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 |
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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 |
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-
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 |
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
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.
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.
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 |