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.