Irish Shanty

The lawyer who found this case wanting had sat in Buchanan's cabinet. Joseph Holt, born in Breckinridge County, Kentucky, in 1807, practiced law in Kentucky and Mississippi before serving as patent commissioner, Postmaster General and, in the last weeks of that administration, Secretary of War, urging Buchanan to oppose secession. On September 3, 1862, Lincoln made him the Army's first Judge Advocate General, and he oversaw the widening use of military law to try civilians, the system that tried the Yellow Creek men. In 1865 he prosecuted the Lincoln assassination conspirators, and he resigned in 1875.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Johnsonville State Historic Park — 25 mi
  A Tennessee River park on the site of a Union supply depot shelled in November 1864 and of the town later drowned by Kentucky Lake, with earthworks, a railroad bed and an African American cemetery.

More markers nearby

• Camp Gillem (Gillem Station) — steps away
• Ruskin Cave — 4.8 mi
• James Worley — 4.9 mi
• Frank Goad Clement — 7.2 mi