Michael B. Murphy - The Kimberlins Go to War: A Union Family in Copperhead Country

As July 7, 1861, dawned, talk of war was in the air in Lexington, Indiana. The county seat of Scott County was abuzz with the latest news about the Southern rebellion. The Madison Daily and Evening Courie r told of skirmishes between Federal troops and secesh forces at Harpers Ferry and Falling Waters, Virginia. Closer to home, word had come that William A. Sanderson had organized a new regiment, the Twenty-third Indiana Volunteers, on June 24, and was recruiting across the second congressional district. A Captain Ferguson had been in town looking for strong young men. All takers were to meet him in Charlestown by sunset on July 8.

Jacob T. Kimberlin was a twenty-one-year-old farmhand, the eighth of ten children of Jacob J. and Elizabeth Kimberlin, of nearby Nabb. Unlike most families in the area, all of the Kimberlin children had survived early childhood. In the mid-1800s, one-half of all Hoosier children died before the age of four from such common causes as diphtheria in the winter and dysentery in the summer. The Kimberlin sons worked on the farm, or as coopers in town, while the three girls shared the household chores. Their mother had died in 1844.

We do not know Jacob T.s thoughts as he decided to sign up for three years of military service, but if there is comfort in numbers, he had plenty of it. Jacob walked out of Lexington on the Charlestown road on July 8 with his older brother, John J., and his cousins, William H. H. Kimberlin, Benjamin F. Kimberlin, and James Stark. These five young men could not have known at the time that none of them would ever return home. They simply knew that the Kimberlins were going to war.

Posted at the start of the Civil War, this broadside urged young men to volunteer for military service at Camp Noble in New Albany, Indiana, for a regiment to be known as the Indiana Snake Killers. (Indiana Historical Society, DC014)

This is the story of the Kimberlin family that sent thirty-three fathers and sons, brothers and cousins, to fight for the Union cause during the Civil War. Ten family members were killed, wounded, or died of battlefield diseasea 30 percent casualty rate that is unmatched in recorded Scott County history. Of the 135 known deaths of Scott County soldiers,

While we know that the Kimberlins suffered disproportionately, our only clues to their feelings about the war come from forty letters to and from the battlefield that have survived. Were they fighting to save the Union or to free the slaves? How did they express grief over the loss of a brother? Did they keep up with their business and the women at home? And what did they think about secesh neighbors in southern Indiana who tried to undermine the Union cause? The answers to these questions will help determine if the Kimberlins were unusual in their patriotism or simply acting as any Union family would in an area of the nation that came to be known as Copperhead Country.