Tales from the road: Where 'The Wizard,' 'Stovepipe' fought

"Cannons are loud," reads the marker on the Battle of Sacramento (Ky.) reenactment site. 

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The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places,” historian David McCullough told us in Ken Burns’ epic TV documentary Civil War, “from Valverde, N.M.,, and Tullahoma, Tenn., to St. Albans, Vt., and Fernandina on the Florida coast.” Here’s another one of those 10,000 places, Sacramento, Ky. — a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, no-stoplight town a two-hour drive north of Nashville.

Adam "Stovepipe" Johnson

Since 2009, Betty Howard has served as mayor of Sacramento (population 425), which holds a reenactment of the battle in the spring. “Caution: Cannons are loud,” reads a marker on the battlefield about the event. (Who knew?) In town, I spotted one carwash, one battlefield monument, one Dollar General, two service stations and bristled at the yapping of two nervous hounds.

Now, how many of you have heard of the Battle of Sacramento?

Here, on Dec. 28, 1861, notorious slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest — the Rebels’ “Wizard Of The Saddle” — earned his first victory and honed fighting skills that would serve him later in the war. “Forrest’s First Fight,” the locals call the battle against United States cavalry.

Casualty figures are murky, perhaps as few as a dozen total, but loved ones mourned the dead of Sacramento just as they did the dead of major battles at Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg and elsewhere. Confederate Capt. Ned Meriwether — the father of six — fell here. Two bullets to the head. So did 45-year-old Captain Albert Gallatin Bacon of the 3rd Kentucky Cavalry (United States), mortally wounded by thrusts of a sword by Forrest.

A report in the Jan. 14, 1862, Daily Selma (Ala.) Reporter of  the death of Albert Bacon.

Forrest scout Adam “Stovepipe” Johnson — who later became a semi-famous Confederate guerrilla — fought here, too. The former drugstore employee earned his nickname during an 1862 raid by his scant force on Newburgh, Ind., a town astride the Ohio River. As a ruse, Johnson tied pieces of stovepipe to blackened logs and pointed out the “cannons” in the far distance to a Unionist in Newburgh. (What a day to not carry binoculars.)

Mollie Morehead's grave

Blinded in a skirmish in 1864 at Grubbs Crossroads, “Stovepipe” Johnson served out the war as a POW at Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor. After the war, he made his way to Texas, where be founded Marble Falls, which became known as “The Blind Man’s Town.”

For the Rebels, this battle also featured a heroine/amateur scout. As Forrest’s cavalrymen approached Sacramento, they spotted a young woman riding a bareback horse. “There the Yankees are! Right over there!" 18-year-old Mollie Morehead shouted, pointing back over a hill.

In the northeast corner of Cumberland Presbyterian Church Cemetery, near a toppled tombstone, I found Mollie’s grave. The wife of a dentist, she died during child birth in 1870, 13 days after her 27th birthday.

Let’s keep history alive. 👊 

Enjoy stories like this? Consider purchasing a copy of my book, A Civil War Road Trip Of A Lifetime. Email me a jbankstx@comcast.net for details on how to get an autographed copy.

A Commonwealth of Kentucky historical marker in Sacramento.

Where United States and Rebel cavalry clashed during the Battle of Sacramento (Ky.). 
Take the driving tour of the battlefield.