The sudden death of Judge Micah Chrisman Saufley in August 1910 startled readers from Wayne County to the Bluegrass. Stanford’s Interior Journal and other Kentucky papers told the same story in slightly different words. A respected circuit judge collapsed at his barn in Stanford, Lincoln County, after a workday that still mixed courthouse business with feeding chickens. He was sixty eight, born in Monticello in 1842, and had packed Confederate cavalry service, frontier judging in Wyoming, and decades of Kentucky politics and civic work into one lifetime.
In his home counties of Wayne and Lincoln he is easier to recognize as the man behind a country road name, a scattering of newspaper items, and a cluster of family graves. His life, though, runs like a thread through some of the most charged episodes in Appalachian and western history, from Morgan’s raids and Northern prison camps to the making of Wyoming statehood and the long shadow of Confederate memory in Kentucky.
Monticello Beginnings
County history places Micah Chrisman Saufley’s birth in Monticello, Kentucky, on 13 May 1842. He grew up in Wayne County in a family connected to local politics and the law. One relative, Micah T. Chrisman, served as clerk of the Kentucky House of Representatives during the 1860s, and the Wayne County history that later sketched Micah’s life treats him as part of that same educated courthouse world.
As a young man he left Wayne County for what was then Kentucky University at Harrodsburg, a predecessor of today’s Transylvania University. Fraternity records for Phi Gamma Delta list “Micah C. Saufly” among the charter members of the short lived Rho Chapter there in 1860 and 1861, placing him among students who would scatter to both Union and Confederate armies when war came.
Wayne County’s local history notes that he secured an academic education and then studied law at the Louisville Law School, an increasingly common path for ambitious young men in the Cumberland counties on the eve of the Civil War. The war interrupted that trajectory and sent him into a very different classroom.
Morgan’s Cavalry And A Confederate Identity
According to the Wayne County sketch, Saufley enlisted in the Confederate army in November 1861 as a private in Breckinridge’s Brigade and soon afterward joined John Hunt Morgan’s cavalry as a lieutenant. A roster of Company H, Sixth Kentucky Cavalry in the Confederate service lists “M. C. Saufley” as first lieutenant, with the note that the company was partly organized in Wayne County.
A separate Wayne County Civil War roster preserves a small but significant annotation signed “M. C. Saufley, 1st Lieut.” explaining confusion over the company’s letter designation. It is the sort of technical correction only a former officer would care enough to make, and it shows him still tidying up the record of his Confederate unit decades after the last shots.
Later narratives of Morgan’s command agree that Saufley rode with the famous raider on his 1863 incursion into Indiana and Ohio and that he was captured on that campaign. Fraternity and genealogical sources place him as a prisoner at Fort Delaware in the mid Atlantic, while other accounts emphasize confinement at Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie, one of the main Union prisons for Confederate officers. Either way, by the last two years of the war he had seen the Confederacy from the inside of a Northern stockade.
Wayne County’s history quotes a reminiscence that appears to come from his pen describing the officer corps of Morgan’s men in those prison days. “Nine tenths of all the officers of Morgan’s men were from Kentucky,” he recalled, adding that many came from families wealthy enough to send money into camp and even to bribe guards into providing sharpened table knives that might serve as weapons. The passage is as revealing about class inside Confederate ranks as it is about conditions behind the wire.
Letters To Sallie Rowan And A Wartime Courtship
While he was cycling through campaigns and prisons, Saufley began a correspondence that would shape the rest of his life. The Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina holds a group of letters received between 1864 and 1867 by Tennessee woman Sallie Rowan, later Sallie Rowan Saufley, from Micah C. Saufley. The description notes that he wrote from the field and from confinement, describing his experiences as a Confederate soldier.
Later guides compiled by the Naval History and Heritage Command and the Federal Judicial Center repeat and expand this description, treating the Sallie Rowan Papers and related Rowan Saufley family collections as key sources for his life and for elite Confederate social networks that tied Kentucky and Tennessee families together. One twentieth century description lists letters from Micah to Sallie, letters from her parents in McMinnville, Tennessee, and later letters from their son Richard at the United States Naval Academy.
Historian Anne E. Marshall mined these wartime and postwar letters for her dissertation on Confederate memory in Kentucky. She notes that Micah’s correspondence does more than report battles or prison hardships. He also comments on how public opinion in Kentucky shifted over the course of the war, providing what Marshall calls an apt summary of the altered political climate by 1865 as former Unionists and former Confederates both tried to narrate the state’s role.
One more Kentucky collection, the Doll Papers at Western Kentucky University, hints at the wider circles in which the couple moved. The finding aid points to a wartime letter mentioning “Lieutenant Micah Chrisman Saufley, a prisoner of war who served with Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan” as part of a correspondent’s social world, underscoring his place in an educated Confederate elite that traded news about battles, courts, and romances.
In 1867, not long after the war, Wayne County’s history records that Micah married Miss Sallie Rowan of McMinnville, daughter of a prominent lawyer and granddaughter of Governor Caswell. The marriage linked a Monticello Confederate veteran to one of Middle Tennessee’s established political families and helped anchor the Rowan Saufley papers that now attract historians to Louisville and Chapel Hill.
From Confederate Veteran To Stanford Lawyer
When he returned to Kentucky, Saufley resumed the legal training that war had interrupted. Obituaries and later sketches agree that he studied law both in Monticello and at Louisville, gained admission to the bar, and then moved north to Stanford in Lincoln County to practice.
He rose quickly in local politics. County history notes that in 1870 he was elected county judge of Lincoln County, a position that put him in charge of both judicial business and considerable administrative work at a moment when Reconstruction politics and veterans’ resentments still shaped every courthouse fight. A decade later he served as presidential elector for the Eighth Congressional District, carrying Democratic votes for the national ticket.
Stanford newspapers show him at the heart of the town’s civic life. In the 1870s and 1880s he chaired meetings, delivered political speeches, and helped promote local education. An ExploreKYHistory entry on Stanford Female College notes that when citizens organized the women’s college in 1871, its founders included John B. Owsley, S. H. Shanks, J. W. Alcorn, M. C. Saufley, John Reid, and H. S. Withers. Later Interior Journal issues list Judge Saufley among trustees and supporters in college announcements and advertising, suggesting a long term commitment to women’s education in a small county seat.
Newspaper snippets from around the region show him as both trial lawyer and judge. A Wayne County anecdote about the career of attorney Thomas Peyton Hill, reprinted from the Wayne County Outlook, remarks that “Judge M. C. Saufley” had written a biographical sketch of Hill for the Interior Journal, evidence that he continued to take an interest in Wayne County affairs and in the careers of fellow lawyers who headed west.
Other clippings place him arguing complicated civil cases in south central Kentucky or presiding over sensational trials that drew press attention as far away as North Carolina, where an agricultural paper summarized one of his breach of promise decisions for readers trying to keep up with legal curiosities from other states.
Appointment To Wyoming’s Territorial Supreme Court
In March 1888, Saufley’s career took him far from the knobs and creek bottoms of Lincoln County. The executive journal of the United States Senate for the Fiftieth Congress lists “Micah C. Saufl.ey, of Kentucky” among nominees to be associate justice of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Wyoming. President Grover Cleveland’s nomination was confirmed the following month.
Legal and historical accounts in Wyoming describe him as one of the youngest of the territorial judges and “one of the brightest,” noting that he succeeded Judge Blair on the bench in 1887 or 1888 and served until shortly before statehood in 1890. The Tenth Circuit Historical Society’s summary of the period points out that Saufley had enlisted in the Civil War as part of Morgan’s cavalry and suggests that his experience as a guerrilla officer shaped the way he approached certain cases on the frontier bench.
Contemporary newspapers preserve glimpses of his judicial style. The Cheyenne Daily Leader and Laramie Weekly Sentinel ran stories headlined “Judge Saufley’s decision” when he handed down opinions that touched raw nerves in places like Laramie City. A Georgia paper summarized a Wyoming case in which he fined and briefly jailed a Western Union manager who refused to produce requested telegrams, an early illustration of a judge forcing a powerful corporation to cooperate with the court.
One cattle rustling case later caught the eye of frontier historians. In a study of Owen Wister’s The Virginian and the cattle wars, historian John Jennings quotes Judge Micah C. Saufley telling four accused rustlers that they were “as guilty as any men I have ever tried,” even as he stopped short of imposing the maximum penalties. The comment suggests a man who combined the hard edge of wartime experience with a certain judicial restraint.
When Wyoming moved from territory to state in 1890, the territorial supreme court was replaced by a new state judiciary. A printed account of the first state legislature notes that Judge Saufley was ceremonially brought into the council chamber and administered the oath of office to the new body, a symbolic moment linking territorial law to state institutions.
After his term ended, he returned to Stanford and resumed private practice. In November 1892 he was elected circuit judge of Kentucky’s Thirteenth Judicial District. Wayne County’s sketch describes his record on the Kentucky bench as “brilliant,” praising his oratory, dignity, and sense of justice.
Confederate Memory And Morgan’s Men
If Wyoming newspapers show Judge Saufley grappling with cattle thieves and telegraph companies, Kentucky sources after 1880 show him grappling with memory. Like many former Confederate officers, he poured energy into veteran organizations and commemorative efforts that tried to fix a particular story of the war in public space.
The Morgan’s Men Association, originally formed in 1868 when surviving troopers of John Hunt Morgan’s command escorted their general’s remains to a new grave in Lexington, became one of the state’s most active Confederate veteran groups. Its modern history notes that officers of the association over the years included Kentucky Governor James B. McCreary, Lieutenant Governor James E. Cantrill, educator John A. Lewis, Colonel D. Howard Smith, and Kentucky state auditor M. C. Saufley.
At one reunion, the association’s history records Saufley telling his fellow veterans that he had “never seen a man who belonged to Morgan’s command who was not proud of his service,” a sentence often reprinted in later articles about Confederate pride and Kentucky memory. His comment echoed Basil Duke’s insistence at the same gathering that nothing but death could separate him from his pride in Morgan’s Men.
The Wayne County history that celebrates his legal career also preserves his detailed account of Morgan officers in Union prison, while an article reprinted there shows him writing a sympathetic yet shrewd biographical sketch of fellow Confederate veteran and Wyoming lawyer Thomas Peyton Hill. Anne Marshall’s work, read alongside these sources, suggests that figures like Saufley helped craft a version of the past in which former Confederates became honorable men of the law and the community rather than rebels who had taken up arms against the United States.
Family Legacies From Stanford To The Sea
Micah and Sallie’s children linked Wayne and Lincoln Counties to national stories in their own ways. Genealogical compilations and family history sites identify a cluster of Saufley sons and daughters whose lives tie together Kentucky courts, Texas migrations, and early aviation.
The most famous is Richard Caswell Saufley, born in Stanford in 1885. A highway marker near Stanford and materials from the United States Naval Academy remember him as one of the pioneers of naval aviation, an Annapolis graduate who helped test seaplanes before dying in a crash in 1916.
Another son, Henry Rowan Saufley, appears in congressional documents as a Spanish American War veteran whose service later formed the basis of a private bill in the United States Senate, while archival guides mention his letters from naval duty back to his mother Sallie.
Findings from the Rowan Saufley family papers and from genealogical projects like FamilySearch, WikiTree, and Ancestry show daughters such as Emma, Jennie, and Kate marrying into other professional families across Kentucky and Texas, extending the Rowan Saufley network into new communities.
Last Years And Local Memory
In his last two decades Micah C. Saufley settled back into the rhythms of a Stanford jurist and civic leader. Notices in the Interior Journal and other Kentucky papers treated him as a mainstay of county life, whether presiding over circuit court, speaking at reunions, or appearing on programs for local institutions like Stanford Female College.
On 12 August 1910 he died suddenly at his home in Stanford, reportedly after an attack of heart trouble while tending to chores. A clipping preserved in a Harrison County news digest lists “Judge M. C. Saufley, age 68” among recent deaths, and obituaries in the Bourbon News and the Paducah News Democrat remembered him as both a “Kentucky jurist” and a former first lieutenant in Morgan’s cavalry.
He was buried at Buffalo Springs Cemetery near Stanford, where later markers and local histories associate his name with both the Confederate past and the civic institutions he helped build.
Working With The Sources
For a figure like Micah Chrisman Saufley, the richest evidence comes from scattered primary sources that must be pieced together across states and repositories. His Civil War and prisoner of war experiences surface in regimental rosters from the Sixth Kentucky Cavalry, Wayne County’s Civil War roster with his own correcting note, and the letters he sent to Sallie Rowan that now rest in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina and in the Rowan Saufley family papers at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville.
Postwar legal and political work appears in county histories like A Century of Wayne County Kentucky, in local newspapers from Stanford and the surrounding counties, and in Wyoming newspapers and law review articles that treat him as part of the territorial bench. Legislative sources, especially the executive journal of the Senate and printed proceedings of Wyoming’s first state legislature, help fix dates for his nomination and for ceremonial duties like administering the oath to new lawmakers.
Newspaper obituaries, cemetery records, and family history compilations flesh out his household and descendants. In particular, Find A Grave entries and genealogical databases connect his life to that of his son, naval aviator Richard Caswell Saufley, and preserve local newspaper transcripts that might otherwise remain locked on microfilm.
Finally, modern scholarship on Confederate memory and on the history of Wyoming law shows how historians have interpreted him. Marshall’s work on Confederate tradition in Kentucky reads his letters as part of an effort to reshape the story of a divided state, while western legal histories and the Tenth Circuit Historical Society’s survey of territorial judges use his career to illustrate how former Confederates carried their experience into frontier courtrooms.
Sources And Further Reading
Key primary sources for Micah Chrisman Saufley include the Rowan Saufley family papers at the Filson Historical Society; the Sallie Rowan Papers and related description in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the T. P. Hill Papers at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, which contain several letters from Judge Saufley from his Wyoming years; Civil War rosters for Company H, Sixth Kentucky Cavalry in the USGenWeb Archives and Wayne County Civil War rosters; compiled files on “Saufley, Micah Chrisman, Lt.” in the Kentucky Library at Western Kentucky University; and the biographical file on him at the Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne. Georgia Historic Newspapers+7Archives West+7Naval History and Heritage Command+7
Government records and newspapers add important texture. These include the executive journal of the United States Senate for the Fiftieth Congress that lists his nomination as Wyoming territorial judge; printed proceedings of Wyoming’s first state legislature; contemporary coverage in papers such as the Cheyenne Daily Leader, the Laramie Weekly Sentinel, and the Griffin Daily News; and Kentucky obituaries and news items in the Interior Journal of Stanford, the Bourbon News of Paris, the Paducah News Democrat, and county digests preserved by the USGenWeb and KyGenWeb projects. Find A Grave+8Congress.gov+8Knowvation+8
High value secondary works include A Century of Wayne County Kentucky, 1800–1900, which provides the fullest early sketch of his life; Bartlett’s History of Wyoming and articles in Annals of Wyoming and the Land and Water Law Review that analyze his role on the territorial bench; the Tenth Circuit Historical Society’s chapter on the territorial and district courts of Wyoming; and John Jennings’s The Cowboy Legend: Owen Wister’s Virginian and the Canadian American Frontier, which quotes one of his rustling decisions. Library of Congress Tiles+6Seeking My Roots+6Saints By Sea+6
For his place in Confederate memory and family networks, see Anne E. Marshall’s dissertation “Memory, Identity and the Creation of the Confederate Tradition in Kentucky,” the Morgan’s Men Association history that quotes him reflecting on pride in Morgan’s command, and genealogical resources such as FamilySearch, WikiTree, and Find A Grave, which pull together vital dates and connections between Micah, Sallie Rowan, their children, and their descendants who carried the Saufley name into twentieth century military, legal, and educational service. Find A Grave+8OpenScholar+8OpenScholar+8