An hour or so after Lucy Williams started out, a hard rainstorm swept across Greeneville, catching many of the troopers before they could unsaddle and find shelters in woods and fields. Their flour was soaked before they could build fires to cook it; their horses, frightened by thunder, almost stampeded.
Morgan and his staff—including Majors Harry Clay, C. W. Gassett, and Charles Withers—dined leisurely, waiting for the storm to let up. But the rain continued, and Morgan finally ordered his officers to don their ponchos and accompany him on an inspection tour of the outlying camps.
They returned to the Williams house just in time to escape another downpour with lashing winds. Logs were blazing in the parlor fireplace, and the officers stood before the fire drying their damp uniforms. They began swapping jests, drinking a little, and singing ballads. Morgan, who usually joined in this sort of merrymaking, did not participate on this evening. He sat silent before the fire, his face drawn and solemn. Suddenly he rose, ordering two of the officers to make another ride around the picket lines. He was afraid the pickets might have become careless in the heavy weather.
Perhaps he also remembered that it was Saturday night. In another hour or so it would be Sunday—the day everything important always happened to John Morgan.
Before he went to bed, he stepped out on the long gallery in the flashing lightning to make certain that sentinels were on duty all around the house.
A few hours later one of these faithful sentinels was knocking on Major Withers’ door, informing him that dawn was breaking. Withers pulled on his trousers and walked across the hall to Morgan’s room, calling him awake.
“It’s still raining, is it not?” Morgan asked sleepily.
“Yes, sir,” Withers answered.
“Let the boys have time to get their guns dry; better say seven o’clock.”
Withers replied that he would send couriers immediately to the camps, informing the colonels of a delay in marching orders until seven o’clock so that the men might dry their weapons.
While Withers waited for the couriers to return with receipted orders, he could hear the rain slackening. Thunder rumbled far away to the east. The long night storm was passing over.
Suddenly he heard another sound somewhere down the street; he listened carefully. It was rifle fire, increasing in intensity and coming closer. He stepped out into the hall, and saw Morgan with Major Gassett hurrying toward a door leading to the garden. Morgan was still fastening his clothes; he wore only a white night shirt, trousers and boots. There had been no time to put on his green under jacket, a present from his wife which he often wore as a charm against danger.
Withers followed Morgan and Gassett out into the board-fenced garden. Morning mist shrouded the rain-washed vines and shrubbery; water dripped from the grape arbors. The air was cool after the rain, heavy with the scent of blossoms.
Rifle fire exploded loudly in front of the house, and they started for the stable across the street to get their horses. But suddenly the street was filled with blue-clad horsemen, indistinct in the gray light. The three Confederates hurriedly took cover inside the small church at the end of the garden.
After a few minutes, Withers made a quick return to the house to try to signal the battery on the hill east of town. But low-lying mists screened everything; he could not even see the hill. The street outside was thick with milling Union cavalrymen. Some of Morgan’s sentries had been killed; others were inside the house, firing from the front windows. When Withers dashed back through the wet garden to inform Morgan of the situation, the mounted Federals saw him, opening fire. He had barely reached the shelter of the church when the enemy began pounding on the street doors.
Withers and Gassett wanted to surrender, but Morgan refused. “It’s useless,” he said. “They’ve sworn never to take me prisoner again.” He suggested they return to the house, join the surviving sentries, and make a stand until help could come. Morgan went out first, crossing behind the grapevines. His white nightshirt betrayed him. One of the Federal cavalrymen shouted, and a dozen or more began firing at once. Withers, racing for the house, heard Morgan moan “Oh, God!” and then saw him fall forward on his face into a clump of gooseberry bushes. A moment later the Federal troopers clubbed a hole through the board fence, urging their mounts into the garden, trampling the shrubbery. In all the confusion, Gassett escaped, but Withers was captured.
As he surrendered, Withers heard one of the cavalrymen shouting: “I’ve killed the damn horse thief!”
Morgan was dead; there was nothing Charles Withers could do now. It was a Sunday—the last day anything important would ever again happen to John Hunt Morgan.
The trooper who was first to reach Morgan’s body was Private Andrew Campbell of the 13th Tennessee Union Cavalry. Campbell threw the body across his horse, and for years Morgan’s men believed he then paraded it around the town. Actually, Campbell turned back toward his command to show Morgan’s body to his general, Alvin C. Gillem. There was no proof Campbell had killed Morgan; the dead leader had been struck by a fusillade from several rifles. Campbell’s purpose was to gain reward or promotion by presenting the dead body of Morgan as evidence of his prowess as a soldier—and he was given a lieutenancy later.
But according to Colonel James W. Scully, who was riding with General Gillem that morning, Gillem denounced Private Campbell for his treatment of the dead, and “had the remains placed upon a caisson and carried back to Mrs. Williams’ house, where they were decently cared for.”
8
In the meantime, Morgan’s men on the roads outside Greeneville had been alerted into action. Bradford’s Tennesseans were in retreat, their camp having been overrun by General Gillem’s attacking force. When Giltner and Smith first heard the gunfire from their distant positions, each assumed that men in one of the other camps were firing off their weapons to dry them. The firing continued in intensity, however, and Smith ordered his battalions to saddle up. They moved out at a gallop toward Greeneville. Down the road, Smith met one of his lieutenants who had been sent into town earlier to obtain a brandy ration for the rain-soaked troopers. As the lieutenant reined up, he shouted: “The town is full of Yankees!” Smith then ordered his column to make a flanking movement into the Jonesboro road, and moved up to the battery on the hill where the 2nd Battalion men were mounted and waiting for orders. The morning fog had cleared by now. “I saw the streets of the town full of Federal soldiers,” Smith afterward reported, “and on the farther side, General Gillem’s whole command in battle array.” Smith immediately ordered the battery to open fire on the Federal lines, and sent the 2nd Battalion charging into Greeneville in a desperate effort to rescue Morgan. None of these men dreamed that John Morgan was already dead.
The charge, led by Lieutenant Lewis Norman’s company, was repulsed, several of the men being captured before they could withdraw to the battery on the hill.
It was some of these captives and certain pro-Confederate citizens of the town who saw Lucy Williams returning to her mother-in-law’s house later that morning. Because she was conducted in by Federal pickets, it was assumed by those who knew her that Lucy Williams had been an informer, had betrayed Morgan to the enemy. The rumors would grow, and because Lucy Williams at first did nothing to disprove them, in fact cherished the notoriety and hoped to ingratiate herself with the Federals, the story grew into a legend accepted by many for years. Basil Duke, for instance, still believed Lucy Williams was Morgan’s betrayer when he wrote his history of the command.
But in none of the Federal accounts of the attack on Greeneville is there any evidence that General Gillem or his officers knew for certain that John Morgan was in the town. There was an informer, however, a young boy named James Leddy, who rode into Gillem’s bivouac about nine o’clock Saturday night and told him “Morgan’s men were all around his mother’s place”—a farm west of Greeneville. As one of Gillem’s officers knew the boy well, the story was believed. An hour later the 13th Tennessee Union Cavalry was marchi
ng, with two other regiments and a battery close behind.
Through torrents of rain and vivid lightning flashes which illuminated the flooded road, the Federal column moved eastward. About daylight the advance was challenged by Colonel Bradford’s outer videttes; they were answered with shots which killed them. The next set of pickets was found fast asleep and captured. (In spite of Morgan’s precautions it was his pickets who failed him in the end.)
A few minutes later, the 13th Tennessee had broken through Bradford’s bivouac, and the advance company was already into the town before the Federals learned for certain that Morgan was there. This time the informer was a Negro boy on a mule who volunteered the information that “General John Morgan was fast asleep at Mrs. Williams’ house.” At that same time Lucy Williams, the legendary informer, was also fast asleep at the Williams farm.
9
After the 2nd Battalion made its reckless charge into Greeneville and was thrown back to the battery on the hill, Smith, Giltner and Bradford joined forces and began a cautious retreat of fourteen miles to Rheatown. At any moment they expected to see the imperishable John Morgan come galloping down some byroad, smiling, and waving his plumed hat. But he did not come.
At Rheatown they held a consultation and sent Captain John J. McAfee of the 4th Kentucky with an escort party under a truce flag back to Greeneville to learn for certain what had happened to Morgan. When McAfee reached the town it was deserted; the Federals had turned back toward Bull’s Gap. He rode on down to the Williams house, and there found his general laid out for burial.
McAfee obtained a neat walnut coffin, commandeered a one-horse wagon for a hearse, and began the slow sad journey back to Rheatown.
The boys in the ranks—the survivors of the old Green River days, the long marches into Kentucky, the Great Raid—could scarcely believe their leader was gone. They had known for weeks that Morgan had changed, that he bore little resemblance to the light-hearted, smiling captain they had known when he was commander of the 2nd Kentucky. But so had they all changed, the war was changing, their world was changing.
For all his human faults they would never lose their admiration for the man who had brought them together. “Any one of us—all of us—would gladly have died in his defense,” Lieutenant Kelion Peddicord wrote after his death, “and each one would have envied the man who lost his life defending him. So much was he trusted that his men never dreamed of failing him in anything that he attempted. In all engagements he was our guiding star and hero.”
14
Episode of the Cloak-and-Sword
I
ON MARCH I 6, 1864, CAPTAIN Thomas Henry Hines with the blessing of Confederate Secretary of War Seddon was officially detailed for special service to Canada. From Tom Hines’ viewpoint this mission was primarily designed to release Confederate prisoners of war forcibly, but from the Richmond viewpoint recovery of prisoners was only one issue of a much broader program of cloak-and-sword intrigue against the Federal Union. Although Hines was given considerable freedom of operation, he was also accountable to a special Confederate mission which was being established in Canada to conspire with the so-called Peace Democrats in the Northwestern States—the Sons of Liberty, Knights of the Golden Circle, the Copperheads.
Hines arrived in Canada late in May, and at Windsor on June 9, he met the leader of the Knights of the Golden Circle, Clement L. Vallandigham, who had been banished from Ohio by President Lincoln for making inflammatory speeches against the administration. Vallandigham, who claimed to have 185,000 followers, disclosed that the Copperheads were preparing to seize the state governments of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. He assured Hines that his organization would be willing to co-operate with the Confederate government in a plot to release prisoners of war from Camps Douglas, Rock Island, Morton and Chase.
Hines was shrewd enough to detect a fundamental difference in his plans and those of the Copperheads. Hines’ burning desire was to free prisoners and take them back south to continue the war; Vallandigham and his followers wanted to overthrow the Federal government and stop the war. For the time being, Hines decided to accept the aid of these dubious allies, who he secretly felt were “tarnishing the shield of the Democratic party by tagging it with the name of Copperheads.”
During the following weeks, Hines busied himself with rounding up escaped Confederates in Canada and in establishing relations with Commissioner Jacob Thompson, chief of the Confederate mission to Canada. He discovered several of his old comrades of the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry in Windsor and Toronto—Lieutenants George Eastin and Ben Drake; Jack Trigg, the regimental forage master; John Ashbrook of Company E; telegrapher George Ellsworth; Bennett Young, one of Quirk’s original scouts; and Henry Stone who had served under Hines as a scout on the Great Raid and had been one of the first to escape from Camp Douglas.
In letters to his family in Greencastle, Indiana, young Stone recorded the strange life of these Kentucky exiles in Canada. “I went out to the Hiron’s House,” he wrote upon his arrival in Windsor, “where I’m stopping now; here I found about 25 of Morgan’s men, a number of whom I knew. I can board here for $2.50 to 3.00 per week. The state of my funds is $17 in money. This will last me a month anyhow.…Our boys register their names here as soldiers of the C. S. A. I wrote mine so in full.…The women all skate here; see their ankles easy.…I intend to study law if I can get books.” Stone went on to tell of how on his first Sunday in Windsor “the Morgan men formed a company and attended Methodist church together.”
They did not find life easy in Canada. Employment was almost impossible to obtain because of competition among the many refugees (who included numerous deserters from the Federal Army). Until Hines and the Confederate mission arrived with funds, they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, dependent upon money sent by relatives and friends back in the States.
All the Morgan men and a number of other Confederate fugitives cheerfully agreed to join Hines in his plot with the Copperheads. Not being inclined to postpone action, Hines set July 4 as a tentative date for simultaneous attacks against Camps Douglas, Rock Island, Morton and Chase. As the date drew nearer, however, the Copperhead leaders asked for more time to arm and assemble their forces. The date was set back first to July 16, then to July 20. By mid-July when it became evident that the procrastinating Copperheads were nowhere near prepared, Hines called a showdown meeting in London, Ontario.
The Copperheads now proposed the last week in August as an ideal time for an uprising. During this week, they argued, the national Democratic Convention would be meeting in Chicago, and representatives of the Sons of Liberty promised to bring at least fifty thousand members into that city for a massive assault against Camp Douglas. Prisoners would be freed, armed, and used to overthrow the governments of Illinois and Indiana.
By this time Hines was growing skeptical of the Copperheads’ ability to deliver on their promises. He agreed to wait until August 29, the date selected for armed revolt, but at the same time he began building up a force of his own from Confederate soldiers who escaped to Canada.
During August he acquired two valuable recruits in Toronto, Colonel St. Léger Grenfell and Captain John B. Castleman. Grenfell was delighted to be among his old comrades of the 2nd Kentucky again, but declared that he had taken an amnesty oath and could not formally join them. After leaving Richmond, the Englishman had journeyed first to Cuba, then to New York and Washington, where he had taken the oath and then had decided to delay returning to England until he had visited Canada for an excursion with some friends on Georgian Bay. When Hines asked him if he would be willing to go to Chicago, Grenfell replied that he would be pleased to accompany the party of disguised Confederates, to “go along to see how they made out.” As a matter of fact, he said, he had accepted an invitation from an Englishman named Baxter at Carlyle, Illinois, to join him for the prairie-chicken shooting season, and he would be traveling through Chicago anyhow.
Whether it was coincidence or not, immediately after Castleman’s arriv
al from Virginia, Hines was able to furnish his little army with pistols, ammunition, railroad tickets to Chicago, and one hundred dollars expense money for each man. But nowhere in the records does the name of Surgeon R. R. Goode appear; there is no mention of the Mount Sterling Farmers Bank of Kentucky.
Castleman being of equal rank was given equal responsibility by Hines. They made a strange pair of conspirators, Hines being twenty-five years old, Castleman only twenty-three. Both were mild-mannered, soft-voiced, courteous. They had come a long way in the two years since the day in Chattanooga when Castleman had sworn Hines in as a private of Company D.
Late in August, Hines gave orders to his best seventy-four men to start for Chicago. They were to travel in pairs so as not to attract attention, and each was given a slip of paper with the number of a room reservation at the Richmond House.
Castleman, Grenfell and two others made the journey on August 25, arriving on a train thronged with hundreds of delegates assembling for the Democratic Convention. One of the young Confederates who met Grenfell on the train was surprised that the Englishman was wearing a gray uniform. “Colonel,” he said, “if you go in those clothes to Chicago they will arrest you; you will not live there five hours.”
“No,” Grenfell replied, “this is an old uniform that was worn in an English battalion I once belonged to.” He smiled and added: “I have my English papers, and my gun and dog, and if they ask me what I am doing, I will say I am going hunting.”
The young Confederate shook his head. He did not believe a word of it; he knew the boys were already talking of how Grenfell had volunteered to lead the assault on Camp Douglas, in a mounted charge, of course.