Tales from the road: A soldier's death near Cotton Grove Road

The Battle of Salem Cemetery resulted in few casualties.

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To reach the Salem Cemetery battlefield near Jackson, Tennessee, I hang a left on Cotton Grove Road, into an area first settled in 1819. This swath of rolling land probably doesn’t look much different than it did in 1821, the year they began planting cotton seeds in its loamy soil. I pass the Fraternal Order of Police gun range and a Woodmen of the World memorial for a man named E.E. Brooks before parking in a small gravel lot beside a state historical marker.

Adam Huntsman's grave
in Old Salem Cemetery.

“No metal detectors,” reads a sign just steps from a cannon and a covered wayside exhibit.

Among those who rest in remote Old Salem Cemetery, the second-oldest burial ground in Madison County, are Susan H. Person — who, according to her broken tombstone, “departed this life Oct. 27, 1842” — and a colorful, one-legged politician and lawyer named Adam Huntsman, who sent Davy Crockett packing for Texas after defeating him in a congressional election in 1835.

After stepping from my SUV, I wonder: How did this battlefield almost become an industrial solar farm?

Gloomy-gray skies threaten rain, but they’re mostly bluffing. So, too, was Nathan Bedford Forrest on Dec. 19, 1862, when “The Wizard of the Saddle” sent his soldiers barreling into Midwesterners in and around the cemetery. The frigid, unforgiving night before the fighting, Union soldiers spied the campfires of Forrest’s men off in the distance — a large brown-and-white historical sign marks that area — so their commander forbade fires.

“Mortified,” wrote Col. Adolph Engelmann of the 43rd Illinois, a Bavarian-born Mexican War veteran, reflecting later on his order.

The Confederate cavalry’s attack — a feint by Forrest, who had more important business elsewhere — came at daybreak the next morning.

“With loud cheers they charged upon my center,” Engelmann wrote. “As they approached they were received by a well-directed fire, some of the foremost horses falling and obstructing the road. Those immediately behind came to a halt, while half a dozen riderless horses rushed madly through our lines.”

The broken grave of Susan H. Person in Old Salem Cemetery.

After the four-hour fight, Engelmann’s outnumbered soldiers retreated toward Jackson. The Battle of Salem Cemetery, of course, was no Antietam, Gettysburg or Cold Harbor. Casualties numbered perhaps 20 killed, wounded or missing on the Confederate side. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, suffered six wounded and two killed. But mothers and fathers — from Tennessee and Mississippi to Illinois and beyond — mourned just the same.

Private Adam Kehl of Company A, 11th Illinois Cavalry — a blacksmith before the war — was among those killed that wintry day. The unmarried son of Rosina and Sebastian Kehl, who hailed from Hesse, Germany, Adam had paid for his parents’ passage from the Old Country. A bullet to the chest sent him to his grave before they arrived in America.

“They came to the United States with the expectation of receiving assistance from their … son,” a family friend noted.

I don’t know where Private Kehl rests today. Perhaps he lies in the national cemetery in Nashville — the U.S. government recovered thousands of Union remains after the war. Or perhaps his bones lie in an unmarked grave in a field or stand of woods near Cotton Grove Road.

A grave for an unknown Confederate soldier in Old Salem Cemetery.

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SOURCES

— Adam Kehl mother’s pension file, National Archives via fold3.com (WC140043)
— Official Records, Volume X Chapter 32, Pages 555-556