* According to Maria Daviess’ amusing account of the 2nd Regiment’s short stay in Harrodsburg, “next day the town was reeking with Sunday’s adventures.” One pretty girl declared she would never wash her hands again until the boys should come back to imprint them with fresh kisses. A more mature beauty was said to have become engaged to marry St. Léger Grenfell. The daughter of Harrodsburg’s most loyal Unionist was wearing on her watch chain a button from John Morgan’s coat. “All the town is crying shame on the way the women kissed Morgan’s boys,” Mrs. Daviess reported, then explained that those who were kissed were “relatives, sons, or college boys.”
**One of the sharpshooters with Hines was John Allen, older brother of James Lane Allen, famed Kentucky author.
3
While Company D was distracting the Federals outside Lexington, some of the veteran companies of the 2nd Kentucky, twenty-five miles away at Cynthiana, were engaged in their bitterest fighting of the war.
About three o’clock in the afternoon, the regiment’s advance flushed out a Federal picket guard, chasing them back to the Licking River and the narrow covered bridge which led into the town. Colonel Morgan knew the terrain well, and had already planned his attack. As usual, he sent Gano’s Texans in a sweeping hook around one end, the other arm of the pincers on this occasion being Captain McFarland’s Company G. They were to cross at fords a mile or so above and below the covered bridge and get in the rear of Cynthiana.
While these two wing companies were galloping away, companies A and B moved to the right of the road, E and F to the left. These men dismounted while C Company held its position back down the pike, prepared to charge as soon as the bridge was cleared. William Breckinridge’s inexperienced recruits, Company I, remained in the rear as reserves.
Here again, as at Lebanon, Tennessee, this was to be a fight largely between Kentuckians. The Union defenders of Cynthiana, under Lieutenant Colonel John J. Landram, consisted of Kentucky infantry and cavalry units and one artillery piece, a twelve-pounder howitzer manned by a company of firemen from Cincinnati. The firemen had their howitzer set up in the Cynthiana square, and they opened up on the 2nd Kentucky while the men were taking positions on either side the covered bridge. Tom Berry, who was preparing to charge the bridge on foot with Quirk’s scouts, said afterward that the Cincinnati firemen “went to work with this gun as if they were trying to put out a fire.”
It soon became apparent to Morgan’s men that they could not take the bridge by frontal assault. In addition to grape and canister flying through the air from the howitzer, heavy rifle fire was now pouring from buildings just across the Licking River.
While E and F moved up to the riverbank on the left, Quirk’s scouts and A Company dropped down into the stream, and holding rifles and ammunition above their heads, the men began swimming across. Bullets spattered around them like rain. Some men were hit, some drowned, but most of them gained the east bank and dug in. For a few minutes it looked as if they could not hold their position, with Landram’s defenders concentrating upon their little bridgehead, but B Company quickly shifted upstream and opened with flanking fire on A Company’s most dangerous assailants.
At this moment, Captain James Bowles’ Company C came charging down the pike, St. Léger Grenfell’s scarlet skullcap bobbing as he raced with the leaders. They hit the bridge with a thundering of hoofs on board planking and dashed headlong up the main street toward the enemy howitzer. And while the Federals were off balance from the shock of this mounted charge, Morgan’s dismounted companies swarmed through the bridge tunnel, each company moving in a different direction through the town. Company A, which had borne the brunt of the assault, charged up the bank from the river, ammunition virtually exhausted. Tom Quirk, noticing a Union soldier taking close aim on Ben Drake, downed the man with a stone.
Meanwhile Gano’s Texans and G Company had swept in from the rear, and the Cincinnati firemen seeing Morgan men approaching “by every road, street and bypath…were compelled to abandon their piece.”
“Old St. Lege,” as the boys now called their British comrade, led a second mounted charge against the last enemy stronghold, the railroad depot. Eleven bullets pierced his clothing, his talismanic cap, and in some places his skin, but his attack ended the righting, and he required no surgeon to patch his wounds. “I cannot too highly compliment Colonel St. Léger Grenfell,” Basil Duke wrote in his report of the action, “for the execution of an order which did perhaps more than anything else to gain the battle. His example gave new courage to everyone who witnessed it.”
Duke also noted that Company A “covered itself with glory.” These former Lexington Rifles, veterans of Green River, Shiloh, and Lebanon, also suffered the most casualties. Private William Craig, first to swim the Licking River, was the first to die, as he mounted the bank. Sergeant Henry Elder, one of the five who drove the hay wagons from Lexington, was too badly wounded to be moved. Tom Berry of the scouts also had to be left behind. All the officers of A Company, except Third Lieutenant Samuel D. Morgan, were wounded.
Lieutenant Colonel Landram, the Federal commander, made his escape on a fast horse. Returning to Cynthiana after the 2nd Kentucky withdrew, Landram reported: “I can give no accurate account of the rebel dead, Morgan having taken off eight burial-cases from this place and his men having been seen hauling off their dead toward Lexington after the fight.…Since Morgan left, thirteen of his dead have been taken from the river.”
Colonel Morgan reported only eight killed and twenty-nine wounded (the thirteen dead later recovered from the river were probably considered as missing). His estimate of enemy casualties was 194 killed and wounded. As for the damage done to military supplies, he listed the capture of three hundred cavalry horses, a large number of small arms, and the destruction of commissary and medical stores, tents, guns, and ammunition. “Paroled prisoners were sent under escort to Falmouth where they took the train for Cincinnati.” John Morgan always made it easy for paroled Federal soldiers to find their way home.
The July sun was still high when the 2nd Regiment marched out of Cynthiana, back over the same covered bridge which they had won at such high cost earlier in the afternoon. With their coffined dead on wagons and their wounded in buggies, they moved cautiously toward Paris. About five miles north of that town they were met by a friendly delegation bringing the good news that the Federal garrison at Paris had been called to Lexington to help fight Morgan’s raiders! John Castleman and Company D had done their work well, and thanks to them their regimental comrades spent a quiet night in Paris, camping on the courthouse lawn. Not all of them used the peaceful night for resting, as the pro-Union editor of the Paris Western Citizen noted in his July 22 issue: “They took all the good horses that they could lay their hands on, and must have taken thirty or forty in the county and around the town of Paris.”
As much as the boys would have enjoyed lingering in Paris, soon after sunrise scouts were bringing in reports of a large enemy force approaching from Lexington. By eight o’clock Morgan started the companies moving south, again, and when they rode into Winchester at noon, they found John Castleman’s Company D in full possession of the friendly town. There were also fresh rumors of enemy troops in pursuit from north, east and west. At four o’clock they moved down to the Kentucky River, crossed before dark, and marched on through the night to Richmond. Here they were happy to discover a friendly “garrison,” a company of recruits under Captain William Jennings, about fifty young men responding to John Morgan’s call to liberate Kentucky from the “hireling legions of Lincoln” As soon as the sun rose on the quiet Sunday morning of July 20, Morgan swore them in as Company K of the 2nd Kentucky.
Back in Winchester that same morning, an eighteen-year-old girl, Mattie Wheeler, was writing in her diary: “All is quiet this morning but yesterday was a day that will be ever memorable to me. Col. John H. Morgan, with a great many of his men passed through Winchester. We all went down town and stood in Mrs. Turnbull’s yard and talked
to some of the soldiers. There was a good many of our acquaintances among them. There was a Dr. Hays whom Bettie had known in Lexington & Johnnie Moore who is a mighty nice gentleman. They got several recruits from this county. Jimmie Price, Marshall and Stonestreet Van Meter, and Joe Croxton. Two boys came in from Lexington. They stole off from there the night before. There were some of the nicest gentlemen among them that I ever saw. They did nothing wrong as far as I could see, except ‘swap horses.’ ” (Mattie Wheeler explained the meaning of “swapping horses” thus: “When one would brake down, they would change it for a fresh one.”)
Late that night she added another entry: “This has been a sad day for me. I hope I may never see a sadder. There is a large army in pursuit of John Morgan, while I am writing. I still hear their tramp, tramp on the Richmond Pike. It is a dreadful sound.”
The tramping army, however, did not overtake the 2nd Kentucky. Before dawn of the twenty-first, the regiment had reached Crab Orchard, and quite aware of the hot pursuit, continued to Somerset. The only exciting incidents of this thirty-six-hour march involved Lightning Ellsworth, the swaggering telegrapher. On the way into Crab Orchard, Ellsworth’s temper was aroused by a bushwhacker firing into the column. When the regiment halted in the town to feed and water mounts, the telegrapher borrowed St. Léger Grenfell’s fine horse—without asking permission—and took off with another trooper to flush out the bushwhacker and capture him if possible. Ellsworth and his friend found the bushwhacker back down the road, but the man’s marksmanship was too much for them; the telegrapher’s companion was wounded, and in rescuing him, Ellsworth let Grenfell’s prize steed escape—with a valuable English saddle and a coat rolled behind it, the pockets containing all of Grenfell’s gold money.
When Ellsworth rejoined the column with his tale of losing the Englishman’s horse, “St. Léger was like an excited volcano, and sought Ellsworth to slay him instantly.” According to Basil Duke, “Three days were required to pacify Grenfell, during which time the great ‘operator’ had to be carefully kept out of his sight.”
At Somerset, Ellsworth returned to his regular duties, and sought to make up for his fiasco by composing some masterful farewell telegrams to General Jeremiah Boyle, commander of Federal troops in Kentucky; to George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal and fiery critic of Morgan’s raiders; and last, to all the Union telegraph operators in Kentucky. He signed the message to Boyle with Morgan’s name:
GOOD MORNING, JERRY. THIS TELEGRAPH IS A GREAT INSTITUTION. YOU SHOULD DESTROY IT AS IT KEEPS ME POSTED TOO WELL. MY FRIEND ELLSWORTH HAS ALL YOUR DISPATCHES SINCE JULY 10 ON FILE. DO YOU WANT COPIES?
His farewell to the telegraph operators was in the form of a general order:
HEADQUARTERS, TELEGRAPH DEPT. OF KY.,
CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA
GENERAL ORDER NO. I
WHEN AN OPERATOR IS POSITIVELY INFORMED THAT THE ENEMY IS MARCHING ON HIS STATION, HE WILL IMMEDIATELY PROCEED TO DESTROY THE TELEGRAPHIC INSTRUMENTS AND ALL MATERIAL IN HIS CHARGE. SUCH INSTANCES OF CARELESSNESS, AS WERE EXHIBITED ON THE PART OF THE OPERATORS AT LEBANON AND GEORGETOWN WILL BE SEVERELY DEALT WITH, BY ORDER OF
G. A. ELLSWORTH
GENERAL MILITARY SUPT. C. S. TELEGRAPHIC DEPT.
For all practical purposes the First Kentucky Raid was now history. The regiment eluded all its pursuers, crossing the Cumberland River at Stagall’s ferry, and after five days of slow marching rode into Livingston, Tennessee, on July 28. Here they rested for three days, repairing equipment and shoeing horses, then marched leisurely down to Sparta to establish camp. Leaving Basil Duke in command, Colonel Morgan went on to Knoxville to report in person to Kirby Smith, and to plead for a more ambitious invasion of Kentucky by the combined armies of the West.
4
In assessing the accomplishments of the 2nd Kentucky Regiment’s thousand-mile July raid, John Morgan noted that he had destroyed Federal supplies and arms in seventeen towns, recruited three hundred men and several hundred horses, captured and paroled twelve hundred enemy troops, and had lost in killed, wounded, and missing about ninety men.
Some other accomplishments, however, he did not mention; for one, the fear engendered among Federal commanders in the West of other and more damaging raids. Not for many months, at least not until after Morgan’s great raid of July, 1863, through Indiana and Ohio, could commanding officers of Union forces between Cincinnati and Tennessee relax in the security of distance from lines of battle. How many thousands of troops were diverted from front-line duty to guard railroads, supply depots, river crossings—every conceivable point of attack or sabotage—cannot be estimated, but the number was large, and would grow larger with each sudden strike of the cavalry raiders.
Even more far-reaching than this was the 2nd Kentucky’s contribution to the science of cavalry—the technique of raiding far behind the lines. Although Morgan and his officers did not realize it at the time, they had brought something new to one of the oldest of the combatant arms.
After the First Kentucky Raid, a British student of cavalry wrote admiringly of the style of raiding introduced by John Morgan’s men: “By skilful marches, by scattering his forces and threatening several points at once, the Federal officers were entirely bewildered, and did not know where to expect a blow. The extreme mobility of his flying column also rendered it difficult to obtain any correct information as to Morgan’s force or his intentions.”
In the first year of the war, cavalry on both sides was compact, slow moving, heavily accoutered, moving always with the infantry. Sometimes it was brought in upon a flank at critical moments for charges. The 2nd Kentucky, however—under John Morgan and with the benefit of St. Léger Grenfell’s knowledge of irregular military tactics—developed as mounted light infantry, drilled to fight on foot, toughened for long marches. After their experience at Shiloh, the boys of the 2nd wanted no more of the old-style role of hovering around infantrymen, and of trying to fight on horseback in wooded or fenced country. They preferred to cut loose from bases, destroy communications, burn bridges and stores, keep the enemy so busy behind his lines that he could apply only a part of his potential when the battle was joined.
The old basic regimental front for a charge had always been a double rank, but the 2nd Kentucky preferred a single rank. “It admitted of such facility of movement,” Basil Duke explained, “it could be thrown about like a rope, and by simply facing to the right or left, and double-quicking in the same direction, every man could be quickly concentrated at any point where it was desirable to mass them.” And in mentioning the regiment’s preference for dismounted combat, Duke pointed out that while it was easy to charge down a road in a column of fours, it was often difficult to charge across wooded or fenced country in extended line and keep any sort of formation. “We found the method of fighting on foot more effective—we could maneuver with more certainty, and sustain less and inflict more loss.”
In dismounted fighting, the role of the horse-holder was as important as that of the rifleman; it was customary in the 2nd Kentucky for one of each set of fours and the corporals to remain with the horses. The men had been carefully drilled by Maury’s manual for this operation. At the command, “Prepare to Dismount,” the sergeant and numbers two and four in each section moved to the front five yards, the corporal and numbers one and three standing fast. As all prepared to dismount, they took the reins in the left hand with a lock of the horse’s mane, carrying the right hand to the right side of the pommel. At the command, “Dismount,” all dismounted, leaving the reins over the pommel. The sergeant and numbers two and four stood to horse, while the corporals and numbers one and three led forward and formed rank with them.
To link after dismounting, each man faced about to the rear, took the link which hung from the halter ring of the horse on his left in his right hand, seized his own horse by the bit near the mouth, drawing the horse on his left toward his own until he could hook the snap into the curb ring.
The dut
ies of a horse-holder were not easy, as one student of Civil War cavalry has observed, “especially if he rode one animal and led three others through the woods, for while he went to the left of a tree, the animals he led invariably went to the right of it.” It was not the practice in the 2nd Kentucky, as it was in some regiments, to use the least efficient men in the command for horse-holders, for when the animals were needed they were needed at once, and the dismounted men were in trouble if the horse-holders had moved too far to the rear.
Fighting dismounted or mounted, every man in the regiment was aware that horseflesh was the key to success or failure on long raids. They had learned that a good cavalry horse must know how to strike the pace of the column and keep an even gait all day or night, that the speed of a column is not measured by the speed of the fastest horse but by the speed of the slowest. As Private George Mosgrove declared, a real trooper “was more provident for his horse than for himself, because, unlike the Federal cavalryman, he had to furnish his own horse, and should he become dismounted he must go into the infantry, the very thought of which was peculiarly disgusting to the Kentucky fellows.…Without any conscientious scruples whatever he could steal forage from his dearest comrades.”
Professional cavalrymen at the time of the Civil War maintained that two years were required to produce a seasoned trooper, a rule of thumb unsuited to members of the 2nd Kentucky Regiment, some of whom had not served even half that prescribed period at the end of their July raid. Almost every one of them had been trained from childhood to manage the most spirited horses with perfect ease, and they were also riding the best mounts available. “The Kentuckians are all splendidly mounted,” British cavalryman Fitzgerald Ross declared. “The horses are much finer and larger than those I saw in Virginia.…Their docility is extraordinary—I never saw a vicious horse the whole time. Every officer or courier coming to a camp will tie his horse’s reins to a branch or twig of a tree, and the animal will stand quietly for hours without even attempting to get away.”