Gen. Morgan returns to Civil War at rural outpost

Having successfully escaped from Union confinement at the Ohio State Penitentiary in late November 1863, Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan zigged and zagged his way to Richmond, Va.

 

He was intent upon having a conversation with Confederate President Jefferson Davis and re-engage in the Civil War effort.

 

Freelance journalist Phil Williams said that Morgan’s arrival in Richmond on Jan. 7, 1864, was cause for a grand reception and parade.

Morgan’s petition to the Confederate War Department to give him a new command was complicated, however. 

Williams explained: “Gen. Braxton Bragg (shown below), Morgan’s former superior officer, now served as a military advisor to Jefferson Davis, and the animosity between the two generals ran deep.”

 

The “bad blood went all the way back to why the Southern public loved Morgan in the first place,” Williams wrote. “Morgan’s claim to fame was his raids…where he attacked Union supply lines.”

“Bragg once gave Morgan specific orders not to cross the Ohio River, knowing his tendency for aggressive action.” 

Morgan disobeyed, pillaging and plundering his way through the southern sections of Indiana and Ohio, “causing mayhem and panic.”

Then, Morgan and a handful of his officers pulled off a miraculous and daring prison escape, making even more headlines and “galvanizing the Southern public,” Williams added.

“What a story…Richmonders ate it up. Unfortunately for Morgan, his military superiors did not feel the same enthusiasm for his exploits.” Bragg and Secretary of War James Alexander Seddon (shown below) felt “Morgan was a better candidate for a court-martial than a new command,” Williams wrote.

 

Yet, they relinquished on June 20, 1864, and gave Morgan command of a rural outpost in Abingdon, Va., to “watch over things” in eastern Tennessee and western Virginia.

 

In late summer of 1864, Morgan perceived an opportunity to “raise his stock” by repelling Union troops in and around Knoxville, Tenn., to gain total Southern control of the region.

With about 1,500 men in his calvary, he planned to swoop down in a surprise attack on a Union encampment at Bulls Gap, Tenn. 

Morgan’s unit arrived in Greeneville, Tenn., on Sept. 4, 1864, where they would spend the night before advancing.

Morgan was guest of honor at a lavish dinner party hosted by Catharine Williams, matriarch of Greeneville’s leading family, staunch Confederates. The late Terry Bisson, an author and historian, wrote: “Mrs. Williams warned Morgan that the area was thick with Union sympathizers; the federals were at Bulls Gap, only 20 miles away.”

“Morgan, who wore his legend like his uniform, coolly reminded her that he was quite capable of defending the honor of the South from Yankee marauders,” Bisson continued.

After consuming ample quantities of blackberry wine and Tennessee whiskey, Morgan was looking forward to a good night’s sleep in a large, comfy bed within the Williams family mansion.

 

Meanwhile, a Union sympathizer was spilling the beans at Bulls Gap to Union Gen. Alvan Cullem Gillem (shown below) that Morgan was in Greeneville.

 

Gillem ordered two companies of cavalrymen to surprise the Confederate pickets stationed at the Williams mansion, capture Morgan and “bring him out, dead or alive.’”

“Morgan’s pickets, many of whom had taken shelter from the rain in sheds and under porches, were caught dozing. Some were immediately captured and disarmed, while others managed to escape. Awakened by the melee, Morgan grabbed two loaded pistols and ran downstairs clad in only a nightshirt and slippers,” Bisson reported.

Morgan tried to make a run for it but was gunned down and killed by a Union soldier who had switched sides during the Civil War, having deserted the Confederate army.

 

Famed ‘Rebel Raider’ was buried 3 times

News from Greeneville, Tenn., on Sept. 4, 1864, reporting the death of Confederate Civil War hero Gen. John Hunt Morgan, 39, traveled swiftly over the telegraph wires. 

Ambushed by a Union raiding party, Morgan had died instantly from a point-blank gunshot blast that pierced his heart.

The Richmond (Va.) Whig newspaper reported: “Another brave, daring and chivalric cavalier has sealed his devotion to his beloved South with his heart’s blood….”

The very next day, under a flag of truce, Morgan’s body was sent on a special Confederate train to Abingdon, Va., where Morgan’s command had its headquarters. It was about 70-mile journey. The body was received by his widow, Martha “Mattie” Ready Morgan.

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Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan had married Mattie Ready on Dec. 14, 1862, in a lavish ceremony in the Murfreesboro, Tenn., home of the bride's parents, Charles and Martha Ready. He was a former U.S. Congressman from Tennessee. 

The residence was decorated with winter berries and holly, lit by candles and lamps. The wedding was considered a major social event of the Christmas season. 

The ceremony was attended by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and numerous high-ranking officers. 

(The artist is John Paul Strain of Benbrook, Texas.)

The funeral procession on Sept. 6, 1864, was led by Confederate Gen. George Bibb Crittenden (shown below). 

It stretched three miles long from the home of Judge John Arthur Campbell, where the body was laid out, to St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Abingdon.

 

It was the largest and most imposing assemblage ever in Southwest Virginia, as people crowded into town to pay their respects to the “Thunderbolt of the Confederacy,” the consummate Confederate raider who was “renowned for burning down Union railroad trestles and generally bedeviling Union generals.”

Morgan was laid to rest “temporarily” in a stone tomb inside an earth-covered tumulus within Abingdon’s Sinking Spring Cemetery. 

(This was the first of three funerals and burials that would pay homage to Morgan.)

Much has been written over the years about events associated with Gen. John Hunt Morgan and pursuits of Morgan’s Raiders. 

Author James A. Ramage likened Morgan to the Revolutionary War’s American Gen. Francis Marion (shown below), who was called “The Swamp Fox.” 

Their approach to battle, employing “irregular warfare” was similar, Ramage noted.

Both were Southerners. Marion, a native of Berkeley County, S.C., was born around 1732.

Morgan was born almost a century later in 1825, in Huntsville, Ala. He was a young boy when the family moved to Lexington, Ky., which he considered to be his true hometown.

“To many Southerners,” Ramage said, “Morgan became the prime model for guerrilla warfare. For Confederates, he was the ideal romantic cavalier, the ‘Francis Marion of the Civil War.’ They make him a folk hero who was especially adored by women.”

Morgan’s popularity with the Southern people “required that he lie in state at the capitol of the Confederacy,” so within a week, Morgan’s body was removed from the tomb in Abingdon and transported by train to Richmond, Va.

One source reported: “At the Richmond depot, Morgan’s body was honored with a military band, a battalion of State Guard troops, a fire brigade, the Kentucky delegation of the Confederate Congress and Richmond Mayor Joseph Carrington Mayo.”

 

“The Confederate flag-draped casket was drawn by four gray horses. At the Capitol rotunda, the crowds were joined by Secretary of War James Alexander Seldon, Virginia Gov. William Smith (shown below) and other dignitaries.”

Thousands of mourners attended a graveside funeral service at Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, officiated by Chaplain George Patterson (shown below). Morgan’s body was entombed in a vault there.

 

The Morgan family was finally able to make arrangements for yet a third funeral service and reinternment back in Lexington, Ky., after the war was over. Morgan’s body was removed from the vault and released to the family in April 1868.

The funeral procession on April 17, 1868, to Christ Church Episcopal Church in Lexington featured a brass band, the Masonic fraternity, family carriages, former members of the Morgan’s Raiders calvary in double file on horseback, other Confederate army veterans and about 2,000 citizens. 

Six former Confederate generals served as pall bearers.

Gen. Morgan would ride again with Confederate calvary

One of the most daring and fascinating Civil War jailbreaks was executed during a fierce storm on Thanksgiving eve in November 1863 when Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan and six of his officers escaped from the maximum-security Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus.

 

After the notorious leader of “Morgan’s Raiders” and about 400 of his men surrendered to Union troops outside of Salineville, Ohio, on July 26, 1863, the decision was made to lock up the Confederate officers (70 men) in the state penitentiary building, where they would be treated as “criminals rather than prisoners of war.” (Enlisted detainees were sent to a military camp in Chicago.)

Immediately upon arrival in the penitentiary’s cell blocks, Capt. Thomas Henry Hines began noodling a plan that would allow Gen. Morgan and some of the captives to escape.

Hines felt sure there was an air chamber located below his individual cell, because there was no dampness or mold present on the walls. They were completely dry.

Capt. Lorenzo Dow (L.D.) Hockersmith  agreed with the assessment. Before the war, Hockersmith was a brick mason in Madisonville, Ky., so Hines relied on Hockersmith to engineer the “excavation.”

The first step was to cut through the concrete floor in Hines’ cell, using an ordinary steel knife, to see what was below. Sure enough, there was a ventilation shaft; it would become their tunnel to freedom.

It was agreed to access six adjoining cells off the narrow passageway. Morgan’s men took turns working at night, using table knives and aided by candles that were collected from the prison’s hospital unit. The men chipped and chiseled their way inch by inch through thick layers of cement, brick and mortar.

 

From the air chamber tunnel, the men took up the laborious task of carving an opening through the outer wall of the prison to reach a deserted corner of the prison yard. Then, there was the matter of scaling a 25-foot exterior wall that surrounded the compound.

To address that issue, Col. Richard Curd Morgan, the general’s younger brother (not among the escape party), who had an engineering background, created a 35-foot rope out of bed ticking with an iron hook fashioned from a stove poker for the escapees to scale the final wall.

 

When the time was right on “a dark and stormy night,” after the guards made their midnight rounds, Gen. Morgan, Hines and Hockersmith, along with four colleagues, made their move through the tunnel.

Because the sentries had sought shelter from the raging storm, the Confederate officers were undetected as they darted across the prison yard and climbed the outer wall to make their escape. The seven men had agreed to split up into three groups.

Morgan and Hines, as one team, booked passage on an early morning train to Cincinnati, determined to reunite with the Confederate army. They deboarded just short of the Cincinnati depot and crossed the Ohio River by ferry to arrive in Ludlow, Ky.

A sympathetic congregation at Big Bone Baptist Church in Boone County, Ky., provided the fugitives with food and shelter as well as supplies and horses for their journey.

The mystique associated with their escape “paints the picture of gallant and honorable Confederate officers skillfully outwitting their dim Union jailers,” wrote historian Lisa Ungemach.

They broke out of a “heavily fortified and guarded state penitentiary and got away to safety in spite of the enormous odds stacked against them,” she said.

 

The jailbreak helped solidify Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s glamorous reputation as a modern-day “Blackbeard the pirate.”

He would fight another day.

Confederate Gen. Morgan likened to pirate ‘Blackbeard’

Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan, the mastermind of “Morgan’s Raid” through the Ohio River Valley during the Civil War, earned a reputation as a marauder and buccaneer.

Historian S.J. Kelly, former columnist for The Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio, labeled Morgan as “Blackbeard with a bridle.”

 

Morgan earned the reputation as a “hit-and-run bandit.” By the summer of 1863, his calvary had plundered 52 towns in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, capturing 6,000 prisoners and damaging $10 million of property.

In so doing, Morgan exhibited “predatory instincts” similar to the infamous pirate Blackbeard, according to editors at Harper’s Weekly Harper’s, a magazine published in New York City.

 

As everyone in coastal North Carolina knows, Blackbeard was the name taken by the notorious Capt. Edward Teach, who terrorized mariners in the waters within the North Carolina Southern Outer Banks, basically between Beaufort and Ocracoke, during the early 1700s.

 

Perhaps a penchant for raiding, pillaging and horse thievery was in Morgan’s genes. He was a descendant of Sir Henry Morgan, the infamous Welsh privateer from the 1600s who took refuge in Jamaica while raiding settlements and shipping ports on the Spanish Main in the Caribbean region.

 

In the fashion of Blackbeard, Morgan used deception and disguise to create confusion. He had his telegraph operator George “Lightning” Ellsworth impersonate Union officers and disseminate false telegraph messages, causing chaos, disorder and havoc.

Morgan was dubbed “Thunderbolt of the Confederacy” and was viewed as a daring, cavalier, chivalrous Southern hero, while in the North, he was regarded as a ruthless outlaw. 

Morgan frequently acted “outside the direct orders” of his superiors, much like a pirate, and his men were seen as a “band of dare-devil vagabonds.”

As “Morgan’s Raiders,” they frequently destroyed Union-held railroad lines, bridges and supply depots…and stole horses…to disrupt transportation and the flow of materials.

Finally, in July 1863, Union armies commanded by Gen. Edward H. Hobson (shown above) and James M. Shackleford (shown below) closed in on Morgan’s troops at the community of Portland, located on the Ohio River in Meigs County, Ohio.

 

Severely outnumbered, Morgan hoped to lead his Confederate calvary forces across the river at Buffington Island to safety in West Virginia, but he was forced into battle on July 19, 1863, which resulted in a decisive Union victory. More than 1,000 of Morgan’s men were taken as prisoners.

Gen. Morgan and about 400 others managed to flee, prolonging the chase. On July 26, 1863, eight days after the Battle of Buffington Island, Morgan surrendered to Union Maj. George W. Rue, about 170 miles north of Buffington Island, outside of Salineville in Columbiana County, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border.

 

The enlisted Confederate army personnel who served under Gen. Morgan were sent to Camp Douglas in Chicago, the Union’s massive, centralized Civil War detainment site.

However, Gen. Morgan and 69 of his officers “weren’t so lucky” to be confined at a military camp.

Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside (shown below) chose to classify Gen. Morgan and his key men as “criminal raiders, horse thieves and land pirates.” They were locked up inside the formidable Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, a place where escape was deemed “impossible.”

 

Or so it seemed. Civil War historian Lisa Ungemach said that Confederate Capt. Thomas Henry Hines began plotting an ingenious plan to bust out.

Before going off to war, Hines was a grammar school principal in LaGrange, Ky. One of his favorite authors was Frenchman Victor Hugo (shown below). 

In Hugo’s 1862 novel “Les Misérables,” the main character Jean Valjean escapes from prison “through the passages underneath Paris.” (Valjean had been found guilty of stealing a loaf of bread.)

Hines devised a way to “tunnel out.”

Confederate telegrapher gains notoriety for Civil War trickery

Confederate telegraph operator George A. “Lightning” Ellsworth was, by far, the best at his craft during the Civil War, consistently befuddling and outwitting his enemy counterparts and their Union generals.

Ellsworth was raised in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada, which is located on the northeast shore of Lake Ontario. His biographer said Ellsworth was totally “fascinated by the telegraph” and “as a young teenager, traveled to Washington, D.C., to study in Samuel Morse’s telegraphy school.”

 

Samuel Morse

Ellsworth found employment as a commercial telegrapher in Lexington, Ky., when he became acquainted with John Hunt Morgan, whose family owned and operated several sprawling horse farms.

Morgan formed and funded the “Lexington Rifles” a pro-South militia in 1857, comprised of about 60 prominent businessmen and community leaders. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Morgan and his men formed the core of a highly effective Confederate calvary warfighting unit.

 

Morgan’s grand plan was “to use the telegraph to spread disinformation” into Union territory. Realizing that Ellsworth, though still in his teens, was perfect for the job, Morgan recruited him to join his unit.

Ellsworth excelled as a telegrapher. Not only could he decode and read messages extremely quickly, he also could imitate the sending style of other telegraphers and he quickly mastered the “fist” of the Union telegraphers in Kentucky and Tennessee, wrote historian Dorris Alexander Brown.

“Ellsworth gained the nickname ‘Lightning’ in 1862 during Morgan’s first ‘Kentucky Raid,’ when he sat on a railroad cross tie in knee-deep water near Horse Cave, Ky., calmly tapping away at his telegraph key during a thunderstorm,” Brown said.

They made a good pair – thunder and lightning. Morgan was dubbed the “Thunderbolt of the Confederacy,” as he became legendary for rapid, hit-and-run raids, destroying railroads, capturing supplies and causing significant Union disruption.

 

Writing for the Civil War Times, freelance journalist Eric Ethier tells the story of Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s telegraph in 1862 from Somerset, Ky., to Union Gen. Jeremiah T. Boyle (shown below) in Louisville, Ky.

 

“Good morning, Jerry! This telegraph is a great institution. You should destroy it, as it keeps me too well posted. My friend Ellsworth has all of your dispatches…on file.”

Ethier said: “While Morgan was slashing through Kentucky that July, Ellsworth had been wreaking havoc on the wire.”

One anonymous historian posted online: “Ellsworth used the telegraph brilliantly to gather information and sow confusion in the enemy. He would learn the unique patterns of the enemy operators, then imitate them while sending false and misleading information to federal commanders about Morgan’s movements and the size of his force, sending them on wild goose chases or scurrying away in retreat.”

“After Morgan’s first raid, Ellsworth prepared an irreverent report detailing how he intercepted federal communications and how he deceived them with spurious messages. 

The report was widely printed in newspapers in both the North and South as well as in Europe. The London Times declared Ellsworth’s activities to be “the most striking and important innovation of the war.”

Gen. Morgan was almost a folk hero, portrayed as an “ideal romantic Southern cavalryman.” His troops, numbering about 2,500 men, covered thousands of miles on horseback, slashing their way through rural parts of  Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio .

 

Morgan’s strikes necessitated some 20,000 Union troops be detached from the front lines to guard communication and supply lines.

 

He surrendered on July 26, 1863, to Gen. Edward H. Hobson near Salineville in Columbiana County in eastern Ohio. 

Gen. Morgan and his officers were sent to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus.

Ellsworth managed to get away by swimming across the Ohio River.