The Battle of Mill Springs, Kentucky by Stuart W. Sanders

Author:Stuart W. Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Union Colonel Robert McCook, who led a brigade at Mill Springs, helped organize the 9th Ohio Infantry Regiment. Wounded at Mill Springs, McCook did not survive the Civil War. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

When the Minnesotans reached the fence, the 15th Mississippi was charging out of the ravine, and the 4th Kentucky was falling back. The Confederates were at the rails when the 2nd Minnesota arrived. “Our boys rose with a yell and charged them,” Lieutenant James Binford of the 15th Mississippi wrote. “Going in front of the company I was leading at the time, I soon got to the fence and there from ten to twenty yards was the enemy line [the 4th Kentucky] falling back…Our entire line, putting their guns through the cracks of the fence fired into them with ball and buckshot, and the scene that followed defied description. The screams and groans, officers cursing and begging, trying to rally their men…Lt. Freeman of company [sic] B jumped up on the fence and called for company B to follow, but just that time another fresh regiment arrived.” The 2nd Minnesota reached the scene in the nick of time.149

The intensity of the fight was evident. One Minnesotan recalled that “the trees were flecked with bullets and the underbrush was cut away as with a scythe, the dead and wounded lay along the fence, on one side the blue, on the other the gray; further on the enemy’s dead were everywhere scattered across the open field [in front of the fence] and lay in a [line] along the ridge [on the east rim of the ravine] where the second line had stood.” Upon reaching the fence, the soldiers also saw Zollicoffer’s corpse. “The body had been dragged out of the way of passing artillery and wagons, and lay by the fence, the face upturned toward the sky and bespattered with mud from the feet of passing men and horses,” one wrote. The Minnesotans also recognized that regimental cohesion had broken down among the 4th Kentucky and the 10th Indiana. Low on ammunition after fighting for several hours, these troops were spread out throughout the area and were near the breaking point. Lieutenant Colonel James George of the 2nd Minnesota testified that these two units were “scattered all along through the woods up to the fence.” The arrival of McCook’s brigade stabilized the Federal line. When the 2nd Minnesota reached the fence, Van Cleve noted, his right flank crossed the Mill Springs Road.150

Just as some members of the 10th Indiana remained on the field when the 4th Kentucky arrived, some Kentuckians stayed in the fight when McCook’s brigade reinforced them. Lieutenant Samuel Jennison of the 2nd Minnesota noted that most of the 4th Kentucky “passed through our files just before we reached the fence.” Since it was, Lieutenant Colonel George remarked, “misty and foggy and smoky and difficult to see,” the Minnesotans probably did not notice the approximately 120 Kentuckians who were “to the rear and forming at an angle of about 40 degrees with the 9th Ohio.

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