That night Blanchard, wearing Moses Buck’s hat with a bloody bullet hole in it, moved into a field overgrown with weeds and stayed there most of the next day, until he was discovered by a man working in a cotton field. The wounded soldier was taken to the home of Joseph Hassell, where he remained until December 6. Everyone seemed very kind, but he soon learned that the bushwhackers ‘intended to wait until Christmas, when they were going to kill me, amid great carnival.’

Unwilling to passively submit to such a fate, Blanchard paid a black man to take him to Centerville, where he met James Carr, who let him ride a horse to within 14 miles of Columbia. He stayed with Andrew Crawford, a Union man, for a week, then moved eight more miles to the home of Daniel McKenon, whose sons finally escorted Blanchard into the Federal lines on December 27.

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The sergeant was admitted to a hospital in Columbia, where he was visited by officers who heard his terrible story. Lieutenant B.F. Travis remembered:

He seemed very much elated at his convalescence and thought it a joke that a funeral had been held to his memory at home. This, he concluded, would have to be cancelled when he should return home. But the poor fellow’s expectations were not to be realized. The time for the second and real funeral soon came. Not long afterward, he sickened with the smallpox and died on January 23d.

Blanchard was buried in the Nashville National Cemetery, but fortunately his story of the murders was written down by Lieutenant L.C. Hill, who considered the sergeant’s statement to be ‘a pretty full exposure of the devilish brutality of the guerrilla mode of warfare.’ Blanchard’s narrative, combined with those of Crouse and Grandstaff, now furnishes a damning indictment of Lieutenant Brownlee Cross and the men of Captain Albert Cross’ guerrilla band.

Despite their heinous deeds, a combination of circumstances guaranteed that there would be no justice for the killers. Soldiers from General Cooper’s brigade would undoubtedly have sought retribution, but they marched 15 miles beyond Centerville on the day after the murders, taking them too far from the bloody scene to avenge their comrades. The brigade never returned to Hickman County. Quick burial of the bodies in a desolate ravine ensured that evidence of the murders had been effectively hidden from future investigators. There is no record to indicate that any Federal authorities sought to bring the guilty parties to trial for these barbarous killings. In fact, other than Brownlee Cross and John and Green Hammonds, the other participants were never identified. Unfortunately, the battles of Franklin and Nashville followed so quickly after the murders, that the deaths of 17 victims seemed to pale by comparison and they were quickly forgotten.

Ethelbert Crouse and Lemuel Grandstaff remained devoted friends, and the memory of their experiences on that terrible night in 1864 never faded. Forty years later, they told their story to W. Henry Sheak, who published it in McClure’s magazine under the title ‘Out of the Jaws of Death.’

Sheak concluded his article with the statement, ‘In their declining years they meet and hold a reunion annually on the 27th of November.’ Their last reunion was held in 1913.

Lemuel Grandstaff died on March 21, 1914, and was buried in Maplewood Cemetery in Decatur, Ind. Ethelbert Crouse, who lived until June 15, 1931, was laid to rest in Riverside Cemetery in Antwerp, Ohio.

By some quirk of fate, those two men had lived through what Sheak called ‘one of the most wonderful experiences in all human history.’ Perhaps it was the rainy darkness, perhaps it was carelessness of their executioners, perhaps it was divine intervention, but these two friends survived to tell the world their story of murder in the Tennessee woods.

This article was written by Alan D. Gaff and originally appeared in the December 2004 issue of Civil War Times magazine.

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