A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
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not. I point with pride to their deeds as a refutation to this foul aspersion. We ask only to meet the hireling legions of Lincoln. The eyes of your brethren of the South are upon you. Your gallant fellow citizens are flocking to our standard. Our armies are rapidly advancing to your protection. Then greet them with the willing hands of fifty thousand of Kentucky’s brave. Their advance is already with you. Then “Strike for the green graves of your sires!” “Strike for your altars and your fires!” GOD, and your NATIVE LAND.
Kentuckians, Tennesseans, Alabamans, Texans, and some Virginians flocked to Morgan’s side, swelling his original fifty men to several thousand. His core command, however, remained fifteen regiments of Kentucky cavalry, including the Second Kentucky Cavalry, which grew out of his original fifty-man Kentucky Rifles.
There were character traits that Morgan and his men shared. Bennett Young, one of Morgan’s officers who would later lead a raid into Vermont from Canada, said that the young men who joined Morgan’s command “shared the full chivalry and flower of the states of Kentucky and Tennessee…. They were proud and that made them brave.” Another of Morgan’s men claimed that they were such good horsemen they were like centaurs.
Thomas Hines, a top Morgan aide, wrote of his fellows “[The] rank and file was of the mettle which finds its natural element in active and audacious enterprise, and was yet thrilled with the fire of youth; for there were few men in the division over 25 years of age.”
Morgan and his men loved and knew horses. The most prized were Denmarks, a type of high-tailed, long-necked horse first bred in Kentucky in 1850. Morgan himself sometimes rode Gaines Denmark, a dark brown horse that was son to Denmark, the namesake of the breed. Morgan’s men could recognize other Kentuckians at a distance by the breed they were riding. They could even recognize Union cavalry at a distance too far away to distinguish their uniforms because the Yankees did not ride as well as they did.
Morgan and his cavalrymen were too restless to be cooped up in camp where other, lesser men such as the infantry were forced to drill and drill again. These young men and boys of Kentucky and Tennessee were eager to be doing something worthwhile for the war effort against the Union. They wanted to have fun accomplishing their missions. They had been brought up knowing how to judge a fast horse, sit still in the saddle without bouncing around like a city slicker, ride for hours without getting saddle sore, and shoot and hit at what they were aiming. All that was part of being a Southern horseman. To do all that and shoot at Yankees was the entertainment of war.
Morgan and his partisan ranger contemporaries Nathan Bedford Forrest (operating in Tennessee and Mississippi) and John Singleton Mosby (operating in northern Virginia) did not have formal military training. Unrestrained from learning the tactics of war from a West Point textbook, all three men developed remarkably similar techniques of fighting. The textbook cavalry command before the war carried carbines, single pistols, and heavy sabers and fought usually from horseback in grand charges on any enemy, whether or not it was infantry or other cavalry. When they were not banging sabers with an opponent, the cavalry’s primary job was to scout out the location of the enemy’s army and report back.
Morgan, Forrest, and Mosby all started the war leading small numbers of men on raids behind enemy lines where their goal was to disrupt communications, gather intelligence, and steal supplies. Instead of always fighting from horseback, if confronted with an enemy, they usually dismounted so they could better aim their rifles. Many of the men discarded their sabers as unpractical during a time when a rifle could hit a man at three hundred yards. Instead, they carried multiple pistols or pistol cylinders that they could change out if they got involved in lengthy close-in fighting.
Throughout the winter of 1861–62, Morgan and his men honed to a fine art their type of swift raiding around Tennessee and Kentucky. They learned how to spread turpentine and pine knots in order to fire wooden bridges and railroad trestles quickly. They learned how to look like and talk like Union soldiers so that they could don captured uniforms and walk around a military camp listening for details on future military movements and rumors as to what they, Morgan’s men, were doing. They put on their civilian clothes and mingled among townsfolk to gather information on when trains would be leaving town so that they could set up ambushes.
Had they been caught wearing Union uniforms or civilian clothes, Morgan’s men would have been shot as spies. The men came to accept those risks as part of war. Their ease at playing someone they were not would come in handy when walking the streets of New York City.
Morgan liked surrounding himself with characters, particularly when those men were also hard fighters who could inspire other men. To name an instance, when British soldier of fortune George St. Ledger Grenfell had come calling with a letter of introduction from Robert E. Lee, Morgan took an instant liking to the 62-year-old man with the huge chin whiskers. When Morgan asked why he was fighting for the Confederacy, Grenfell replied, “If England is not fighting a war, I will go find one.” Grenfell would help train Morgan’s men, turning them from undisciplined boys into fighting men.
Morgan needed men like George “Lightning” Ellsworth, a Canadian by birth, who was living in Texas when he received a note from his old friend Morgan to rush to Kentucky. Ellsworth was a wizard at telegraphy, learning how to listen to the rapid stream of dots and dashes that was Morse code and read out the words without even needing to put the letters down on paper to form messages. Within days of starting on the job with Morgan, Ellsworth learned how to imitate the telegraph keying style of civilian and Union telegraphers.
Whenever Morgan was leading a raid, Ellsworth would tap into a telegraph line running between towns, listen for news, and then spread his own version of the news to throw off Union garrisons looking for Morgan. Ellsworth acquired the nickname Lightning when amused troopers watched him sitting in a river calmly tapping out his messages as a lightning storm raged overhead.
Basil Duke, thirteen years younger than Morgan, was a lawyer and Morgan’s brother-in-law, having married one of his commander’s sisters just before the war began. Dark skinned compared to Morgan’s light complexion and cool and collected compared to Morgan’s impulsiveness, Duke proved to be the perfect second in command to Morgan. He also seemed to attract Yankee gunfire. Wounded at Shiloh in April 1862 by a musket ball through his shoulder that came close to his spine, Duke recovered only to be wounded again in December 1862 when an artillery shell fragment crashed into his body. He recovered from that, too, but would spend nearly a year in a prison after being captured in July 1863.
Thomas Hines was a 23-year-old schoolteacher when he joined Morgan’s Ninth Kentucky Cavalry as a private reporting to Captain John Breckinridge Castleman, an officer who he would later recruit to free the Confederate prisoners in Illinois. Hines and Morgan both realized that Hines’s best skill was acting as an independent scout for the cavalry, slipping in and out of enemy territory to gather information that could be passed on to the officers who would lead the raids. Hines had great powers of observation, a skill that would come in handy when he, Morgan, and others would be locked up in a seemingly unescapable prison.
All through 1862 and into the summer of 1863, Morgan’s men struck terror in the hearts of Unionists in Kentucky and Tennessee. In June, Morgan decided that it was time to act on a long-held personal goal—to invade the North. Morgan obtained permission from his commanding officer, General Braxton Bragg, to lead a 1,500-man raid into Kentucky from his base in Sparta, Tennessee. Bragg readily agreed. Once he had permission for the raid, Morgan took 2,500 cavalrymen, 1,000 more than he had permission to take, and started north.
What Bragg did not know, besides the fact that Morgan had taken far more men than had been ordered, was that Morgan did not intend to stay in Kentucky on the southern side of the Ohio River. On July 8, 1863, just days after two different Confederate armies had surrendered at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and retreated from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Morgan crossed the Ohio River into Indiana at the head of 1,800 men, having lost about 700 to skirmishes in Kentucky.
For the next two weeks, Morgan and his men, including brother-in-law Duke, his spy protégé Hines, his telegrapher Ellsworth, and future Canada-based agents Captain Robert Martin and Lieutenant John Headley, fought a skirmish nearly every day as the militias of Indiana and Ohio turned out to fight Confederates on Union soil.
Morgan