Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories

A Fortuitous Meeting

181 A Fortuitous Meeting In late August 1864, near Nicholasville, Kentucky, Sgt. Russell Babcock’s horse gave out; and his regiment, the Eleventh Michigan Cavalry, went on without him. Babcock made his way to nearby Camp Nelson, a bustling federal army supply hub. The camp’s dusty roads were crowded with wagons packed with supplies destined for troops in Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and western Virginia. The wagons rolled passed a hodgepodge of some 300 buildings, mostly temporary structures, which included a hospital, facilities for thousands of refugees fleeing slavery, and the Union’s third largest recruiting and training station for black regiments. Babcock found his old captain, Adna Bowen,287 who had recently left the Eleventh to help recruit troopers for the Fifth and Sixth U.S. Colored Cavalry. Their meeting was fortuitous for the young quartermaster sergeant. Capt. Bowen was looking for officers to lead the two new regiments , and he offered nineteen-year-old Babcock a second lieutenancy in the Sixth Cavalry. He accepted, was assigned to Company D, and joined his new command in late October. He had missed the Sixth’s first battle, at Saltville, Virginia, where it fought with other units in a failed attempt to destroy the town’s salt works.288 In December, he led his company on Maj. Gen. George Stoneman ’s289 raid into southwestern Virginia. A few days before Christmas , 1864, the Sixth and its fellow raiders had a second chance to capture the salt works, and this time they succeeded. The regiment spent the following year in Kentucky, and Babcock mustered out in September 1865. He returned to his Hudson, Michigan, home, where he married , fathered a daughter, and worked as a real estate agent and for 182 2nd Lt. Russell Dailey Babcock, Company D, Sixth United States Colored Cavalry Carte de visite by the Elrod Brothers (life dates unknown) of Lexington, Kentucky, about 1864 183 a railroad company. In 1871, the Babcock family moved west. They first stopped in Hastings, Nebraska, where they lived until 1889, then in Denver until about 1907, and finally in San Francisco. Babcock’s eyesight and mental faculties went into decline about 1922, and he died of colon cancer in 1928 at age eighty-three. ...