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| Thomas C. Hindman in 1858. |
Jan. 7, 1862. |
Jan. 11. |
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regiments of infantry and a battery of six guns.
The Nationals, though greatly outnumbered, and attacked chiefly by cavalry and artillery, repulsed the assailants with ball and bayonet, killing Terry and thirty-two others, wounding about fifty, and losing eight killed and ten wounded themselves.1 In this work they were aided by a battery on the north side of the river.
Seeing re-enforcements crossing, the Confederates withdrew toward Bowling Green, slowly followed by the Nationals.
In the mean time, stirring scenes were in progress in the extreme eastern part of Kentucky, and movements there caused a brief diversion of a part of Buell's army from the business of pushing on in the direction of Tennessee.
Humphry Marshall was again in the field, at the head of about twenty-five hundred insurgents, and at the beginning of January was intrenched in the neighborhood of Paintsville, in Johnston County, on the main branch of the Big Sandy River, that forms the boundary between Kentucky and Virginia. Colonel James A. Garfield, one of the most energetic young men of Ohio, was sent with the Forty-second Ohio and Fourteenth Kentucky regiments, and three hundred of the Second Virginia cavalry, to dislodge him. Garfield followed the course of the river in a march of greatest difficulty and danger, at an inclement season.
When Marshall heard of his approach, he fled in alarm up the river toward Prestonburg.
Garfield's cavalry pursued, and, in an encounter with those of Marshall,
at the mouth of Jennis's Creek, they killed some, and drove the others several miles.
On the following day, Garfield also set out with about eleven hundred of his force in pursuit, and overtaking Marshall in the forks of Middle Creek, three miles above Prestonburg, where he was strongly posted with three cannon on a hill, he gave battle, fought him from one o'clock in the afternoon until dark, and drove him from all his positions.
Garfield, having been re-enforced by seven hundred men from Paintsville, was enabled to make the victory for the Unionists at the battle of Prestonburg, as it is called, complete.
The National loss was two killed and twenty-five wounded. That of the insuregents was estimated at sixty killed, and about one hundred wounded or made prisoners.2 The ponderous Marshall was not heard of afterward as a military leader.
Because of his services on this occasion, Garfield was commissioned
a brigadier-general of volunteers.
1 Report of General Buell to General McClellan, December 18, 1861. General Hindman, in his report on the 19th, said General Terry and three of his regiment were killed, three others slightly wounded, and only six missing. As they left a much larger number dead on the field, Hindman's report must have been incorrect.
2 Garfield, in his report, says that twenty-seven dead insurgents were found on the field the next morning. The Richmond papers reported the battle as a success for the insurgents, in which they lost only nine killed and the same number wounded; while the loss of the Nationals was “from 400 to 500 killed, and about the same number wounded I” Such was the usual character of the reports in the Confederate newspapers, under the eye of the conspirators at Richmond. With the most absurd mendacity, they made the deceived people believe that in every fight the Confederates won a victory over vastly superior numbers, killing, wounding, and capturing the Nationals by hundreds and thousands. These false reports were made on purpose to deceive the people, so as to draw men into the army, and money from the pockets of the dupes of the conspirators.
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