Kirkland Bushwhackers

The Kirkland Bushwhackers, also known as the Kirkland Raiders, were an irregular armed group led by former Confederate officer John Jackson Kirkland during the American Civil War. The group operated principally in the southern Appalachian borderlands of present-day Monroe County, Tennessee, and Graham County, North Carolina.McClung, Marshall. "The Kirkland Bushwhackers." Graham Star.

The surviving record of the group is fragmentary and consists of military service records, Confederate parole records, court proceedings, pension material, regional histories, archival research collections, and oral or family traditions. Contemporary records establish the military service of several men later connected with the Kirkland network and document criminal accusations involving Kirkland and some of his associates. Other episodes attributed to the band survive chiefly in later regional accounts and therefore require more cautious treatment.

Origins and leadership

John Jackson Kirkland was born in 1827. He served as an officer in Company B of the Confederate 3rd Tennessee Infantry, commonly identified as Lillard's or Vaughn's regiment. A surviving Monroe County roster includes Kirkland among the men of Company B.

The regiment contained numerous recruits from East Tennessee, including several members of the extended Kirkland family.

Kirkland's documented service with the regiment ended before its later campaigns in Mississippi. Confederate service documentation identifies him as a junior second lieutenant and records that he was "dropped" from the rolls on May 12, 1862.

His removal occurred immediately before the regiment's reorganization on May 14, 1862. The surviving record does not explain why he was dropped and does not itself characterize the event as desertion. Although later sources sometimes describe Kirkland as a Confederate deserter, that characterization should therefore be distinguished from the wording of the contemporary military record.

The regiment had originally been organized in May 1861 and included recruits from Monroe, Polk, Blount, McMinn, and other East Tennessee counties.

Kirkland's removal came only two days before the regiment's formal reorganization on May 14, 1862. The surviving record gives no reason why he was dropped. Company B's commissioned leadership changed during the reorganization, raising the possibility that Kirkland's departure was connected with changes in the officer structure, although no surviving evidence presently located establishes the cause.

His documented departure occurred more than a year before the Confederate surrender at Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4, 1863. His later Confederate pension application described his earlier service but does not establish that he accompanied the regiment into the Vicksburg campaign.

The Kirkland gristmill

Later regional tradition associates the Kirkland family with a gristmill on Turkey Creek above Tellico Plains, Tennessee, near a location subsequently known as Lower Turkey Creek Falls or Kirkland Mill Falls.

The traditional mill site is approximately , within the Turkey Creek drainage in Monroe County.

Burning of the Kirkland gristmill

Regional accounts state that the Kirkland family mill was destroyed during Federal operations in Monroe County in December 1863.

The timing places the tradition within a documented period of extensive Union movement through the county following the relief of Knoxville. After Confederate forces under James Longstreet withdrew from Knoxville, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman began moving most of his command south toward the Hiwassee River.

Historian Bill Baker's reconstruction of these movements, drawing upon wartime correspondence, places Sherman's command in the Monroe County region between December 8 and December 10, 1863.

On December 8 Sherman notified Ulysses S. Grant that he intended to leave Knoxville and move toward the Hiwassee. By December 9 Sherman was communicating from the vicinity of the Tellico Iron Works, while other elements of his force operated around Madisonville, Athens, Sweetwater, and crossings of the Little Tennessee and Hiwassee rivers.

Sherman's correspondence of December 9 and 10 also shows that his forces were obtaining food, livestock, meal, and forage from the surrounding countryside while operating in the region. A history of the 70th Ohio likewise documents Federal movements through the Tellico Plains–Hiwassee region during this period.

The Tellico Iron Works constituted a military target and was destroyed during the Federal movement. Union parties also ranged through the surrounding countryside, creating conditions in which mills, farms, livestock, and stored provisions were vulnerable to military seizure or destruction.

No contemporary report presently identified names the Kirkland mill specifically, identifies the soldiers who destroyed it, or gives an exact date for its loss. Its destruction during these operations therefore remains a regional tradition consistent with the documented presence of Federal troops but not independently established at unit level.

Later accounts sometimes portray destruction of the mill as the event that transformed Kirkland from a Confederate soldier into a bushwhacker. The chronology does not support that sequence literally: Kirkland had been dropped from his regiment in May 1862, approximately nineteen months before Sherman's December 1863 movement through Monroe County.

The destruction of family property may nevertheless have influenced later hostility. The surviving evidence does not establish when Kirkland first began leading a distinct irregular group.

Confederate and Union military networks

Vicksburg and the Kirkland family

The Confederate 3rd Tennessee later served in the Vicksburg campaign. The National Park Service Confederate parole index records several Kirklands among Confederate soldiers paroled after the surrender.

James Kirkland and William Kirkland of the 3rd Tennessee appear among the parolees. The same index records a Jesse "Kirkling" associated with the 59th Tennessee Infantry.

John Jackson Kirkland himself should not be included among the Vicksburg parolees merely because his former regiment was captured there. His documented connection with the 3rd Tennessee had ended in May 1862.

The surviving records demonstrate that several members of the extended Kirkland family followed different wartime trajectories. Some remained with Confederate forces, while other relatives or neighboring families subsequently appear in Union organizations or irregular formations.

Unionist opposition and the 3rd Tennessee Mounted Infantry

By 1864 Unionist military organization was expanding in the same mountain communities in which the Kirkland network operated.

The Union 3rd Tennessee Mounted Infantry Regiment was organized in East Tennessee during the latter half of 1864. Its companies included men recruited in Monroe, Blount, and neighboring counties as well as western North Carolina.

Among its officers were Captain Timothy Lyon of Company C and Captain Joseph C. Gray of Company H.

Company C was mustered during August 1864 and contained numerous recruits familiar with the mountain region bordering North Carolina. Company H was recruited primarily in and around Monroe County later that year.

The regiment was a short-lived organization and never developed into a conventional field regiment in the same manner as many earlier Union formations. Its companies nevertheless gave locally armed Unionists a formal military structure and brought them into direct conflict with Confederate troops, deserters, and irregular groups.

The resulting struggle was intensely local. Men on opposing sides often came from the same communities, kinship networks, churches, roads, and valleys.

Membership and associates

No contemporary roster of the Kirkland Bushwhackers is known to survive. Membership therefore cannot be reconstructed with the certainty possible for a regular military company.

Individuals associated with the group must be distinguished according to the type of evidence connecting them with Kirkland.

James and William Kirkland

John's brothers James and William Kirkland served in Company B of the Confederate 3rd Tennessee. The Vicksburg parole records identify James as a corporal and William as a private.

William later appears with John in surviving Monroe County criminal proceedings, establishing a stronger documentary connection between the brothers after their regular Confederate service.

James's Confederate service and Vicksburg parole are documented, but his precise later role in John's irregular organization is less certain.

The Jesse Kirkland identity problem

The historical record contains more than one man named Jesse Kirkland, and later narratives appear at times to have conflated them.

The Vicksburg parole records include a Jesse "Kirkling", identified as a sergeant in Company B of the Confederate 59th Tennessee Infantry and listed as a hospital parolee.

John Preston Arthur's 1914 Western North Carolina: A History (1730–1913) describes a Jesse Kirkland killed during an expedition conducted by Captain Timothy Lyon's Union force near Isaac Carringer's Creek. Arthur described the dead Jesse as a kinsman of the Kirklands he discussed rather than explicitly identifying him as John Jackson Kirkland's brother.

A different Jesse Kirkland survived the war. The 1890 Union veterans census for Monroe County lists a Jesse Kirkland of Ball Play who served as a private in Company D of the Union 3rd Tennessee Mounted Infantry between July 25 and November 30, 1864.

That veteran cannot have been the Jesse whom Arthur described as killed during Lyon's operations.

The available evidence therefore does not support treating every wartime reference to Jesse Kirkland as a single individual or identifying the man killed by Lyon unequivocally as John Jackson Kirkland's brother.

Kirkland Bushwhackers

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