Morton explained to Wallace that he had organized five regiments for which he needed colonels and in this emergency he asked several generals to accept these commands. three others refused; but Wallace, though a major general, agreed to take the provisional rank of colonel and command the 66th Indiana. To get back into the field, he was ready to do anything–provided Morton would take Stanton and General-in-Chief Halleck off his back during the emergency.

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The same day Wallace took a train to Jeffersonville, where the 66th was in camp, and reported to Brigadier General Jeremiah T. Boyle, who was dumbfounded at having a major general who ranked him turn up to serve under his command. Wallace explained that he was a volunteer on special business. Boyle then ordered him to proceed with his regiment to Lexington, Kentucky and to take command of the forces there–six infantry regiments, four of them from Indiana. Shortly after his arrival, he received another order from Boyle, explaining Kirby Smith’s march and ordering Wallace to march south to Cumberland Gap, to relieve the Union Brigadier General George W. Morgan there.

Wallace questioned the soundness of this order, considering that he men would simply put a strain on Morgan’s limited provisions and that the proper position was a defensive one. In fact, Kirby Smith had bypassed Morgan; leaving about 9,000 men before Cumberland Gap to contain the equal number of Union forces holding it, he set out from Barbourville on August 25, and led his ragged troops north through the rough terrain of the Cumberland Mountains. Badly outnumbered by Smith’s 21,000 men. Wallace saw that the place to hold the Confederates was at the Kentucky River, about fifteen miles below Lexington. Accordingly he confiscated all boats and closed the river locks to flood the fords. Flanked by limestone cliffs, near the site where Daniel Boone had built Fort Boonesboro in “the Dark and Bloody Ground,” the river offered Wallace a natural defense that could prove deadly to the attackers.

Meanwhile, Wallace obtained four guns from Cincinnati, procured horses and harness for them, located an artilleryman, a and thus had a battery. When word came that Kirby Smith was proceeding north to London, en route to Lexington and the cities beyond it, loyal Kentuckians rallied to Wallace’s support, including that fiery old abolitionist and bowie knife expert, Cassius Marcellus Clay of White Hall. Even so, Wallace saw that his best strategy was to avoid having his raw regiments fight against Kirby Smith’s veterans’ if his forces were lost, Cincinnati would fall.

Word then came that Colonel Leonidas Metcalfe’s regiment had been defeated by Kirby Smith’s advance force under Colonel John S. Scott at Big Hill near Berea and that Scott, with about 1,200 men, was advancing on Richmond, a nondescript town on the edge of the Bluegrass, just twenty-five miles away. Here Wallace thought , he had an opportunity; by sending one of his regiments on a night march from Nicholasville to Scott’s rear and then advancing himself from Lexington, Wallace could crush Scott before the main Confederate force came up and thus avoid harassment by Scott as he himself retreated to Cincinnati. But just as Wallace’s column was departing, four generals arrived; and one of them, William Nelson, handed Wallace a dispatch from Buell placing Nelson in command over Wallace and all the troops at Lexington. Six feet, 4 inches tall and weighing 300 pounds, Nelson was notoriously “ardent, loud-mouthed, and violent.” He rejected the operation against Scott; and Wallace, deprived of his role, took the train to Cincinnati.

On his second day there, while he was casting about for some way to get back into active duty, he received an urgent telegram from General Horatio G. Wright, commander of the Ohio military department, ordering him to return immediately to Lexington. Nelson had been disastrously defeated. Instead of withdrawing behind the Kentucky River, where he might have made an effective stand, he had loitered south of the river, and Kirby Smith caught him. Arriving at Richmond to find his troops already in a disorganized rut after preliminary skirmishing, Nelson rallied them in the town cemetery where, despite the cover offered by tombstones, they failed to hold. His 6,500 raw recruits were overwhelmed, and Smith took some 4,000 prisoners. With the Union army virtually destroyed, Nelson’s remnants became fugitives. (He himself was shot to death a month later in the lobby of a Louisville hotel.)

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