On June 23rd General Lee sent word to Captain Benjamin Farinholt, who commanded a battalion of reserves charged with defending the bridge, warning him that the Federals were about to come down hard on him, and ordering him to prevent the bridge from being destroyed. If the Union troops were able to get to the bridge even briefly, they would pour oil on its wooden structure and torch it.
Captain Farinholt’s situation was dire. He commanded a force of fewer than 300 soldiers, and had only six artillery pieces with which to confront the sixteen being fielded by the Northern cavalry.
That night he sent word out to the surrounding communities, asking for volunteers to help defend the bridge. Military-age men had already been siphoned off by conscription, so the captain was drawing on teenage boys and men over 45 to form hastily-assembled militias. In popular accounts written after the war they were referred to as the “Brigade of Old Men and Young Boys”.
The new arrivals were also augmented by 150 Confederate regulars from detachments stationed around the region. With the regulars added to the old men and boys, Captain Farinholt was able to deploy a force of 938 men — less than 20% of the size of the cavalry units bearing down on him.”
The following is a four-part series on the life of Major General Patrick Cleburne, C.S.A. It derives heavily from two sources, “Cleburne and His Command,” by Captain Irving A. Buck, C.S.A., (1908), and “Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne & the Civil War,” by Professor Craig L. Symonds, Lieutenant U.S.N.R., (1997). For the sake of brevity in a blog article, citations will refer to last name and page reference.
“The Empire is a slow and methodical killer, especially for our people. It has slowly bled us since 1861. If it does not destroy our bodies, on foreign battlefields for vain glory and gold, as in the case of my father, it will most certainly destroy our reputations, as it has the great men of Dixie, such as John C. Calhoun. However, we are getting wiser, no longer enjoining our sons in large numbers as in times past, no longer the janissary class of this dying empire. We are remembering our heroes, as these two great South Carolinians, and pursuing a path that will lead us into the future, unashamed and vigilant to see our ancestors’ vision of a free and independent Dixie accomplished, in a glorious and victorious age!”
“If you are younger than a Boomer, you have spent much of your life under only one pillar of the Great Compromise. Although we lost home rule in 1965, we were able to keep our identity. The reasoning for this was largely two-fold, the destruction of Southern identity was always going to be more difficult than ending home rule. The fact that they needed us to fight their wars further protected the second pillar of the Great Compromise. But now, those days are over, they really don’t think they need the Southern janissaries anymore.
Thankfully, they appear to have gotten their wish. Southerners no longer have a desire to fight for a nation that hates them. The Empire is about to learn the hard way, in a war with China or Russia, why Dixie is the backbone of the American military.
They are about to learn why they need us, and we are about to learn why we don’t need them.”
The Tactical Hermit 
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