Retaliation  "The Price Of Life"

While on a recruiting mission in Kentucky in the fall of 1864, Confederate cavalrymen Charlton G. Duke, his brother John C. Duke, and their cousin Capt. Lindsay Buckner were captured by Union soldiers and imprisoned at Louisville in a prison called the "slaughter pen". Charlton Duke recounted the events that followed:
 

We had been there some three or four weeks. We were coolly informed one morning that Captain Lindsay Buckner, B.P. Wallace, John Duke, and I would be shot the following day by order of General Burbridge in retaliation for a mail carrier who had been killed by a band of guerrillas, supposed to be the Sue Mundy gang.

We were greatly surprised the next morning when several nicely dressed men in blue uniforms, one of whom we recognized as Mr. Ed Baker, from our home at Princeton, KY, came into the prison. He expressed pleasure at seeing me and my brother John, and informed us that it was his great happiness to convey to us the good news that through his influence and that of another prominent Union man of Princeton, General Burbridge had been persuaded to countermand the order for our execution, and that we could have our choice of being sent to a Northern prison or take an oath of allegiance and return home. We thanked him and said we would go to prison.

Captain Lirly, Lieutenant Blincoe, and an old man named Halley were selected in our stead. We little supposed that the men who had interfered in our behalf were actuated by any but but kindly motives in securing our release from death, but soon found that these expressions of friendship had cost our mother $2,000 in cash, which she promptly forwarded to Louisville. Our friend Wallace was also ransomed by his friends, and had Captain Buckner's brother received in time the letter written him, his terrible fate would have been averted... In the afternoon of the next day the four men mentioned were placed in irons and taken out on the Jeffersontown road and shot to death.

Fascinating Fact:  Charlton Duke spent the rest of the war in Johnson's Island Prison; his brother John ended the war at Camp Douglas Prison.


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