John Hunt Morgan

John Hunt Morgan (June 1, 1825 – September 4, 1864) was a Confederate general in the American Civil War. In April 1862, he raised the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry Regiment, fought at Shiloh, and then launched a costly raid in Kentucky, which encouraged Braxton Bragg's invasion of that state. He also attacked the supply-lines of General William Rosecrans. In July 1863, he set out on a 1,000-mile raid into Indiana and Ohio, taking hundreds of prisoners. But after most of his men had been intercepted by Union gunboats, Morgan surrendered at Salineville, Ohio, the northernmost point ever reached by uniformed Confederates. The legendary "Morgan's Raid", which had been carried out against orders, gained no tactical advantage for the Confederacy, while the loss of his regiment proved a serious setback. Morgan escaped from Union prison but his credibility was low, and he was restricted to minor operations. He was killed at Greeneville, Tennessee, in September 1864. Morgan was the brother-in-law of Confederate general A. P. Hill. Various schools and a memorial are dedicated to him.
Early life and career
John H. Morgan was born in Huntsville, Alabama, the eldest of ten children of Calvin and Henrietta (Hunt) Morgan. He was an uncle of geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan and a maternal grandson of John Wesley Hunt, an early founder of Lexington, Kentucky, and one of the first millionaires west of the Allegheny Mountains. He was also the brother-in-law of A. P. Hill and of Basil W. Duke. Morgan never used his middle name of Hunt during the war — it is a post war appellation.
John Wesley Hunt, Morgan's grandfather, was a leading landowner and businessman in Kentucky and was the first millionaire west of the Allegheny Mountains. "His business empire included interest in banking, horse breeding, agriculture and hemp manufacturing. Among his business associates were Henry Clay and John Jacob Astor." He was a slave owner and an investor in the Lexington slave-trading business of Lewis C. Robards.
Morgan's paternal grandparents were Luther and Anna (Cameron) Morgan. Luther Morgan had settled in Huntsville, but a downturn in the cotton economy forced him to mortgage his holdings. His father, Calvin Morgan, lost his Huntsville home in 1831 when he was unable to pay the property taxes following the failure of his pharmacy. The family then moved to Lexington, where he would manage one of his father-in-law's sprawling farms.
Morgan grew up on the farm outside of Lexington and attended Transylvania College for two years, but was suspended in 1844 for dueling with a fraternity brother. In 1846, Morgan became a Freemason, at Daviess Lodge #22, Lexington, Kentucky. Morgan desired a military career, but the small size of the US military severely limited opportunities for officer's commissions.
In 1846 Morgan enlisted with his brother Calvin and uncle Alexander in the U.S. Army as a cavalry private during the Mexican–American War. He was elected second lieutenant and was promoted to first lieutenant before arriving in Mexico, where he saw combat in the Battle of Buena Vista. On his return to Kentucky, he became a hemp manufacturer and in 1848, he married Rebecca Gratz Bruce, the 18-year-old sister of one of his business partners. Morgan also hired out his slaves and occasionally sold them. After the death of John Wesley Hunt in 1849, his fortunes greatly improved as his mother, Henrietta, began financing his business ventures.
In 1853, his wife delivered a stillborn son. She contracted septic thrombophlebitis, popularly known as "milk leg", an infection of a blood clot in a vein, which eventually led to an amputation. They became increasingly emotionally distant from one another. Known as a gambler and womanizer, Morgan was also known for his generosity. He had at least one slave son, Sidney Morgan, by a slave woman, and was the biological grandfather of African American inventor Garrett Morgan (1877-1963).
Morgan remained interested in the military. He raised a militia artillery company in 1852, but it was disbanded by the state legislature two years later. In 1857, with the rise of sectional tensions, Morgan raised an independent infantry company known as the "Lexington Rifles," and spent much of his free time drilling his men.
Civil War service
Like most Kentuckians, Morgan did not initially support secession. Immediately after Lincoln's election in November 1860, he wrote to his brother, Thomas Hunt Morgan, then a student at Kenyon College in northern Ohio, "Our State will not I hope secede I have no doubt but Lincoln will make a good President, at least we ought to give him a fair trial & then if he commits some overt act all the South will be a unit." By the following spring, Tom Morgan (who also had opposed Kentucky's secession) had transferred home to the Kentucky Military Institute and there began to support the Confederacy. Just before the Fourth of July, by way of a steamer from Louisville, he quietly left for Camp Boone, just across the Tennessee border, to enlist in the Kentucky State Guard. John stayed at home in Lexington to tend to his troubled business and his ailing wife. Becky Morgan finally died on July 21, 1861.
In September, Captain Morgan and his militia company went to Tennessee and joined the Confederate States Army. Morgan soon raised the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry Regiment and became its colonel on April 4, 1862.
Morgan and his cavalrymen fought at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, and he soon became a symbol to secessionists in their hopes for obtaining Kentucky for the Confederacy. A Louisiana writer, Robert D. Patrick, compared Morgan to Francis Marion and wrote that "a few thousands of such men as his would regain us Kentucky and Tennessee."
In his first Kentucky raid, Morgan left Knoxville on July 4, 1862, with almost 900 men and in three weeks swept through Kentucky, deep in the rear of Major General Don Carlos Buell's army. He reported the capture of 1,200 Federal soldiers, whom he paroled, acquired several hundred horses, and destroyed massive quantities of supplies. He unnerved Kentucky's Union military government, and President Abraham Lincoln received so many frantic appeals for help that he complained that "they are having a stampede in Kentucky." Historian Kenneth W. Noe wrote that Morgan's feat "in many ways surpassed J. E. B. Stuart's celebrated 'Ride around McClellan' and the Army of the Potomac the previous spring." The success of Morgan's raid was one of the key reasons that the Confederate Heartland Offensive of Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith was launched later that fall, assuming that tens of thousands of Kentuckians would enlist in the Confederate Army if they invaded the state.
As a colonel, he was presented with a Palmetto Armory pistol by the widow of Brigadier General Barnard Elliott Bee Jr. That pistol is now owned by the Museum of the American Civil War.
Morgan was promoted to brigadier general (his highest rank) on December 11, 1862, though the Promotion Orders were not signed by President Davis until December 14, 1862. He received the thanks of the Confederate Congress on May 1, 1863, for his raids on the supply lines of Union Major General William S. Rosecrans in December and January, most notably his victory at the Battle of Hartsville on December 7.
On December 14,1862, Morgan married Martha "Mattie" Ready, the daughter of Tennessee United States Representative Charles Ready and a cousin of William T. Haskell, another former U.S. representative from Tennessee.
Morgan's Raid
Hoping to divert Union troops and resources in conjunction with the twin Confederate operations of Vicksburg and Gettysburg in the summer of 1863, Morgan set off on the campaign that would become known as "Morgan's Raid". Morgan crossed the Ohio River, and raided across southern Indiana and Ohio. At Corydon, Indiana, the raiders met 450 local Home Guard in a battle that resulted in eleven Confederates killed and five Home Guard killed.
In July, at Versailles, IN, while soldiers raided nearby militia and looted county and city treasuries, the jewels of the local masonic lodge were stolen. When Morgan, a Freemason, learned of the theft he recovered the jewels and returned them to the lodge the following day.
After several more skirmishes, during which he captured and paroled thousands of Union soldiers, Morgan's raid almost ended on July 19, 1863, at Buffington Island, Ohio, when approximately 700 of his men were captured while trying to cross the Ohio River into West Virginia. Intercepted by Union gunboats, over 300 of his men succeeded in crossing. Most of Morgan's men captured that day spent the rest of the war in the infamous Camp Douglas Prisoner of War camp in Chicago, which had a very high death rate. On July 26, near Salineville, Ohio, Morgan and his exhausted, hungry and saddlesore soldiers were finally forced to surrender. It was the farthest north that any uniformed Confederate troops would penetrate during the war.
On November 27, Morgan and six of his officers, most notably Thomas Hines, escaped from their cells in the Ohio Penitentiary by digging a tunnel from Hines' cell into the inner yard and then ascending a wall with a rope made from bunk coverlets and a bent poker iron. Morgan and three of his officers, shortly after midnight, boarded a train from the nearby Columbus train station and arrived in Cincinnati that morning. Morgan and Hines jumped from the train before reaching the depot, and escaped into Kentucky by hiring a skiff to take them across the Ohio River. Through the assistance of sympathizers, they eventually made it to safety in the South. Coincidentally, the same day Morgan escaped, his wife gave birth to a daughter, who died shortly afterwards before Morgan returned home.
Though Morgan's Raid was breathlessly followed by the Northern and Southern press and caused the Union leadership considerable concern, it is now regarded as little more than a showy but ultimately futile sidelight to the war. Furthermore, it was done in direct violation of his orders from General Braxton Bragg not to cross the river. Despite the raiders' best efforts, Union forces had amassed nearly 110,000 militia in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio; dozens of United States Navy gunboats along the Ohio; and strong Federal cavalry forces, which doomed the raid from the beginning. The cost of the raid to the Federals was extensive, with claims for compensation still being filed against the U.S. government well into the early 20th century. However, the Confederacy's loss of Morgan's light cavalry far outweighed the benefits.
Late career and death
After his return from Ohio, Morgan returned to active duty. However, the men he was assigned were in no way comparable to those he had lost. Morgan once again began raiding into Kentucky. However his men lacked discipline, and he was unwilling or unable to control them, leading to open pillaging along with high casualties. The raids of this season were in risky defiance of a strategic situation in the border states that had changed radically from the year before. Union military occupation of this region, long denied to major Confederate armies, had progressed to the point that even highly mobile raiders could no longer count on easily evading them. Northern public outrage at Morgan's raid across the Ohio River may well have contributed to this state of affairs.
His "Last Kentucky Raid" was carried out in June 1864, the high-water mark of which was the Second Battle of Cynthiana. After winning a minor victory on June 11 against an inferior infantry unit in the engagement known as the Battle of Keller's Bridge on the Licking River, near Cynthiana, Kentucky, Morgan decided to take a chance the following day on another contest against superior Union mounted forces that were known to be approaching. The result was a disaster for the Confederates, resulting in the destruction of Morgan's force as a cohesive unit, only a small fraction of whom escaped with their lives and liberty as fugitives, including the General and some of his officers.
After the flashy but unauthorized 1863 Ohio raid, Morgan was never again trusted by General Bragg. Nevertheless, on August 22, 1864, Morgan was placed in command of the Trans-Allegheny Department, embracing at the time the Confederate forces in eastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. Yet around this time some Confederate authorities were quietly investigating Morgan for charges of criminal banditry, likely leading to his removal from command. He began to organize a raid aimed at Knoxville, Tennessee.
John Hunt Morgan arrived in Greeneville, Tennessee on the afternoon of Saturday, September 3, 1864. That evening a 12-year-old boy, who lived west of town, rode the to a Union cavalry encampment at Bulls Gap to report that secessionist soldiers were in his town again. Confederate scouts had spotted the Union forces but Morgan believed the bulk of the force were some at Strawberry Plains. For their part, the "Tennessee Yankees," led by Alvan C. Gillem, had inaccurate intelligence from the boy that Hunt was with maybe 300 men, when in fact he had 1500 soldiers and two cannons. Gillem and his colonels, John K. Miller, W. H. Ingerton, and John "Belt" Brownlow, determined they must seize the moment and organized what was intended to be an encirclement of the town, dividing their forces in two, with Ingerton's locally raised soldiers taking "a trail used by wood haulers," and the bulk of the force under Gillem and Brownlow taking the main road. The night ride was beset by thunderstorms which conferred a two meager advantages: Confederates scouts stayed inside and "almost constant lightning" lit their way down the muddy, mostly empty, country roads.
Near morning, not one but three separate civilians, informed the advancing Union troops that were facing a considerably larger Confederate force than they understood and that John Hunt Morgan had spent the night at the Williams mansion, where he dined with the ladies and the servants. The Williams family had two sons were Confederate officers, one son was Union, and thus the family hosted officers of both sides during the course of the war. Hunt had placed pickets on three roads entering the town—but not Newport Road, the one that would be taken by Col. Ingerton and his men—and perhaps most importantly, "by placing his units a few miles outside Greeneville, Morgan rested for the night out of direct contact with his troops." As Col. Ingerton approached the town, "an excited young black man" was one of the three civilians who described Morgan's whereabouts to Union soldiers. This was likely the first that Ingerton heard about Morgan specifically being in the area, but Ingerton took the man at his word and "called upon Capt. Christopher C. Wilcox of Company G, ordering him to take his company and Northington’s Company I and 'dash into town, surround the Williams’ residence, and bring Morgan out dead or alive.'"
The two companies under the command of Capt. Wilcox rode into town, rousted what rebel sentries were to be found, and engaged in just enough gunfire with Confederates along Main Street to awaken Gen. Morgan. As Union soldiers entered the Williams property, they spotted "a man clad in a white shirt and trousers near the summer house. As they raced toward him, he fired his pistols at them and dashed into the vineyard bordering Depot Street." Morgan was dashing through the grape arbor toward a hotel, when Pvt. Andrew Campbell caught up with his group of three. Of two officers with Morgan in the shrubbery, one surrendered and one "caught a loose horse" and was able to escape. In any case, despite Campbell's repeated demands that he halt, Morgan failed to comply and kept running. Pvt. Campbell shot the man through the back, foiling his getaway. The bullet traveled through his heart, and he died on the spot. Only later did any of the Union men learn who Campbell had killed, when his body was identified by one of his staff officers, apparently in quite romantic language: "You have killed the best man in the Southern Confederacy...It is General Morgan."
Morgan was buried in Lexington Cemetery. The burial was shortly before the birth of his second child, another daughter.
Legacy
Hart County High School, in Munfordville, Kentucky, the site of the Battle for the Bridge, named their mascot the Raiders, in honor of Morgan's men. Also, a large mural in the town depicts Morgan. Trimble County High School, in Bedford, Kentucky also named their mascot the Raiders, in honor of Morgan's men.
The John Hunt Morgan Memorial statue in Lexington is a tribute to him. The statue was relocated from the courthouse lawn in July 2018, the same location where slave auctions were held. It was placed in the Confederate section of the Lexington Cemetery.
The Hunt-Morgan House, once his home, is a contributing property in a historic district in Lexington.
The John Hunt Morgan Bridge on East Main Street/U.S. Route 11 in Abingdon, Virginia, is named after him.
The John Hunt Morgan Bridge on South Main Street/U.S. Route 27 in Cynthiana, Kentucky, is named after him.
The General Morgan Inn, located at the spot he was killed in Greeneville, Tennessee, is named after him.
A Kentucky Army National Guard Field Artillery battalion, the 1st BN 623d FA (HIMARS) with headquarters in Glasgow, Kentucky, are known as Morgan's Men.
A statue was erected in Pomeroy, Ohio, for the effect he had on the town and its people.
See also
List of American Civil War generals (Confederate)
List of Notable Freemasons
Alvan Cullem Gillem
Battle of Buffington Island
Battle of Corydon
Battle of Salineville
Guerrilla warfare
Kentucky in the American Civil War
Garrett Augustus Morgan
Thomas Hunt Morgan – nephew of John Hunt Morgan who won the 1933 Nobel Prize in Medicine
William P. Sanders
Notes
Sources
Brown, Dee A., The Bold Cavaliers: Morgan's Second Kentucky Cavalry Raiders. 1959. Republished as Morgan's Raiders, Smithmark, 1995. .
Dupuy, Trevor N., Johnson, Curt, and Bongard, David L., Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography, Castle Books, 1992, 1st Ed., .
Evans, Harold. Who Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine. Little Brown, 2004.
Eicher, John H., and David J. Eicher, Civil War High Commands. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. .
Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol. 3, Red River to Appomattox. New York: Random House, 1974. .
Horwitz, Lester V., The Longest Raid of the Civil War, Farmcourt Publishing, 1999, .
Mackey, Robert E. The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861–1865. Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. .
Noe, Kenneth W. Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. .
Ramage, James A. Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986. .
Sifakis, Stewart. Who Was Who in the Civil War. New York: Facts On File, 1988. .
Warner, Ezra J. Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. .
Further reading
Duke, Basil W., Morgan's Cavalry New York, 1906.
Gorin-Smith, Betty Jane, 'Morgan Is Coming!': Confederate Raiders in the Heartland of Kentucky. Louisville, Kentucky: Harmony House Publishers, 2006, 452 pp., .
Johnson, Robert Underwood, and Buel, Clarence C. (eds.), Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Century Co., 1884-1888.
Mowery, David L., Morgan's Great Raid: The Remarkable Expedition from Kentucky to Ohio. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2013. .
Rue, George Washington, Maj. (1828-1911): Celebration of the Surrender of General John H. Morgan, Ohio Archæological and Historical Society Publications: Volume 20 [1911], pp. 368–377.
Penn, William A., Kentucky Rebel Town: Civil War Battles of Cynthiana and Harrison County, (Lexington: U. Press of Kentucky, 2016)
External links
The History of the Thunderbolt Raiders by journalists Lee Bailey and John Hambrick
John Hunt Morgan Heritage Trail
"The Battle of Corydon, Indiana" – Article by Civil War historian/author Bryan S. Bush, which contains rare images of Morgan shown courtesy of the Civil War Museum of the Western Theater in Bardstown, Kentucky.
"Morgan's Christmas Raid" – Article by Civil War historian/author Bryan S. Bush
1825 births
1864 deaths
Military personnel from Huntsville, Alabama
American people of Welsh descent
Confederate States Army brigadier generals
American military personnel of the Mexican–American War
Confederate States of America military personnel killed in the American Civil War
American Civil War prisoners of war
American Freemasons
Escapees from United States military detention
Lexington in the American Civil War
Orphan Brigade
People of Kentucky in the American Civil War
Transylvania University alumni
Slave owners killed in the American Civil War
Morgan family of Kentucky