With his command reduced to less than four hundred men, Morgan broke away during this rear-guard charge, and continued northeastward. Riding parallel with him, however, on a secondary road, was another fresh enemy regiment—Major George Rue’s assemblage of crack horsemen drawn from five different Kentucky and Michigan regiments, including a few of Frank Wolford’s Wild Riders.
About noon the raiders collided with a small band of home guardsmen out of Lisbon. There was no fight, Morgan quickly sending forward a truce flag and promising to pass through the county without disturbing property if the Ohioans offered no resistance. Being completely outnumbered and unaware that Morgan’s men were almost out of ammunition, the guardsmen agreed. When Morgan asked for a guide to the next county line, James Burbick, acting as a temporary captain, agreed to accompany the raiders as far as Elktoh.
A few minutes later, his column in motion again, Morgan sighted the dust of Major Rue’s troopers off to the right across a broad valley. He turned immediately to Burbick and asked him if he would accept the surrender of the sick and wounded soldiers who were struggling to keep up with the fast pace. Burbick agreed to do so. While they were discussing terms, Rue’s fresh horses pushed far ahead, swerving down a dry creek bed and cutting across Morgan’s front.
John Morgan knew now that the end had come to his Great Raid. His men did not have enough ammunition to sustain a five minute encounter; his horses could not outrun the force in his front, and he knew the pursuers in his rear would soon overtake him. But he had one more card to play—he wanted paroles for himself, his officers and men.
He ordered a halt and asked Burbick abruptly if he would accept his surrender. “On what conditions?” asked the astonished guardsman.
“On the condition that my officers and men be paroled to go home,” replied Morgan.
“I don’t understand the nature of a surrender,” Burbick stammered. “I am not a regular officer.”
“I have a right to surrender to anyone,” Morgan insisted. “I want an answer right off, yes or no?”
“Yes,” said Burbick.
Morgan took a handkerchief from his pocket, reached for Burbick’s riding stick, and tied the white cloth to the end of it. He then ordered Burbick to ride out in company with two of the raiders’ officers and inform the Federals that General Morgan had already surrendered.
It was two o’clock, July 26, 1863, a bright Sunday afternoon on the Crubaugh farm south of Lisbon, Columbiana County, Ohio, when Major George Rue, a six-foot-three Kentuckian came riding up to John Morgan. Rue had to guide his mount through Morgan’s troopers who were lying in the grass along both sides of the road, some already asleep in the shade of fence corners. Morgan smiled when he recognized Rue; they had soldiered together in the War with Mexico.
Without preliminaries, Morgan informed Rue that he had already given his parole to Captain James Burbick. Then as a sort of conciliatory gesture, he offered the Union commander a sorrel mare for a trophy.
Rue had little to say, but it was evident that he felt cheated over losing the honor of capturing General John Hunt Morgan. He ordered his officers to disarm the Rebels and collect their horses. He had three hundred and sixty-four prisoners and almost four hundred horses.
The endurance of the 2nd Kentucky Regiment is apparent in the records of Rue’s prisoners. More than one third of them were of that rugged organization. At the beginning of the Great Raid, one in five of Morgan’s men was a 2nd Regiment trooper; after Buffington it was one in four; at the final surrender the ratio was better than one in three. The hard training given them by Basil Duke and St. Léger Grenfell had paid off for the veterans of the old 2nd. The Lexington Rifles, the Green River boys, the Lebanon Racers—they had shown the Yankees that Kentucky boys are alligator horses.
Years afterward a marker would be placed at the site of surrender, bearing the inscription:
This Stone Marks the Spot Where the
Confederate Raider, General John H. Morgan
Surrendered His Command to Major Geo. W. Rue
July 26, 1863, and is the Farthest
Point North Ever Reached by Any Body of Confederate Troops During the Civil War
Whether Morgan surrendered to Rue, Burbick, or General James Shackleford is one of those moot points of history. To the end of his days Shackleford would claim the honor. Rue, he said, was operating under his command, and he even took away from Rue the sorrel mare given by Morgan, as well as the great Glencoe, which he shipped off as a gift to old General Winfield Scott. As for Burbick, Shackleford dismissed him as a mere civilian with no authority to accept a surrender from anybody.
Only a few minutes after Rue reached Morgan’s side, Shackleford and Wolford arrived at a fast trot, and a strange reunion occurred there in the quiet Ohio farm country, all four men being Kentuckians. Wolford slid off his horse, limping with pain from the old wound Morgan’s men had given him months before, his scorched meat-axe face breaking in a great grin at the sight of John Morgan disarmed.
Shackleford’s manner, on the other hand, was cold and disdainful. Upon Morgan’s insistence that Burbick had given him a parole, Shackleford declared that such a proposition was “not only absurd and ridiculous, but unfair and illegal.” When Morgan saw that Shackleford had no intention of letting him go, he demanded to be put back upon the field to fight it out. “Your demand,” Shackleford retorted, “will not be considered for a moment.”
According to one of Wolford’s men who was present at the meeting, “General Shackleford’s passion got the upper hand of his judgment and he began to bestow some caustic epithets upon the conquered chieftain. Colonel Wolford interrupted, and rebuked the irate General, and told him that it was wrong to speak harshly to one whose hands were figuratively confined. Morgan as a token of appreciation of his kindness presented to Wolford his fine silver spurs.”
During the afternoon the captives were marched down to Wellsville for transport by railroad to Cincinnati. Frank Wolford, in charge of the officers, put his prisoners at ease, and invited them all to share chicken and dumplings with him at the Whittaker House. “Gentlemen,” he is reported to have said, “you are my guests. This hotel together with its bar, cigar stand, and other accessories is at your service and my expense. Do not go off the square in front of the hotel.”
8
Basil Duke and the raiders captured at Buffington Island meanwhile had already been taken to Cincinnati. On that hot Sunday afternoon after the defeat at Buffington Island, they were marched ten miles on foot down the river to board two waiting transports. The overland march told severely on them, several almost fainting on the road from heat and exhaustion, and Duke himself became so lame he could hardly walk.
As the two boats bearing the prisoners approached Cincinnati, the levee filled with a throng of men, women, and children eager to see “Morgan’s terrible men.”
The sixty-eight captured officers disembarked, the boats then moving on down to the foot of Fifth Street where the enlisted men were marched to a special train which would take them to Camp Morton at Indianapolis.
Duke, because of his lameness, and Dick Morgan, because of an infected leg wound, were ordered into an open carriage. Their fellow officers formed in two ranks behind them, and with guards four deep on either side were marched through Cincinnati to the City Prison on Ninth Street.
“Colonel Duke seemed to have many acquaintances in the city,” one observer reported, “for as he rode up the street he was frequently recognized by persons in the crowd, to whom he would respond by lifting his hat.”
For a brigade commander, the twenty-five-year-old Duke made a most unimpressive appearance, being dressed in plain blue jeans pants, a white linen shirt, and a dusty, wide-brimmed hat. He wore no marks of rank whatever. Yet he attracted the attention of everyone, including a reporter for the New York Post. “He is of small stature, weighing scarcely 130 pounds, well built, erect, with angular features, dark hair brushed carelessly aside, sparkling and penetrating eyes of the
same color, a low forehead, moustache and goatee. He has a sweet musical voice, a pleasant smile continually on his face, and is very free and cordial in his manner. There is nothing commanding in his appearance, though he has been termed by some the ‘brains of the raid.’”
This same reporter also arranged to visit the other prisoners, “huge brawny men, most of them, while not a few of a more lithesome form, lying on blankets, jumped up and courteously greeted us, evincing in their manner good birth and education. They were dressed in all styles of costumes, but few Confederate uniforms being worn, as they were mostly clad in linen coats appropriated from the wardrobes of Ohioans or from clothing stores, the property of which they had confiscated. One huge six-footer was clad in a dressing robe, and sported a huge black sombrero, looped up at the side with a plume of the same color. His immense black whiskers, which reached nearly to his waist and his heavy moustache, gave him a brigandish-looking appearance, as he strode in a theatrical manner around the room, smoking a cigar.”
John Morgan’s arrival after dark a week later, with Webber, Cluke and his other officers, provided another Roman holiday for Cincinnati. A mob of five thousand milled around the railroad station, some brandishing pistols and shouting, “Hang the cut-throats!” But no effort was made to storm the glittering bayonets of the guard, Union regulars of the 11th Ohio Infantry, who formed a hollow square and marched the prisoners quickly through the crowds, the regimental band playing “Yankee Doodle.”
At the jail, newspaper reporters were permitted to interview the prize captive of the raid. “Morgan appeared in good spirits,” one wrote, “and quite unconcerned at his ill luck.” He was dressed in a linen coat, white shirt, black trousers, and a light felt hat, “a well-built man, of fresh complexion and sandy hair and beard.” The alert New York Post correspondent quoted a request Morgan made to General Mahlon Manson: “General, I wish you would intercede and get a drink for me. I’m terribly dry.” After this remark, the reporter said, Morgan bowed courteously to the newspapermen, and with cigar in mouth walked away with his jailer.
9
And what did it accomplish—the Great Raid of July 1863? Militarily it forced General Burnside to delay his planned move into eastern Tennessee to join Rosecrans against Bragg at Chattanooga. Bragg never forgave Morgan for crossing the Ohio, but the absence of thousands of Burnside’s troops occupied in pursuing Morgan’s raiders enabled Bragg to win the battle of Chickamauga—the only great victory the Confederacy was to win in the western theater of war. In addition, during the crossing of Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, the raiders inflicted almost six hundred casualties and captured and paroled six thousand enemy troops. They destroyed bridges, railroad equipment, telegraph wires and military stores, the total value of claims public and private approaching ten million dollars.
Yet neither Bragg nor the Confederate high command considered all this a fair exchange for two thousand of the Confederacy’s best cavalrymen.
As for the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry, it was never to regain its full strength. In late July the remnants of Company D, escaping from Twelve Mile Island, were making their way south by stealthy night marches through Kentucky and Tennessee. Sections of A, F and L companies and a scattering of men from other companies were with Adam Johnson in western Virginia, searching for the Confederate lines. Four hundred and ninety-three men of the 2nd Regiment were prisoners in Camp Morton, their officers locked in cells in the Cincinnati jail.
Almost two more years of war, however, were yet to come, and many 2nd Kentucky cavalrymen would play exciting parts in the struggle, even into the turbulent weeks following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
12
The Captives
Oh, Morgan crossed the river
And I went across with him;
I was captured in Ohio
Because I couldn’t swim.
I
DURING THE STEAMBOAT JOURNEY down from Buffington Island to Cincinnati, several prisoners among the enlisted men of Morgan’s command took advantage of the dark rainy night to leap overboard from the crowded hurricane deck and swim to the safety of the West Virginia shore. They were the last to escape by crossing the river.
Sergeant Henry Stone stayed aboard, and next morning wrote a letter to his father in Indiana:
On Board the Ingomar
Bound for Cincinnati
Tuesday July 21, 1863.
DEAR FATHER
I am now with 700 others of Morgan’s men a prisoner of war.…So far I have been treated fairly well by our captors, but I can’t tell you how long such treatment will last.
I have but one suit of clothing and that is on my back. As to money I have none that will buy anything in Abolitionland.…I have deck passage now and last night when it rained I got wet through and through.
I’ll bet we are the gayest lot of prisoners ever taken.…Last night we had hard crackers and raw bacon…this morning we had the former and coffee. We meet with a little sympathy now and then. Some ladies cheered us on the Virginia side this morning.
At Cincinnati, the men were loaded in boxcars and moved north to Camp Morton, Indiana, only forty miles from Sergeant Stone’s home in Greencastle. To his surprise, Stone found himself in the keeping of old friends and neighbors, the boys of the 71st Indiana. “They all seemed rejoiced to see me there,” he wrote. “Through their intervention I received clothing and other necessities from home, and obtained an interview with my brothers and some of my old friends who learned of my capture while at Indianapolis and came out to see me.”
Camp Morton was badly overcrowded, recent arrivals being packed into earthen-floored stables crawling with vermin. At their first roll call, Morgan’s men provided considerable amusement for the guards, lining up in variegated costumes collected during the raid—stovepipe hats, linen dusters, jeans pants stuffed into cavalry boots, or in a combination of Confederate gray and civilian summer wear. Almost all were miserably dirty from an accumulation of sweat and dust.
Squads were soon assigned to laundry duties, however, and in a few days clothes were clean and bodies washed. A week later when their comrades were brought in after Morgan’s surrender in northeastern Ohio, the first arrivals had settled into prison ways. They had learned to defy the ever-present “graybacks” in their barracks, a few had managed to escape, and others were watching every opportunity to do so.
In a move to relieve overcrowding and prevent additional escapes, the Federal prison authorities decided to transfer the Morgan prisoners elsewhere. On August 15, Henry Stone scribbled a hasty note to his father: “Understanding whether reliable or not that we leave here for some other prison today.…I guess if we leave here it will be for Fort Delaware, or to be exchanged.”
The hopes of Sergeant Stone and his companions for immediate exchange were considerably dampened a day or so later. After a night rail journey, daylight revealed the flat prairies of northern Indiana, and the rising sun told them their train was moving westward rather than to a Delaware exchange camp. At Michigan City they had their first glimpse of Lake Michigan, and not long afterward the train halted outside Chicago where Federal soldiers were waiting for them alongside the tracks. To the sharp commands of blue-coated sergeants, they unloaded and began what for some would be their last march. Their destination was Camp Douglas, the North’s worst military prison.
2
Camp Douglas had been established in the spring of 1862 to house Confederate prisoners taken at Fort Donelson and elsewhere in Tennessee and Kentucky during the Federal offensive of that year. Constructed on land originally owned by Stephen A. Douglas, the camp was named for him. Its location on low ground which flooded after every rain, and in winter became a sea of frozen mud, was a poor choice for any sort of concentration of human beings. The camp was four miles from the center of Chicago, about four hundred yards from Lake Michigan.*
Conditions in Douglas became so wretched in January, 1863, that Federal soldiers stationed there to guard prisoners almost mutinied; t
hey expressed their loathing of the place by rioting, and wrecked some of the barracks and fencing. In the following month, 387 prisoners died, a mortality rate of ten per cent, which according to official records was the highest monthly death rate of any military prison during the war.
After an official investigation in March, a medical officer strongly recommended removal of the camp to another site, but General Halleck rejected the proposal. Death and disease rates among both prisoners and guards continued to run so high, however, that in April another investigation was made by the Sanitary Commission. “In our experience,” the inspecting officers reported, “we have never witnessed so painful a spectacle as that presented by the wretched inmates…the ground at Camp Douglas is most unsuitable, being wet and without drainage. We think it ought to be abandoned.”
Although the camp was not abandoned, no more prisoners were assigned there until August, 1863. In that month the gates were reopened, and prisoners came into Douglas like a flood, the first of the thousands being the men of the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry Regiment and their comrades of the Great Raid.
Barracks were in poor repair when the Kentuckians arrived on August 19, and there was no shade except along the sides of buildings. But cool winds usually blew off the lake to relieve the heat, no rain fell to leak through the roofs, and the broken walls provided comfortable summer ventilation. At first, most of the boys considered Douglas an improvement over crowded Camp Morton. Colonel Charles V. De Land, the commandant, quartered the prisoners by their old company organizations, each with a sergeant for spokesman. Through the sergeants the men were informed of rules and regulations, and were told they should make the best of the situation as they would be confined in Camp Douglas until the end of the war. Few prisoners believed this latter assertion, and during the first week or so not many escapes were attempted, even though the broken fencing was tempting. Almost to a man they were certain that exchange was only a matter of days. Why risk being shot while trying to escape, when exchange with transportation provided back to Confederate lines was bound to come soon?