Barbourville was a Civil War engagement fought in Kentucky, 1861. It was a Confederate victory.
Kentucky Union sympathizers had trained recruits at Camp Andrew Johnson, in Barbourville, throughout the summer of 1861. Confederate Brig. Gen. Felix Zollicoffer entered Kentucky in mid-September intending to relieve pressure on Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston and his troops by conducting raids and generally constituting a threat to Union forces and sympathizers in the area. On September 18, 1861, he dispatched a force of about 800 men under command of Col. Joel A. Battle to disrupt the training activities at Camp Andrew Johnson. At daylight on the 19th, the force entered Barbourville and found the recruits gone; they had been sent to Camp Dick Robinson. A small home guard force commanded by Capt. Isaac J. Black met the Rebels, and a sharp skirmish ensued. After dispersing the home guard, the Confederates destroyed the training camp and seized arms found there. This was, for all practical purposes, the first encounter of the war in Kentucky. The Confederates were making their might known in the state, countering the early Union presence.
On September 19, 1861, Confederate and Union forces clashed in Knox County, Kentucky, in what became known as the Battle of Barbourville, one of the conflict's earliest confrontations. This clash unfolded as part of the Kentucky Confederate Offensive and marked the Confederacy's first triumph within the commonwealth. Federal commanders, unnerved by the outcome, hastily dispatched troops toward central Kentucky in an effort to push back the invading force. Their efforts finally succeeded the following month, when the advance was halted at the Battle of Camp Wildcat.
When the U.S. Army handed Fort Sumter over to Confederate forces, President Abraham Lincoln responded the next day, April 15, 1861, by asking loyal states to furnish volunteers who could put down the rebellion among the seven states that had already left the Union. Kentucky's governor, Beriah Magoffin, sympathized with the Confederacy and declined to contribute soldiers, yet because pro-Union sentiment dominated the Kentucky General Assembly, the president's request failed to push the state toward secession. A legislative committee urged neutrality on May 16, and Magoffin formally declared Kentucky neutral four days later, on May 20.
Voters went to the polls on August 5, 1861, and handed pro-Union candidates enough seats in both the Kentucky House of Representatives and the Kentucky Senate to override any veto. The following day, August 6, Union forces established Camp Dick Robinson close to Lexington. Weeks later, on September 2, lawmakers had the U.S. flag hoisted above the state capitol building in Frankfort.
Kentucky's neutral stance collapsed on September 3, 1861, when Confederate Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk directed Brig. Gen. Gideon Pillow to take Columbus, a town along the Mississippi River, ahead of any Union attempt to occupy it. Within days, on September 6, Union Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant answered by capturing Paducah, and both sides soon began further troop movements and operations across the state.
Meanwhile, Confederate Brig. Gen. Felix Zollicoffer had marched his men out of Tennessee, aiming to press through the Cumberland Gap and establish a foothold in central Kentucky, since control of this border state carried great strategic weight. Ten days after setting out with 5,400 troops, on September 14, he took the Gap itself and then advanced to Cumberland Ford, near what is now Pineville, positioning his men to counter local Unionist activity. That summer, Union
A dense fog blanketed the morning of September 19, 1861, when Zollicoffer dispatched roughly 800 troops forward under the command of Col. Joel A. Battle. By that point Camp Andrew Johnson stood mostly empty, its recruits having already relocated to Camp Dick Robinson nearby, a site where Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas presided over several thousand assembled Federal soldiers. As Battle's column pushed toward the abandoned camp, it ran into 300 Home Guards loyal to the Union, led by Capt. Isaac J. Black, who quickly tore the planks from the bridge so the Confederates could not cross. A brief but intense exchange of fire followed, yet Battle's numerical edge won out, handing Zollicoffer the day. His troops then took possession of the camp, burned its structures to the ground, and gathered up the weapons and gear the fleeing recruits had left behind.
Casualties on the Union side amounted to one man killed, one wounded, and thirteen taken prisoner, according to Black's own count. The Confederates, exposed as they were on open ground during the assault, suffered worse in terms of dead, losing seven men.
Zollicoffer pulled back to his camp at Cumberland Gap for a short time afterward, but he did not remain idle. Not long after the clash at Barbourville, he dispatched a detachment to scatter yet another Union Home Guard unit stationed at Laurel Bridge in Laurel County, Kentucky. Then, on September 28, a separate detachment struck the Goose Creek Salt Works in Clay County, Kentucky, capturing two hundred barrels of salt and destroying the facility.
These moves did not go unanswered. Brig. Gen. Thomas, acting for the Union, ordered Col. Theophilus T. Garrard and his men to establish Camp Wildcat in the Rockcastle Hills near London, Kentucky. The position, at Wildcat Mountain, sat thirty miles (48 km) north of the ruined salt works and allowed Garrard's force to guard the crossing on the Rockcastle River while blocking the Wilderness Road as it ran through that stretch of country. The stage was thus set for a further clash: when Zollicoffer resumed offensive operations on October 16, the result was the Battle of Camp Wildcat, fought on October 21, 1861.
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