Battle of Rowlett's Station

Just south of Munfordville, Kentucky, near the Green River railroad crossing that would become so contested in eighteen sixty-two, one of the Civil War's early skirmishes took place in December of eighteen sixty-one. It is remembered today partly for what happened on the field, and partly for whom it killed.

By late fall of eighteen sixty-one, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston had established a defensive line across southern Kentucky running roughly from Columbus in the west to Prestonsburg in the east, with Bowling Green at its center. Along the Green River, Confederate cavalry had been pushing toward the Louisville and Nashville Railroad bridge at Munfordville, and Union General Don Carlos Buell sent troops forward to contest their approach.

On December seventeenth, a Confederate force of roughly thirteen hundred men, including the Eighth Texas Cavalry and infantry under General Thomas Hindman, attacked a Union detachment of about five hundred soldiers from the Thirty-Second Indiana Infantry. The Thirty-Second was notable in its own right: it was composed almost entirely of German immigrants and the sons of German settlers, men who had crossed the Atlantic and then enlisted to fight for their adopted republic. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry von Trebra, formed his men into a hollow square, the classic infantry defense against cavalry charges.

The Texas horsemen, among them the regiment that would become famous as Terry's Texas Rangers, came on repeatedly. The Union infantry held. When the fighting ended, the Confederates had lost thirty-three men killed, including their commanding officer, Colonel Benjamin Franklin Terry, the Rangers' founder, and about fifty wounded. The Union suffered thirteen killed, twenty-eight wounded, and five captured. The battle was tactically inconclusive, but the Union held the bridge. Terry's death that day robbed the Confederacy of one of its most capable cavalry organizers before the war had barely started.