On the Road to Atlanta – Slaughter at Nickajack Gap.
Often overlooked amid the war’s larger drama, smaller engagements sometimes had outsized impacts on campaigns. One such event occurred on April 26, 1864, when elements of Confederate Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry corps slipped away from their camps at Tunnel Hill to strike a Union picket post of 62 officers and men of the 92nd Illinois Mounted Infantry at Nickajack Gap in Taylor’s Ridge, eight miles south of Ringgold. As recorded by Illinois Corp. John M. King of Company B, the detachment was made up of men drawn from “each company,” sent out to “guard a little path.” At 4:00 a.m. on the 26th, just after King had come off night watch and fallen asleep, he was awakened by gunfire. “A large force of rebels . . . were ascending the mountain to attack us.” The Federals were divided into five squads of a dozen each, guarding the gap and various side paths; now King and the eleven comrades of his squad confronted a force several times their number. “It was a mistake for twelve men to square themselves to fight with a great army,” King admitted, even though the Yankees carried advanced weaponry: Seven-shot Spencer repeating rifles.[1]
The odds proved too lopsided. King and his companions dashed back to the reserve squad who waited with the detachment commander, Lieut. Horace C. Scoville. Scoville tried to stem the tide, but the reserve met with no better luck and were also soon running for their lives. Of the sixty-two Federals involved, “thirty-three were captured, killed, or wounded.” Though uninjured, King lamented that “I had lost my overcoat, haversack, hat, and gun and did not know but what I would lose my horse and even my life before I got out of there.” Rumors soon circulated that several of the prisoners were executed after surrendering. Pvt. William A. “Willie” Hills of Company K, King recorded, “was shot near a house.” When the Federals returned to recover their casualties, “a lady told us she saw a rebel take a gun and put it against his breast and shoot him.” Back in camp Pvt. Eugene Swaggart of Company I recorded the murder of his friend William Reynolds as it was recounted to him. “[A]fter they surrendered, they shot them down in Cold blood. Bill Reynolds surrendered. One reb rode up to him and told Bill he wanted his boots, but Bill did not hear him at first, and then was a reb captain came up, drew his revolver and shot him, (Bill) through the bowels, and said, ‘now God damn you, you will give up your boots.’” Bill’s brother Charlie was also taken prisoner. He wasn’t gunned down, spending time at Andersonville before eventually returning to the regiment to be mustered out in 1865. Several others were not so lucky, sharing Hill’s and Bill Reynolds’s fate in what King grimly termed “the Nickajack Slaughter.”[2]
King never identified the Rebel regiment responsible, and the existing records are silent on the matter. Instead, the Federals retained an indiscriminate simmering anger towards Wheeler’s men. As ugly news often did, rumors of the incident flew quickly through the army. Writing home on April 28th, Thomas Winston, the 92nd’s surgeon, informed his wife that his friend, Maj. John M. Miller of the 34th Illinois in the XIV Corps, grimly predicted that “the murders of our men . . . will . . . no doubt prove unfortunate for many rebels before the end of the year.”[3]
[1]Claire E. Swedberg, ed. Three Years with the 92d Illinois. The Civil War Diary of John M. King (Mechanicsburg, PA: 1999), 192-194.
[2]ibid., 195-196; Betty E. More, Soldier Boy, Letters and History of an Illinois Union Soldier Who Left his Family and Farm and Fought in Sherman’s Destructive Army from Tennessee Through Atlanta to the Carolinas (Bowie, MD: 2000), 233-235.
[3]“My Dear Carrie,” April 28, 1864, Thomas Winston Letters, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL.
