Commentary: Bull Nelson would have checked three of Hegseth’s four boxes

Holy Warrior Pete Hegseth has declared holy war on “fatties, trannies, beardos” and “weirdos” in the military.

History, which I taught in a community college for two dozen years, instructs that in combat, corpulence and competence are not mutually exclusive.

From William the Conqueror to Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, more than a few famous battle captains have been on the stout side.

Famous at least in his native Kentucky, rotund Gen. William “Bull” Nelson was a brave soldier best known for playing an outsized role in keeping the commonwealth out of the Confederacy.

Bull would have checked three of the defense secretary’s four boxes. He was a bearded 6-4 (some sources say 6-2), 300-pounder (body mass index 37, obese).

The circumstances of his death were weird. Another Yankee general shot Nelson in a popular Louisville hotel.

Bull’s personality was weirder. The New York Herald found him “rough in manners, a stern disciplinarian, quick and decided in all of his actions, no respecter of persons, trampling upon even his dearest friends when they stood in the path of his duty; but kind at heart, tender to his men in suffering, a good scholar and a hard student.”

Born in Maysville in 1824, Nelson was a sailor before he was a soldier. He graduated from the Naval Academy, went to sea and fought in the Mexican- American War.

With the Civil War looming, he uniquely offered his services to President Lincoln. On March 6th, 1861, two days after Lincoln’s inauguration, the burly Bull went to the White House and supposedly told the president, “Here I am; if you don’t like me, that’s the worse, for you.”

In May, after America’s most lethal conflict started, Lincoln tapped Nelson for a secret mission to help keep their native state under the Stars and Stripes.

Kentucky, a border slave state where loyalties were divided, had declared itself neutral, a stance most citizens supported and the pro-Union party accepted for the time being.

The Unionists worried that the well-armed, equipped and trained State Guard, which leaned steeply Southern, might try to force Kentucky out of the Union at gunpoint. Pro-Union Home Guard companies were being organized statewide, but they needed firepower to check the State Guard.

Lincoln had Nelson oversee the secret shipment of 5,000 military rifles to the Home Guards. In the summer, most of the State Guards joined the rebel army, and possible civil war in the state was averted.

After the state forthrightly declared for the Union in September, Nelson became an Army brigadier general of volunteers. In the first half of 1862, he fought in the battles of Shiloh, Tenn., and Corinth, Miss. In late summer, he was wounded in action helping defend central Kentucky from invading Confederate armies.

With the enemy threatening Louisville, Nelson, who had been promoted to major general of volunteers, took command in the city and vigorously prepared its defenses. He ordered regular Army Brig. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis, a Hoosier, to organize the Home Guards. Davis disliked the assignment and detested his assigner, Robert Emmett McDowell wrote in “City of Conflict: Louisville in the Civil War 1861-1865.”

On Sept. 22, the generals clashed at the old Galt House, Nelson’s headquarters.

Nelson angrily rebuked Davis for not knowing the precise number of companies he had organized. He relieved Davis on the spot and banished him to Cincinnati.

Davis left but was back in the Falls City on Sept. 28 with Indiana Gov. Oliver Perry Morton in tow. The Republican Party bigwig also hated Nelson.

Davis confronted Nelson at the Galt House around 8 a.m. on the 29th. He charged Bull “with having insulted him at their last meeting and demanded satisfaction,” McDowell wrote. “Go away, you damned puppy; I don’t want anything to do with you!” Bull roared, according to McDowell.

The 5-9, 125 pound Davis wadded up a hotel registration card and threw it at Nelson, hitting him in the face. Nelson delivered a backhanded slap to the side of Davis’ head, glared at Morton and asked, “Did you come here to see me insulted?” The governor meekly replied in the negative.

Nelson then decamped for the stairs, evidently intent on seeing Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, the Army of Ohio’s commander, in his second-floor headquarters, McDowell wrote.

Davis borrowed a pistol from Louisville lawyer Thomas W. Gibson, who had lived in Indiana, and shot Nelson in the chest at close range. Bull might be Hegeseth’s idea of a “fatty.” But Neldon mustered “the strength, the incredible vitality, to walk up the stairs and reach the upper hall before he toppled and fell,” wrote McDowell.

The general was borne to the closest room and laid on a mattress which had been placed on the floor. He entreated Silas F. Miller, the hotel proprietor, to summon a clergyman.” I wish to be baptized,” Bull pleaded. “I have been basely murdered.”

An Episcopal pastor apparently arrived in time to grant the general’s dying wish. His life ebbed away within the hour, McDowell wrote. Nelson was first buried in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery, but his remains were reinterred in the Maysville Cemetery.

McDowell suggested that “in a way, though, the aftermath of the affair was more shocking than the assassination….nothing was done; no court was appointed. General Davis was never brought to trial.” Because the brass hats desperately needed veteran combat commanders like Davis, they found it easier to buy his questionable claim of self-defense. (Davis was indicted for manslaughter in Jefferson Circuit Court but was never tried.) He returned to duty, survived the war and died in 1879 at age 51.

Opened in 1863, Camp Nelson, now a national monument in Jessamine County, was named for Bull. The camp evolved into the largest recruiting station for Black troops in Kentucky and was also a refuge for the soldiers’ families who, too, were escaping enslavement.

There was yet another weird twist to Nelson’s demise. “A garbled version of the murder spread like wildfire, carrying consternation in its wake,” McDowell explained. “For a while it was actually thought that Jefferson Davis, President of Confederacy, had slipped into Louisville and murdered Nelson!”

Courtesy of Kentucky Lantern