01/11/2026
On January 10, 1862, Col. James A. Garfield led soldiers of the 18th Brigade against Confederates in the battle of Middle Creek. This was Garfield's first combat experience during the Civil War, and he performed ably. His troops drove Confederates led by Brig. Gen. Humphrey Marshall out of eastern Kentucky and back into Virginia, helping secure that part of the border state Kentucky for the Union. Three days after the battle, Garfield wrote in a letter to his wife, Lucretia: "Men who have been in other battles say they never saw such fierce and terrible fighting...I would dearly love to go home and see you...I must make up my mind to stay till the war is over."
Garfield biographer Allan Peskin summarized Middle Creek as such: "By the bloody standard of later battles, Middle Creek was a tame affair, but to the participants, few of whom had seen combat before, it was a dangerous and exciting afternoon." The carnage of battle shocked Garfield, and he later told his mother that "at the sight of these dead men who other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of his lifetime, that never came back again; the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it."
Image: General James A. Garfield (Library of Congess)
