The Battle of Camp Wildcat (also known as Wildcat Mountain and Camp Wild Cat) was one of the early engagements of the American Civil War (Civil War). It occurred October 21, 1861, in northern Laurel County, Kentucky during the campaign known as the Kentucky Confederate Offensive or Operations in Eastern Kentucky (1861). The battle is considered one of the first Union victories of the Civil War, and marked the second engagement of troops in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
On April 15, 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln called upon the States remaining in the Union to provide volunteers to suppress the insurrection in the seven States which had seceded from the Union by that date. Pro-Confederate Kentucky Governor Beriah Magoffin refused to send troops, but since the majority of the members of the Kentucky General Assembly were pro-Union, Lincoln's call for volunteers did not prompt the State to secede. On May 16, a Kentucky legislative committee recommended that the State remain neutral in the conflict and Governor Magoffin proclaimed the State's neutrality on May 20.
In elections on August 5, 1861, Kentucky voters returned a veto-proof majority of pro-Union members to the House of Representatives and Senate. On August 6, 1861, Camp Dick Robinson, a Union camp, was established near Lexington. On September 2, 1861, the Kentucky General Assembly raised the U.S. flag over the Kentucky State Capitol at Frankfort.
On September 3, 1861, Confederate Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk ordered Brig. Gen. Gideon Pillow to seize Columbus, Kentucky on the Mississippi River before Union forces could do so. This ended Kentucky's neutrality, led to Union Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's seizure of Paducah, Kentucky on September 6, 1861, and other military movements and actions by both Union and Confederate armies in Kentucky soon afterwards.
Brig. Gen. Felix Zollicoffer's Confederates had moved from Tennessee to push from the Cumberland Gap into central Kentucky in an effort to gain control of that important border state. On September 14, 1861, ten days after his 5,400-man force left their base, Zollicoffer occupied the Cumberland Gap and took a position at the Cumberland Ford (near present-day Pineville, Kentucky) to counter Unionist activity in the area, where Union supporters had been organizing and training recruits from Kentucky and east Tennessee at Camp Andrew Johnson near Barbourville, Kentucky.
On September 19, 1861, Zollicoffer sent about 800 men under Col. Joel A. Battle against Camp Andrew Johnson, which had largely been vacated, with the Union recruits having moved to nearby Camp Dick Robinson, where several thousand Federal troops were gathered under the command of Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas. As Battle's men approached Camp Johnson, they met a force of 300 pro-Union Home Guards under Capt. Isaac J. Black, who hastily removed the planking from the bridge to prevent the Confederates from crossing it. Sharp skirmishing broke out, but Battle's superior numbers prevailed and Zollicoffer's Confederates drove off Battle's men, with the Union force suffering 1 killed, 1 wounded and 13 captured and the Confederates losing 7 dead. His men seized the camp, destroyed the buildings, and captured the arms and equipment left behind by the retreating recruits.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
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