Appalachian History
A Border County at War
In the summer of 1862 the war along the Upper Cumberland was already older than the official battle names suggest. Monroe County, Kentucky, sat on a rough frontier between the Bluegrass and the Cumberland Plateau, tied by road and river to nearby Celina and Livingston in Tennessee. Both Union and Confederate commanders saw Tompkinsville, the county seat, as a key crossroads for any force moving between Nashville, Knoxville, and central Kentucky.
As early as November 1861, Federal reports from Louisville warned that roughly twenty seven hundred Confederate troops had gathered in the Tompkinsville and Burkesville area, preparing to join Brigadier General Felix Zollicoffer’s East Tennessee command. Those dispatches identified Monroe County as a forward staging ground rather than a remote backwater, a place where columns could assemble and forage before striking north into the state’s interior.
At the same time Federal authorities were planting more permanent roots. In 1861 Tompkinsville merchant J. B. Evans donated a hillside on the edge of town as a national cemetery for Union dead. By the end of the war about one hundred fifteen soldiers from scattered posts and skirmish sites along the Upper Cumberland had been reinterred there. When national policy shifted toward larger consolidated cemeteries, most of those remains were moved to Nashville National Cemetery in 1867, leaving behind what locals came to call the Old Soldiers Cemetery, a small burial ground that still holds the graves of two dozen Civil War soldiers and veterans.
From the start, then, Tompkinsville was both a military way station and a place of burial, a community that felt the war in its streets and in its soil.
Skirmish on the Cumberland: June 6, 1862
The best documented Federal unit in Monroe County’s war is the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry, also known as the 92nd Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers. Organized in late 1861 and sent west to join Don Carlos Buell’s command, the regiment soon scattered its companies across south central Kentucky to watch the roads and river crossings that connected Tennessee and the Bluegrass.
By early June 1862 Major Thomas J. Jordan commanded a battalion of the 9th posted at Tompkinsville. Official lists of engagements and later compilations note a “Skirmish near Tompkinsville” on 6 June, reported by Colonel Edward C. Williams and Major Jordan. Contemporary summaries describe Federal reconnaissance from Glasgow toward the Cumberland, a brush with Confederate cavalry, and a brief firefight that drove the Southern horsemen back across the line.
In the grand narrative of the war that June skirmish barely registers. For Monroe County it marked the moment when Tompkinsville’s garrison stopped being a paper assignment and became a post that had traded shots with the enemy. It also introduced the men of the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry to the roads and farm lanes they would be fighting along a month later.
Morgan’s First Kentucky Raid Comes North
On the Confederate side the man who would transform Tompkinsville’s skirmishes into headlines was Colonel John Hunt Morgan, the Lexington horseman who had turned his prewar militia company into the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry. By mid 1862 Morgan’s troopers were operating out of East Tennessee, probing northward along the Cumberland.
Confederate and Federal sources agree on the broad outline. In early July 1862 Confederate command authorized Morgan to raid into Kentucky in order to disrupt Buell’s advance toward Chattanooga, tear up railroads and telegraph lines, and test whether discontented Kentuckians might rally to the Southern cause. Morgan left Knoxville around 4 July, moved through Sparta, Tennessee, crossed the Cumberland River near Burkesville, and aimed his column directly at Tompkinsville.
Kentucky Historical Society’s roadside marker “Tompkinsville Raided” distills the objective to a single sentence: Morgan’s first goal on entering Kentucky was the destruction of the Union force in and around Tompkinsville.
July 9, 1862: The Capture of Tompkinsville
On 9 July 1862 Morgan’s column collided with Jordan’s small garrison and turned Monroe County’s courthouse town into the first major stop on what would become famous as Morgan’s First Kentucky Raid.
In his official report, written from Louisville that December and preserved in Series I, Volume XVI of the Official Records, Major Jordan recalled that he commanded Companies C, I, and M of the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry at Tompkinsville, with Company E temporarily detached at Glasgow. On 6 July he learned that a large Confederate force was gathering at Salina, a village on the south bank of the Cumberland about twenty miles away. He strengthened his picket lines along the Celina and Burkesville roads and pushed patrols toward the river, but he had barely two hundred thirty troopers to cover the approaches.
Around sunrise on 9 July firing erupted on the Celina road as Morgan’s advance guard slammed into the outer pickets. Within minutes Jordan’s videttes fell back, reporting that a heavy column of Confederate cavalry supported by artillery was pressing toward town. Jordan formed his men as best he could on the Burkesville road and among the buildings of Tompkinsville, trying to delay the attackers long enough to save his horses and wagons. According to the regiment’s later historian Samuel P. Bates, the Pennsylvanians held an “unequal contest” for nearly two hours before the Confederates began to envelop their flanks, forcing a retreat toward Burkesville.
Colonel Sanders D. Bruce, commanding at Bowling Green, relayed the first official news up the Federal chain of command. Telegraphing on 10 July he reported that “fifteen hundred rebel cavalry and two pieces of artillery attacked Major Jordan at Tompkinsville and killed or captured his three companies,” adding that his own troops were in pursuit and urgently requesting more men and guns.
From Morgan’s side the action looked very different. Confederate accounts and later summaries emphasize that his cavalry heavily outnumbered Jordan’s battalion, that the attack fell with surprise in the early morning, and that the town’s small garrison broke under pressure. The Military History of Kentucky, drawing on Confederate reports, notes that Morgan rode into Kentucky with roughly eight hundred sixteen men, that he defeated Jordan’s command at Tompkinsville, and that his own losses there were light, though Colonel Hunt of Georgia was mortally wounded.
When the smoke finally lifted the cost to the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry was sharp for such a short engagement. The National Park Service’s battle list credits the Tompkinsville action on 9 July 1862 to Companies E, I, and M of the regiment and records Federal casualties as four killed, seven wounded, and nineteen missing, a total of thirty men. Company rosters compiled from the men’s service records mark individual lines with phrases such as “killed at Tompkinsville, Ky., July 9, 1862” or “captured at Tompkinsville.” Among them was Second Lieutenant Aaron Sullivan of Company E, later memorialized in Pennsylvania and in modern biographical notes as having fallen in the fight at Tompkinsville.
Jordan himself did not escape. A Confederate communication from Richmond later summarized the outcome succinctly, reporting that “Col. John H. Morgan, the famous partisan chief, attacked and captured a Pennsylvania battalion near Tompkinsville, Ky. Amongst the prisoners taken was a Major Jordan, commanding said battalion,” who was sent first to a prison at Madison, Georgia.
Prison, Propaganda, and the Question of “Marauders”
Jordan’s capture at Tompkinsville echoed far beyond Monroe County. To Federal authorities in Kentucky, Morgan’s cavalry posed a legal as well as military problem. General Jeremiah T. Boyle had instructed subordinates not to treat Morgan and similar raiders as regular soldiers but as marauders, men whose operations behind Union lines blurred the distinctions between cavalry raid, partisan warfare, and guerrilla banditry.
A letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, preserved in the Official Records, explained that when Morgan’s force of about eighteen hundred men struck Tompkinsville on 9 July, Jordan “did not consider under his orders he ought to surrender to him,” since Morgan’s command was not recognized as lawful combatants. The writer defended Jordan as a strict disciplinarian and insisted that no atrocities had been committed by his men at Sparta, Tennessee, where Confederate civilians accused the major of abuses.
The Confederate press told another story. In October 1862 the Richmond Dispatch reported that Major Thomas J. Jordan of the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry, “captured at Tompkinsville, Ky.,” had been moved from Libby Prison to Castle Thunder to face charges that he had allowed his troopers to commit “unheard of atrocities” at Sparta. The article, reprinted in Series II, Volume IV of the Official Records, described an attempted prison escape at Castle Thunder and singled out Jordan as a prominent prisoner.
Archival biographies and later cavalry histories confirm that Jordan spent several months moving through Confederate prisons before investigators concluded that his unit had only passed through Sparta briefly and that the accusations were exaggerated. He was exchanged late in 1862, returned to the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry as colonel, and went on to command a brigade in the Atlanta and Carolinas campaigns.
In that sense the Battle of Tompkinsville produced more than a local defeat. It generated a long running argument over the status of raiders, the treatment of prisoners, and the line between legitimate military reprisals and civilian abuse, with a Monroe County skirmish suddenly at the center of debates in Louisville, Washington, and Richmond.
From First Raid to Great Raid
Tompkinsville was not simply the unlucky town where Morgan’s men drew first blood. It became the opening chord of a larger campaign.
The Kentucky legislature’s own historical summary of “Tompkinsville Raided” emphasizes that Morgan’s success there foreshadowed his entire First Kentucky Raid. Over the next twenty four days his column rode roughly one thousand miles, captured about twelve hundred prisoners, tore up track and telegraph, and seized or destroyed large quantities of Union supplies, at a cost of fewer than one hundred Confederate troopers. Morgan claimed that thousands of Kentuckians would join the Confederate army if the South could hold the state. Those boasts helped convince Confederate leaders to launch the larger invasions that led to the battles of Richmond, Munfordville, and Perryville later that summer.
Official compilers took note as well. The government’s alphabetical list of battles and modern reference works derived from the Official Records list “Tompkinsville, Ky., July 9, 1862” among the recognized engagements of the war, along with a later action there in April 1863 and a lesser skirmish near the town on 6 June 1862.
Tompkinsville also returned to the story in 1863, when Morgan launched his far more ambitious raid through Indiana and Ohio. On 4 July 1863 Brigadier General Henry M. Judah wired from Glasgow that, while pursuing Morgan northward, he had kept Federal troops at Tompkinsville and nearby Marrowbone in order to protect the region south and west of Columbia. The dispatch shows that even a year after the July 1862 fight, commanders still saw Monroe County as a shield for central Kentucky.
Courthouse Burning and Guerrilla War
The clash of flags at Tompkinsville was only one violent chapter in Monroe County’s Civil War. As the conflict dragged into 1863, raiders, partisans, and regular cavalry from both sides moved back and forth across the Kentucky Tennessee line.
A Kentucky Historical Society marker titled “Courthouse Burned” stands on the public square in Tompkinsville and records one of the most dramatic episodes of that guerrilla war. In April 1863 Confederate cavalrymen rode into town and burned the Monroe County courthouse, destroying nearly all of the county’s early records. Local tradition and the marker text connect the fire to retaliation for a Union raid that had burned the town of Celina, Tennessee, just across the Cumberland River.
Confederate Military History and similar compilations also note a later “skirmish near Tompkinsville” in November 1862, in which a Confederate colonel reported four men killed and three wounded, another reminder that the roads around the county seat saw repeated clashes that never quite rose to the level of set piece battles.
By war’s end Monroe County had experienced Confederate occupation, Federal garrisons, multiple raids, and the symbolic erasure of its courthouse records, all within a landscape of farms, churches, and family cemeteries more often associated with quiet hill country than with constant military traffic.
Old Soldiers Cemetery and the Work of Memory
Today visitors who follow Kentucky’s Civil War driving tours into Monroe County encounter a landscape where memory has to work around what the war destroyed. The courthouse that burned in 1863 was replaced long ago, and the records lost in the fire can never be reconstructed. Yet the county has layered new markers and commemorations on top of those absences.
On a hill near the site of the old national cemetery, a Kentucky Historical Society marker and a Next Exit History entry identify the Old Soldiers Cemetery. They explain that J. B. Evans donated the land in 1861 for a national cemetery, that about one hundred fifteen Union dead from the surrounding region were buried there, and that most of those remains were moved to Nashville in 1867, leaving a smaller burying ground still in use. Modern research compiled through projects such as Find A Grave has identified at least twenty four Civil War soldiers and veterans resting there, their headstones and veterans’ markers telling a quieter story of the men who survived Morgan’s raids and the years that followed.
On the streets below, Kentucky Historical Society marker number 524, “Tompkinsville Raided,” stands close to the battle site. It briefly sketches the events of 9 July 1862, noting that Morgan’s cavalry surprised about three hundred men of the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry, captured prisoners and supplies, and launched the raid that would carry his name across Kentucky.
Taken together, the markers, cemetery, and scattered references in regimental histories and diaries keep Tompkinsville’s war alive in public memory. Basil W. Duke’s 1867 memoir Morgan’s Cavalry, written by Morgan’s brother in law and staff officer, gives a Confederate staff view of the raid, while Kentucky diarist Frances Dallam Peter, whose writings have been published as A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky, recorded the anxiety that news of Morgan’s early Kentucky forays stirred in Unionist Lexington.
Why Tompkinsville Matters
For many Civil War readers Tompkinsville appears only as a line in a casualty table or a footnote to more famous engagements. On the ground in Monroe County the story runs deeper.
The June 6 skirmish and the July 9 battle show how quickly a remote Appalachian county could become a testing ground for new styles of warfare, where mobile cavalry raids, contested loyalties, and questions about who counted as a “soldier” collided. Morgan’s success at Tompkinsville emboldened Confederate planners, shaped the decision to risk larger invasions of Kentucky, and launched a First Kentucky Raid that still looms large in regional memory.
At the same time the fate of Major Thomas J. Jordan and his men reminds us that even a small garrison on a hilltop town could find itself pulled into debates over guerrilla warfare, prisoner treatment, and wartime morality that stretched from Sparta, Tennessee, to the editors’ desks of Richmond.
For Appalachian communities like Tompkinsville, the Civil War was not a distant set of campaigns but a series of raids, burnings, and burials that unfolded along familiar roads and ridges. To stand today by the Old Soldiers Cemetery fence or read the “Tompkinsville Raided” marker is to see how a few hours of fighting on a July morning in 1862 helped tie a small Monroe County town into the wider story of a nation at war.
Sources & Further Reading
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. XVI, Part I (Serial 22). Includes Colonel Sanders D. Bruce’s 10 July 1862 report from Bowling Green and Major Thomas J. Jordan’s 29 December 1862 narrative of the capture of Tompkinsville, along with related correspondence on Morgan’s First Kentucky Raid. civilwar.com+1
Official Records, Series I, Vol. XXIII, Part I (Serial 35). Brigadier General Henry M. Judah’s 4 July 1863 dispatch from Glasgow notes that Federal forces were held at Tompkinsville and Marrowbone to protect the region south and west of Columbia during Morgan’s Great Raid. The Portal to Texas History
Official Records, Series II, Vol. IV (Serial 117). Prisoner of war correspondence and reprinted Richmond Dispatch articles detailing Major Thomas J. Jordan’s confinement at Libby Prison and Castle Thunder after his capture at Tompkinsville, including accusations related to Sparta, Tennessee. Civil War Richmond+1
Samuel P. Bates, History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, and associated rosters for Companies C, E, I, and M of the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry. These muster rolls, preserved and transcribed on Pa Roots and related sites, record individual soldiers as killed, wounded, or captured at Tompkinsville on 9 July 1862. PA-Roots+2NPGallery+2
Basil W. Duke, Morgan’s Cavalry (1867). Duke’s memoir offers a Confederate staff officer’s account of Morgan’s early Kentucky operations, including the approach to Tompkinsville and the opening of the First Kentucky Raid. JSTOR
Richmond Dispatch, 17 October 1862, as reprinted in the Official Records and indexed by Civil War Richmond. Reports Jordan’s transfer from Libby Prison to Castle Thunder and discusses his alleged conduct at Sparta. Civil War Richmond+1
Kentucky Historical Society markers “Tompkinsville Raided,” “Tompkinsville National Cemetery,” and “Courthouse Burned,” with texts accessible through ExploreKYHistory and HMDB. These markers summarize the July 9 1862 raid, the establishment and later disinterment of the national cemetery, and the April 1863 burning of the Monroe County courthouse. Digital Library of Georgia+3explorekyhistory.ky.gov+3Human Metabolome Database+3
Military History of Kentucky (1939), issued by the Adjutant General’s Office. Provides a concise narrative of Morgan’s movements into Kentucky, the fight at Tompkinsville, and the raid’s wider impact on the state’s wartime experience. KY National Guard History+1
“All Known Battles and Skirmishes During the American Civil War – Kentucky,” Carolana. Compiles engagements from the Official Records and Dyer’s Compendium, listing the June 6 1862 skirmish near Tompkinsville and the July 9 1862 capture of the town as recognized actions. Carolana+2Carolana+2
American Battlefield Trust, “The First Kentucky Raid.” Summarizes the origins, route, and consequences of Morgan’s July 1862 campaign, highlighting Tompkinsville as the opening blow. American Battlefield Trust
Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, “Tompkinsville Raided” (Legislative Moment PDF). Popular scholarly overview that connects Morgan’s success at Tompkinsville to the decision to launch major Confederate invasions of Kentucky later that summer. Legislative Research Commission
Monroe County, Kentucky, 1820–1988 (Monroe County Press, 1988). County history that brings together Official Records, local tradition, and marker texts to sketch Monroe County’s Civil War era, including the Tompkinsville actions, courthouse burning, and Old Soldiers Cemetery. NPGallery+1
Lane Report and related Kentucky Historical Society pieces on Tompkinsville National Cemetery and Old Soldiers Cemetery. These modern summaries trace the donation of the cemetery land, the number of Union dead reinterred there, and the later transfer of most remains to Nashville National Cemetery. Find A Grave+3Lane Report+3Wikipedia+3
Biographical sketches of Thomas Jefferson Jordan from Dickinson College Archives and later cavalry histories. These works place the Tompkinsville fight within the broader career of the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry and its commander, from early service in Kentucky and Tennessee through the Atlanta Campaign and beyond. Archives & Special Collections+1