Hardin Helm was born in Bardstown, Kentucky, in 1831, the son of John L. Helm, governor of Kentucky in 1850-51 and
1867. He came into Abraham Lincoln’s Kentucky
family circle when he married Emilie Todd, Mary Lincoln’s half sister, in 1856.
Hardin Helm had attended the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point and graduated ninth in his class in 1851. After serving briefly on the Texas frontier before illness forced his resignation from
the army, he studied law and entered practice in Elizabethtown before being elected to the
Kentucky House of Representatives in 1855.
A year before the Civil War started, he became an assistant inspector
general in the Kentucky State Guard.
Civil War began, President Lincoln offered his brother-in-law a commission as
paymaster in the Union army. He turned
down the offer and helped recruit the First Kentucky Cavalry Regiment for the
Confederate army. Commissioned a
colonel, Helm quickly rose in rank when he was promoted to brigadier general
after the battle of Shiloh and served under fellow Kentuckian General John C.
Breckinridge in Mississippi and Louisiana. Eventually, General Helm became commander of
the First Kentucky Infantry Brigade (the “Orphan Brigade”) and was killed at
the battle of Chickamauga in northern Georgia on
September 20, 1863. When President
Lincoln learned of his brother-in-law’s death in battle, he was deeply moved
and told one member of his cabinet that he felt like David in the Bible when he
learned that his son Absalom had been killed.
of Benjamin Hardin Helm
Kentucky Historical Society Collections