen began preaching in the Ohio River hill counties. In 1812 he was

received "on trial" in the Ohio Conference and for the next four years

traveled the Grand River, Erie, Little Kanawha, and Cumberland cir-

cuits until he was ordained an elder and assigned to the Shenango Cir-

cuit in Mercer County, Pennsylvania.16

He married Margaret Campbell of Meadville, Pennsylvania, became

"disaffected toward the Church,"¹⁷ and dropped out, only to return in

1819, when he was readmitted to the Erie Conference. His subsequent ca-

reer until 1831 was hectic, marked by his eccentricities18 and periodic

transfers to new charges: Lake Circuit, Meadville, Youngstown, Wheeling,

and Steubenville. In 1831 Hatton again renounced Methodism and united

with the Cumberland Presbyterians, just then organizing their Pennsyl-

vania Presbytery.19 Apparently he held pastorates of this denomination

in Pittsburgh and Allegheny until 1835, when he took his family to Nash-

ville, Tennessee, the headquarters of the church.

Robert Hopkins Hatton, the future Confederate general, born in

Youngstown during his father's two-year tenure there, was nine years

old when the shift was made to the South. His formative years were

spent in a middle Tennessee environment, and he was educated at Cum-

berland University in Lebanon, where he later lived, practiced law, owned

a few slaves as house and garden hands, and got into politics.20 His father

underwent a reversal of faith and returned to Methodism about 1837,

holding pastorates in Sumner and Wilson counties until his death in 1866.

If the unquiet spirit of the Rev. Mr. Hatton had not turned him from

Methodism in 1831 and to the southern fount of his new faith in 1835,

the son would have grown up entirely a northerner by birth, education,

and conviction. As it befell, young Hatton remained a vigorous and ar-

ticulate Unionist as a Whig--Know Nothing member of the Tennessee

legislature, 1855-56, unsuccessful candidate for governor, 1857, and

member of the thirty-sixth congress, 1859-61. Not until Tennessee seceded,

did Hatton abandon his efforts to preserve the Union.21

By May 28, 1861, he had been elected colonel of the Seventh Tennessee

Infantry, which was sent to eastern Virginia to repel McClellan's Penin-

sular campaign invaders. On May 31, 1862, eight days after he was pro-

moted to brigadier general, he was killed at Fair Oaks.22

The restiveness of youth, anxious to get away from the farm and find

a better life in a profession, impelled the movements of Daniel Harris

Reynolds and Otho French Strahl. They met on the campus of Ohio Wes-

leyan University in 1852, when Reynolds, the younger, was a junior and

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OHIO'S CONFEDERATE GENERALS                                    149

 

Strahl a freshman.23 Neither stayed to graduate, although when they

left in the spring of 1854, Reynolds probably had enough credits for a

degree, and in later years he told biographers he had received one.24

Strahl's parents and grandparents on both sides were wandering Qua-

kers. His mother's father, Otho French, had first come to Ohio in 1799

from Frederick County, Maryland, to buy cheap land in the Seven Ranges.

He went back to Maryland, married, and returned with his family in

1802. He was the son of another Otho French, who left the Annapolis

area in 1776 for western Maryland, probably to escape military duty in

the Revolution. In Ohio the younger Otho won a lasting place in Belmont

County annals as a mighty hunter, foe of liquor and slavery, leader in the

Society of Friends in Warren Township, and acquirer of sizeable acreage

in Belmont and Morgan counties.25

The prolific Strahl clan originated in the Catawissa, Pennsylvania, area

southwest of Wilkes-Barre, joined in marriage with the drifting Friends

who had gone to Loudoun County, Virginia, and back to Pennsylvania,

thence turned westward into Jefferson County, Ohio, in 1803.26 Some-

time before 1810 Philip and Sarah Strahl and their nine children migrated

to Warren Township, Belmont County, where the most notable resident

was old Otho French and near where Bushrod Johnson's parents had

lived since 1804. Here the future general's parents, Philip, Jr., and Rhoda

Ann French, were married in Stillwater Monthly Meeting House, War-

ren Township, in 1826.27 In 1828 they bought from Otho French a farm

in Homer Township, Morgan County, and moved there, at the same time

leaving the Society of Friends to join the Disciples of Christ.28 Two

years later they moved again to Malta Township, Morgan County, where

the future general was born, the third of six children.29

Otho French Strahl grew up in the Malta-McConnelsville area. His

father, a Democrat, lost a race for the general assembly by nine votes in

1847, but won as county infirmary director in 1851 after losing in 1849

and 1850. He failed of reelection in 1854.30 The boy's uncle, Otho French,

the third of that name, won as a Whig the office of county commissioner

in 1845, but served only one term.31

A youthful urge to get beyond the influence and control of the parental

circle may have motivated young Otho Strahl in going to Ohio Wesleyan.

Nearer home were Marietta College, down the Muskingum River, and

antislavery, Presbyterian Franklin College in New Athens, Harrison

County. He may have purchased one of the thirty-dollar "scholarships"

which covered tuition for four years and were sold by preacher-agents of

Ohio Wesleyan. There he both met and formed a friendship with Daniel

Harris Reynolds of Knox County and for most of the rest of his life their

destinies were linked.

The forebears of Reynolds may also have been Quakers, in the Phila-

delphia area, and those of his great-grandmother, Rebecca Harris, among

the Friends of Virginia, where one Daniel Harris in 1733 stalwartly re-

fused to bear arms or pay tithes to support the Anglican clergy.32 The

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150                    OHIO HISTORY

first Reynolds of record, John, listed in the 1790 census in Philadelphia,

died in 1807 in Hardy County, Virginia (now West Virginia). His son

William came to Zanesville in 1808, and William's son Amos came to Knox

County in 1817, and married Sophia Houck, a daughter of James Houck,

in 1824. The Houck ancestry was German, and they had come to Balti-

more, later to Zanesville, and still later to Newark and to Centerburg

in Knox County. Daniel was the fourth of nine children. Sophia died in

1849 and Amos in 1850, two weeks after taking a second wife.33 The

settlement of Amos' estate, augmented by wages as a rural school teacher,

gave Daniel the money to enter Ohio Wesleyan in 1851.34

There is a plausible explanation why Reynolds and Strahl decided to

quit school and begin roaming. In each family an older brother had al-

ready set a precedent. Burr Houck Reynolds, two years older than Daniel,

left home in 1849 and went to San Francisco, near where he lived until his

death in 1890. Strahl's older brother David went to Crawford County,

Kansas, in the early 1850's, and to the same place about 1871 Philip and

Rhoda Ann traveled from McConnelsville, ending a family migration

which had traversed half the continent in the space of two generations.36

But evidence is lacking to show why the two young men chose to go

to southern Tennessee to support themselves as teachers while they stud-

ied law. Reynolds had tried the same experiment for eleven months among

other Reynolds kin in Louisa County, Iowa, some 500 miles from home,

after quitting Ohio Wesleyan. There were no southerners at the school

who might have persuaded them. The cotton economy and slave-based

society in Hardeman County, Tennessee, 500 miles south of Knox County,

presented an atmosphere utterly different from any either had ever

known. But it had promise of rewards beyond those they saw in Ohio,

and subsequent success justified their choice.37

After three years of instruction under Chancellor John W. Harris, a

veteran legal authority of Somerville, Tennessee, the young Ohioans were

admitted to the bar in 1858. Then they separated. Probably on the advice

of their mentor, who had expert knowledge of the need for young lawyers

in the cotton country, Strahl went to Dyersburg, Dyer County, in west

Tennessee, and Reynolds to Lake Village, Chicot County, Arkansas, one

of the leading cotton-producing sections in the nation. Both found an

immediate acceptance by their communities and lucrative practices. By

1861 Strahl had acquired title to 1,100 acres and Reynolds to 700 from

fees, retainers, and purchases.38

Within the short space of three years the amalgamation of the young

Ohioans into the southern pattern of thought and behavior was complete.

As soon as their states seceded they were chosen to lead local fighting

units, Strahl as captain in the Fourth Tennessee and Reynolds as cap-

tain of the Chicot Rangers, a cavalry troop destined to join the First

Arkansas Mounted Rifles.39 After only eleven months and one battle--

Shiloh--Strahl was elected colonel of the Fourth Tennessee. In July 1863

he was promoted to brigadier general and he was killed at the battle of

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OHIO'S CONFEDERATE GENERALS              151

Franklin, November 30, 1864. Reynolds attained a colonel's rank after Chickamauga and the stars of a general in March 1864. He fought in eighteen battles and was maimed for life at Bentonville, North Carolina, a few weeks before Appomattox.40 Periodically on the move after their graduation from West Point were the three professional soldiers, Johnson, Duncan, and Ripley. Johnson served in Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico; Dun- can in Florida, Maine, and Oregon; and Ripley in Maryland, South Caro- lina, Georgia, Florida, and Mexico.41 The effect made upon them by their contacts with the local society in these places cannot be dismissed lightly. They were especially significant in the case of Ripley, who succumbed to the lure of the South uncritically, unlike Ohioan W. T. Sherman in the same milieu.42 The peregrinations involved in army assignments undoubtedly contrib- uted to the insecurity of Duncan and Ripley, who left the service for civilian prospects that seemed more permanent. The situation of John- son, as will be shown, had different aspects. But in all three cases, their fermenting dissatisfaction may have been an echo of the experience of their sires, whose lifetimes saw shiftings and mutations until the con- straints of age called a halt. The Johnson and Spencer forefathers of Bushrod Rust Johnson had participated in the Quaker drifting from eastern Pennsylvania to Lou- doun County, Virginia, as early as 1765, and thence to the Seven Ranges in 1804. The general's father, blacksmith Noah, sold his Virginia farm near Leesburg to buy Ohio land near Morristown, Belmont County, which the family occupied for twenty-three years. Then, in 1827, when the new

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152                                               OHIO HISTORY

 

National Road's stage lines offered employment at their busy relay point

in Norwich, Muskingum County, the Johnsons moved there. After Rachel

Spencer Johnson's death in 1833 and Noah's second marriage, the

family returned to Wayne Township, Belmont County, where Noah died

in 1844. The eldest son, Nathan, born in 1794 in Virginia, reaped suffi-

cient profits in Wayne County, Indiana, real estate in 1818 to enable

him to study medicine and earn a license in 1827 and he practiced in the

town of Belmont, in Belmont County, until his abolitionist and fugitive

slave activities compelled him to move to Cambridge City, Indiana, about

1840.⁴³ Dr. Nathan Johnson, twenty-three years older than Bushrod,

acted as a second father to him until Nathan's death in 1872.

Nathan's Quaker tenets led him to decline to support Bushrod's entry

into West Point in 1836,44 but during the Civil War his daughter sheltered

Bushrod's motherless son, Charles, a mental defective, who was told his

father was fighting for the Union.⁴⁵

Bushrod was a classmate of Sherman and George H. Thomas in the

military academy. His cadetship was undistinguished; he finished twenty-

third among forty-two graduates. His service in the Third United States

Infantry for the next seven years was mediocre; he won no brevet pro-

motions for gallantry at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterey, or

the siege of Vera Cruz, albeit such honors came to many of his con-

temporaries.46

His army career ended abruptly in October 1847. While serving in Vera

Cruz as an acting assistant commissary of subsistence, as the army termed

food and sundry staples, he wrote a letter to a superior in New Orleans

offering him "between 1200 and 1500 dollars" if the latter would ship

a large quantity of flour, soap, and candles marked "commissary sup-

plies," which Johnson would deliver to operators of the Mexican War

equivalent of a modern "black market" in Vera Cruz. The recipient sent

the letter to Washington, and a court of inquiry summoned Johnson to

New Orleans. He admitted writing the letter. After an appeal to Presi-

dent Polk he was permitted to resign in lieu of dismissal.47  He could

never return to the "old army," as Grant, Sherman, and Halleck did

after leaving it, without reviving the scandal of his separation.

Thenceforward until the Civil War, Johnson was connected with West-

ern Military Institute, a school started in the fall of 1847 in George-

town, Kentucky. Also on the faculty were James G. Blaine, later speaker

of the United States House of Representatives and senator from Maine,

and Richard Dale Owen, future first president of Purdue. Johnson and

Owen purchased the school in 1850, but they parted in 1858, after it had

been made the literary department of the University of Nashville and was

achieving some success following periodic relocations in Kentucky and

Tennessee.48

Johnson's Confederate career was spotty. He picked the unfortunate

site for Fort Henry, walked away from his captors two days after the

surrender of Fort Donelson, was wounded at Shiloh, fought ably at Perry-

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OHIO'S CONFEDERATE GENERALS               153

ville and Stones River, and reached his apogee at Chickamauga by lead- ing a scratch division of Hood's corps in Longstreet's wing in the catas- trophic penetration of the Union lines. He dallied in torpid inactivity when the federal mine blew up his troops at Petersburg, and ran away with George Pickett and Richard Heron Anderson at Sayler's Creek. One of Lee's last acts before signing the surrender at Appomattox was to issue an order relieving the trio and sending them home in disgrace.49 Roswell Sabin Ripley began his wandering at about the age of four, when his parents left Worthington for Leicester, Massachusetts, for a brief residence before locating in Ogdensburg, St. Lawrence County, New York in 1828.50 There Christopher and Julia spent the balance of their lives, he until 1851 and she to 1874. Because Christopher's older brother, James Wolfe Ripley, an 1814 West Point graduate, had won some fame

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154                                               OHIO HISTORY

 

as an ordnance expert, the family destined young Roswell for the mili-

tary academy. So eager, indeed, were they that their first application for

his entrance was denied because he was underage at fourteen.⁵¹

As a cadet his scholastic record was outstanding, but his conduct rat-

ings were adversely affected by characteristic opposition to obeying rules

or submitting to authority. He finished seventh among thirty-nine. His

classmate U. S. Grant was twenty-first.52

His assignments in the Second and Third United States Artillery were

all in the South and ten months of his Mexican War duty were spent as

an aide to Gideon J. Pillow, a law partner of President Polk and a south-

ern politico-general.53 With Pillow he got along. With others he was

frequently in controversy. His two-volume The War With Mexico, pub-

lished in 1849, was sharply critical of Winfield Scott, the general-in-chief,

who, however, ignored the strictures of the brevet major author.54

Ripley's marriage to a South Carolina heiress, in Charleston, precipi-

tated his resignation from the army January 2, 1853. Unquiet and change-

able, he spent much of the next seven years in the arms business in Eng-

land, and in the months before Sumter he was engaged in promoting a

scheme for state gun factories and armament stockpiling by Georgia,

Alabama, and South Carolina.⁵⁵ Promptly upon South Carolina's seces-

sion he was named a lieutenant colonel of state troops, and the guns at

Fort Moultrie firing the first shots of the war were under his command.

Except for brief and middling performance as a combat brigade com-

mander in the Seven Days and Antietam campaigns, Ripley spent most

of the war in his own Charleston back yard. Arrogant and self-centered,

he quarrelled in succession with Lee, Pemberton, Beauregard, Cooper,

and various subordinates.56 He capitalized on the confidence held in him

by his townsmen and was able to muster effective political pressure when-

ever his status was threatened.57

Until his death in New York in 1887, Ripley spent much time again

in England in various, unnamed business affairs. Wayward and mercurial

to the last, he could never bring himself to any permanent attachment

to an activity or a location. Even his family--wife, daughter, step-daugh-

ter, sister, and mother--appear to have been estranged from him in the

post-bellum years.⁵⁸

Prior to the migration of Andrew Duncan, the father of Johnson Kelly

Duncan and William Patterson Shaw Duncan, to Hancock County, Ohio,

in October 1839, the Duncan clan had lived in the Lancaster-York area of

Pennsylvania for a century. Andrew rose from the ranks in the York

County militia to become a major general and was elected high sheriff

of the county, 1830-33. He also purchased and operated the White Hall

tavern in York, 1833-39, and owned or inherited other property.59 He

bought 400 acres near Findlay in 1834 for $1,400 and sold 328 of them

in 1839 for $3,000, demonstrating the profit then to be made in Ohio

lands.60 This fact was not lost on other Duncans. An exodus followed.

Soon the families of Andrew's brother John and his sister Catherine

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OHIO'S CONFEDERATE GENERALS                                  155

 

came to Greene County near Xenia, and to Crawford County near Bucyrus

went his half-brother Washington, his half-sister Ann Elizabeth, and his

step-mother, Elizabeth Andrews Duncan.61 Andrew lived fourteen more

years near Findlay, but never attained the affluence or prestige he had

known in York, Pennsylvania.

Johnson K. Duncan, known in the family as "Kell," was twelve years

old when he reached Ohio. His brother William P. S. Duncan, called "Pat,"

was nine. Part of their formative years thus were spent in a yeoman,

antislavery environment, until Kell went to West Point in 1845 and Pat

to Kentucky Military Institute, near Frankfort, in 1847. Kell was gradu-

ated fifth among forty-three in the class of 1849; Pat stayed on at KMI

after graduation in 1851 to earn a master's degree in civil engineering

and to teach on the faculty until 1853.62 Then apparently he became in-

volved in the Cuban filibustering schemes of John A. Quitman, the New

York-born Mississippian, whose daughter Rose was married to Pat in

1861.

Kell Duncan's duty with the Third United States Artillery was spent

mostly in Maine until he was detailed to accompany Brevet Captain George

B. McClellan on the Oregon railroad route survey in 1853-54. When it

was finished, he was reassigned to the Pacific Coast. He asked for an ad-

vance in pay to buy equipment. Jefferson Davis, secretary of war, refused.

An appeal for transfer to another unit also went awry. Frustrated twice,

Duncan resigned January 31, 1855.63

It is more than probable that Pat Duncan, having become advanta-

geously installed in the Quitman menage, prevailed upon Kell to throw

in his lot with him in New Orleans. Doubtless through Quitman influence,

Kell was named superintendent of repairs on United States installations

in lower Louisiana and in 1859 he became chief engineer of the state's

board of public works, building and repairing levees with a fleet of boats

and eighty-three state-owned slaves.64

In 1858 Kell married Mary Grimshaw, the daughter of a well-to-do

British cotton broker in New Orleans, and his integration with the South-

land was final and complete.65

In the Confederate army he commanded the forts below New Orleans

and was forced to surrender in April 1862 to Farragut's fleet. He led

a brigade in Bragg's invasion of Kentucky in the summer of 1862 and

died of typhoid in Knoxville, Tennessee, December 18, 1862, soon after

he had been named Bragg's chief of staff.66

Death and the war quelled the restive questing of six of the Ohio Con-

federates. Only Ripley continued to wander. Reynolds came back to Lake

Village, Chicot County, Arkansas, married, and in the 1880's acquired

a fortune in land, which vanished before his death. Johnson resumed the

school enterprise in Nashville whose budding success had been ended by

the conflict, but the second venture failed, and he sought refuge with

his afflicted son on an Illinois farm he bought in 1860. Clark recouped his

financial and political fortunes at Doro plantation in Bolivar County.

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156                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

Their choice of the South by the seven Ohioans had been impelled by

a variety of motives--economic, romantic, social, and political--most of

them at variance with their yeoman, Quaker, abolitionist heritages, and,

in some cases, involving a break with their northern families. But it also

may be argued with some validity that an additional compulsion was psy-

chological--a rootless instability inherited from the fluid and shifting

generations that had preceded them in fleeting pursuit of the eternal

promises beyond the horizon.

 

 

THE AUTHOR: Charles M. Cummings

is a former managing editor of the Ohio

State Journal of Columbus and a retired

colonel in the Army of the United States.

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