By Berry Craig
NKyTribune columnist
When the Yankees captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis, a Christian County native, Trigg Countian Hazard Perry Baker offered his sword as a token of surrender.
Baker, a Rebel army lieutenant, doesn’t rate even a line in most history books. Neither does Capt. Given Campbell and the other horsemen from the Second Kentucky Cavalry Regiment. They rode as Davis’ personal escort when he tried to escape pursuing Union troops as the Civil War was ending in Confederate defeat.
Baker’s story is sketched on an olive green, gold-lettered state historical marker on U.S. Highway 68-Kentucky 80 in Canton, a little Trigg County community on Lake Barkley. The officer is buried nearby.
The Livingston County-born Campbell carried a diary titled “Memorandum of a Journal Kept During the Last March of Jefferson Davis.” Owned by the Library of Congress in Washington, the rare relic describes Davis’ flight through the Carolinas to Georgia, where Union cavalry caught him on May 10, 1865.
Campbell and his men were part of a small cavalry force that rendezvoused with the Davis party at Greensboro, N.C., where Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his army on April 26. Gen. Robert E. Lee gave up on April 9.
The war was lost, and Davis decided to flee the victors. Campbell penned that the Confederacy’s only president “appeared well on horseback,” thin but not “frail or weak.”
In South Carolina, Davis chose Campbell and his men as his bodyguards. Traveling on, the little caravan of wagons and soldiers reached Washington, Ga., where more than $200,000 in money and gold from the Confederate treasury were left with still-loyal Rebels.
To speed his escape, Davis pared down the group. He asked Campbell to choose “a few faithful hearts who would be willing to go as escort.” The captain named Baker and six other men -— five Kentuckians and a Tennessean, according to Kay Brown Woomack, Baker’s great-great-granddaughter. Afterwards, Davis, a Mexican-American War veteran, presented Campbell “a pair of large revolvers, Kerr’s Patent.”
At Abbeville, Ga., Davis spent the night in his tent with his wife, Varina, who had been traveling with their children in a separate caravan. Two of Campbell’s scouts galloped up, “their horses showing the effects of…hard and rapid ride,” and reported that 400 blue-clad troopers were close.
The presidential train moved slowly on the road to Irwinville, then stopped on the morning of May 9. Alarmed, Campbell “took the liberty of suggesting to President Davis the danger of this delay and the readiness at which the enemy’s cavalry could pursue so broad a train.”
Yankee cavalrymen weren’t the president’s only worry, Campbell recorded. Davis “seemed very much impressed for the safety of his wife and children, on account of the large number of deserters from the Confederate Army residing in the adjacent counties.”
Davis ordered Campbell to take a man and find a place to cross a river near Irwinville. Campbell “remonstrated against leaving the president at that time and suggested he send another party.”
Nonetheless, he rode on as ordered. On May 10, Campbell made the last entry in his diary: “…At the house of a deserter…we learned that President Davis had been captured, north of and near Irwinville.”
In Campbell’s absence, Baker took command of Davis’ escort. When he tendered his sword to the leader of the Yankee troops who captured Davis, the Union officer gallantly returned it.
Baker got back to Trigg County. After the war, Campbell lived in St. Louis, New Orleans and Paducah.
Berry Craig of Mayfield is a professor emeritus of history from West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the author of five books on Kentucky history, including True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo and Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase. Reach him at bcraig8960@gmail.com