The Battle of Rowlett's Station

The Battle of Rowlett’s Station, fought along the Louisville & Nashville Railroad at the Green River bridge in Hart County, Kentucky, on 17 December 1861, was a small engagement by later Civil War standards, but it revealed much about leadership, training, and the character of the Western Theater in the war’s first year. Fewer than five hundred Union infantrymen of the 32nd Indiana, supported by artillery north of the river, faced roughly thirteen hundred Confederates under Brigadier General Thomas C. Hindman, including the 8th Texas Cavalry—Terry’s Texas Rangers—and Arkansas infantry and cavalry. The official result was “inconclusive,” yet the Union retained control of the vital bridge, and the 32nd Indiana’s stand against repeated cavalry charges became a minor sensation in the Northern press and a formative episode in the regiment’s identity.[1]

To understand why such a seemingly modest action attracted attention, it is necessary to set the battle within the broader currents of 1861. When Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter in April, many Americans believed the crisis might be resolved by a short war. The secession of the Deep South, followed by Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, created a fractured republic, but popular imagination still clung to the idea of a decisive campaign. The Union defeat at First Bull Run (Manassas) in July 1861 shattered this illusion, demonstrating that raw volunteers and uncoordinated leadership would not suffice. In Missouri, the bloody engagement at Wilson’s Creek showed that the struggle in the West would be equally bitter.[2]

Kentucky, perched between North and South, quickly emerged as a key battleground. Economically tied in both directions, with strong Unionist and secessionist minorities, it tried to steer a course of “armed neutrality.” The legislature declared that neither Union nor Confederate armies should enter the state. That position, however, ignored the imperatives of strategy. Whoever controlled Kentucky controlled not only a thousand miles of frontier but also river systems and transportation networks upon which armies depended. Abraham Lincoln, himself born in Kentucky, understood the point: to lose Kentucky would expose the Ohio River valley and imperil the Union hold on the West.

The Confederacy reached the same conclusion. President Jefferson Davis and General Albert Sidney Johnston, appointed to command in the West, viewed Kentucky as a shield for Tennessee and a springboard toward Cincinnati and Louisville. In early September 1861, Confederate forces under Major General Leonidas Polk seized the bluffs at Columbus on the Mississippi River, violating Kentucky’s neutrality. Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant promptly occupied Paducah at the mouth of the Tennessee. Once both sides had moved in, neutrality collapsed in practice. The legislature invited Union troops to protect the state; Confederate forces coalesced along a defensive line running from Columbus through Bowling Green to the Cumberland Gap.[3]

Opposing Johnston’s line stood the newly-organized Army of the Ohio under Brigadier General (soon Major General) Don Carlos Buell. His tasks were to secure Kentucky for the Union and to prepare an advance into Tennessee. Central to that effort was the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, which carried men and supplies from the Ohio River deep into central Kentucky and eventually toward Nashville. Buell assigned the protection of key stretches of the line, including the Green River bridge near the hamlet of Rowlett’s Station close to Munfordville, to divisions under officers such as Brigadier General Alexander McDowell McCook.

The Union infantry regiment that would become synonymous with Rowlett’s Station, the 32nd Indiana Volunteer Infantry, had been organized only months earlier. Known as Indiana’s “First German” regiment, it was composed overwhelmingly of German immigrants or their sons from Indiana, Ohio, and neighboring states. These men belonged to a broader German-American community that had grown steadily since the 1840s, including many refugees of the failed 1848 revolutions in the German states.

At the head of the 32nd stood Colonel August Willich. Born in Braunsberg, Prussia, in 1810, Willich graduated from Prussian military schools and served as an artillery officer. His sympathies, however, lay with radical democracy. In 1848–49 he joined the revolutionary forces in Baden, fighting against the monarchies he believed oppressive. When the revolutions failed, he fled, eventually emigrating to the United States. In Cincinnati and Indiana, Willich became a prominent figure among German workers and intellectuals. When the Civil War broke out, Indiana’s governor Oliver P. Morton asked him to help form and lead a German regiment. Willich agreed, but he insisted on professional standards: the men would drill, maneuver, and fight according to the principles he had learned in Europe.[4]

His training methods quickly earned attention. Unlike many volunteer colonels, Willich insisted on strict camp discipline and regular, structured drill. He introduced Prussian-style bugle calls so that, in battle, commands could be conveyed instantly across noise and smoke. In particular, he trained his men in forming a hollow square—a formation of four infantry faces presenting bayonets on all sides, traditionally used against cavalry. To American volunteers, this seemed like a relic of Napoleonic battlefields; to Willich, facing opponents who surely fielded mounted regiments, it was a necessary safeguard. Michael A. Peake, who studied the regiment’s early history, notes that some men grumbled about the severity of the drills but later acknowledged that Willich’s methods “saved their lives” on the Green River.

The 32nd Indiana mustered in late August 1861 and moved to Kentucky in the autumn, eventually joining McCook’s division at Camp Nevin. After weeks of drilling and picket duty, companies of the regiment were ordered forward to protect the repair of the damaged railroad bridge over the Green River near Rowlett’s Station. The regiment’s first true test of combat would come there, within sight of the unfinished work.

On the Confederate side, one of the most striking units assembled in Johnston’s Western army was the 8th Texas Cavalry, soon to be famous as Terry’s Texas Rangers. Organized in Houston in August 1861, this was a volunteer cavalry regiment recruited largely from the plantations and frontier settlements of Texas. Each man was expected to provide his own horse, tack, and weaponry—often a double-barreled shotgun or carbine, multiple Colt revolvers, and a Bowie knife. Colonel Benjamin Franklin Terry, a Kentucky-born sugar planter and railroad investor who had prospered in Fort Bend County, used his wealth and prestige to recruit a cadre of hard-riding young Texans.

The regiment left Texas for the Confederacy’s Western front, traveling by rail via New Orleans and Nashville, and joined forces near Bowling Green, Kentucky. Contemporary accounts and later histories agree that the Rangers quickly built a reputation for courage and dash. Their tactics emphasized speed and aggression: close-range pistol fire delivered from horseback, rapid charges against flanks or disordered lines, and independent scouting operations ahead of the main army. One Ranger later wrote that the men “rode as if born to the saddle” and believed no equal existed among Union cavalry.[5]

Supporting the Texans near Rowlett’s Station were Arkansas infantry and cavalry under Brigadier General Thomas C. Hindman. The official order of battle for the Confederate force includes the 1st Arkansas Infantry Battalion, the 2nd and 6th Arkansas Infantry Regiments, the 6th Arkansas Cavalry Battalion, and Swett’s Mississippi battery, in addition to the 8th Texas Cavalry. These units had been drawn together as part of Hindman’s brigade operating in the Bowling Green area.

Hindman himself was a rising Confederate commander. Born in Tennessee in 1828, he had moved to Arkansas as a young man and established himself as a lawyer and Democratic politician, eventually serving in the U.S. Congress. A strong proponent of Southern rights, he embraced secession and entered Confederate service as a brigadier general. Subordinates and contemporaries described him as fiery, bold, and fond of taking the offensive. In Kentucky in late 1861, his brigade formed part of Johnston’s effort to resist Buell’s advance and threaten the Louisville & Nashville line. Hindman looked for opportunities to strike isolated Union detachments—opportunities the scattered work parties and small infantry forces near Rowlett’s Station seemed to offer.

By mid-December, the Green River bridge had already been sabotaged. Confederate troops had destroyed part of the southern stone pier and the track, forcing the Union to rush in engineers and civilian stonemasons from Louisville. On 15 December, Willich sent two companies across the river to cover the workers and to help build a temporary pontoon bridge. When the bridge was complete, he sent two more companies to reinforce them, while four companies remained on the north bank. On 16 December, the civilian stonecutters began repairs. On the Confederate side, Hindman concentrated about 1,300 men in the vicinity, intending either to destroy the Union detachment or to seize or damage the bridge once more.[6]

The morning of 17 December 1861 was cold and, according to several accounts, overcast. Union pickets from the 32nd Indiana probed into the woods south of the bridge and encountered Confederate skirmishers. These fell back, firing occasionally, drawing the Union advance outward from the immediate bridgehead toward a broader clearing. Hindman now had an opportunity: he could bring superior numbers to bear on fewer than five hundred Union infantrymen south of the river, supported only at long range by artillery north of the Green.

Lieutenant Colonel Henry von Trebra, commanding the companies on the south side, deployed his men to meet the threat, forming line along the fields near the railroad and using fence lines and slight rises for cover where possible. The Arkansans pressed toward them; Swett’s Mississippi battery opened fire; and in the rear, the Texans began to form for a mounted charge. One Confederate recollection described the men “eager to measure sabers and pistols with the German infantry,” convinced that once the Rangers broke their line the battle would be quickly decided.[7]

The first rush of the Texans met controlled volleys. At Willich’s earlier insistence, the regiment had been taught to hold fire until officers gave the command; in the hands of inexperienced volunteers, muskets were easily wasted at long range. Now, as the horsemen drew nearer, bugle calls and shouted orders synchronized the line’s response. A Union private later recalled that the Texans “came yelling, riding low, firing as they came, but we held our fire until the word and then gave them a volley that struck them like a wall.”[8] Horses went down; riders veered away. The Rangers regrouped for another attempt.

At some point in the clash, Colonel Terry himself rode forward with his men. Sources differ on whether he led the first or a subsequent charge, but all agree that he fell near the front, shot from the saddle. A brief notice in contemporary Southern reports simply stated that Colonel Terry “was killed while gallantly leading his regiment” near Woodsonville; later reminiscences expand this into a romantic tableau of the colonel urging his men on, saber raised, at the moment he was struck.[9] His death shocked the Rangers and deprived them of their original commander less than four months after they had entered Confederate service.

Despite Terry’s loss, the Texans continued to attack, but they encountered a formation rare on American battlefields: the hollow square. As the cavalry massed again, the bugles of the 32nd sounded the command for the companies to pivot and form a four-sided defensive posture. Each face of the square aimed outward; bayonets were fixed; officers and the wounded were sheltered in the interior. Willich, who had been at division headquarters when the clash began, returned to find his men executing precisely the maneuvers he had drilled into them. A later summary of the battle noted that the infantry square “held fast against all attempts by the cavalry to break it,” forcing the horsemen to pull up or veer away rather than ride into a wall of steel.[10]

Not all parts of the line remained so secure. On one flank, a platoon under Lieutenant Max Sachs found itself cut off as the fighting swirled. The Texans surrounded this small group and demanded their surrender. Sachs refused. According to Peake’s reconstruction of the episode, based on regimental accounts, the lieutenant and his men fought on with bayonet and musket until Sachs and several others were killed or mortally wounded; only a handful managed to escape back toward the square under cover of fire from comrades. Their refusal to yield became part of the regiment’s internal legend.

For several hours the battle continued as a series of charges, counter-movements, and artillery exchanges. On the north bank, Battery A, 1st Ohio Light Artillery, and Battery A, Kentucky Light Artillery (Stone’s Battery), fired across the river in support of the 32nd Indiana, while Swett’s Mississippi battery targeted Union reserves and skirmishers along the road toward Munfordville. Hindman’s Arkansas infantry pressed where they could, but the decisive effort remained with the cavalry, whose inability to break the square increasingly frustrated Confederate hopes.

Eventually, reports reached Hindman that larger Union forces under McCook were moving toward the area. Willich had already begun, with characteristic deliberation, to shift his men into a stronger position nearer the bridge. Having lost his surprise, uncertain of the exact size of the Union reinforcements, and having failed to destroy the advanced companies of the 32nd Indiana, Hindman finally ordered a withdrawal. The Confederates retired from the immediate vicinity, taking with them their wounded and the body of Colonel Terry. The 32nd Indiana remained in control of the field south of the bridge long enough to cover the engineers and workers, then consolidated around the crossing.

Casualty figures varied in early reports, as was common. Union accounts settled on losses of 46 for the 32nd Indiana: thirteen killed, twenty-eight wounded, and five captured or missing. Confederate casualties were estimated by Union officers at around ninety-one, including Terry; Hindman’s later claims reduced these numbers and argued that Union losses were higher. Regardless of exact totals, the fight had been sharp but limited; it was what contemporaries often called a “severe skirmish” rather than a full-scale battle.

In its aftermath, the men of the 32nd Indiana undertook an act of commemoration that gives Rowlett’s Station an unusual place in Civil War memory. The bodies of their fallen comrades were buried near the field, and one of the regiment’s own, Private Christian Friedrich August Bloedner, carved a limestone monument to mark the graves. Inscribed in German, the stone praised the courage of “our comrades who died for the preservation of the free institutions of the United States of America” and boasted that five hundred Germans had defeated several enemy regiments and a battery. Although the inscription exaggerated the Confederate numbers, it captured the pride of the regiment.[11] This Bloedner Monument is widely considered the oldest surviving Civil War monument in the United States.

News of the engagement spread quickly. Northern newspapers, eager for encouraging stories after the shock of Bull Run, carried accounts of a German regiment that had held the open ground against repeated charges by Texas cavalry. General Buell commended the regiment officially. In Indiana and among German-American communities across the Midwest, Rowlett’s Station became proof that immigrant volunteers were not only loyal but formidable in battle.

The units involved carried forward the experience in their own ways. For the 32nd Indiana, Rowlett’s Station was their “baptism of fire.” Over the next three and a half years they fought in many of the major campaigns of the Western armies—Shiloh, Stones River, Chickamauga, the Tullahoma and Atlanta campaigns, and ultimately the operations that carried Union forces into the Deep South. Casualties mounted; the regiment that mustered nearly a thousand men in 1861 mustered out in 1865 with far fewer. Yet the early memory of the Green River square remained central in veterans’ writings and commemorations, often cited as evidence of what disciplined training and cohesive leadership could accomplish.

Terry’s Texas Rangers, despite their failure to crush the 32nd Indiana and the loss of their founding colonel, quickly reconstituted under new leadership—eventually Colonel John A. Wharton—and went on to serve as one of the Confederacy’s most active and celebrated cavalry regiments. They participated in the Shiloh campaign, rode in the Kentucky campaign of 1862, and fought at Perryville, Murfreesboro (Stones River), Chickamauga, and numerous smaller engagements. Their aggressiveness and mobility made them a favored tool for Confederate commanders seeking scouting, raiding, or shock action on the flanks of larger battles. They remained in the field through the final, desperate campaigns of 1865; some accounts note that small groups of Rangers simply rode home rather than formally surrender as a regiment.

The Arkansas regiments that had marched with Hindman at Rowlett’s Station also left their mark on the Western campaigns. The 2nd and 6th Arkansas Infantry saw heavy combat at Shiloh, Corinth, and the later battles of the Army of Tennessee, suffering high casualties but developing reputations for stubborn fighting. Their early operations in Kentucky formed part of the Confederacy’s first efforts to contest Union control of the border states, even though later setbacks at Mill Springs and the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson would soon force the Confederate line back into Tennessee.

As for the commanders, Rowlett’s Station occupies a smaller but telling place in their careers. Hindman, whose aggressiveness in Kentucky gave him prominence, was later sent to Arkansas as a sort of military governor, where his harsh measures against draft evasion and dissent made him both effective and deeply unpopular. He fought with distinction at Prairie Grove and returned to the Army of Tennessee, where he led a division at Chickamauga. After the war, his attempt to resume political life in Arkansas ended violently when he was assassinated in 1868, a victim of the unstable and often deadly politics of Reconstruction.

Colonel Terry did not live beyond Rowlett’s Station, but his name did. The 8th Texas Cavalry formally adopted the title “Terry’s Texas Rangers” in his honor, and postwar reminiscences by veterans such as James K. P. Blackburn helped fix an image of the regiment as the quintessential Confederate cavalry outfit—daring, loyal, and intensely proud of its early sacrifices.[12]

August Willich’s career, by contrast, continued upward after his regiment’s stand at the Green River. Promoted to brigade command, he led larger formations of German and Midwestern troops in battles such as Shiloh and Stones River. It was at Stones River that Willich was captured. On the first day of the battle, 31 December 1862, a Confederate assault broke into his brigade’s position after a miscommunication led to a temporary gap in the Union line. Willich was taken prisoner and sent to Libby Prison in Richmond. According to later accounts, he continued in captivity to lecture fellow prisoners on tactics and politics, and the Emancipation Proclamation—issued during his confinement—deepened his conviction that the war had become a struggle not only to preserve the Union but to end slavery.[13] Exchanged in 1863, he returned to command and brought forth additional tactical evolutions to the Indiana regiment.

Looking back from the vantage point of later campaigns, Rowlett’s Station can appear as a minor prelude to the larger storms that followed: Mill Springs in January 1862; the fall of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in February; the bloody struggle at Shiloh in April; and the great battles of Stones River and Chickamauga in 1862–63. Yet the engagement encapsulates several fundamental themes of the Civil War in the West. It shows the limits of cavalry shock against prepared infantry; it demonstrates the importance of training and leadership in transforming raw volunteers into effective soldiers; it highlights the role of ethnic regiments and frontier cavalry in shaping the character of the armies; and it underscores the strategic centrality of Kentucky and its railroads in the first year of war.

On a cold December day, on ground whose significance lay not in any great city or fortress but in a stone bridge and a stretch of track, the men of the 32nd Indiana, Terry’s Texas Rangers, the Arkansas regiments, and the artillery on both banks of the Green River learned lessons about war that would remain with them for the rest of their lives. Their clash at Rowlett’s Station stands as an early, concentrated example of the broader conflict that would soon engulf the Western Theater—a conflict of maneuver and entrenchment, of national strategy and local loyalties, of revolutionary émigrés and frontier riders, all meeting in the smoke along the rails.

Notes

1. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 4, reports of Col. August Willich and Brig. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman on the engagement at Rowlett’s Station.

2. For a concise overview of early campaigns in 1861, see standard Civil War narratives summarized in “American Civil War,” and battle-specific entries “First Battle of Bull Run” and “Wilson’s Creek.”

3. On Kentucky’s neutrality and its collapse in 1861, see campaign summaries in the National Park Service’s battle entries and related Kentucky histories.

4. Biographical details on August Willich and his political-military background are drawn from modern studies of German-American officers and biographical sketches.

5. Characterizations of Terry’s Texas Rangers, their equipment, and ethos derive from the Texas State Historical Association’s entry on the Eighth Texas Cavalry and veterans’ reminiscences.

6. The movements around the Green River bridge, the deployment of companies, and the presence of civilian stonemasons are detailed in battle summaries and Peake’s reconstruction of events.

7. On the composition of Hindman’s force, including the 1st Arkansas Battalion, 2nd and 6th Arkansas Infantry, 6th Arkansas Cavalry Battalion, and Swett’s Mississippi battery, see modern orders of battle and narrative syntheses.

8. Quotations attributed to Union privates and officers are paraphrased from Peake’s Baptism of Fire and from compiled soldier accounts.

9. Reports of Colonel Terry’s death and later commemorations appear in Confederate newspaper summaries and the Texas State Historical Association’s article on the regiment.

10. Descriptions of the infantry square and its significance rely on Peake and later interpretations in battlefield studies emphasizing Rowlett’s Station as a rare example of open-field infantry successfully repulsing multiple cavalry charges.

11. Information on the Bloedner Monument, its inscription, and its later history is taken from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Frazier History Museum, and related conservation reports.

12. On the continued service of Terry’s Texas Rangers and their postwar legend, see veteran accounts and scholarly articles on the regiment’s operations in the Western Theater.

13. Accounts of Willich’s capture at Stones River and his time in Libby Prison are summarized in modern biographical essays focusing on his experience as a German revolutionary in Union blue.