“Here’s the health to Duke and Morgan
Drink it down;
Here’s the health to Duke and Morgan
Drink it down;
Here’s the health to Duke and Morgan,
Down, boys, down, drink it down!”
Morgan rode on, smiling and waving. Behind him came Duke, a flowing plume in his hat, and they all marched out for the Cumberland singing “My Old Kentucky Home.”
The river was rain-swollen, more than half a mile wide, running out of its banks and filled with driftwood tumbling and rocketing through the foam. The 2nd Kentucky moved above Burkesville, the men out searching for boats, finding nothing but a few frail canoes. They lashed these together and made crude floorings of fence rails.
“We turned the horses in,” Sergeant Stone wrote a few days later, “and the men came over in the canoes with their saddles—the wagons were put on canoes, piece at a time and brought over.” At some places driftwood covered almost the entire surface, and to secure their animals the men had to enter the water, holding to a canoe-raft with one hand and to their horse’s mane or tail with the other.
As bad as was the flooded stream, it had one beneficial effect; there was no organized resistance to the crossing. The Federals were confident the river would stop Morgan, and only a few scattered patrols were on the north bank.
Bennett Young, crossing with Quirk’s scouts, described one of the few encounters with the Yankees: “Those who had clothing on rushed ashore and into line, those who swam with horses, unwilling to be laggard, not halting to dress, seized their cartridge boxes and guns and dashed upon the enemy. The strange sight of naked men engaging in combat amazed the enemy. They had never seen soldiers before clad only in nature’s garb.”
The Union soldiers opposing the dangerous Cumberland crossing were of Frank Wolford’s Kentucky regiment, and Morgan’s men were thankful there were so few of them. With Tom Quirk’s scouts in the lead and the 2nd Regiment close behind, the columns of dripping horses and men moved on toward Marrowbone Creek. Here, about midafternoon, the scouts charged a Union encampment, and the dauntless Irishman took a bad bullet wound in the arm. “Only one man received a wound,” Kelion Peddicord noted laconically, “Captain Tom, whose rein arm was broken.”
But the scouts regarded Quirk’s misfortune as an ill omen; they had come to consider their bold leader as indestructible. Over his profane protests, Quirk was ordered back to Burkesville to convalesce, and for the first time the 2nd moved into Kentucky without Tom Quirk up front to serve as eyes and ears for the regiment.
By nightfall of the following day the regiment was seven miles beyond Columbia, with other units of the division strung out far behind. It was three o’clock the morning of July 4 before the rear regiment entered Columbia, bivouacking in the streets. Duke in the meantime had sent Captain Franks and the scouts forward to reconnoiter the Tebb’s Bend bridge at Green River. Franks reported back before dawn that the Yankees at the bridge appeared to be expecting an attack. They were as busy as beavers, he said. All through the night the scouts had heard the ringing of axes and the crash of falling timbers.
At daybreak of July 4, the meaning of all this night activity was revealed to Franks and his men. Across the narrow peninsula entering Tebb’s Bend, a hundred-yard breastwork blocked the neck of land, facing south and barring access to the bridge. It was a sturdy abatis of logs and tangled brush, with rifle pits protected by fence rails, wire and sharpened pieces of wood.
Morgan was up front before the sun rose, ordering Captain Byrnes to open with his battery. After one round was fired into the barricade, Lieutenant Joe Tucker was sent forward under a truce flag with a message to the Union commander, demanding unconditional surrender. Tucker found the commander to be Colonel Orlando H. Moore of the 25th Michigan Infantry, with about two hundred men dug in shoulder to shoulder. Moore read Morgan’s message, smiled, and said to Tucker: “Lieutenant, if it was any other day I might surrender, but on the Fourth of July I must have a little brush first.” He then wrote a brief note to Morgan: “It is a bad day for surrender, and I would rather not.”
The 2nd Regiment took no part in the fight at Tebb’s Bend bridge, the 2nd Brigade having passed through Duke’s regiments during the early morning march up from Columbia. Colonel D. W. Chenault’s 11th Kentucky, being in advance, led the assault dismounted, a straight frontal attack across open ground with bugles blaring. As the first wave ran into fallen timbers and brush, it collapsed under the close fire of Moore’s determined Michigan infantrymen. Chenault was killed as he climbed the barricade, falling back into the debris. Two succeeding attacks also failed.
“Many of our best men were killed and wounded,” Major McCreary noted in his journal that night. “It was a sad, sorrowful day, and more tears of grief rolled over my weatherbeaten cheeks on this mournful occasion than have before for years. The commencement of this raid is ominous. Total loss in killed and wounded—71.” Among the dead was Alexander Tribble, Lieutenant Eastin’s companion in the celebrated duel with Colonel Halisey. Tribble had only recently been promoted to captain and transferred to Chenault’s regiment from the 2nd Kentucky.
After three hours, with the morning still young, Morgan called the useless fighting to an end. Under another flag of truce he sent a second message to Colonel Moore, requesting permission to bury his dead. Moore gave consent, delivering the bodies to the front of his line.
After burying their dead and bypassing Tebb’s Bend, the regiments moved north through Campbellsville and out on the road toward Lebanon. They knew it had been a bad Fourth of July for Morgan’s raiders, but they did not know how terrible a day it had been for the Confederacy. In Pennsylvania, Lee’s army was beginning its retreat after disaster at Gettysburg; on the Mississippi, Vicksburg was surrendering to Grant. Morgan’s raiders, instead of invading a country wavering and divided after two years of indecisive war, would find the people celebrating their first real victories, reunited in a determination to bring the war to a triumphant end.
Completely unaware of these portentous events, the raiders camped that Fourth of July night five miles west of Lebanon.
2
From reports of scouts, Morgan and Duke learned before six o’clock the morning of July 5 that Lebanon was defended by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Hanson’s 20th Kentucky Infantry with detachments from three other Kentucky Union regiments, a total force of nearly five hundred men. Hanson was a brother of Roger Hanson, the Confederate leader who had welcomed Morgan’s Lexington Rifles when they first came down to Green River from the Bluegrass. The 20th Kentucky was also a Bluegrass regiment, containing former friends, near relatives, and even brothers of men in Morgan’s command.
Hoping to take Lebanon without a clash between brothers and friends, Morgan decided on a bold show of force. Ordering his regiments to form a two-line front, he marched them up to the edge of town, the forward skirmish line spread out for two miles across open fields bordering the turnpike, Byrnes’ battery at center on the road. Hanson had thrown up a crude breastwork where the pike entered the town, and Morgan ordered Byrnes to shell it. As soon as the breastwork’s defenders scurried back into town, Morgan sent his adjutant and occasional editor of the Vidette, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Alston, forward under a truce flag to demand a surrender.
To Alston’s discomfiture, he was fired upon as he approached Hanson’s headquarters, and when his own men attempted to cover him with retaliating fire, negotiations almost came to a sudden end. After the tense situation finally quieted, Hanson informed Alston that he had no intention of surrendering. “Then notify the women and children to leave immediately,” Alston replied. “The town will be shelled.”
As soon as Alston departed, Hanson concentrated his men in a sturdy brick railroad depot, an excellent defensive position according to Sergeant Henry Stone: “Our artillery could not bear on it, only at the roof.” Colonel Roy S. Cluke’s 8th Kentucky opened with a vigorous assault, but this was to be no quick victory. Befor
e Morgan’s scouts had circled the town and cut telegraph wires to Louisville, Hanson had received orders to hold out on the assurance that reinforcements would arrive in a few hours.
July 5 was a torrid summer day, the temperature soaring into the nineties by midmorning, and the 8th Kentucky was pinned down around the depot in patches of high weeds that held the heat. Lying on their bellies, half-smothered and choking for want of water, carefully hoarding their diminishing supply of ammunition, Cluke’s men could neither advance nor retreat.
Although Lebanon was completely surrounded now, Morgan could neither take the town nor withdraw until Cluke’s men were extricated from the weed patches around the depot. Basil Duke, watching the deadly duel, was reminded of the 2nd Regiment’s fight in Augusta, and realized that what was needed was a regiment experienced in street fighting. With Morgan’s permission he ordered Major Webber to bring the 2nd Regiment into the siege. “The 2nd had tried that sort of work before,” Duke said. “Major Webber skillfully aligned it and moved it forward.”
Kelion Peddicord, who went in with the scouts in the 2nd’s first attack wave, said they charged all the way up to the rear of the depot, with the boys of the 8th cheering them on. Some ran their rifles and pistols through windows, firing blindly inside, others stormed the doors and broke them down. “A street fight,” commented Peddicord dryly, “is one of the most desperate modes of warfare known to a soldier. The advantage is strongly against the storming party.”
Colonel Hanson surrendered, but the 2nd and 8th regiments paid a high price for the victory. Almost at the moment Major Webber gave the 2nd orders to charge, nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Tom Morgan, the General’s favorite brother, was killed. “Poor Tommy Morgan,” Robert Alston wrote in his diary that day, “ran forward and cheered the men with all the enthusiasm of his bright nature. At the first volley he fell, pierced through the breast.” “His brother Calvin caught him as he fell, and he died in Calvin’s arms; his only words were: “Brother Cally, they have killed me.”
By three o’clock on that hot afternoon, Adjutant Robert Alston and Captain William Davis had the prisoners lined up and were issuing paroles. In the midst of these activities, scouts brought warnings of approaching Union cavalry in strength—Hanson’s promised reinforcements arriving too late to save him. To avoid another costly fight, Morgan ordered regiments formed and started, columns moving rapidly north toward Springfield. Alston and Davis herded their unparoled captives together, marching them on the double-quick along the same route.
About halfway along this dusty eight-mile stretch of road, a raging rainstorm overtook the prisoners and their guards. “Hardest rain I ever experienced,” Alston commented. The water-soaked, bedraggled column did not reach Springfield until after dark.
While Morgan’s raiders moved on through the night toward Bardstown, Alston and Davis established paroling headquarters in a comfortable Springfield house, the owner’s lovely daughters, Frances and Belle Cunningham, watching the proceedings with fascination. For William Davis and Frances Cunningham it was love at first sight, and when the last prisoner was released, Captain Davis reluctantly obeyed Alston’s order that he move out and rejoin his command.*
But Alston himself delayed departure. “Wet and chilly, worn out, tired and hungry,” he fell asleep, was aroused by his orderly just before dawn, and started hurriedly for Bardstown. When he reached a point on the road where he expected to find Morgan’s rear guard, a party of cavalrymen appeared out of the gray morning fog. “Supposing them to be our pickets,” he explained later, “I rode up promptly to correct them for standing in full view of anyone approaching, when to my mortification I found myself a prisoner. My God! how I hated it, no one can understand.” Like a true cavalryman, Alston’s first thought was for his fine mare, “Fannie Johnson, named after a pretty little cousin, of Richmond, Va. I said, ‘Poor Fannie, who will treat you as kindly as I have?’ I turned her over to a captain and begged him to take good care of her, which he promised to do.”
One by one, Morgan was losing the officers he most depended upon, and he was not yet across the Ohio.
*The romantic wartime letters of William Davis to Frances Cunningham, which began as a result of this meeting and led to their marriage in 1866, were carefully preserved by the recipient, and are now in the Filson Club, Louisville, Kentucky.
3
The 2nd Kentucky and other regiments of Duke’s brigade were in Bardstown by daylight of the sixth, and enjoyed the benefit of a six-hour rest while Adam Johnson’s 2nd Brigade marched on through town to take the advance. Most of Duke’s boys lounged in the shade of a sycamore grove, but Lightning Ellsworth rode off with a detachment to Bardstown Junction on the L. & N. Railroad.
Ellsworth was amused to find the operator there wearing a uniform—recently issued to Union telegraphers—dark blue blouse, blue trousers with a silver cord on the seam, a natty buff vest, a forage cap with no ornaments or marks of ranks. “Hello, sonny,” said Ellsworth as he showed his cocked revolver. “Move an inch except as I tell you, and you’ll be buried in that fancy rig.”
In a few minutes Ellsworth learned that strong Union cavalry forces were gathering in the rear, no more than twenty-four hours behind Morgan’s main column. From every message he intercepted, it was evident the Yankees were certain that Morgan’s raiders were bound for Louisville, and troops were being concentrated there for an expected attack.
John Morgan, meanwhile, was preparing the way for his river crossing into Indiana, the selected jump-off point being Brandenburg, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He started Captains Sam Taylor and Clay Merriwether and their companies of the 1oth Kentucky by forced march direct to Brandenburg. They were told they would probably find Captain Tom Hines, who had been scouting the area for several weeks, somewhere around that town. They were to join forces with Hines and capture Brandenburg, as well as any boats which might be lying at the landing.
At the same time Morgan ordered the love-smitten captain, William Davis, to take Company D of the 2nd Kentucky and Company A of the 8th Kentucky on a diversionary expedition east of Louisville. Davis’ mission was to cut telegraph wires, burn railroad bridges, and create the impression that his two companies comprised Morgan’s entire raiding force. They were to aim for Twelve Mile Island above Louisville, cross the Ohio River there, and attempt to rejoin Morgan’s raiders at Salem, Indiana.
Lieutenant George Eastin of D Company was second in command. When he rode off with Captain Davis at the head of his company, Eastin was still proudly wearing his talisman, the sword of the Union colonel, Dennis Halisey.
In a letter to Frances Cunningham, Davis told of how he first learned of Morgan’s plans to invade Indiana. “When within ten miles of Shepherdsville [on the afternoon of July 6] Gen’l Morgan explained to me his intention of crossing the Ohio at Brandenburg, and ordered my detachment to create a diversion by operating between Louisville and Frankfort. Rapidly pushing forward ahead of the column, I crossed Salt river at an almost impracticable ford three miles above Shepherdsville and directed my course towards the railroad some thirty miles above Louisville.”
At the same time, the main column was turning northwestward, away from Louisville, still twenty-four hours ahead of the Union cavalry massing behind. Morgan was rather certain that no attack would be forthcoming from Louisville where the enemy was gathering in fearful anticipation of the raiders’ striking there.
4
Early on the morning of July 7, Sam Taylor and Clay Merriwether led their companies into Brandenburg. Being so far north, the town was not garrisoned. The people appeared to be either apathetic or Confederate in sympathy, and no fight was offered. The only vessel at the landing was a small wharf boat, but Taylor and Merriwether learned that a packet steamer running between Louisville and Henderson was due in early that afternoon. A faster mailboat usually passed about the same time, but made no scheduled stops.
Brandenburg was a small town built high on a hill. From the crest the winding river cou
ld be observed for several miles in either direction. After placing lookouts on the highest points and pickets along roads entering the town, the two captains permitted their men to laze away the morning on the river front. Shortly after noon, a boarding party was ordered on to the wharf boat. Around one o’clock lookouts signaled that a steamer was coming, and the men on the wharf boat were instructed to ready their weapons and keep under cover.
Promptly on schedule the steamboat John B. McCombs rounded the last bend, sounded its hoarse whistle, and slowed its chugging engines. With paddle wheels splashing silvery in the July sunshine, it turned in to the Brandenburg landing.
The instant the packet eased alongside the wharf boat, forty fully armed Confederate cavalrymen leaped aboard, much like the pirates of a certain seagoing Morgan. In a matter of seconds, the John B. McCombs was in Rebel hands. Captain Ballard, the crew and fifty passengers, caught by surprise, were without arms and offered no resistance.
A few minutes later a fast mailboat, the Alice Dean, came puffing upriver. From the pilothouse of the McCombs, Clay Merriwether watched until he was certain the Alice Dean did not intend to stop, then ordered Captain Ballard to steam out toward her.
Some accounts of the capture of the Alice Dean claimed the Confederates ran up distress signals to lure the second boat alongside. According to a report in the Cincinnati Gazette, however, which was based on witnesses’ stories, “the McCombs was headed out just in time to touch her bows, when the Rebels who were concealed on the McCombs, jumped on board the Dean and effected the capture of that boat also.”
The Cincinnati newspaper also reported that passengers were assured their private property would be respected. Ten thousand dollars in the boats’ safes were returned to the various owners, and all were liberated with instructions not to try to leave Brandenburg. Guards of course were placed on both vessels, officers and crews being held aboard.