Tried Men and True, or Union Life in Dixie

Tried Men and True, Or Union Life in Dixie

Thomas Jefferson Cypert

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

MARGARET M. STOREY

UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2011

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: AGaramond

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum reqirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cyptert, Thomas Jefferson, 1827–1901.

Tried men and true, or Union life in Dixie/Thomas J. Cypert; edited by Margaret M. Storey.

   p. cm.

Containing the personal experience of Thomas J. Cypert of Wayne Co., Middle Tenn., from 1861 to 1866: a complete account of his capture by the rebels, his treatment at their hands and final escape: with occasional digressions and reflections in regard to some questions that arisen during the Rebellion. Also a history of the Second Regiment of U.S. Tenn. Mounted Infantry, raised by Mr. Cypert n[ow] Senator from the Sixteenth District of Tennessee.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1750-8 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8578-1 (electronic) 1. Cypert, Thomas Jefferson, 1827-1901 2. United States. Army Tennessee Infantry Regiment, 2nd (1861-1865) 3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Personal narratives 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Prisoners and prisons. 5. Tennessee—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Personal narratives. 6. Tennessee—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Campaigns. I. Storey, Margaret M., 1969- II. Title. III. Title: Tried men and true. IV. Title: Union life in Dixie.

E531.52nd. C97 2011

973.7′468—dc22

Cover: Senator Thomas J. Cypert, 46th Tennessee General Assembly, 1889-1891. (Courtesy of Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Author's Dedication

This book is reverently dedicated to the memory of the Union Martyrs, who were hunted or forcibly taken from their homes, and then barbarously murdered by rebel soldiers. May their country some day record their history, and honor their Memory.

Editor's Dedication

For Josie

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,

As home his footsteps he hath turned,

From wandering on a foreign strand!

If such there breathe, go, mark him well.

For him no Minstrel raptures swell;

High though his titles, proud his name,

Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;

Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

The wretch, concentered all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.

—Sir Walter Scott

—Canto Sixth, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Note on Editorial Method

Timeline

Editor's introduction

Chapter First

Chapter Second

Recruiting for the union cause. Col. Foster wounded. A raid which became a retreat. Visit to Illinois. Rebel conscription. Sufferings and martyrdoms of Union men.

Chapter Third

Further recruiting. Quiet gathering, and a bee line for Corinth. March to Columbia. Skirmishes on the road—also a little strategy. Safe arrival of recruits at Nashville.

Chapter Fourth

Organization of Second U.S. Tennessee Mounted Infantry. Names of officers and men. Memories of the slain. Noble families of East and West Tennessee.

Chapter Fifth

Small pox. Captured at last. Unwilling travels. Jackson. Johnson. Roddy. Pond Springs, Ala. Desperate sensations. A leap in the dark. Confusion on both sides.

Chapter Sixth

A home in the hills. Hidings and watchings. Trained Children. Friends that are friends. Tracks towards the Tennessee river.

Chapter Seventh

Crossing a log. Level lands and small woods lots. Frequent scares and hair breadth escapes. Oh balmy sleep; why woo the wretch/That dares not yield to thy caress. Union Frogs. On the banks of the Tennessee. Rebels thick as blackberries.

Chapter Eighth

Constructing water craft. Labor and success. The Island and its population. Further attempt at raft building. A desperate contest: beat all hollow. Crossing the Rubicon. I was hungry and they fed me, naked and they clothed me, a stranger, and they took me in. Home sweet Home.

Chapter Ninth

Richard's himself again. Attacks on the outposts. Loss of Brown and McGee. Biffle demands the surrender of Clifton. Polite reply of Maj. Dickerson. Biffle does not get all he came for. Battle of The Hills, Ala. Death of Lieut. Barnett. Battle of Nashville. Journey home. Unsoldierly conduct of Wilson's men. Black sheep in all flocks. The flag of our Union. Beneath its folds, alone is safety.

Biographical Register

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the following people for their assistance and expertise in researching this volume. First, my thanks to Ralph M. Montgomery, great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson Cypert, who preserved and then shared his ancestor's memoir with The University of Alabama Press and with us all. At the Tennessee State Library and Archives, Darla Brock and Susan Gordon provided helpful advice and guidance to the library's voluminous local and genealogical records. Susan also worked with her colleagues Amber Gilmer, Karina McDaniel, and Carol Roberts to reproduce the image of Thomas Cypert during his second stint as a Tennessee state senator. Thanks as well to Ron Westphal, who at my request tracked down the photograph at the Tennessee State Museum. James H. David, Garry brewer, and David brewer lent their expertise about Wayne County people and places through helpful conversations and e-mail correspondence; the staff at the Newberry Library, Chicago, offered assistance with microfilm and local history sources; at the John C. Richardson Library of DePaul University, Paula Dempsey, Cary Cline, and the staff of the interlibrary loan department went beyond the call of duty to supply me with necessary materials, often in daunting quantities. I am also grateful for the careful critiques of the manuscript by the anonymous reviewers for The University of Alabama Press; their comments improved this edition in important ways. Finally, Jonathan Heller helped me carve out the time to work, offered his always insightful comments on the manuscript, and encouraged me along the way. All errors, of course, are mine alone.

Abbreviations

CWSS Civil: War Soldiers and Sailors System (http://www.civilwar.nps.gov/cwss)

OR: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: government Printing Office, 1880–1901)

ORN: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: government Printing Office, 1894–1922)

NAB: National Archives building, Washington, D.C.

Report: Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Tennessee, of the Military Forces of the State from 1861 to 1866 (Nashville, Tenn.: 1866)

Rose: Wayne County Tennessee Families, 1817–1999, volume ii (Humboldt, Tenn.: The Rose Publishing Company, 1999)

SCC: Southern Claims Commission

TSLA: Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee

Turner: Wayne County, Tennessee: History and Families, 1817–1995 (Paducah, Ky.: Turner Publishing Company, 1995)

Note on Editorial Method

This edition of Thomas J. Cypert's Tried Men and True is based on my transcription of a photocopy of the original manuscript. I have tried to reproduce the manuscript faithfully, redacting nothing and altering the original text only in minor ways. With the exception of occasionally misspelling words or omitting capitalization, and a distracting tendency to overuse commas, Cypert rarely made errors. Most such items have been corrected silently; the exceptions are bracketed. The document's first page is missing, presumably destroyed or lost due to exposure, and the last page has damage that impinged slightly upon the integrity of the prose. Editorial additions in the place of missing letters or words have been bracketed.

In many instances, understanding Cypert's meaning requires a grasp of historical context that Cypert himself did not provide because he assumed it would be understood by his imagined audience of nineteenth-century readers. I have therefore annotated the memoir using endnotes to fill in the gaps and illuminate more obscure references. These annotations also allowed me to correct Cypert's factual errors. At first blush, the fact that he made errors may suggest a level of unreliability in the source. but rarely do we find primary sources that are free of errors—it is to be expected that individual views of large events are often skewed or confused. Even more important, however, is the way that some of Cypert's errors clearly supported his ideological agenda. That he had such an agenda is, in my view, significant to understanding southern unionists' attitudes toward the Civil War and postwar politics. Thus, the errors in themselves give us insight to his worldview, even if they do not provide a dependably accurate account of all the events. I have tried in my annotations to provide the reader with sufficient context to correct errors and to offer balance for Cypert's more ideological interpretations of events.

Finally, Cypert refers to many people, most of whom were average citizens in their day. I have constructed a biographical Register (found at the end of the memoir) to serve as a glossary of details about these people whom Cypert considered so important to his own, and the country's, history. individuals included in the Register are marked with a † in the text.

Timeline

February 6, 1862       Fall of Fort Henry

February 6–10, 1862       Lieutenant S. L. Phelps leads four gunboats on an expedition from Fort Henry up the Tennessee River to Florence, Alabama, encountering unionists in Hardin County along the way

February 11, 1862       Thomas Jefferson Cypert and unionist friends attempt to reach Union army at Fort Henry

February 12–16, 1862       Siege and fall of Fort Donelson

February 15–22, 1862       Lieutenant William Gwin leads expedition from Cairo, Illinois, to Eastport, Mississippi

February 23–25, 1862       Confederates evacuate Nashville and federal forces begin

June 28, 1862       occupation of the city Cypert and recruits leave for Nashville with Colonel Foster

July 4, 1862–July 11, 1862 (approx.)       Cypert and recruits reach Nashville Cypert and five friends return to Wayne County

July 14, 1862       Cypert and friends encounter rebels on the way home

July 20, 1862 (approx.)       Cypert joins Kentucky Union troops on a raid from Waynesboro

November 9, 1862       Cypert travels to Metropolis, Illinois

January 9, 1863 January–May 1863       Cypert returns to Wayne County Cypert lies out in Wayne County to avoid Confederate conscription

May 28, 1863       Cypert narrowly escapes capture by Colonel Jacob Biffle

July 10, 1863       Cypert is approached by John Bracher to join the unionists in his neighborhood in organizing a regiment

July 14, 1863       Cypert meets neighborhood unionists and plans to offer services to general Grenville M. Dodge at Corinth, Mississippi

July 15, 1863       Cypert and friends escape Colonel Biffle and arrive at unionist William Cherry's plantation outside Savannah, Hardin County, Tennessee

[July 18, 1863]       Cypert and fellow volunteers arrive at Corinth, Mississippi, and meet with general Dodge

[July 21, 1863]       Cypert and recruits return to Savannah; Cypert leaves for Nashville

September 16, 1863       Cypert has returned to Savannah from Nashville; leads his men toward Columbia, Tennessee, to formally muster into federal service

September 17, 1863       Cypert and recruits skirmish with rebel cavalry on the Florence to Savannah road

September 18, 1863       Cypert and recruits camp on Indian Creek, Wayne County; remain for two days, gathering more recruits

September 21, 1863       Cypert and recruits attacked by Colonel Jesse Forrest near Smith's Old Stand (aka McGlamery's Stand) on the Lawrenceburg Road

October 2, 1863       Company A, Second Tennessee Mounted infantry, musters into federal service

October 15, 1863       Company b, Second Tennessee Mounted infantry, musters into federal service

October 2–December 18, 1863       Cypert and his men remain at Nashville

December 18, 1863 [approx.]       Cypert and his men ordered to Clifton, Tennessee

December 24, 1863 [approx.]       Cypert and men arrive at Waynesboro under the command of Major John Murphy

December 11–17, 1863       Colonel Richard Rowett (Seventh Illinois Cavalry) and Major Murphy lead expedition to Florence, Alabama

December 1863–January 1864       Captain Samuel Martin of Company b leads scout to Eastport, Mississippi, engages with rebel guerrillas George Smith and Cuff McCandless

February–March 1864       Second Tennessee skirmishes with guerrillas, moves in pursuit of general Nathan Bedford Forrest's raid into West Tennessee and Kentucky

April 1, 1864       Smallpox appears in Cypert's family

April 5, 1864       Cypert returns home to minister to family

April 17, 1864       Cypert is captured by rebels while at home with family

April 17–May 4, 1864       Cypert is in Confederate custody in northern Alabama

May–September 1864       general William Tecumseh Sherman's Atlanta Campaign

May 5, 1864       Cypert escapes his rebel captors

May 6–16, 1864       Cypert finds safety with Union family in northern Alabama

May 16–20, 1864       Cypert journeys home through the Tennessee valley

May 25, 1864       Cypert returns to his command at Clifton, Tennessee

July–September 1864       Fighting guerrillas in and around Clifton, Tennessee

September 16–October 10, 1864       general Nathan Bedford Forrest's raid into Alabama and Tennessee

October 14, 1864       Cypert honorably discharged

October–November 1864       Cypert ill with typhoid fever in Nashville

December 10, 1864       Second Tennessee at Nashville, ordered to headquarter at Gallatin, Tennessee, and patrol the Cumberland River

December 17, 1864       Battle of Nashville

December [20?], 1864       Cypert travels to Paducah, Kentucky, where he is elected as a delegate to the Union Convention in Nashville

December 31, 1864       Second Tennessee still at Gallatin, but assigned to guard the Louisville and Nashville Railroad

January 9, 1865       Union Convention in Nashville

Mid-January 1865       Cypert returns home from Nashville

January 21, 1865       Second Tennessee ordered to Clifton for post duty

March 4, 1865       Cypert elected to Tennessee State Senate for the Sixteenth District

June 27, 1865       Second Tennessee mustered out of service

Editor's Introduction

The story of southern unionism during the Civil War is hardly a happy one. When working on a study about Alabama unionists some years ago, I used to joke that it was bad, then it got worse, and then even ‘worser.' Loyalist men and women took up the cause of the Union despite having many reasons not to do so, risked all they had to maintain this allegiance, and suffered dearly as a consequence. In the process, they forged intense bonds of loyalty among themselves and came to believe that their sacrifices would be rewarded in the event that the Union prevailed. That the end of the war brought with it only transient peace and considerable continued suffering at the hands of recalcitrant rebels, was a wrenching disappointment to most white unionists in the South. Their victory wrought a bitter harvest indeed.

Thomas Jefferson Cypert's memoir of his time leading the Second Tennessee Mounted infantry, U.S.A., transports us to the chaotic, dangerous, and un-predictable war of these homefront-bound unionists. Completed in 1866, Tried Men and True, Or Union Life in Dixie, was intended for publication, at least as far as we can tell from Cypert's internal notes in the manuscript. For reasons unknown to us, he never added to it, nor published it. Instead, his descendants inherited and cared for the manuscript (containing two hundred hand-written pages) over successive generations, until Cypert's great grandson, Ralph M. Montgomery of Alabama, decided to bring the piece to print.

On one level, Cypert's is a story of passion, loyalty, bravery, adventure, escape, and perseverance; it typifies in many respects the genre of heroic autobiography and regimental history familiar to literate and well read men of the mid-nineteenth century. But one cannot help but notice the way the tale has been stretched to fit this form—though held taut against the frame of the archetypal war narrative, his story is disrupted by a number of incongruous elements: Cypert was captured at home, not on a battlefield; he was not subject to the rules of warfare, but instead arrested with no recourse nor promise of relief; his future held no hope of imprisonment and exchange, but only summary execution in the woods. No amount of artful storytelling could fully normalize what was a distinctly irregular affair. Cypert was nearly murdered in cold blood, in his own land, for his political beliefs.

Nonetheless, Cypert's experience was central to Civil War reality, not to mention our understanding of the meaning of loyalty and resistance on the southern homefront. Tried Men and True reminds us forcefully that southern unionists fought their Civil War largely among kin and neighbors, in defense of their families and local control. As a consequence, the conflict through which they lived was often brutal, confusing, and hard to categorize, both at the time and today. Cypert's story illuminates these tensions: the deep and personal divisions that marked the secession crisis in the upper South; the centrality of community and kinship ties to political loyalty and military engagement; and the chaotic, murky, and murderous quality of the partisan warfare endemic to West and Middle Tennessee during the Civil War.¹

Born in 1827 in Wayne County, Tennessee, Thomas Jefferson Cypert was the son of John Cypert and grandson of Francis Cypert Jr., a Revolutionary War veteran. These two forebears moved from North Carolina to Wayne County in 1818, along with other Cypert relatives, shortly after the county was opened to white settlement. It is likely that Francis and his brother, Robert, took possession of land granted them as a reward for their service in the Continental Army.² Situated in the southwestern corner of Middle Tennessee, on the westernmost edge of the Highland Rim, Wayne County offered good pastures, farms, and timberland watered by a number of creeks. The area also boasted mineral ore deposits, which ultimately fostered the growth of iron production in the later antebellum period.³ The Cypert family settled along Indian Creek, located near the center of the county, where they farmed and operated gristmills.

Little is known about Cypert's life before the Civil War, except that at the age of twenty-one, he married Eliza Hays, who died very shortly after the birth of their first child, Eliza Jane, in 1848 (d. 1861). He then married Martha Elizabeth Roberson in 1852, with whom he had five children: Martha Caroline (1854–1935), James Millard Fillmore (1856–1925), Henry Lamar (1860–1927), Mary Elizabeth (1862–1921), and Thomas R. (1866–1933).⁴ Upon marrying Martha, Cypert settled on a farm in the community of Mount Pleasant, near the town of Cypress inn, some miles south of his family's historic settlements along Indian Creek, but close to his in-laws. Here he made his living until he died, farming on a modest but increasingly stable scale. In 1860, he owned sixty-eight acres of land worth $200 and a personal estate of $1,000, placing him squarely in the yeomanry of his county. He never held slaves, though his cousins who remained on Indian Creek owned small numbers of bondspeople. He was, in most respects, typical of the middling farmers who populated his county on the eve of the Civil War, though his memoir shows him to be notably well read and broadly conversant with American political history and the Bible.⁵

Cypert's county, Wayne, is situated on Tennessee's southern border with Alabama, and though technically part of Middle Tennessee, should more properly be understood as part of a separate, Highland Rim border region between Middle and West Tennessee. There, a strip of thirteen counties straddling the Tennessee River was characterized by the lowest rates of slaveholding and slave populations in the state, outside of East Tennessee. These border counties were not anomalies in the state, but they did represent a departure from their immediate surroundings, which were deeply interested in staple crop agriculture and slavery.⁶ Though slave populations often ranged well below 15 percent in these counties, in Middle Tennessee slaves represented 29 percent of the total population, and in West Tennessee just over one-third of the population was enslaved.⁷

Cypert's county of Wayne was emblematic of this subregion of the Highland Rim border. With a slave population of 14 percent, the county fell well under the state average of 24 percent; only 240 people in the county, or 3.5 percent of the free population, held slaves.⁸ Moreover, these citizens were not large slaveholders. On the eve of the war, 80 percent of Wayne slaveholders owned ten or fewer slaves; 45 percent owned only one or two slaves.⁹ Indeed, as was typical of the Upper South, slave hire was probably as common in Wayne County as was slave ownership. The census shows that a number of private and public employers rented slave labor from larger owners. Furthermore, these larger slaveholding families produced large amounts of corn, wheat, rye, and wool, but only rarely engaged in the cultivation of cotton or tobacco. In fact, only seventy-three farms in Wayne, or 6.5 percent of the total, grew cotton; of those, only twelve produced five or more bales annually, and most of the tobacco grown in the county was worked by family or hired labor. This is not to say that slavery played no role in the county's economy. Instead, it suggests that slavery in Wayne did not hold the place typically associated with slave labor in the plantation South.¹⁰ For example, the largest slaveholders in Wayne County, W. H. Pointer and T. G. Pointer, did not farm at all, but owned the Wayne Furnace, one of the most significant early iron furnaces in the region. In operation since 1833, the furnace always relied on slave labor, both owned and hired, and was the largest enterprise in the county at the time of the Civil War.¹¹

Other features also distinguish Wayne from the larger region. From 1847 to 1861, the county never polled a Democratic majority in either gubernatorial or presidential elections. Instead, the Whig Party, and later, other Democratic opposition parties (the Know-Nothings, the American Party, the Opposition Party, and the Union Party), consistently won elections in Wayne by substantial margins. The county's attachment to the Whig Party was not unusual state-wide; both East and West Tennessee tended to support Whigs over Democrats until the mid-1850s.¹² But the county's political allegiance diverged sharply from that of Middle Tennessee as a whole, which offered the strongest support for the Democrats in the entire state. Moreover, unlike West Tennessee, which eventually went Democratic in 1855, Wayne County persistently supported anti-Democratic parties through the end of the antebellum period. This persistence, when examined in light of Wayne County's opposition to secession, suggests a reluctance to endorse the sectionalism that had grown increasingly important in late antebellum politics.

We do not know for certain that Thomas Cypert was a Whig prior to the Civil War, but circumstantial evidence suggests that he reflected the sentiments of his county in its historical support for the Whigs and later opposition parties. In his memoir, Cypert indicates that the majority of his county opposed, as he did, the secession movement, which suggests that they shared prior political ground. As the historian Dan Crofts reminds us, Antebellum southerners voted more as members of a community than as individuals. And that community was defined by kinship, ‘habits of mutuality,' and an intricate network of patron-client relationships.¹³

Other evidence also points to Cypert's anti-Democratic politics. In December 1856, he named his second son James Millard Fillmore. By that time, Fill-more had served as thirteenth president of the United States as a Whig, and had just run unsuccessfully for a second term as president on the American Party ticket in 1856. Campaigning explicitly on a conservative, pro-slavery unionist platform, Fillmore gained the majority of his support in the Upper South from former Whigs, who had begun to join the Know-Nothings when their party collapsed nationally.¹⁴ By extension, Cypert was more likely to have come to the American Party as a former Whig than as a disillusioned Democrat.

Only four years after Fillmore's defeat by Democrat James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency on an avowedly sectional ticket, bringing to pass the great sectional split that many of Fillmore's supporters had feared. But the great electoral shift that Lincoln's election represented occurred largely outside Tennessee and the other Upper South states. The Republican Party's victory by a plurality of votes was, of course, the logical outcome of a race that effectively split his opposition—Democrats and former Whigs—into three factions: the mainline Democratic Party (which nominated Stephen Douglas of Illinois), the southern rights Democrats (John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky), and the Constitutional Unionists (former Whig, John Bell of Tennessee). In Tennessee, antebellum voting trends largely held steady and favorite son and senator John Bell—endorsing vague tenets like strict adherence to the Constitution, enforcement of the laws (i.e., the Fugitive Slave Law), and protection of the Union—carried the state, though the Democratic Party certainly made a fair showing, particularly in Middle Tennessee, which supported Breckinridge.¹⁵ Abraham Lincoln was not on the ballot in Tennessee, and, though Cypert refers to Lincoln later as the nation's savior, he would likely have supported Bell if Lincoln had been on the ballot.

Lincoln's victory came as a shock to many voters in the country's border regions, including Tennessee. Even more startling was the rapidity and unanimity with which Deep South states began to advocate for secession. Radical fire-eaters had long hoped for such a result, and indeed, had prepared for it: in South Carolina and Alabama, for instance, state legislators had authorized the state prior to the presidential election to automatically hold a secession convention in the event of a Black Republican victory. Very shortly after the election, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana followed suit, all