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20. Bulls Gap
- Louisiana State University Press
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1. Scott and Angel, Thirteenth Regiment, 133–36. 2. Ibid., 137–38. CHAPTER 20 Bulls Gap O n February 18, 1864, the 13th Tennessee arrived from Kentucky and camped at Camp Gillem, a mile northwest of Nashville. Forty new recruits joined them the next day, bringing reports of suffering from upper East Tennessee . The regiment spent several days raising “big ‘Bell’ tents.” These “old smoker [s]” with a stove in the middle, wrote regimental historians, caused the men “more tears . . . than all [their] tribulations.” Soon details drained the grounds, “police[d] the camp,” and went on scouts. On March 3 all of the men received two months’ pay, which some spent “for . . . useless things [from] swindlers . . . swarm[ing] about the vicinity,” while others saved it or “sent it back to their suffering families.”1 By the ides of March, the men had their “first mounted drill,” the source of “many amusing . . . accidents.” Early in April Daniel Ellis brought in recruits and mail from the upper counties of East Tennessee. By then non-enlistee refugees arriving from the region established their residence at a boardinghouse on Summer Street. After an outbreak of smallpox in camp, Colonel Miller moved the men nine miles west of the capital along the Nashville & Northwestern Railroad to Camp Catlett, established at Belle Meade plantation. Here the mountain men camped from April 13 to May 3, spending time “in drill, saber exercise, camp duty and grazing horses.” On occasion they guarded “forage . . . being transported down the Cumberland river to Nashville.”2 When first established in May 1864, the first two brigades of Gillem’s Fourth Division guarded the railroads south and west of Nashville while the Third Brigade guarded the Louisville & Nashville at Gallatin. Once a “prosperous 320 East Tennessee and Beyond 3. Durham, Rebellion Revisited, 197–98; BDTGA, 2:98; Alice Williamson Diary, May 6, 1864, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University; Scott and Angel, Thirteenth Regiment, 140–41. 4. Durham, Rebellion Revisited, 197–98; Alice Williamson Diary, May 6, June 5, 1864; Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge, 1988), 134. business” town surrounded “by fine farming lands,” The county seat had a courthouse and jail; a few churches; several general stores and shops for tailors , shoemakers, and saddlers; three blacksmiths; and male and female academies . Miller appointed Lt. Col. Andrew J. Brown of the 8th Tennessee as provost there. The former mayor of Jonesborough had his hands full from the beginning. Only days before the Third Brigade entered the town, a Yankee schoolmaster arrived with six instructors to teach what he estimated would become a school for three to four hundred blacks. The schoolmaster had the support of the town’s outgoing commander, Brig. Gen. Eleazer A. Paine, and Capt. Benjamin Nicklen, in charge of an artillery battery at Fort Thomas as well as a nearby contraband camp. White sixteen-year-old student Alice Williamson recorded in her diary that “[the] East Tenneseans are the meanest men I ever saw; but they have one good trait they make the negroes ‘walk a chalk.’”3 In a racist rampage during the first week in May, some of the troopers burned a school for contrabands, one shot a black man whom he accused of insulting a white female student, and that cavalryman’s comrades threatened to “kill every negro” in the town. A week later Tories torched another black school, but Yanks “by ringing bells and firing gun[s], . . . assembled and put it out.” Tennesseans resented out-of-state soldiers “making the colored . . . man think he is the whole thing [what the war was about]” and giving blacks an opportunity to be schooled. Backed by some locals, Tories pitted themselves against blacks and a few Yankee artillerymen and northern schoolteachers. To prevent violence, Miller prohibited the men from visiting town except with a pass from their colonel. He also threatened them with severe punishment if they interfered with the teachers.4 Most of the brigade’s troopers camped outside of town at a grove of sugar trees near Fort Thomas. From there they chased real and imaginary guerrillas, impressed horses, and searched for forage. Many of the men became ill during May and June because of the location of their campsite on “low ground . . . densely shaded [with] . . . sugar trees.” Some troopers, according to one officer, were “dying of diarrhea caused by using Limestone water.” Some of Brown’s [44.200.39.110...