Northern Kentucky forts, batteries hurriedly manned with volunteers in 1862  

By Mike Rutledge This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

In September 1862, the bloodiest war on American soil marched within 7½ miles of Cincinnati. It was the Civil War's "Siege of Cincinnati."

Confederate troops under Gen. Edmond Kirby Smith, fresh from routing Union troops at Richmond, Ky., Aug. 29-30, began marching north to Cincinnati and passed through Lexington with token resistance. The rebel forces split, with Smith leading his half against Frankfort. Another 8,000 troops under Gen. Henry Heth headed up Lexington Pike toward Northern Kentucky.

Cincinnatians were uneasy. The threat was real.

With an estimated 161,044 residents in the 1860 U.S. Census, Cincinnati was the nation's seventh-largest city – and second-biggest west of the Appalachian Mountains, behind New Orleans.

If the Union hadn't been prepared to defend "the Queen City of the West," a key industrial and shipping center, the Civil War might have swung differently.

"(Cincinnati) was a major steamboat-building and steamboat-traffic port," said Jeannine Kreinbrink, an adjunct lecturer of anthropology and history at Northern Kentucky University.

"It had the railroads coming in from the North that could bring supplies to the steamboats and supply the army in Mississippi. Lots of goods came through. And if you control that river traffic, you control a lot.

"A lot of steel and iron and other resources that they needed were in Cincinnati, or came through Cincinnati. All the iron from Pittsburgh came down the Ohio River."

That would have greatly assisted the South, whose industrial power could not match that of the North.

Kentucky, meanwhile, walked a tenuous balance as a border state. The commonwealth officially was neutral, although it remained part of the Union. It legally was a slave state and was allowed to remain so during the Civil War – even after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, which applied only in states that had seceded from the Union.

Only after the war was slavery banned in Kentucky and other border states.

The late Chester Geaslen, a history writer for The Kentucky Post, emphasized the commonwealth's importance to the war in the 1972 edition of the book, "Our Moment of Glory in the Civil War: When Cincinnati was defended from the hills of Northern Kentucky."

Geaslen found this remark from President Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War's first year: "Had my native state of Kentucky seceded with her mother state Virginia, the fields of battle in this war would undoubtedly be north of the Ohio River by this time."

Union Gen. Horatio G. Wright, for whom Fort Wright is named, ordered Gen. Lew Wallace to vacate Paris, Ky., and defend Cincinnati, Newport and Covington. When Wallace arrived Sept. 2, he declared martial law. He issued a call in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan for a volunteer militia.

Union forces had built cannon batteries in Northern Kentucky since the war started in 1861, with Col. Charles Whittlesey helping design Cincinnati defenses in Northern Kentucky. He also placed several cannon platforms on Price's Hill (now Price Hill) and Mount Adams. With an invasion seeming imminent in the summer of 1862, construction was accelerated.

Whittlesey planned a series of cannon batteries near the tops of hills, which would give Union forces an advantage shooting down on invaders trying to pass on roadways or through creek valleys.

There ultimately were five enclosed forts of varying styles – including Fort Mitchel and Fort Wright – plus about 23 batteries protecting cannons that could fire shells up to 32 pounds.

An urgent call was put out in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan for a 30-to-90-day call-up of a militia that became known as "the Squirrel Hunters," named because they were farm boys who didn't have to shoot twice to hit a squirrel, according to Geaslen.

Union officers had 14,000 volunteers, within two days. A pontoon bridge, making use of river barges, was built in just two days immediately upriver of the under-construction Roebling Suspension Bridge so troops could cross from Ohio to Northern Kentucky's hills.

About 72,000 men and boys manned the Northern Kentucky lines, sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder in the 8-mile-long strand of rifle trenches and fortifications from Ludlow-Bromley to the Ohio River's shore in what's now Fort Thomas.

"It was a week that will never be forgotten – a grand historical that will always be referred to and an important incident of this troublous era," according to a dispatch that ran in The Cincinnati Enquirer on Sept. 7, three days before the Confederates reached Northern Kentucky.

"For the first time in more than half a century Cincinnati has been menaced with invasion – a deadly and ruthless foe has threatened to establish himself within our gates," the article continued.

At dawn on Sept. 10, Gen. Heth arrived with 8,000 battle-hardened Confederate troops and established camp near what now is Dixie Highway at Turkeyfoot Road in Lakeside Park. During the tense hours, Wallace and Heth looked at each other through field glasses.

James Ramage, a Northern Kentucky University history professor, said in 2005 during the dedication of the James A. Ramage Civil War Museum in Fort Wright that four Union troops were killed during the crisis and three were wounded, with two Confederates wounded.

As quickly as they appeared, the Confederates left in the darkness between Sept. 11 and 12.

According to Joseph S. Stern Jr.'s 1961 article, "The Siege of Cincinnati," published for the Ohio Historical Society, when dawn broke and Cincinnati's defenders saw no rebel campfires, they suspected enemy trickery.

But scouts determined the Confederates had indeed left.

"They A., realized they were vastly outnumbered, and B., were being summoned back south," Kreinbrink said.

When the troops returned across the bridge "cheers broke out on the crowded levee," Stern reported. "The streets were jammed; national emblems appeared everywhere. Families welcomed back their patriotic citizen soldiers; the city was justifiably proud of itself."

The cannon batteries were long forgotten. Some were bulldozed and are beneath subdivisions. One, Battery Hooper, was on the same property as the Ramage Museum and is the site of occasional archaeological digs.

Two others, Battery Bates and Battery Coombs, are in western portions of Covington's Devou Park and the city is seeking to have them added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Enquirer staffer Jeff Suess contributed.

If you go What: James A. Ramage Civil War Museum

When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays

Where: 1402 Highland Ave., Fort Wright

Information: 859-344-1145

We cherish our history and want to share it online. Visit nky.com and search Our History.

PHOTO CREDIT: FORT WHITTLESEY PHOTO/Courtesy of "Our Moment of Glory in the Civil War" Fort Whittlesey was one of the defensive structures built in what now is the city of Fort Thomas for the Civil War defense of Cincinnati. While the cities of Fort Mitchell and Fort Wright were named after such fortifications, the namesake of Fort Thomas was not built until well after the Civil War. (Courtesy of "Our Moment of Glory in the Civil War.")