Giltner’s troopers and Martin’s dismounted regiment were left behind to complete destruction of Federal stores and search for horses to remount Martin’s regiment. But before dawn the bivouac camp at Mount Sterling was surprised by a slashing attack from General Stephen Burbridge’s command. Colonel John Mason Brown’s 45th Kentucky Union Infantry overran Martin’s pickets, killed or captured most of them, and was into the Confederates’ bivouac area before the men could crawl out of their blankets.
Under a fog cover Giltner and Martin made a hasty withdrawal through Mount Sterling. A courier racing westward toward Lexington overtook Smith’s regiment near Winchester, and Morgan turned back. About ten miles out of Mount Sterling, he met Giltner and Martin. They had lost about two hundred and fifty men, but Burbridge’s horses were too exhausted to pursue; the Federal cavalry had been under forced march for twenty-four hours in an effort to overtake the raiders.
After a brief consultation with his colonels, Morgan gave the order to march on to Lexington. From reports of friendly informers, he knew that five thousand of the best Bluegrass saddle horses were waiting there for the taking; he was also eager to see Hopemont again.
It was two o’clock in the morning when the 2nd Battalion, with Quirk’s scouts in advance, walked their horses slowly into the darkened outskirts of Lexington. “I volunteered to test the enemy by going into Lexington under a flag of truce,” John Castleman later recorded. For escorts he chose his brother, Humphrey, and sixteen-year-old Key Morgan, the General’s youngest brother. They went in on Winchester Street, calling out repeatedly, “Bearer of flag of truce,” but the Federal garrison evidently felt so secure that no pickets had been posted around the town. At Limestone Street a window raised suddenly and a woman’s voice asked if they were Morgan’s cavalry When Castleman replied that they were, she said she was Mrs. John George. Her husband was with the raiders. She warned the flag-bearers to be careful, that Captain Hawes’ Union battery was posted a short distance down the street.
“I advised the boys to pull their horses well up on the sidewalk,” Castleman said, “and we halted and announced our mission with unusual vehemence.” A few minutes later Captain Hawes himself approached with a lantern, wanting to know the purpose of the truce party. “To demand the surrender of Lexington,” Castleman replied. After some delay, Hawes declined to surrender, and the flag-bearers turned back.
Confident that Lexington was not heavily garrisoned, Morgan now ordered Castleman to take a number of the Lexington boys and scatter through the town, setting fire to the railroad depot and military warehouses. While the Federals were distracted by these blazes springing up on all sides, Morgan led his column into Lexington, captured Hawes’ battery, and seized a number of outposts.
As day was breaking, Tom Quirk led a detachment from the 2nd Battalion out to Ashland, raiding John Clay’s stables and capturing several Thoroughbreds, including Skedaddle, one of the great racers of the times. Before noon they had more horses than they could handle, and more were being brought in from Federal stables every hour. “My entire command,” Morgan noted in his report, “was then elegantly mounted and the greater portion clothed and shod.”
After paying a visit to Hopemont (it was the last time he would see his ancestral home) Morgan ordered companies formed for marching. The best of the surplus animals were gathered into a horse herd to be driven at the rear of the column, and by mid-afternoon they were riding out of Lexington.
Before daylight of the eleventh, they were approaching Cynthiana, the boys of the old 2nd recalling their bitter fight at the covered bridge back in July, 1862. On this day it was much easier. Bowles and Kirkpatrick led the attack, dismounting and charging through a wheatfield, while Cassell was galloping the 2nd Battalion around to the right to outflank the small garrison. In a sharp little fight in the downtown streets, a fire broke out in a livery stable, spreading through several business buildings before Morgan’s men and the townspeople could stop it.
After the excitement was over, Morgan and his officers expressed their regrets for the fire, and then would have resumed march had they not learned of heavy infantry reinforcements approaching Cynthiana. Morgan quickly divided his regiments, Giltner meeting the enemy in dismounted skirmish formation while Smith circled to the rear. In a mounted charge, “yelling the infernal Rebel yell,” Smith’s troopers stampeded the rear of the Federal line, and truce flags went up.
Commander of these surrendered troops was General Edward Hobson, who had pursued Morgan’s raiders across Ohio in July, 1863. Here was a prize indeed! Morgan’s first thought was that perhaps a parole exchange might be arranged for some of his officers in Northern prisons. Hobson, however, could sign no valid parole, nor could any of the thirteen hundred ninety-day volunteers who had surrendered. Federal War Department regulations forbade further acceptance of paroles, with penalty of court-martial for any Union officer or soldier who did so.
On that late Saturday afternoon of June 11, General Morgan thus found himself burdened with more than a thousand prisoners. If he released them, they would quickly return to fight him; if he held them, they must be marched back to Virginia.
The question now before Morgan and his staff was whether or not to leave Cynthiana at once, with or without the prisoners. Evidently there was sharp division of opinion. Two enlisted men, Sergeant G. D. Ewing and Private George Mosgrove recorded that there was a long wrangling officers’ conference during the evening. Morgan was in favor of staying until morning. He still hoped to work out some sort of special exchange arrangement with the captured General, Hobson. He also felt that his men and horses needed rest. But Colonel Giltner wanted to march without delay. He was certain that General Burbridge, outrun at Mount Sterling, was long overdue.
As it turned out, Giltner was justified in his fears of an attack from Burbridge. And if Morgan had been more superstitious, he should have realized that the next day was a Sunday—the day of the week on which everything important happened to him.
Before sunrise, General Burbridge struck with a force twice as strong as Morgan’s. Four cavalry regiments, the 9th and 17th Michigan, and the 7th and 12th Ohio came in out of the gray light, overrunning the pickets, hoofs drumming, their long skirmish line crescent-shaped. Gilmer’s men were preparing breakfasts in a field beside the town, and some were trapped before they could reach their horses. As soon as he heard the firing, Colonel Smith sent Bowles and Kirkpatrick forward, but Bowles’ battalion was hit hard, his troopers falling back to the Licking River. The covered bridge jammed with panic-stricken horses, their riders leaping off and swimming the stream.
As best he could, Smith re-formed his lines in the street, but he soon saw that it would be impossible to hold, and ordered the men to attempt escape by squads.
“I saw General Morgan,” Private Mosgrove said, “skimming along at an easy pace, looking up at our broken lines and—softly whistling. I was glad to see him getting away, for had he been captured he would doubtless have fared badly—as the Federals had not forgiven him for his daring escape from the Ohio prison.”
Carl Sager, one of the boys trapped at the river, told of jumping his horse over a stone fence and landing in the water. “As we crossed, the enemy farther down gave us a heavy enfilade fire, killing many of our horses. To avoid the enfilade fire, we hung over the side of our horses, using them as shields from the bullets while crossing. My horse was shot through the neck, but succeeded in swimming the river and jumping the bank. Due to the loss of so much blood he fell to the ground. I had no difficulty in getting another horse, as many of them came out without riders.”
Miraculously, all but about two hundred and fifty men escaped from Cynthiana, but the survivors were so badly scattered that weeks would pass before all found their different ways back to Virginia. Among those captured was George Ellsworth, the telegrapher. The boys would miss his sardonic humor, but they guessed correctly that Ellsworth was too slippery a character for the Yankees to hold for long in prison.
/> Moving through the hills by nights, constantly searching for food for men and horses, Morgan led the 2nd Battalion along the valley of the Big Sandy, picking up scattered bands here and there. On June 20, the survivors rode into Abingdon, a much smaller force than had left there three weeks earlier. But John Morgan was still wearing a plume in his hat, he had horses to spare, and he was confident that most of his missing men were resourceful enough to escape from Kentucky.
6
July and August, 1864, were cheerless months for the Confederacy, with Grant hammering at Lee’s armies around Petersburg and Sherman slicing away at Johnston in Georgia. In their little corner of southwestern Virginia, Morgan’s men were almost forgotten in a temporarily quiet eddy of the giant struggle.
Singly and by squads the men who had been separated at Cynthiana continued to come in to Abingdon. By August, Morgan not only had most of his men back at Abingdon headquarters, he also acquired two additional regiments—formed from the broken brigades of Generals John C. Vaughan and William E. Jones. Determined to build up another cavalry division, he listed his four regiments as brigades in his table of organization, although their total strength was less than three thousand. Survivors of the 2nd Kentucky continued under Major Cassell as the 2nd Battalion of D. Howard Smith’s “brigade.”
On the surface everything seemed to be going well. Morgan’s wife had come up from South Carolina to live at headquarters, and she accompanied the General on his inspection tours about the camps. He dressed impeccably, he could still flash a smile at his boys, and would always stop for a word of good humor or encouragement.
But underneath, John Morgan was a troubled man. He could shrug off the censure from Richmond concerning his June raid, but not the many adverse reports from Kentucky. Some of his staunchest civilian supporters in his home state had turned against him, denouncing him for the looting in Mount Sterling and Lexington, the burning of Cynthiana. The robbery of the Mount Sterling bank was the sorest point of all.
Before John Castleman left Abingdon to join Tom Hines’ secret mission in Canada, he said that Morgan was “low-spirited, embarrassed by misfortune. He had not the buoyancy, nor the self reliance, which was his wont, and had not any longer his accustomed faculty of inspiring enthusiasm.”
What hurt Morgan most was criticism from his own officers, criticism which turned to direct accusations. Giltner, Smith, Martin and Alston, in attempts to clear themselves, all went over Morgan’s head to report to Richmond what they knew about the Mount Sterling bank robbery. “Appeals have been made to Morgan by Cols. R. A. Alston, and R. M. Martin and others,” Giltner reported, “to institute proceedings of investigation, but he has failed to do so.”
Alston had learned many details about the robbery from enlisted men in Company A of the 2nd Battalion who volunteered the information that they had been ordered to assist Surgeon Goode in robbing the bank. John Castleman’s brother, Humphrey, who was not yet twenty years old, was named as a key participant. According to Alston, when he passed this information on to Morgan’s inspector-general, Captain Bryant Allen, the latter “called on Humphrey Castleman, and instead of taking his evidence told him that ‘mum was the word.’ I use his language.”
Alston then discovered that all the volunteer witnesses among the enlisted men were being transferred away from Abingdon, that “all privates who dared to speak openly…were arrested.” Affidavits and other papers which he had collected on the robbery mysteriously disappeared from his quarters.
When he persisted in his demands for an investigation, Alston himself was transferred to Gladesville, Virginia, on the pretext that he was needed there to inspect troops. At this point, Alston decided the time had come to confer with his fellow officers, and together they submitted their charges to the Confederate War Department.
Instead of making an explanation of the bank robbery or defending his failure to investigate, Morgan wrote out a mild statement on August 21 for Secretary of War Seddon: “The facts developed thus far are not sufficient to a full exposé of the matter, and I have delayed any public action in regard to it until the whole thing can be thoroughly sifted.”
During the following week, Richmond headquarters studied the submitted reports. Morgan’s old enemies, including Braxton Bragg, no doubt considered these charges by the General’s own officers an excellent excuse to bring the incorrigible cavalry leader to account. On August 30, Richmond ordered that “Brig-Gen. J. H. Morgan be suspended from command and a court of inquiry…be at once constituted and convened, to meet at Abingdon, in Southwestern Virginia, on the 10th day of September next.” In addition, court-martial proceedings were drawn against Private Humphrey Castleman and Surgeon R. R. Goode. Significantly the charge against Goode read: “Brig. Gen. John H. Morgan, commanding, ordered the said Surg. R. R. Goode, then serving on his staff, to enter the Farmers Bank of Kentucky, located in Mt. Sterling, and seize the public funds in said bank for the use of the Confederate States, whereupon said Goode took from said bank $72,000, and failing to account for the same, applied said money to his own use.”
Did Morgan order Goode to take the money? And if so, did the surgeon abscond with it, or was he sent to Canada to turn the funds over to Captain Tom Hines for use in freeing Confederate prisoners in the North? Hines was in need of negotiable funds, and the money taken from Mount Sterling was in specie and U. S. treasury notes, instead of Confederate paper which was as worthless in Canada as it was in the North. Goode, with his foreign accent, would have been an ideal messenger.
Neither Goode nor Humphrey Castleman was ever brought to trial. Goode vanished immediately after the robbery, young Castleman about the same time that his brother left Abingdon to join Hines in Canada.
If the money was to be used for secret cloak-and-sword activities in the North, why did Morgan not hint at this in his letter to Secretary of War Seddon? Did he assume that Seddon knew this already? Was he covering up for someone higher in authority? Or did he consider the bank’s deposits fair spoils of war and therefore nothing to be overly concerned about?
The answers to this mystery will probably never be known. Before the court of inquiry could meet, John Hunt Morgan was beyond the reach of any mortal judges.
7
On the same day the Confederate War Department ordered a court of inquiry to investigate the robbery of the Mount Sterling bank, Brigadier General John C. Echols was named to replace Morgan as commander of the Department of Southwestern Virginia. But before Echols could arrive in Abingdon to take over command, scouts brought warnings of a Union column moving toward Bull’s Gap on the department’s defense line to the southwest. Morgan immediately ordered the troops—which Echols was supposed to be commanding—to march out toward Tennessee. He would join them later, if Echols did not arrive in time.
In the midst of this turmoil, Basil Duke arrived suddenly from the south. He had been unexpectedly exchanged at Charleston, South Carolina, reaching Abingdon only a few hours before the deadline Morgan had set for leaving. Duke was shocked by Morgan’s appearance. “He was greatly changed. His face wore a weary, care-worn expression, and his manner was totally destitute of its former ardor and enthusiasm.” The brothers-in-law briefly discussed events which had occurred since they had last seen each other in the Ohio penitentiary, then it was time for Morgan to board a train which would take him across the Tennessee line to Jonesboro, where he planned to join the troops for a march toward Bull’s Gap. Duke expressed a willingness to go with the expedition, but Morgan suggested he stay in Abingdon. He knew Duke was looking forward to a reunion with his wife, Henrietta.
Morgan’s train reached Jonesboro September 2, and he joined his waiting troops that afternoon on the road south of town. He had sent sixteen hundred men out of Abingdon, Giltner’s 4th Kentucky, Colonel William Bradford’s regiment from Vaughan’s old Tennessee brigade, and D. Howard Smith’s battalions. For this expedition, Captain James E. Cantrill was in command of the 2nd Battalion.
On the afternoon of Septe
mber 3, with the Great Smokies hazy in the distance, they were approaching Greeneville. Scouts rode far in advance, on the flanks, and beyond the town, but could find no trace of the enemy.
At a grist mill outside Greeneville, the column halted long enough for quartermaster details to obtain meal and flour. The weather had turned warm and humid, with dark cloud banks rolling up from the Smokies. At a turn in the road just before entering Greeneville, Morgan detached a battery and a company of the 2nd Battalion. The artillery was pulled up on a hill overlooking the town, and the column moved on.
In disposing his forces for the night, Morgan sent Smith and the remainder of his regiment out southwest of town to bivouac along the Bull’s Gap road, Gilmer’s 4th to the northwest on the Rogersville road, and Bradford’s Tennesseans to the fork of the Newport and Warrensburg roads. He thus had troops covering every main entrance to Greeneville.
General Morgan and his staff established headquarters in the largest house in town, the home of Catherine Williams. Mrs. Williams professed to be a pro-Confederate, but her house had often been used as a stopping place by both Confederate and Union officers. She had two sons in the Confederate Army, one in the Union Army. Greeneville, the home of Andrew Johnson, was a town of divided loyalties.
Catherine Williams’ house occupied almost an entire block, shaded by large trees, bordered by a boxwood hedge, with a board-fenced garden at one side extending to a small church. As John Morgan and his staff officers entered the front yard late that sultry afternoon, the air was filled with the fragrance of roses blooming in profusion around the gallery.
About the same time that Morgan entered the house, Mrs. Williams’ daughter-in-law, Lucy, left in a buggy for the purpose of driving out to the Williams farm to obtain watermelons. Because Lucy Williams was married to the Union soldier of the family, and happened to depart at about the same time Morgan and his staff arrived, she was to become a legend, one of the enduring myths of the Civil War.