Free The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home by William C. Davis Page B

us!” There would be no attack,no breakout, no escape. Private Montgomery had carried a flag of truce to Grant. Floyd and Pillow, with Forrest’s cavalry, had escaped from the encircling enemy during the night. Buckner had refused to go with them. “For my part,” he said, “I will stay with the men, and share their fate.” Their fate would be captivity, for the message Private Montgomery bore to Grant was a request for terms of surrender.
    Dejection overpowered the command. All of the Orphans, Hanson included, believed that they had taken an avenue of escape that would have saved most of the Army, had Pillow not called them back on the day before. Now to be told that they were prisoners, soon to be captives in some northern cell, while Floyd and Pillow had escaped to safety, was bitter news. Many would never forgive the generals for escaping. None would ever forget the loyalty and self-sacrifice shown by Buckner in remaining to stand by them.
    Soon federal guards appeared and the Orphans were disarmed, and Graves relieved of his field pieces. It was a humiliating experience, yet one with ironic overtones. Men from the 7th Iowa mingled with Hanson’s Kentuckians in disarming them and took particular note of the Mississippi rifles carried by some of the captives. One soldier saw an inscription on the stock of a rifle and shouted out in surprise. It indicated that this was one of the rifles with which old John Brown of Kansas armed his followers in their raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. When Brown’s men surrendered, their weapons went into the Virginia arsenals, and when Virginia seceded, these same weapons were given to the Confederate service. Among those thousand rifles that Governor Letcher so kindly sent Breckinridge last fall, then, were some of the very same rifles that had fired what many regarded as the first real shots of the war over two years before. Having carried these rifles for a couple of months now, it came as some surprise to the Orphans that they were using John Brown’s guns to spit lead back at the abolitionists.
    There was time to count the wounded and tally the dead. Reports conflict, Hanson’s own being lost not long after he filed it. Of the 2d Kentucky, Hanson had a total strength of 618, and Graves’s battery numbered another 113. Hanson’s losses were 13 killed, among them Lieutenant Hill. Lieutenant Keene would die soon from his wound as well. Four other officers of his regiment lay wounded, among them Captain Charles Semple of Company K. Indeed, brother officers at first thought Semple killed, and led their men into the last chargesyelling “Forward, men! Avenge Charlie Semple’s death!” He would recover, however, as would most of the 57 wounded in the regiment. All told, Hanson lost almost 12 per cent of his regiment as casualties. Graves fared far better, with 5 wounded and none killed.
    Some of the wounded actually escaped capture. Major Jim Hewitt, to whom the regiment must have been thankful for its overcoats during the cold nights at Donelson, took a painful but not serious wound in the nose early on February 15, and joined other wounded aboard a steamboat that managed to escape Dover and steam up the Cumberland to Nashville. A few other wounded were dropped at Clarksville along the way. Private Washington Taylor of Company F was wounded in the head during the last day’s fighting. The next morning his sister in Harrison County, Kentucky, told their mother about the nightmare she had during the night. She saw him in her dream, she said, “coming from the yard gate to the house with the front of his coat all clotted with blood.” Taylor’s wound was not serious. He would recover to fight again. But on that night of February 15, thanks to his wound, the breast of his coat was covered with his own blood. 11
    The next day Hanson and the Kentuckians went aboard federal steamboats for the trip to a northern prison, Buckner among them. They were going farther from home