The Battle of Mill Springs, 1862: The Civil War Divides Kentucky

Just after midnight on January 19, 1862, 4,000 Confederate troops left their camp at Beech Grove, Kentucky, for a nine-mile march through fog, sleet and mud toward a Union army camped at the hamlet of Logan's Cross Roads. One Union soldier later wrote that it was always some comfort, on a night like that, "to think that his enemy over there, was at least as cold and wretched as he himself was."

Largely forgotten today, and overshadowed at the time by Fort Donelson and Shiloh, the Battle of Mill Springs was the Union's first significant victory of the Civil War. It helped secure Kentucky and the interior South for the Union — and it laid bare how deeply the war divided the border states. This page draws on the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places lesson on the battle.

An artist's rendering of the battle from Harper's Weekly. No photographs were taken at Mill Springs.

A state pulled both ways

Kentucky had sympathy for both sides. Its position on the Ohio River brought its people into contact with travelers from across the country. About 225,000 people were enslaved there, yet many Kentuckians also supported the Underground Railroad. The state had produced Henry Clay, "the Great Compromiser," and John Crittenden, author of the Crittenden Compromise, both of whom had worked to hold the nation together.

When the war began, some Kentuckians, pointing to the state's tradition of compromise and nationalism, wanted to stay in the Union; others felt bound to the South by culture, family and, above all, slavery. In May 1861, a month after Fort Sumter, the legislature declared "a position of strict neutrality."

Neutrality couldn't last. Both sides courted the state, knowing what it offered: defense of vital territory, key transportation routes, wheat and livestock, and the third-largest white population of any slaveholding state — a deep pool of soldiers. Kentucky was the gateway to the Confederacy's strongholds in Tennessee and the interior South. "I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game," President Lincoln wrote to a friend.

Unionists won the state's congressional elections in May and legislative elections in August 1861. Many undecided white Kentuckians turned toward the Union in September, when Confederate General Leonidas Polk seized Columbus, a railroad junction on a bluff above the Mississippi; though Union troops under U. S. Grant soon occupied two other towns, Polk had moved first. Still, the state stayed divided, and enlistments on both sides split families — all but one of Mary Todd Lincoln's seven brothers and half-brothers fought against the Union her husband was trying to save.

The Confederate "southern defense line" across Kentucky — a chain of positions, not a continuous wall, from Columbus to the Cumberland Gap, with Mill Springs near its eastern end. National Park Service.

Both sides appealed for Kentuckians' loyalty. Union Colonel Curren Pope of the 7th Kentucky Infantry, in an October 1861 speech in Louisville, praised the flag as the banner of Washington and of liberty and vowed that loyal Kentuckians would never strike at their own state. Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer, a former Tennessee newspaper editor and congressman who had crossed the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky with 6,000 men and camped near Mill Springs, issued a proclamation in December 1861 urging southeastern Kentuckians to side with the South — warning that the Union meant to free their slaves and grant them equality, and calling on them to fight for "the preservation of your property."

The battle

The Confederate commander in the region, Major General George B. Crittenden, learned that Union forces under Major General George Thomas were gathering at Logan's Cross Roads. He and his officers decided to strike before more Union troops arrived and attacked their defenses near Mill Springs. Losing that line would open the Cumberland Gap — the main route into southwest Virginia — and the heart of Tennessee to the Union.

After six hours of marching, the Confederates met Union pickets, and for about four hours fighting ranged over hilly farmland broken by woods and ravines that hampered cavalry and artillery on both sides. Kentuckians fought on both sides, on ground many of them knew.

• Early Confederate success. The attackers first drove the Union troops back, but after about an hour the lines steadied as Union reinforcements arrived and gunsmoke mixed with the fog.
• Wet powder. Many Confederates carried old flintlock muskets whose priming powder sat in an open pan. "The rain was descending in torrents and our flint lock muskets were in bad condition; not one in three would fire," one wrote.
• Zollicoffer's death. In the confusion, Zollicoffer rode up to the 19th Tennessee, sure it was firing on fellow Confederates, and ordered it to stop. He then rode toward the target unit and told another officer to cease fire; in rubberized raincoats hiding their uniforms, neither recognized the other. As one of Zollicoffer's aides shouted that these were enemy troops, the 4th Kentucky (Union) opened fire, killing Zollicoffer and the aide instantly.
• The turning point. Fighting continued for at least two more hours. After one last Confederate push failed to break the Union line, the 9th Ohio made one of the first and most effective bayonet charges of the war, shattering the Confederate left and sending the whole army into a disorderly retreat. Rear-guard actions let the Confederates reach their fortified camps nine miles back by nightfall.

That night, as the Union prepared to attack at dawn, the beaten Confederates hurried across the Cumberland River, leaving behind their artillery, wagons, horses, food and most of their belongings. Union troops plundered the camp; an Ohio soldier wrote home about the broadcloth coats, satin vest and silver-handled stiletto he had taken.

What it meant

The defeat collapsed the Confederate defensive line in eastern Kentucky, placing the region under Union control and opening eastern Tennessee to invasion. After the loss of Forts Henry and Donelson just across the Tennessee line, all Confederate forces had to leave the state. A Confederate attempt to retake Kentucky later in 1862 failed, and the state stayed firmly in Union hands for the rest of the war.

Part of the battlefield preserved in Mill Springs Battlefield Park (American Battlefield Protection Program).

Remembering the dead

The battle left 55 Union and 148 Confederate soldiers dead. War Department orders on burying Union soldiers provided no land and no system for identification, so the Union dead were buried in individual graves but many were misidentified or unidentified. With no policy for enemy dead, the Confederates were placed in mass graves so shallow that local people had to rebury them within days. Zollicoffer's body was returned to the Confederates and buried in Tennessee.

At the end of 1862 Congress created 12 national cemeteries, including one at Mill Springs, but little happened until comprehensive legislation passed in 1867. That year William Logan, for whom the crossroads was named, donated the land for Mill Springs National Cemetery, dedicated on June 15, 1881. Only Union soldiers were supposed to be buried there, but local residents say some Confederates were moved in too, since men from both sides had been buried together after the battle.

Mill Springs National Cemetery (American Battlefield Protection Program, National Park Service).

The Confederate mass grave lay beside a white oak called the "Zollie Tree," where Zollicoffer's body had been placed. In the early 1900s a 10-year-old local girl, Dorotha Burton, began tending the grave with her father and hanging an evergreen wreath on the tree. In 1904 her custom caught the attention of the United Confederate Veterans, and in 1910, on land given by a Union veteran and his wife, a member of the Logan family, an obelisk and grave marker were unveiled. The site became Zollicoffer Park Cemetery in the 1930s, cared for for 60 years by Dorotha Burton Hudson, her family and volunteers. The Kentucky Department of Parks took it over in the 1970s, and the Mill Springs Battlefield Association formed in 1992 to protect the battlefield and cemetery. A storm destroyed the Zollie Tree in 1995; on Memorial Day 1996, a seedling from it was planted in its place.

Sources

• National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places: "The Battle of Mill Springs: The Civil War Divides a Border State," by William P. Turpen and Ronald Nicholas, based on the National Register file for Mill Springs Battlefield and quoting period letters, diaries, speeches and official records. The lesson's photograph of the Zollie Tree is privately credited and is not reproduced.