A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
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The general had been told by Confederate sympathizers that the Copperheads in southern Indiana and Ohio would welcome his approach and would even join his ranks. None did. Irritated that these supposed Confederates in waiting did not flock to his side, Morgan did not offer them any protection when his men swapped out their tired horses for the fresh ones found on farms.
Morgan’s raid panicked lower Indiana and Ohio. The July 25, 1863, edition of Harper’s Weekly reported:
The raid of the rebel Morgan into Indiana, which he seems to be pursuing with great boldness, has thoroughly aroused the people of that State and of Ohio to a sense of their danger. On July 13th General Burnside declared martial law in Cincinnati and in Covington and Newport on the Kentucky side. All business is suspended until further orders, and all citizens are required to organize in accordance with the direction of the State and municipal authorities. There is nothing definite as to Morgan’s whereabouts; but it is supposed that he will endeavor to move around the city of Cincinnati and cross the river between there and Maysville.
Finally, on July 19, 1863, the raid came to an effective end at the Battle of Buffington Island, Ohio, when large numbers of Union soldiers started to press Morgan’s men down to the Ohio River. Morgan himself was escaping halfway across the river, holding onto the tail of his swimming horse, when he saw a Union gunboat come around the bend. Looking back to the Ohio side, Morgan saw that hundreds of his men would be unable to follow because the gunboat would soon be in range to shell them both in the water and on the river’s banks. Instead of escaping himself, Morgan swung his horse back toward Ohio and returned to the remnants of his command. Those men escaped capture for just another few days until Morgan surrendered the rest of his command on July 26.
The greatest and longest cavalry raid in the war’s history was over. Though they had been captured, Morgan and his men considered it a rousing success as they had inflicted more than 600 casualties on the Federals, and captured and paroled more than 6,000 Union soldiers and militiamen, nearly four times their own size force. More than 10 million dollars’ worth of Union war material was destroyed before it could be deployed against the Confederacy. The Union army had been thrown into disarray, forced to deal with enemy soldiers in its rear rather than countering the movements of Confederate general Bragg to its front.
Morgan and his officers expected to be sent to the Confederate officer’s prison camp on Johnson’s Island, Ohio, in Lake Erie, opposite the town of Sandusky. To their angry surprise, they were sent to Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. Treated like common criminals instead of Confederate officers, Morgan and his officers were shorn of their beards and hair and dressed in prisoners’ civilian clothes.
Morgan’s men were targeted for punishment for any infraction. They were put in a dungeon for doing virtually anything such as making comments that were considered anti-Union or for talking after lights out. Escape from the block walls that were twenty-five feet high seemed impossible.
The wily Hines was the one who discovered that escape was possible. He noticed that the floor of his prison cell was always dry, instead of damp as it would have been had it been resting on earth. A few questions of an elderly prison guard confirmed that an air chamber did indeed run under the floors of the cells.
Over the course of several weeks in October 1863, Hines and the other prisoners dug through the concrete floor using knives pilfered from the dining hall. Using a spade they had sneaked into their cellblock, they dug into the earth on the other side of the air shaft. They fashioned a thirty-foot rope made from shredded bedding and a grappling hook from a fireplace poker. On the night of November 27, seven members of Morgan’s cavalry, including Morgan and Hines, broke through the floors of their cells, dropped into the air chamber, and then dug their way into the prison yard where they successfully climbed the outer wall.
Hines and Morgan made their way to the train station and bought tickets to Cincinnati, the city Morgan’s men had bypassed rather than attack back in July. Morgan sat next to a Federal major on the train south. As the train passed the prison, the major pointed it out and commented that that was where they were keeping the rebel Morgan. Morgan replied, “I hope they will always keep him as safe as he is now.” Before dawn, Morgan and Hines had found a young boy to row them across the Ohio River to freedom in Kentucky.
Once word got out that the infamous General Morgan was on the loose, a Southerner in Canada got a bright idea. To throw off what he anticipated to be a pursuit by Union soldiers of the real General Morgan, the man started moving around that country registering at hotels using his real initials of J. H. Morgan. Once word got back to the United States, Union agents began scouring Canada looking for the elusive Confederate general.
Almost immediately, embarrassed Ohio officials charged that Copperheads had somehow sneaked into the prison and helped Morgan break out when the truth was much simpler. Just as he and his men had always done, Morgan had exploited the enemy’s weaknesses to their advantage.
Morgan would make his way to Richmond, Virginia, in January 1864, expecting a hero’s welcome for the strike he had made against the North. Instead, Confederate officials gave Morgan the cold shoulder, angry that he had ignored his commander’s direct orders not to cross the Ohio River. Happily, Morgan was reunited in Richmond with Hines, who had been recaptured in Tennessee on his way south after the Ohio penitentiary escape. Hines had escaped yet again from Union hands.
Morgan expected Hines to rejoin his command so that the two of them could start rebuilding the cavalry force that had been literally broken apart by the raid. Hines sadly told his mentor that he could not put on his gray uniform and strap on his pistols. From this point in the war forward, he would be wearing civilian clothes. He had been ordered to Canada. Hines told Morgan that he had been asked by Jefferson Davis to join Jacob Thompson and Clement Clay, Commissioners in the Confederate Secret Service, in the effort to convince the Copperheads in Illinois and Indiana to throw off the yoke of Union domination.
Morgan may have envied the adventure Hines was undertaking. Morgan himself never regained the old vigor that he had early in the war. When his brother-in-law Duke, who had been exchanged for some Union officers, saw him in early September 1864 for the first time in nearly a year, Duke was shocked at 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.”
Several days later, in Greeneville, Tennessee, Morgan’s sentries were surprised by Union calvarymen in the predawn darkness as the sentries waited for daylight to clean their weapons of the moisture from the rain that had been steadily falling all night long. When Morgan rushed from the house where he had been sleeping, he was shot down by several Union cavalrymen who had been tipped to his presence by a young slave boy who had heard of the Union patrol.
Once Morgan was shot down, one Union cavalryman shouted, “I’ve killed the horse thief!” He then jumped down from his horse, retrieved Morgan’s body, threw it across the neck of his horse, and paraded it before his commander. The Union commander reprimanded his soldier and had him leave the general’s body in Greeneville so that it could be properly buried. Morgan’s death shocked the few remaining survivors of the regiments he had formed in the fall of 1861.
“Any one of us—all of us—would gladly have died in his defense, 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,” wrote Lieutenant Kelio Peddicord.
Hines must have grieved over the senseless murder of his former commander at the hands of jubilant Union cavalrymen who could have easily taken an unarmed man prisoner. But in September 1864, Hines had a mission to complete, so he had no time to consider the death of his friend. Before Election Day in November, Hines wanted to free his old friends from the Second Kentucky Cavalry who were then imprisoned along with seven thousand other Confederates at Camp Douglas, outside of Chicago. In Hines’s mind, that would be the best revenge for Morgan’s murder: the release of battle-hardened, angry, hungry soldiers into the streets of Chicago.
Up in Canada, other officers who had ridden with Morgan were regularly gathering in their hotel rooms winnowing down the number of Confederate volunteers