Colonel Ebenezer Magoffin | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1817 Mercer County, Kentucky |
| Died | 1865 |
| Buried | Woodlawn Cemetery, Jackson County, Missouri [1] |
| Relations | Beriah Magoffin (brother) [2] |
Ebenezer "Ben" Magoffin (1817-1865) was a Confederate officer in the American Civil War who carried a Missouri State Guard's colonel's commission and became a prominent figure in the early phase of the war in Missouri. [3] He was sentenced to death by a Union Army military commission in 1862, but was spared execution after Kentucky Governor Beriah Magoffin pleaded for the life of his brother with Abraham Lincoln. [4]
Ebenezer Magoffin was born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky to Beriah Magoffin, Sr., and Jane (McAfee) Magoffin. [5] Among his siblings were a Kentucky governor Beriah Magoffin and James Wiley Magoffin (1799–1868), a U.S. consul in Mexico. On July 12, 1836, he married Margaret Ann Hutchison (1820-1861) and they had nine children. Around 1856, he relocated his family to Boone County, Missouri and then purchased 2,160 acres in Pettis County, Missouri for $16,000 naming the new farm, Prairie Lea. [6]
In May 1861, Ebenezer Magoffin presented himself to Missouri Governor Claiborne F. Jackson and received an instruction to raise a regiment of cavalry for the Missouri State Guard. The regiment took part in the Battle of Boonville under the command of Major Thomas E. Staples while Magoffin stayed at his farm; he joined his regiment in the Battle of Carthage where he acted as an aide to Governor Jackson. Magoffin raised another regiment for General Price on Jackson's request, of which he was elected a colonel. The regiment at three companies strength was mustered in at Prairie Lea and left under the command of Col. Edwin Williamson Price, the eldest son of General Price. [7]
On August 29, 1861, he was apprehended in Georgetown, Pettis County, Missouri by Col. Henry M. Day of the First Illinois Cavalry, after a shootout that took life of Sergeant George W. Glasgow, 1st Illinois Cavalry, and placed under arrest in Lexington. After the Battle of Lexington Magoffin was exchanged for former Missouri Governor Austin A. King and stayed with Gen. Price's army. In December 1861, he asked for and received a 10-day pass from Col. Frederick Steele, Union Army of the West to see his wife who was dying; Union military authorities assumed that Magoffin asked for and was paroled. [6] On his return from Prairie Lea, Magoffin was taken prisoner with his two sons, Elijah H. Magoffin, 24 years old, and Beriah Magoffin, 19 years old, at Milford, Johnson County, Missouri, while traveling with a detachment of Confederate troops under Col. F. S. Robertson. [6]
On orders of Union General Henry W. Halleck, commanding the Department of Missouri, Ebenezer Magoffin was brought to St. Louis and charged with the murder of Sergeant Glasgow in Georgetown in August 1861 and violation of his alleged parole after rejoining the Confederates.
Magoffin was sentenced to death on February 20, 1862, by a military commission under General David S. Stanley, which absolved him of the murder charges but found guilty of violating his parole. [8] [9] His brother, the Governor of Kentucky at the time, sent a letter to President Lincoln asking for clemency. [2] Lincoln suspended the sentence pending review but Magoffin escaped Alton Prison, where he had been confined, on July 25, 1862. [10] Magoffin's sons, Elijah H. Magoffin and Beriah Magoffin were instrumental in digging in twenty days the 60-foot-long tunnel leading to freedom; altogether, 36 Confederate prisoners escaped. [6] [11]
The Magoffins went to Arkansas where they served under General Shelby. Elijah Magoffin was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel in July 1864. [12]
According to reports, Ebenezer Magoffin was stabbed to death in 1865 while trying to break up a tavern fight. [13] Elijah Magoffin traced the killer from Arkansas to Texas and hanged him to avenge his father's death. [6]
Mercer County is a county located in the central part of the U.S. Commonwealth of Kentucky. As of the 2020 census, the population was 23,772. Its county seat is Harrodsburg. The county was formed from Lincoln County, Virginia in 1785 and is named for Revolutionary War General Hugh Mercer, who was killed at the Battle of Princeton in 1777. It was formerly a prohibition or dry county.
In the context of the American Civil War (1861–65), the border states were slave states that did not secede from the Union. They were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and after 1863, the new state of West Virginia. To their north they bordered free states of the Union, and all but Delaware bordered slave states of the Confederacy to their south.
Beriah Magoffin was the 21st Governor of Kentucky, serving during the early part of the Civil War. Personally, Magoffin adhered to a states' rights position, including the right of a state to secede from the Union, and he sympathized with the Confederate cause. Nevertheless, when the Kentucky General Assembly adopted a position of neutrality in the war, Magoffin ardently held to it, refusing calls for aid from both the Union and Confederate governments.
Henry Cornelius Burnett was an American politician who served as a Confederate States senator from Kentucky from 1862 to 1865. From 1855 to 1861, Burnett served four terms in the United States House of Representatives. A lawyer by profession, Burnett had held only one public office—circuit court clerk—before being elected to Congress. He represented Kentucky's 1st congressional district immediately prior to the Civil War. This district contained the entire Jackson Purchase region of the state, which was more sympathetic to the Confederate cause than any other area of Kentucky. Burnett promised the voters of his district that he would have President Abraham Lincoln arraigned for treason. Unionist newspaper editor George D. Prentice described Burnett as "a big, burly, loud-mouthed fellow who is forever raising points of order and objections, to embarrass the Republicans in the House".
The U.S. state of West Virginia was formed out of western Virginia and added to the Union as a direct result of the American Civil War, in which it became the only modern state to have declared its independence from the Confederacy. In the summer of 1861, Union troops, which included a number of newly formed Western Virginia regiments, under General George McClellan drove off Confederate troops under General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Philippi in Barbour County. This essentially freed Unionists in the northwestern counties of Virginia to form a functioning government of their own as a result of the Wheeling Convention. Before the admission of West Virginia as a state, the government in Wheeling formally claimed jurisdiction over all of Virginia, although from its creation it was firmly committed to the formation of a separate state.
The Battle of Barbourville was one of the early engagements of the American Civil War. It took place on September 19, 1861, in Knox County, Kentucky during the campaign known as the Kentucky Confederate Offensive. The battle is considered the first Confederate victory in the commonwealth, and threw a scare into Federal commanders, who rushed troops to central Kentucky to try to repel the invasion, which was finally stopped at the Battle of Camp Wildcat in October.
James Fisher Robinson was the 22nd Governor of Kentucky, serving the remainder of the unfinished term of Governor Beriah Magoffin. Magoffin, a Confederate sympathizer, became increasingly ineffective after the elections of 1861 yielded a supermajority to pro-Union forces in both houses of the Kentucky General Assembly. Magoffin agreed to resign the governorship, provided he could select his successor. He selected Robinson.
Kentucky was a southern border state of key importance in the American Civil War. It officially declared its neutrality at the beginning of the war, but after a failed attempt by Confederate General Leonidas Polk to take the state of Kentucky for the Confederacy, the legislature petitioned the Union Army for assistance. Though the Confederacy controlled more than half of Kentucky early in the war, after early 1862 Kentucky came largely under U.S. control. In the historiography of the Civil War, Kentucky is treated primarily as a southern border state, with special attention to the social divisions during the secession crisis, invasions and raids, internal violence, sporadic guerrilla warfare, federal-state relations, the ending of slavery, and the return of Confederate veterans.
Louisville in the American Civil War was a major stronghold of Union forces, which kept Kentucky firmly in the Union. It was the center of planning, supplies, recruiting and transportation for numerous campaigns, especially in the Western Theater. By the end of the war, Louisville had not been attacked once, although skirmishes and battles, including the battles of Perryville and Corydon, Indiana, took place nearby.
The Battle of Salyersville, also called Battle of Half Mountain was the largest of the many skirmishes in Magoffin County, Kentucky, during the American Civil War.
During the American Civil War, Arkansas was a Confederate state, though it had initially voted to remain in the Union. Following the capture of Fort Sumter in April 1861, Abraham Lincoln called for troops from every Union state to put down the rebellion, and Arkansas and several other states seceded. For the rest of the civil war, Arkansas played a major role in controlling the Mississippi River, a major waterway.
The Confederate government of Kentucky was a shadow government established for the Commonwealth of Kentucky by a self-constituted group of Confederate sympathizers and delegates sent by Kentucky counties, during the American Civil War. The shadow government never replaced the elected government in Frankfort, in which the state legislature had strong Union sympathies while the governor was pro-Confederate. Neither was it able to gain the whole support of Kentucky's citizens; its jurisdiction extended only as far as Confederate battle lines in the Commonwealth, which at its greatest extent in 1861 and early 1862 encompassed over half the state. Nevertheless, the provisional government was recognized by the Confederate States of America, and Kentucky was admitted to the Confederacy on December 10, 1861. Kentucky, the final state admitted to the Confederacy, was represented by the 13th (central) star on the Confederate battle flag.
Kentucky Declaration of Neutrality was a resolution passed by the Kentucky Legislature declaring the Commonwealth of Kentucky officially neutral in the American Civil War. It was enacted on May 16, 1861, following Governor Beriah Magoffin's refusal to send troops to aid the Union in invading the South the previous month. Magoffin had flatly refused President Abraham Lincoln's call for troops to fight seceded Southern states. The Legislature passed the resolution in an effort to prevent Kentucky from seceding and also to prevent Kentucky from becoming a battleground. Kentucky remained neutral until September 4, 1861, when Confederate Major General Leonidas Polk ordered Brigadier General Gideon Johnson Pillow to occupy Columbus. There were thirteen battles fought in Kentucky including Barbourville, Camp Wildcat, Ivy Mountain, Rowlett's Station, Middle Creek, Mill Springs, Richmond, Munfordville, Perryville, Somerset, Lebanon, Paducah, and Cynthiana. Although neutral, Kentucky was a key state during the Civil War. The battles that took place in Kentucky gave both the Union and the Confederacy distinct advantages and strongholds in the American Civil War.
The Skirmish at Blackwater Creek, also known as the Skirmish at Milford, was an American Civil War skirmish that took place in central Missouri on December 19, 1861 near present-day Valley City. It was a victory for the North.
In mid-May 1861, U. S. Navy lieutenant William "Bull" Nelson armed Kentuckians loyal to the Union and that soon became the foundation for his receiving authority to enlist 10,000 troops for a campaign into East Tennessee. On August 6, 1861, those recruits marched into Camp Dick Robinson, making it the first Federal base south of the Ohio River. For Col. George C. Kniffen, "the wisdom of President Lincoln commissioning. .. Nelson to organize a military force on the [neutral] soil of Kentucky" prevented making the state a "battle ground for many months" and it thereby changed the whole direction of the war. In 1864, Salmon P. Chase declared in a speech at Louisville "when Kentucky faltered, hesitated" in the early stages of the Civil War, that undecided "status was settled by WILLIAM NELSON, at Camp Dick Robinson." Six years later, Indiana Senator Daniel D. Pratt reported to the U. S. Senate that Camp Dick Robinson "was one of the most noted military encampments of the war.. .. From its admirable locality and advantages, it was almost indispensable for the successful operations of the" Civil War.
The units of the Arkansas Militia in the Civil War to which the current Arkansas National Guard has a connection include the Arkansas State Militia, Home Guard, and State Troop regiments raised by the State of Arkansas. Like most of the United States, Arkansas had an organized militia system before the American Civil War. State law required military service of most male inhabitants of a certain age. Following the War with Mexico, the Arkansas militia experienced a decline, but as sectional frictions between the north and south began to build in the late 1850s the militia experienced a revival. By 1860 the state's militia consisted of 62 regiments divided into eight brigades, which comprised an eastern division and a western division. New regiments were added as the militia organization developed. Additionally, many counties and cities raised uniformed volunteer companies, which drilled more often and were better equipped than the un-uniformed militia. These volunteer companies were instrumental in the seizure of federal installations at Little Rock and Fort Smith, beginning in February 1861.
Joseph H. Tucker was a banker, businessman and Illinois militia colonel during the first two years of the American Civil War. He was given initial responsibility for building Camp Douglas at Chicago, Illinois, and was the first commander of the camp. Originally a training camp for Union Army recruits, in 1862 and 1863 Camp Douglas was converted into a prison camp for Confederate States Army prisoners captured by the Union Army. Tucker was commander of the camp from the start of its construction in October 1861 until September 28, 1862, except between February 26, 1862, and June 19, 1862. During this time, the camp was used as a training facility and had its initial use as a prisoner of war camp. Tucker was never mustered into the Union Army, remaining a colonel in the Illinois militia during the term of his service in the Civil War.
The Battle of Camp Wildcat was one of the early engagements of the American Civil War. It occurred October 21, 1861, in northern Laurel County, Kentucky during the campaign known as the Kentucky Confederate Offensive or Operations in Eastern Kentucky (1861). The battle is considered one of the first Union victories of the Civil War, and marked the second engagement of troops in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
The Ford's Arkansas Cavalry Battalion was a Confederate Army cavalry battalion during the American Civil War.
| Origins | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Combatants | |||||||||
| Campaigns | |||||||||
| Battles |
| ||||||||
Involvement (by city or town) | |||||||||
| Leaders |
| ||||||||
| Aftermath |
| ||||||||
| Related topics | |||||||||
