Brigadier General James Edward Rains,
P.A.C.S.
Brigadier-General James Edward Rains, one of the many civilians who rose
to high military command during the great war between the States, was
born in Nashville, Tenn., in April 1833. He was graduated at Yale in 1854,
and then studied law. He became city attorney at Nashville in 1858, and
attorney-general for his judicial district in 1860. In politics he was a Whig,
and was for some time editor of the Daily Republican Banner.
When the summons to war came, he enlisted in the Confederate army as
a private, but was elected colonel of the Eleventh Tennessee infantry and
commissioned May 10, 1861. The greater part of his service was in east
Tennessee. During the winter of 1861-62 he commanded the garrison at
Cumberland Gap. This position he held as long as it was possible to do so,
repulsing several attempts of the enemy upon his lines. It was not until the
18th of June, 1862, that the Federals turned his position and rendered it
untenable. Had this occurred earlier, east Tennessee would have been
completely lost to the Confederates in 1862. But the forces which Kirby
Smith was now gathering about Knoxville, in addition to those in the
neighborhood of Cumberland Gap, made the Union occupation of that post
almost a barren victory. When, in August, Smith advanced into Kentucky,
he left Gen. Carter L. Stevenson with a strong division to operate against
the Union general Morgan, who was holding the gap with about 9,000 men.
Colonel Rains commanded a brigade in Stevenson's division, and so efficient
was his work that his name frequently appeared in both the Confederate
and Union reports. Kirby Smith's success in Kentucky by the Confederates,
at last forced the Union commander to abandon Cumberland Gap and retreat
through eastern Kentucky to the Ohio river. The efficient service rendered
by Colonel Rains in all these movements was rewarded by a brigadier
general's commission, November 4, 1862. When Bragg was concentrating
his army at Murfreesboro (November, 1862), after the return from the
Kentucky campaign, the brigade of General Rains, composed of Stovall's
and J. T. Smith's Georgia battalions, R. B. Vance's North Carolina
regimentand the Eleventh Tennessee under Colonel Gordon, was ordered to
that point and assigned to the division of General McCown, serving in Hardee's corps.
In the brilliant charges made by this corps in the battle of December 31,
1862, by which the whole Federal right was routed and bent back upon the
center, with immense loss in killed, wounded, prisoners and guns,
McCown's division bore an illustrious part. But, as in all great battles is to
be expected, the division lost many brave men and gallant officers. Among
the killed was Brigadier-General Rains, who fell shot through the heart as he
was advancing with his men against a Federal battery. he left to his family,
to his native State and to the South the precious legacy of a noble name.
Source: Evans, Clement, ed. Confederate Military History, Vol.
VIII, Confederate Publishing Company, Atlanta, GA, 1899
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