Revenge fueled one-man war

Tom McKenney spent 15 years researching his book about Hinson.

Sometimes the truest stories sound the most like fiction.

Today, visitors to Nashville’s Civil War heritage site at Fort Negley will learn the story of Jack Hinson, a man of peace provoked into a one-man war against an entire army.

“History is cruel in a lot of ways,” said Larry Carter, one of the re-enactors who will be at the fort this weekend to help breathe life back into a story that history had largely forgotten.

In 1862, after Union troops summarily executed and mutilated two of his sons, Hinson took to the hills and riverbanks of Stewart County, Tenn., and single-handedly terrorized the federal occupation forces in Western Tennessee and Kentucky.

Hinson haunted what is now known as Land Between the Lakes with a sniper rifle. By the time he came out of the woods at the end of the war, the rifle was covered with notches, each marking a kill, and at least 100 Union soldiers and sailors were dead.

A Civil War cannon at Fort Donelson National Battlefield in Dover, Tenn., is aimed down the Cumberland River near the area where Jack Hinson fought his one-man war against Union troops he blamed for killing two of his sons.

Author and retired Marine Lt. Col. Tom McKenney spent 15 years researching Hinson’s story. He will be at Fort Negley at 2 p.m. today to sign copies of his book, Jack Hinson’s One-Man War.

The story begins peacefully enough. Hinson was a prosperous farmer and father of 10 from Stewart County, some 80 miles northwest of Nashville.

Pushing 60 when the war started, Hinson opposed secession and remained friendly to both the Confederate forces in the area and Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who was in charge of Union troops at the battle of Fort Donelson.

That peace shattered in 1862. Two of Hinson’s sons, 22-year-old George and 17-year-old John, were hunting near the family’s sprawling property when they ran into a patrol from the Union’s Fifth Iowa Cavalry Regiment.

The only photograph known to exist of Jack Hinson was taken late in his life. He killed at least 100 Union soldiers and sailors in the Civil War. The only photograph known to exist of Jack Hinson was taken late in his life. He killed at least 100 Union soldiers and sailors in the Civil War.

Mistaking the boys for bushwhackers, the soldiers killed them, dragged their bodies behind the horses, then decapitated the young men and hung their heads on the gateposts of the family farm, in full view of their horrified parents and siblings.

What happened next reads like the stuff of legends or Mel Gibson movies.

Hinson buried his boys. Then he paid a call on the local gunsmith, who crafted a .50-caliber, 18-pound monster of a sniper rifle, accurate up to 500 yards. Hinson’s war was about to begin.

The first soldiers killed by that rifle were the lieutenant who ordered his sons’ execution and the sergeant who hung their heads on the fencepost. For the rest of the war, he took aim at Iowa cavalry at every opportunity.

“He was hell-bent for leather … and he was one heck of a shot,” said Carter, camp adjutant for the Sons of Confederate Veterans Col. Randal W. McGavock Camp #1713.

“They sent 500 men out looking for him at one point, but they never found him.”

Hinson was a man the federal troops never should have crossed. From the cliffs high above the Twin Rivers, the Cumberland and the Tennessee, he was able to pick off officers, his preferred targets, and hit the Union gunboats and re-supply vessels that plied the river.

He may be the only single gunman in history who forced an armed gunship to surrender.

Author Tom McKenney holds the .50-caliber rifle Hinson had made before launching his one-man war.

Hinson slips away

The Union sent infantry and cavalry from nine regiments after Hinson and detailed an entire amphibious task force of Marines to try to catch him.

The old man evaded them all.

But Hinson paid a heavy price for his campaign.

In the winter of 1863, federal troops torched his home — driving the family out into the cold. Two of his young children died shortly afterward.

By the end of the war, Jack Hinson would lose seven of his 10 children. More than anything else, Hinson’s story shows the terrible toll war can
take on civilians and on families.

Hinson survived the war. Never caught or prosecuted for his deeds, he hung up his gun, dying in 1874.

Visitors to Fort Negley will get a chance to meet McKenney, a retired infantry officer who served in Korea and Vietnam. Volunteers from the Randal McGavock Camp will do troop drills and other re-enactments from the Civil War era.

Hinson’s sniper rifle will be on display.

[Via  Tennessean.com]