Kelion Franklin Peddicord of Quirk's Scouts, Morgan's Kentucky Cavalry, C. S. A.

by India W. P. Logan

On reaching Wolf River at midnight we found its banks overflowed, which necessitated our swimming across with our horses. The same condition existed at Oby, and we did not arrive at camp until a little after daylight, when we at once reported all we knew to the Colonel, and then went to our headquarters to rest, having been in our saddles nearly fifty hours. Much to the delight of the scouts, this was the last foray in the direction of Monticello.

Shortly after this occurrence the brigade had a very severe engagement with the same forces at Greasy Creek, near Monticello; but we routed them and drove them across the country so rapidly that quite a number were drowned.

The General soon after this moved his command down to Carthage, crossing the river above at Hardee’s Ford. He quietly advanced on the town, which was garrisoned by a brigade, including infantry, cavalry, and artillery. With his plans for attack almost in readiness, the General would have issued orders for an assault had it not been for the instructions that reached him from General Bragg, ordering him to make his last great raid, which ended so unpleasantly.

I should have first related that the brigade, under the command of Colonel Duke, before the fight at Greasy Creek, made a raid to Alexandria and Lebanon, via Statesville and Beards’ Mills, with the intention of cutting Minty’s cavalry brigade off from Murfreesboro, forcing him to fight. But he would not stand, except to skirmish and retreat. Company B continued the pursuit until within their lines. It was afterward reported by a Yankee correspondent and published in the Louisville Journal, that Minty’s cavalry had met and defeated John Morgan near Lebanon, Tennessee, the article also telling of a “gallant sabre charge” the Yankees had made, and what they did not cut into pieces was run out of the country, etc. It was described in such glowing terms that on paper it seemed most terrific. What a pity it was false! All the charges made with their sabres on that day were not only few, but “very far between” them and us, they using their spurs to make it farther.

When General Morgan withdrew his forces from Carthage to go to the south bank of the river he ordered each regiment to move by different roads in the direction of Burksville, where the command was to be concentrated preparatory to the “gallop” through Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio. The “gay Fourteenth” marched via Liberty, McMinnville, Sparta, Cooksville, and Livingston, reaching the encampment near the river opposite Burksville on the last day of June, 1863.

As soon as all the preparations necessary to a long march were made, such as issuing rations and ammunition, and providing for the “lame, sick, and lazy,” the crossing of the Cumberland was begun on the evening of the 30th of June. The first and second companies—A and B—of the Fourteenth Kentucky succeeded in crossing, although the river could not be contained within the limits of its banks; but it was by a difficult swim. On gaining the north bank we were sent on an outpost that night. It was not much unlike the crossing of the Delaware in the years gone by, the difference being that “the Father of his Country” had to contend against large masses of floating ice, with his enemy in the rear, while the “horse thieves,” upon their horses, and armed and equipped for fight, with the enemy in front, had to swim a boisterous river, covered with large drifts of trees, a feat almost as difficult and far more dangerous than crossing a river in boats, amid the ice.

On the evening of the second day of July our forces—twenty-two hundred strong—had safely, with two exceptions, reached the bank north of the river at three crossings near Burksville. The Fourteenth, meanwhile, had all crossed, and gone to the front in the direction of Glasgow, Kentucky.

You will notice that so far I have, intentionally, omitted to mention the loss of men. Not that I do not remember, but because it would be a sorrowful task, and a subject too sacredly sad for me to handle, since many of them were my intimate friends and loved companions, and doubly endeared to me on my finding them in the same line of battle with myself.

Early in the morning of the second we were withdrawn from the Glasgow road, and passed through Burksville on the road to Columbia, taking charge of our front in that direction. As our column was passing through town General Morgan detained about twenty members of Company B for special duty. All of the members of the company were eager and anxious to go with their General, but he only had use for the twenty. Soon after the regiment left town, and the now “gay twenty,” with the General in front, cantered out on the Glasgow road, on which the enemy had been found in force a few miles from the river, with the object of making a feint in our favor.

Our true line of march was via Columbia, but we wished to make a diversion to impress the Yankees with the belief that our march was to be via Glasgow. Going a few miles, we were met by a Yankee cavalry regiment, who changed front to rear immediately upon the sight of our scout, using their rowels with little mercy. Confusion and the twenty scouts were soon among them, and what the former did not do, the pistols of the latter accomplished.