He Could Whip any Lincolnite: The Arrest of James Digby, Part 2

Part One

Just after Chancellor Livingston had his freedom affirmed, the Civil War started and men on both sides began learning how to kill and be killed. Bloodshed gradually increased as did the distrust of rumored “disloyal” citizens in border areas like Campbell County. In Kentucky, Union authorities contracted what one historian described as “secession fever,” a sort of paranoia that southern sympathizers were conspiring to move the state into the Confederacy. To combat this fear, they “began arresting prominent pro-Confederate civilians and spiriting them to out-of-state prisons without warning, formal charges, or trial.” [Sanders, Stuart. Anatomy of a Duel University Press of Kentucky 2023. p. 32]

This tactic showed up in Campbell County, where, on September 27, soldiers under orders from General Ormsby Mitchell, commander of the Department of the Ohio, apprehended Robert Maddox and Hubbard Helm for treason against the U.S. and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They nabbed both in Newport, then transported them to Cincinnati to await further orders from Mitchel.

Helm was a former county sheriff who had been embroiled in public disputes during the James Waggoner case. Provost Marshal Henry C. Gassaway, meanwhile, described Maddox as a man of means who had “great influence with his money particularly in this neighborhood.” He spent his funds “freely to effect his end.” The officer considered Maddox “a dangerous man to our Government,” and believed that locking him up in jail for significant time would “do much good in quelling outbursts among the Rebels in this County.” 

At the same time, two companies of Home Guards, also under orders from General Mitchel, attempted to serve arrest warrants on local attorneys Albert S. Berry and Thomas L. Jones. They did not find their targets on this day. Jones remained in Newport, only to be arrested in September of 1862 while Berry avoided arrest and joined the Confederate Marines in early 1863, eventually being captured at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek in April 1865.

A court order freed Helm and Maddox in mid-November, but Mitchell’s men immediately arrested them again, revealing the General’s determination to stamp out suspected disloyalty. The back-and-forth continued, as they were released from confinement in Louisville just weeks later, in late November and arrived back home on the 27th. They were arrested yet again in the following year.

General Ormsby Mitchel

On October 5, the U.S. Deputy Marshall, also under orders from General Mitchel, arrested well-known lawyer and future judge James R. Hallam, sending him to military headquarters in Cincinnati, accused of “sympathizing with the Rebels.” This was a reasonable assumption since it was no secret that he had two sons in the Confederate army, but he denied the charge, even as one newspaper labelled him “an active and influential Secessionist in Newport,” while another tabbed him “a political trickster.” He was released on December 4 per an order from General Don Carlos Buell and returned to his work as a lawyer in Newport. (He was arrested again on July 18, 1862, and sent to Camp Chase in Columbus, Ohio.)

As the cases of Helm, Maddox, and Hallam demonstrate, these late 1861 arrests foreshadowed what was to come in 1862.

In the middle of that new year, with the conflict a year old, growing more violent, and without an end in sight, political arrests resumed in Campbell County. Union authorities, firmly in political and military control of the county, again sought to clear it of suspected Rebels, this time much more aggressively.

New Provost Marshal Gassaway and his staff resolutely arrested dozens of men from around the county - north, middle, and south - in a local “reign of terror” over the next few weeks, particularly from July 18th to the 20th. Many of these detainees ended up at Camp Chase, where they stayed until they took the Oath of Allegiance and were released. 

James Smith Digby, a county native and lifelong resident, was among the men snared in this roundup, taken  on July 19. His records, though not large in number, describe in detail the specific cause of his detention, leaving his arrest as the most well-documented in the county.

Two participants in the fracas left virtually identical accounts of what happened.

In his telling of the encounter, John G Youtsey declared that he was

acquainted with James Digby the prisoner arrested by the Provost Marshall in this county. In the month of May last I met him on the Alexandria Pike about 8 miles from Newport. He came down the road in company with Frank Harrison. He was hurrahing for Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy. I told him to shut up. He then used some very indecent language, swore he could whip any damn blue bellied Lincolnite. I showed fight, he got off of his horse and took off his coat and unbuttoned his vest and exhibited a Bowie Knife & pistol on his belt. The young man Harrison interfered and took him away. Since then I have been informed by my neighbors that he threated to shoot me and states that if I had advanced on him that day he would have shot me."

The other version is from John L Harrison. Youtsey may have misremembered his name as Frank in the previous recounting, but this second man also stated that he knew the detainee, and that

 in April or May last I was in company with James Digby. He had been drinking and was on his way home down the Alexandria Pike at Youtsey Place. He hurrahed for Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy. Youtsey told him to shut his mouth. He then used insulting language to Youtsey. Youtsey told him he could come and kick him. He got off of his horse and took off his coat and was preparing to fight. He had a dirk knife on his waist belt. I then took him away and we went home. 

(The threat of violence may not have been an empty one, as in July of 1860, Digby, a Stephen Douglas supporter, had a physical altercation with Dr. John Q. A. Foster (the same from part one of this story) who favored John Bell. Digby “beat him so severely that he is now confined to his bed”).

Provost Marshal Gassaway took these statements as evidence to confirm Digby's alleged disloyalty.

Digby was far from alone. Other men around the county had suffered the same indignity in what might be termed the “Summer of Gassaway.” A story in late July reported that Thomas Jones and thirty-seven other unnamed “Newport and Campbell county Rebels” had been sent to Camp Chase “under a strong guard.” (As in Digby’s story, some of these cases included statements from loyal citizens supporters questioning the fidelity of the suspects.) 

Camp Chase

A few days following his arrest, Digby was among 93 Kentucky men (an amazing 27, or 29%, from Campbell County) at that Ohio facility who signed a letter addressed to Kentucky Governor Beriah Maggofin asserting that “We were brought here by the force of arms, against our will and consent, in violation of the laws of Kentucky and the laws of the United States.”

They virtually begged Maggofin to inform the state legislature of their status so that it could do something for their benefit. They insisted they were “law-abiding citizens” and repeated that they “had not violated laws” of either Kentucky or “our common country,” and were “confined and restrained of our rights and liberty that we are justly entitled to.”

Just weeks after Gassaway and his men arrested Digby and others now at Camp Chase, General Horatio Wright, now commanding the reorganized Department of the Ohio, removed Gassaway from his role, with the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer of September 14 rejoicing that "justice" had finally taken place. 

This newspaper described Gassaway as the man who has, "by his tyrannical acts, made himself so obnoxious to the citizens of our city" (i.e. Newport), revealing the reputation he had quickly earned in his short time in office, which lasted only from June until mid-September. 

On November 4, Digby took the Oath of Allegiance, pledging to give no aid to “the so-called Confederate States,” and to support the Unites States’ Constitution and government. He agreed to a $500 bond as a guarantee he would abide by the terms of his release. Violation of these conditions could theoretically result in his execution.

At the time he regained his freedom, the 33-year-old James stood 5 feet 8 inches tall, with brown eyes, dark hair, and sandy-tinted whiskers to go with his light complexion. Upon his release, he returned to Campbell County where he spent the test of his days, mostly in Cold Spring, a Democrat in politics and a collector and farmer in his work life.

In June of 1863, he was one of more than a dozen men who filed lawsuits in the Campbell County Circuit Court against “various parties” on allegations of “false imprisonment in Camp Chase.” Each plaintiff sought $50,000 in damages.

Gassaway and other Union men were the defendants in these suits, informally called the “Camp Chase cases.” They spent years in the legal system before the courts dismissed them on a technicality in December 1866.

James Digby lived out his life and passed away at his Cold Spring home on July 15, 1904. His obituary noted that he was “at one time prominent in Campbell County politics.”

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After the rash of apprehensions in 1861 and 1862, and the local scare known as the “Siege of Cincinnati,” in September 1862, Campbell County began to settle down. No more mass arrests occurred, though other occasional reminders of civil war still took place, such as the 1863 execution at Johnson’s Island, Ohio of two county residents convicted of being spies, some horse-stealing in 1864, and other smaller incidents.

Even as those arrests linked Campbell County to similar happenings around the state, a pair of national elections showed one way the county diverged from the state's direction.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln received 314 votes, or 11.85% of the 2,648 ballots cast in Campbell County, the highest raw number among any of the state’s counties, several of which tallied zero votes for him. (Neighboring Kenton County offered Lincoln another 267 votes.) The Republican had received only 1,364 votes statewide, but Campbell County gave him an eye-opening 23% of those, even as Lincoln finished fourth and last in the county. (John Bell won the state, but Stephen Douglas took Campbell County.)

In Lincoln’s second run for President in 1864, Democrat George McClellan easily won the state, but Campbell County was one of 25 Kentucky counties (out of 101 reporting results) that Lincoln took, as he received 27,787 votes statewide, a significant increase from 1860. 1,504 (about 5%) of those votes came from Campbell County, 53.9% of the county’s 2,790 ballots. Lincoln was the choice of more voters in the county in 1864 than in the entire state in 1860 (though having only two candidates instead of four certainly helped that.)

The Kentucky Historical Society noted: “Whether the Lincoln vote signified Unconditional Unionism or traditional Whig nationalism, this strain of Kentucky politics would prove short-lived.” That showed in the 1868 Presidential contest, when Democrat Horatio Seymour won both the state and Campbell County over General U.S. Grant. Kentucky again had bucked the national trend, as Grant won the national balloting

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In spite of the abolition controversies five years earlier, the adoption of emancipation as a war aim, the arming of African American troops, and the struggles of the 1864 military campaigns, all of which could have angered or concerned residents, the overall progress of the war was satisfactory enough for most 1864 voters in Campbell County to support the existing administration instead of “swapping horses while crossing a stream,” as Lincoln had famously advised against doing.

Unlike so many areas throughout the nation, no major battles or bloodshed marred the county’s land during these four years, but the difficult and violent conflict retained an inescapable presence in the county. The experiences of James Digby and dozens more like him show how the long arm of war reached beyond combat and into everyday civilian life, including in Campbell County, Kentucky.