Forcing a stern manner, Morgan ordered the culprits to stand at attention, and demanded: “What were you doing there, Trigg?”
“Why, sir,” replied Trigg, “I only went there to find Ballard.”
Morgan turned to Ballard, repeating the question.
“Sir, I went to find Sterrett.”
Barely able to repress a smile, Morgan asked wiry little Sterrett what he was doing at the faro dealer’s. As there was no one else to shift the blame to, Sterrett drawled, “I was coppering the ace, sir.”
“Very well,” said Morgan. “And what punishment do you think you should receive?”
Sterrett answered without blinking an eye: “About thirty days’ furlough from this place of temptation, sir.”
3
With the coming of March and more tolerable weather, skirmishes became more frequent along the cavalry front. “There were frequently days and nights passed,” wrote Leeland Hathaway, “in which I did not take off my clothes for sleep. Every day and night brought its skirmishes somewhere and we had quite a number of men killed and wounded.”
On March 1, Lieutenant Colonel Bowles took the 2nd Kentucky on reconnaissance down toward Bradyville for his first experience of command under heavy attack. The attackers were the regiment’s oldest antagonists, the 4th Ohio Cavalry with some companies of the 3rd Ohio. The Union troopers closed in on all sides, forcing the regiment to fight its way out. The 2nd lost several men as prisoners, and Company C in rear-guard action had to stand off a saber charge.
One man especially irritated by the saber wielders was Tom Boss, the bristly black-haired giant who had constructed a bake oven for Colonel Duke during the episode at Sparta. It was Boss’ habit to carry a short-handled axe strapped to his back, and when a Federal captain lunged at him with a saber, Boss snatched his axe from its sling and drove it into his assailant’s skull.
The boys could not count Bradyville as a victory, nor did they admit any defeat, although some of them thought Jim Bowles had been a bit rash in his actions that day.
About three weeks later the 2nd was back in action near Liberty, losing two of its best officers in a minor skirmish, Captain James Sale of Company E and Captain John Cooper of Company L. Spring was in the air that day, peach and cherry trees in full bloom, the grass greening, buds swelling on the trees, and a few summer birds singing. But the 2nd’s saddles were emptying, the ranks of the old Green River boys thinning. There was no bright lifting of hopes in the springtime of 1863 as there had been in 1862.
April brought more skirmishes, more blood letting. The first nights of the month were cool and clear, with full moonlight falling softly on the greening hills. After such a night, the regiment was hit hard at daybreak of the third, Bowles’ camp near Liberty being overrun by Colonel Robert Minty’s 1st Cavalry Brigade. D Company bore the brunt of the attack. Captain Castleman’s beloved Denmark mare was shot, her legs broken, and Private Charley Wilson afterward told of how he found Castleman weeping beside the dying horse with bullets still flying all about. Tom Quirk and his scouts fought a brilliant delaying action that morning, but the 2nd was badly scattered, strung out along the road back toward McMinnville.
After this engagement there was a lull of several days in the skirmishing, giving Colonel Duke an opportunity to reorganize his brigade in the hills north of McMinnville. During the following three weeks, Duke’s regiments were in almost constant motion around Liberty and Smithville, then were ordered north to guard the Cumberland River crossings from Stagall’s ferry to Celina. Most of the time the weather was fine, in sharp contrast to the desolation and decay that lay across the familiar countryside. In the once-thriving little towns, some of the finest residences had been wrecked, doors and sidings torn away, trees and shrubbery cut or trampled. In many places a fearful stench arose from decaying horses and mules left unburied in the woods during the winter, the warm weather now revealing their presence.
It was while the 2nd was on picket duty along the Cumberland that the boys heard the astounding news of General Morgan’s narrow escape from capture at his McMinnville headquarters. All through the winter, McMinnville had been considered as impregnable as a moated castle, Morgan bringing his bride there for safety. Officers on leave met their wives at McMinnville, brought up from Chattanooga or Georgia to brighten the weekends with social evenings, dinners and dancing.
In mid-April the Federals decided to have a try at breaching John Morgan’s headquarters fortress. Colonel Minty’s cavalry brigade, supported by infantry, broke through the McMinnville picket line at dawn of April 21 and charged into town eight abreast. Morgan barely had time to bundle his young wife into a carriage and send her off toward Sparta with the headquarters wagon train. He was able to escape himself only because of the loyalty and quick thinking of Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Martin and Major Dick McCann. Afterward, Corporal John Williams of the 7th Pennsylvania, who led the first charge into McMinnville, reported that McCann held his horse steady in the middle of the street and shouted, “Come on, you Yankee son of a bitch!” Corporal Williams accepted the challenge, spurred his horse forward, and knocked McCann from his saddle with a saber stroke across the head. McCann, struggling to his feet, shouted in a loud voice: “I am Morgan! You’ve got the old chief at last!”
While Corporal Williams was making McCann a prisoner under the impression that he was General Morgan, the Union charge halted in confusion, and Lieutenant Colonel Martin chose this moment to further delay the enemy. With his bridle in his teeth and a pistol in each hand he dashed down upon the Pennsylvanians, firing until his weapons were emptied. A bullet burned into his lungs, but Martin swerved down a side street, hoping to divert the enemy long enough to give Morgan an opportunity to escape.
Morgan did escape, and so did the wounded Martin, taking refuge in a farmhouse out in the hills. That night, Major McCann also escaped, after getting his guard drunk on a ration of brandy which had been allowed him because of his painful head wound.
Along the road to Sparta, however, a Union patrol had bagged Morgan’s fleeing wagon train, capturing the General’s wife. But when her captors learned her identity, they gallantly freed Martha Morgan and sent her back to join her still-lucky husband.
4
“In this year,” Basil Duke wrote in retrospect, “the glory and prestige began to pass away from the Southern cavalry. It was not that their opponents became their superiors in soldiership, any more than in individual prowess.…But it was daily becoming more and more difficult to keep the Confederate cavalry in good condition.…One special cause of the degeneracy of the Southern cavalry was the greater scarcity of horses and the great difficulty of obtaining forage within the Confederate lines, and consequently of keeping the horses which we had in good condition.”
Duke’s opinion was shared by most of the other cavalry leaders in the South. 1863 was the last year the Confederate beaux sabreurs held center stage; soon the Yankee raiders would be stealing their thunder, and until the end it would be largely an infantryman’s war for the Rebels.
It was difficult enough for a man to retain his spirit and endurance on short rations; for a horse it was impossible, and the more spirit a horse had, the worse it was for such an animal when sustenance was withdrawn. The best of horses losing a shoe on rough roadways became utterly unfit for service in half a day’s march. “I have seen my men many a time have strapped to their saddles the hoof of a dead horse,” said General T. T. Munford, “which they had cut off at the ankle with their pocket knives, and would carry them until they could find a smith to take the shoes off with his nippers, and thus supply their sore-footed steeds.”
With the border states and the upper South occupied by Union armies, the Confederacy had lost its best source of riding horses. The South’s horse breeders, in fact, had been supplying replacements for both armies, as the South’s farmers were now being forced to feed both armies.
It is no wonder that as conditions grew worse instead of better in the first months of
1863, a wave of pessimism swept through the camps of Southern cavalrymen, a weariness and a disillusionment with war that even the bright springtime could not banish.
5
Late in the spring, however, two isolated events occurred which in different ways seemed to lift John Morgan and his men from the lethargy of winter’s discontent, to bring them out of despondency and inspire them into attempting their greatest raid of the war.
First, there was the publication of a book, Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men, by Sally Rochester Ford. Mrs. Ford was a Bluegrass belle who had attended a Georgetown seminary, married a Baptist preacher, and become a fairly popular novelist. Raids and Romance was fiction woven around the actual adventures of Morgan and the 2nd Kentucky, most of the action taking place during the raids of 1862. Printed in Mobile, Alabama, by Sigmund H. Goetzel in an edition limited by the Confederacy’s short paper supply, it was widely sought by Southerners, and was banned as seditious by Union authorities in Memphis and St. Louis.*
The alligator horses must have been fascinated to read of their heroic deeds in a romance wherein John Morgan rode as a sort of Richard the Lion-Hearted, surrounded by a band of flesh-and-blood knights that included Duke, Grenfell, Castleman, Gano, McCann, Ellsworth, the younger Morgan brothers, and other real characters.
The second event in the spring of 1863 which came like an electric shock was the successful raid of Colonel Benjamin Grierson and his Union cavalrymen through the heart of Mississippi to Baton Rouge, a raid which according to Grierson, proved the South to be “a hollow shell.”
Both these events—the book and the enemy raid—were stimulating challenges; each must have had a profound effect not only upon John Morgan but upon his officers and men. Sally Ford’s book was a pattern of glory to be lived up to; Grierson’s raid was a dare to be emulated. If Yankee cavalry could ride through the South with impunity, then surely Confederate cavalry could ride through the North.
Not long after the appearance of Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men, and the first startling news of Grierson’s raid, Captains Tom Hines and Sam Taylor were sent north on separate missions. Hines took a number of men into Indiana, scouting practicable river crossings west of Louisville and raiding routes around Cincinnati. According to Duke, Hines was also instructed “to stir up Copperheads” and locate other Southern sympathizers who might be useful while a raid was in progress. Captain Taylor’s** mission was to scout fords and other escape routes along the Ohio River east of Cincinnati.
On May 26, Morgan ordered all his regiments concentrated between Liberty and Alexandria. Many men who had been on long furloughs or convalescent leaves reported for duty, filling up the vacant ranks, their renewed enthusiasm cheering the winter-weary veterans. After a few days of grazing on rich spring grass, the horses fleshed into condition. Miraculously, wagons loaded with uniforms and weapons began rolling up from Chattanooga. Fresh horses were driven down from eastern Kentucky by troopers who had been stationed on the northeastern end of the long winter front.
Working his old magic, John Morgan brought a new regiment into his division—Colonel D. Howard Smith’s 5th Kentucky Cavalry. In a few days the division’s total strength increased from two thousand to almost three thousand men.
Something big was in the wind. The men could sense it, although even their officers were not sure what it was, and Morgan was still down at Tullahoma headquarters working out the plans with Braxton Bragg.
With renewed zest the men cleaned and polished their weapons, refurbished equipment, tended their horses and drilled, drilled, drilled. From eight o’clock until sundown they went through evolutions in the meadows, fighting flies and swarms of bees in the clover. Dress parades followed inspections, and inspections followed dress parades. Strict vigilance was maintained at all times against Yankee spies, the camps being spread apart and concealed as much as possible to avoid revealing the presence of so large a concentration of cavalry obviously preparing for something out of the ordinary. Diversionary patrols were kept moving far out to avoid any large-scale contact with the enemy.
On June 10, John Morgan appeared suddenly in Alexandria, dressed in a resplendent new uniform and flashing his confident smile. That evening he called his staff together, brigade and regimental commanders, and told them he had orders from Bragg to make a raid far north into Kentucky. If all went well they would cross the Ohio River into Indiana and strike eastward for Ohio. The time had come for the North to feel the lash of invasion.
*In 1864 a New York publisher reprinted the book with appendices to bring the reader up to date with the raiders’ later misfortunes, and it was no longer considered dangerous literature.
**Captain Samuel Taylor was a nephew of “Old Rough and Ready” Zachary Taylor.
10
The Great Raid Begins
I
ALTHOUGH GENERAL MORGAN WAS confident in early June of 1863 that he would receive authorization for a raid across the Ohio River, Braxton Bragg never issued such an order. Bragg only wanted Morgan to enter Kentucky and make a threat against Louisville—a mere diversionary raid to take pressure off the Army of Tennessee for a few days.
Bragg’s forces had been seriously weakened by the sudden removal of several divisions under General Joseph E. Johnston, rushed to Mississippi in hopes of relieving besieged Vicksburg. Fearing for the safety of his army after Johnston’s departure, Bragg decided to withdraw to more easily defended positions below the Tennessee River. To accomplish this maneuver without inviting attack, he needed action elsewhere to distract the enemy’s attention. A raid by Morgan, he thought, would be sufficient distraction, and it was for this reason in the main that Bragg granted Morgan permission to march north.
When final orders reached Morgan’s headquarters at Alexandria, instructing him to move into Kentucky—but not to cross the Ohio River—Morgan decided forthwith that he had had enough of Bragg’s timidity. He was determined to strike for Indiana as planned. He revealed his decision to disobey Bragg to only one officer, his brother-in-law, Basil Duke. In recording the incident afterward, Duke made no apologies for his commander, stating simply: “So positive were Morgan’s convictions that in order to be of any benefit in so grave a crisis, his raid should be extended to Northern territory, he deliberately resolved to disobey the order restricting his operations in Kentucky.”
On June 11, Morgan started his regiments north to the Cumberland, where he planned to capture the Federal garrison at Carthage and clear the river crossings before beginning a lightning dash across Kentucky. Late in the day, however, a courier arrived from Bragg’s headquarters with a message which delayed all his well-laid plans. A heavy Union raiding party was reported pushing into eastern Tennessee, threatening General Buckner’s small defending army, and Bragg ordered Morgan’s cavalry to intercept.
As a result of this order, the following three weeks were utterly wasted in hard marches over rugged country and bad roads, the division moving east through Gainesboro and Livingston, and then north across the Kentucky line to Albany, only to discover that the Federal force—if it ever existed—had completely vanished.
This wild-goose chase not only delayed Morgan’s raid for three weeks, it wore down horses and used up carefully hoarded rations. Under pouring rains that flooded roads and creeks, the regiments swung back westward through the hills to the Cumberland approaches near Burkesville, camping long enough to commandeer grist mills for grinding corn and blacksmith shops for shoeing horses.
By July 2 the rains had stopped. Morgan held a final conference with his regimental commanders, informing them definitely that they were going across the Ohio. He traced the route on a map, indicating four main danger points—the crossing of the flooded Cumberland just ahead of them, the crossing of the Ohio west of Louisville, the long march north around Cincinnati, and the re-crossing of the Ohio east of Cincinnati. Later he told Duke privately that they might not have to recross the Ohio River; he had learned that General Lee was invading Pennsylvania, an
d if all went well Morgan’s men might keep marching eastward and join Lee.
All were cautioned to secrecy concerning the invasion of Indiana and Ohio, and the colonels evidently kept tight security. None of the men suspected that they were going beyond Kentucky, although at least one was hopeful of it. Sergeant Henry L. Stone, whose family lived in Greencastle, Indiana, writing from the “South Bank of the Cumberland, 5 miles from Burkesville” mentioned that he had heard “Captain Hines with 90 men is in Indiana.…I wish I was with him.…I wish our whole command could go into Hoosier.”
Below Burkesville that day, Morgan had ten regiments assembled, all far under strength, one of them the hastily organized 14th Kentucky Cavalry, scarcely larger than a company, commanded by the General’s brother, Colonel Richard C. Morgan. The 2nd Kentucky was led by its acting commander, the fiery Major Thomas B. Webber, Colonel Bowles being unable to make the journey. Four three-inch Parrott guns and a section of twelve-pounder howitzers comprised the division’s artillery support under Captain Ed Byrnes. Total present for duty was 2,460 men, about 1,500 of them in Duke’s 1st Brigade, the others in Colonel Adam Johnson’s 2nd Brigade.
“In high feather and full song,” reported George Mosgrove, “Morgan’s gallant young cavalrymen formed in columns, looking toward Kentucky.” When General Morgan, smartly uniformed and mounted on his favorite, Glencoe, rode along the column to the front, the men cheered and sang: