Kincaid himself came to agree. As 1864 wore on, he realized his men were old, sick, boisterous, and not battle-tested. The desire to command had gone out of him. His disenchantment apparently had begun even before he reached Rock Island. He had taken long leaves of absence while his troops were in St. Louis and Alton–20 days in April 1863, 25 in August, and another 20 in September. And while he remained with the regiment for most of its stay at Rock Island, he was no longer the hydrant-pumping fiend of a year before. He did nothing more outrageous than pester the quartermaster for horses for him and his field officers.

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If Kincaid had grown soft, however, his officers had grown harsher. Two officers–identified in reports only as Captain Hogendoble and Lieutenant Graham–were especially noxious to the prisoners. Hogendoble, struck by a foul ball from a prisoners’ baseball game, approached the batter, drew his pistol, and threatened to “blow the d—-d rebel’s brains out.” Graham used his side arm more profitably. He often played cards with the prisoners, and if he lost he would draw his pistol, accuse them of cheating, and keep the money anyway.

After several months at the prison, the 37th left Rock Island for an assignment in Tennessee. Johnson received a 100-day regiment of half-trained boys as replacement guards. Even these youths, he believed, would be an improvement over the Greybeards. A prisoner put it more succinctly in his diary: “The Greybeards are ordered to Memphis. What for?”

What for, of course, was more guard duty, this time on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. And on July 5, 1864, a few of the Greybeards found what their colonel had been dreaming of since 1862: combat. While atop a train bound for La Grange, Tennessee, a detachment of Greybeards received and returned the fire of a gang of bushwhackers. Four of the Iowans were wounded, two mortally. Kincaid insisted that his men did the enemy at least equal damage, although he neglected to report how he determined this from the top of a moving train.

This was the only engagement the 37th would ever see. In August the regiment was sent east to Camp Morton in Indianapolis. There, the 37th was broken into two detachments; five companies stayed put while the other five continued east to Ohio, where they were parceled out among several garrisons–notably Camps Chase, Gallipolis, and Cincinnati.

Kincaid ended up in Cincinnati. Now he commanded not even a regiment of old men, but just a few companies. He passed the remainder of the war quietly, his ego deflated and the fire and defiance wrung completely out of him. Even though the establishment of the 37th had indeed prompted an increase in enlistments in Iowa, Kincaid considered his “children” nothing but a disappointment. When the “decrepit old men” were gathered in May 1865 and sent back to Rock Island to be mustered out, Kincaid could not bear to watch. As these “unpromising subjects” stood in the ranks as soldiers for the final time, Colonel Kincaid was not with them–he was once again on leave.

A lifelong student of the Civil War, Illinois native Benton McAdams is working on books about Rock Island Prison and the 12th Illinois Infantry. This is his first article for Civil War Times.

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