Sergeant Tom Quirk could not bear the thought of Black Bess being left behind for some Federal soldier to capture. He jumped into a canoe and started paddling back, intending to bring her over by swimming, but he was scarcely halfway across the Cumberland when Federal pursuers appeared on the opposite ferry landing and began peppering bullets toward his frail craft. Quirk reluctantly turned about and rejoined his comrades.*
There in the woods north of the river was all that remained of Morgan’s gay raiders of yesterday—scarcely a squad of unhorsed cavalrymen, safe only temporarily in a country that seemed to be swarming with blue-coated enemies.
And where were the others? Several were casualties back in Lebanon. Dead was Captain A.C. Brown of Company D, and six or seven enlisted men, including the first to die, Pleasant Whitlow. Almost half of the original raiding force had been captured, including Lieutenant Colonel Wood, three captains, and four lieutenants. The remainder were scattered in the forests between Lebanon and the Cumberland.
Among the captured enlisted men were Corporal Tom Logwood and Sergeant William Jones, two of the original five who had driven the wagonload of rifles out of Lexington on that fateful night back in September.
*The ultimate fate of Black Bess was never known. It was said that she was used for a time by General Dumont, then sold to a civilian who traveled around the country exhibiting her for an admission fee of twenty-five cents. After the war, her original owner, Warren Viley, published advertisements offering a large sum of money to anyone giving information of Black Bess’ whereabouts, but to no avail.
3
With the handful of men who had crossed the ferry at Rome, Colonel Morgan moved on toward Carthage, impressing horses along the way until all were mounted again. On May 6, after eluding Federal patrols, they reached Sparta at the foot of the Cumberland plateau and went into camp. Afterward some of the boys told of seeing their commander in tears as the full realization of the disaster affected him. Events had moved full circle; from a handful of loyal Lexington Rifles he had built a dauntless cavalry squadron, the beginnings of a regiment. But now all was swept away in one rainy night. In months to come the boys would refer wryly to the debacle as the “Lebanon Races,” but only among themselves; they never discussed Lebanon with outsiders.
During the following three days, however, their spirits began to rise again as several of the “lost” men wandered in to the camp near Sparta. It reminded them of the old days back at Camp Charity, when the arrival of one new recruit warranted a whole series of hearty cheers. They shod their horses, re-equipped as best they could, and grew homesick for Kentucky.
By May 9, there were almost fifty men in camp, a few from B and C companies, most of them from the indestructible A, the elite originals of Woodsonville. Morgan had no difficulty in persuading them they could make their way into Kentucky; more likely it was the boys who persuaded their colonel.
Two days and nights of hard riding brought them into the fringes of their old Green River scouting country—outside Glasgow. John Hines, a native of the town, volunteered to slip into Glasgow and size up their chances for spending the night there. He found the town garrisoned by five hundred Federals.
The boys were disappointed, but Morgan reminded them they had started on this expedition primarily to damage Federal transportation lines north of Nashville. Only ten miles away was the L.&N. Railroad. This would be as good a time as any to strike a blow against the enemy.
Urging their weary mounts into motion once again, they turned northward toward Cave City. At least they could take some comfort from the sensation of being back in Kentucky, although from the signs of enemies on all sides, they realized now that fifty men stood small chance of riding unchallenged all the way to Lexington.
By morning they were outside Cave City, and could see the twin rails of the L.&N. glistening in the sunshine. With five men, Morgan cantered into the village, intending to pose as Federals if Cave City proved to be garrisoned. They found only a peaceful village, a freight train standing on a siding. Morgan took command of the railway station, and sent a man back to bring in the boys waiting in the woods. During the morning they burned the cars and exploded the locomotive of the captured freight train.
About noon they heard a locomotive whistling from the north, and they took quick action to arrange its capture. After filling a cattle guard near the station with upright ties, a detail hurried down the tracks to block the train’s rear in case the engineer tried to reverse his engines when he saw the barricade.
By the time the train appeared in sight, blowing steam and slowing for a stop, everything was in readiness; the men were concealed around the station and along the tracks, weapons prepared for firing. As soon as the wheels ground to a halt, the raiders leaped aboard and found the cars filled with Federal soldiers, some accompanied by their wives.
Among the officers was Major W. A. Coffey, returning from leave to join Old Meat Axe Wolford’s regiment. When he realized what was happening, Coffey swung off the platform of the car in which he was riding, his pair of Colt’s six-shooters blazing. Private Ben Biggstaff, alert for such resistance, sent a rifle bullet whistling past Coffey’s ear, and the Major dropped his pistols. “Stop firing, boys,” he said calmly, “I’m out of ammunition and have concluded to quit.”
As the raiders corralled the Federal officers, they turned them over to Morgan, who was well acquainted with some of them, Major Coffey in particular. The traveling wives gathered around the group, weeping and sobbing frantically, and one begged Morgan to spare her husband’s life. “My dear madam,” the Colonel replied with a bow, “I did not know you had a husband.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “There he is. Don’t kill him for my sake.” “He is no longer my prisoner,” Morgan declared. “He is yours.” As a further favor to the ladies, Morgan gallantly agreed not to burn the train—he knew there was no place for them to rest comfortably in so small a town—but he sent a search detail through the baggage cars, seizing several thousand dollars in Federal funds.
After placing a guard on the train, Morgan took the remainder of the boys to the hotel, inviting Major Coffey along as a guest, and they all dined sumptuously, paying the hotelkeeper in United States greenbacks. During the dinner Morgan wrote out a parole for Major Coffey, a rather special parole binding Coffey to remain a non-combatant until such date as the Major could secure an exchange for Lieutenant Colonel Wood, captured at Lebanon. Morgan felt a special responsibility for Wood, having invited him along on the expedition.
After completing the leisurely dinner, Morgan’s men herded the paroled captives and their ladies back aboard the train, and ordered the engineer to reverse his locomotive and return to Louisville. Before the locomotive was out of sight, the boys were swinging into their saddles, ready to turn back for the Cumberland. Although they were leaving Kentucky earlier than they desired, their morale was restored. Now they could return proudly to the Confederate lines; they had proved that damaging raids could be made by cavalry deep into Federal-held territory. And if fifty men could do what they had done, what might an entire regiment accomplish? John Morgan was determined to return to Confederate Army headquarters, and recruit such a regiment.
They drifted down through the hills toward Burkesville, avoiding main roads, forded the Cumberland the next day, and after two or three days of easy marching arrived at Chattanooga, which would soon become an assembly point for General Braxton Bragg’s new Army of Tennessee.
4
About the time that Morgan’s small raiding party was leaving Cave City, forty-one young men of the Bluegrass were gathering secretly some 125 miles to the northeast, just outside Lexington. For weeks they had been planning to slip away from under the watchful eyes of Federal patrols and march south, hoping to find John Morgan and join his cavalry squadron. Now at last, all was ready; the night of departure had come.
Leader of this group was John B. Castleman, who had been a corporal in the Lexington Chasseurs, rivals of Morgan’s Lexi
ngton Rifles. A number of the Chasseurs had followed their commander, Sanders Bruce, into the Union Army. John Castleman, however, had slipped away to Bowling Green in October, 1861, and after his enlistment in the Confederate Army had returned to Lexington, with Morgan’s approval, for the purpose of raising a company of cavalry.
Castleman’s recruiting went slowly; he had to work secretly and was also handicapped because most of the men of military age in his neighborhood were already enlisted in one or the other of the contending armies. In the end his recruits were mostly in their teens (Castleman was only twenty-one himself) but by mid-May he had enlisted forty young men, and it was they who were gathered at the Castleman home out on the Newtown pike. By eleven o’clock the company was assembled, all well-armed with rifles, revolvers, and a good quantity of ammunition. Most of these arms had “vanished” months ago from the well-stocked armory of the Chasseurs, mysteriously reappearing on this evening in the Castleman home.
Midnight was set as the hour of departure, but as luck would have it a Federal patrol appeared on the pike as they were mounting up. “No. 2 of each set of fours took the horses to a nearby place of concealment,” Castleman recorded, “but nothing happened.” At one-thirty they moved out on the deserted Newtown pike, halting before dawn at a friend’s farm. At dusk they continued toward Mount Sterling, and hiding by day and marching by night through hills and mountains, they at last reached Knoxville where they found a large Confederate training camp. Reporting to the commander, General Kirby Smith, they explained they were seeking John Morgan’s cavalry. Smith informed them that Morgan was recruiting a regiment at Chattanooga, and sent them on their way.
As they approached Morgan’s camp on a day late in May they were recognized from a distance for Kentuckians because of the horses they were riding. All forty-one were mounted on Denmarks—as they were called in that time, after an old race horse whose mating with a pacer produced Gaines’ Denmark, the greatest of the American Saddle Horse sires.* In the opinion of most of Morgan’s men these were the finest of all cavalry horses, and the eyes of the boys at Chattanooga on that May day in 1862 must have lighted when they saw forty-one of them, with Bluegrass riders up, come cantering into camp. In ten days these Denmarks had marched four hundred miles, and looked as fresh as the night they started from Lexington.
The arrival of John Castleman’s company at Chattanooga could not have been more timely. Colonel Morgan had been scouring the Confederacy for uncommitted cavalry companies to build his new regiment, and here, out of the blue as it were, an unexpected one appeared.
Already the empty ranks of A, B, and C companies had been filled with two hundred men of the 1st Kentucky Infantry. These men had enlisted for one year, had served in Virginia, and at the completion of enlistments requested transfer to Morgan’s cavalry. Now the remnants of the late Captain Brown’s company were assigned to John Castleman, who became captain of Company D. As new volunteers came in, along with about thirty more of the missing veterans who had escaped from the Lebanon Races, Company E was formed with John Hutchinson as captain. About the same time, Captain Thomas B. Webber arrived from Holly Springs with a company of Mississippians; they became Company F. From Alabama, Captain R. McFarland reported with enough men to form Company G. And then from Corinth came Basil Duke, recovered from his Shiloh wound, bringing along two companies of Texans under Captains R.M. Gano and John Hoffman. Both Gano and Hoffman were Kentucky-born, eager for service with Morgan.
And so it was that within three weeks after the disaster at Lebanon, the magic name of John Morgan attracted enough men to form a regiment, the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry.
Among the new recruits who would help make the history of the 2nd Kentucky were Gordon E. Niles, former New York editor, soon to found one of the most peripatetic newspapers of the Confederate armies, the Vidette, published whenever and wherever a printing press was available; Robert A. Alston, fiery South Carolinian, who would serve as Morgan’s adjutant; George Ellsworth, Canadian-born telegrapher, whose tricks on the wires would bedevil Federal commanders in the West for the next two years; Thomas Henry Hines, a mysterious Kentuckian sworn in as a private by John Castleman. Hines and Castleman would experience their most daring adventures behind the Federal lines in a fantastic plot to free Confederate prisoners.
For the veterans of Green River and Shiloh there were promotions in rank; men like Ben Drake and Tom Quirk, for instance, were named sergeants for their daring scouting work. Basil Duke, now second in command, became a lieutenant colonel, relinquishing Company A to Captain Jacob Cassell.
During the latter days of May there was a vast amount of activity around the new regiment’s camp, Colonel Morgan hurrying back and forth to army headquarters, seeking arms, equipment, regulation uniforms, and additional mounts. The price of good cavalry horses had risen to two hundred dollars, but Morgan held out for the best, and got them. But when he requested permission to take his regiment immediately into Kentucky, he was reminded that a good portion of his new command consisted of inexperienced recruits. Early in June the 2nd Kentucky was ordered to Knoxville for a month of training under General Kirby Smith.
At Knoxville several companies were armed with the medium Enfield—regular Enfields with the barrel sawed off—a weapon which would remain the 2nd Regiment’s favorite through the war because of its ease of handling on and off horseback. Drilling and training was intensive from the first day, the usually easygoing John Morgan driving the men hard, eager to obtain Kirby Smith’s early approval for a Kentucky raid.
Officers and non-coms were supplied with new editions of Dabney Maury’s Skirmish Drill for Mounted Troops, and from daylight until darkness they drilled and drilled, practicing every evolution in the manual—skirmish drill, open order, close order, by twos and by fours. They practiced wheeling, dismounting to fight, deploying to front, flanks and rear, changing from line into column, from column to line. They learned how to take ground in different directions, how to provide for the employment of supports and reserves.
In the midst of all this hard work, the tedium was relieved one day by the arrival of an extraordinary recruit for the 2nd Kentucky. “Dressed in an English staff blue coat and a red forage cap,” this newcomer was riding one mount, leading another, with two or three hunting dogs following along in the rear. His name was George St. Léger Grenfell, a British soldier of fortune, and to the Bluegrass boys nurtured on Sir Walter Scott he might have stepped out of the pages of Ivanhoe—the Knight Templar, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert. “His bold aquiline features were scorched by the sun to a swarthy hue,” said Basil Duke, “and his face, while handsome, wore always a defiant and sometimes fierce expression.” Grenfell carried letters of introduction from Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard. John Morgan was immediately entranced by the man’s exotic personality.
Although he was in his middle fifties, Grenfell looked twenty years younger—being spare of frame, sinewy and athletic. He took to the routine of training like the veteran he was, teaching the boys British cavalry tactics, showing them how to fire pistols from the saddle by the right, left, front, and rear. He explained the fine points of aiming while moving at a gallop, how the trooper should rise slightly in the stirrups, arm half extended, the body turned toward the object of the aim.
It must have seemed rather odd for a Britisher to be instructing Kentuckians in the education of horses, but Grenfell could show the boys a trick or two they did not know about training green mounts to stand under fire. Young horses were like girls, he explained, they must be soothed when excited, and the most timid were more easily trained when matched with more experienced ones.
The Kentuckians were intrigued by this strange old warrior, plying him with questions until they learned he had soldiered all over the world—in Africa with the Moors, in India with the British, in Turkey with the Bashi-Bazouks, in South America with Garibaldi. As a captain of cavalry he fought in Crimea at the time of the famed Charge of the Light Brigade.
He had been r
aising sheep in South America when he heard of the American Civil War, and had sailed immediately for Charleston, South Carolina. “If England is not at war,” he explained, “I go elsewhere to find one.” From Charleston he went to Richmond, offering Lee his services in the “Southern States’ struggle for independence,” as he put it. Lee had sent him to Beauregard, and as soon as Grenfell expressed a desire for cavalry service, Beauregard forwarded him on to John Morgan.
Grenfell achieved a certain rapport with the 2nd Kentucky on all points except that of discipline. Accustomed to rigid European military standards, he could not comprehend the attitude of these free-born alligator horses toward their officers. It was impossible for him to understand, for example, an incident that occurred between Colonel Morgan and Sergeant Ben Drake on an occasion when Morgan asked Drake to unsaddle and feed his horse. The sergeant, who had been scouting in the saddle for twenty-four hours, was resentful and performed the service grudgingly. Morgan appeared to ignore Drake’s grumblings, and when the sergeant completed tending the horse, the Colonel invited him into a farmhouse to sleep beside a warm fireplace. Next morning, Morgan had to awaken the sergeant, ordering him to get up and eat his breakfast in a hurry; the command was ready to move. “Why didn’t you rouse me sooner, Colonel?” Drake asked. “My horse hasn’t been fed.” “You needed sleep,” Morgan replied. “I’ve fed and saddled your horse.”
Perhaps there was more of this camaraderie between officers and men in the 2nd Kentucky than in other regiments. After all, most of the men had known each other as equals since boyhood, and military titles meant little to them. “There was always a sort of free-masonry,” John Castleman wrote, “born of close relations between rank, file, and officers.”
Every once in a while—whenever discipline tended to break down altogether—Morgan and his officers would tighten the reins on the boys, but these occasions were of short duration. As Basil Duke put it philosophically, a cavalryman was harder to discipline than an infantryman “for the reason that he was harder to catch. It is more difficult to regulate six legs than two.”