The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1934-10-26

seized their squirrel rifles or muskets back in
the summer of 1853, and rushed forth to defend
their home land from being ravaged by party
Of rebel raiders"
You recited at school poem called Kentucky
Belle" by Constance Fenimore Woolson with
those unforgettable lines:
Morgan, Morgan the Raider, and Morgan's
terrible men,
With bowie knife and pistol are gauoping
up the glen"
Your childish eyes studied with fascinated in
terest the illustrations in some old book-prob-
ably Harper's Illustrated History of the Civil
War and you for yourself how terrible Nor
gan and his terrible men" looked.
II you are Southerner, you probably think
Of Gen. John Hunt Morgan as a combination Of
Beau Sabreur and Prince Rupert, as the verb
table symbol Of the ante-bellum South in which
all the women were lovely and all the men were
modern knights Grant, riding forth to brave and
daring deeds on the backs Of the finest horses
in the world
And, whether Northerner or Southerner, If you
ever read 1.-The Little Shepherd of Kingdom
Come" by John Fox, Jr, you remember in it the
glimpses Of what seemed to be one of the most
dashing, romantic figures in American history,
this same Gen. John Hunt Morgan.
Somewhere between those two extremes lies
the true picture Of this man and 1t is that sort
which Howard Swiggett whose book 1.-THE Rebel
Raider-A Biography Of John Hunt Morgan
has just been published by the Bobbs-Merril
company. has tried to paint
Both Northerners and Southerners as described
at the beginning of this article viii find much
in Mr.. Swiggett's book to confirm their views,
but no one, except an extreme partisan. can seri-
ously quarrel with his conclusions about Morgan
nor doubt that this biography is as honest az
fair and as accurate portrait OF him as can be
painted from the evidence available after the
20 years which have elapsed since he died.
In brief. this is the life story of John Hunt
Morgan. Born in Huntsville, Ala, June 1, 1925,
he grew up in Lexington. KY, under the code of
the young gallants of the Blue Grass aristocracy
who
a. learned the arts of riding fencing, gunnery
And how to scale fortress-or a nunnery'
A student at Pennsylvania college at the age
Of sixteen, he was twenty-one when he enlisted
in the First Kentucky cavalry to serve in the
Mexican war. He was at Buena Vista but saw
little other fighting before he was mustered out
the next year and returned to Lexington to en-
gage in the manufacture of hemp and the gen.
eral merchandising business left him by his
grandfather. In 1S4S he married Rebecca Gratz
Bruce, named for her ancestress, Rebecca Gratz,
whom Washington Irving described to Sir Wal
ter Scott and who was the model for the char
acter of "Rebecca" in "Ivanhoe."
In 1857 Morgan founded the Lexington Rifles
militia company of the young bloods of that
town. At the outbreak of the War Between the
States, Kentucky as a state tried TO remain neu-
tral. But not so her high-spirited young men.
Some of them Joined the Union army and others
the Confederate. Before the war was over she
was to know to the fullest the horrors of a civil
war with members of the same family arrayed
against each other and once more to become a
Dark and Bloody Ground
After the firing on Fort Sumter Morgan began
drilling his Lexington Rifles in the armory in
that city and all through the summer Of 1861
continued TO drill them under the suspicious
eyes of Union troops stationed at Camp Dick
Robinson which had been established Lex
ingtOn. Then, moonlight night in September,
some of the Lexington Rifles, eluding the Wig
nance Of Union watchers, slipped away down the
pike toward the Confederate camp of Gen. Simon
Bolivar Buckner at Bowling Green.
Morgan was at the head of them, of to the
long raids that were to lead to such glory, des-
pair and disillusionment He was thirty-six
years old. handsome man with blond mustache
and imperial i. :. 4. A handful went with him and
the splendor of his name was to recruit the
handful into long column that would dwindle,
as the saddles emptied. to another handful"
Almost as romantic figures Morgan himself
were some of the men who rode with him. There
were his FIVE brothers, the youngest, Key Nor
gan, named for their famous relative who wrote
"The Star Spangled Banner" There were two
others who symbolized the two sides of Morgans
nature: Basil Duke, long his second-in-command,
chivalrous, generous soldierly and T. H.
Hines, a scholar and wit, charming to his COM
rades. dangerous to his enemies, insolent to his
captors, twenty-one when he joined the army
a year older than John Wilkes Booth to whom
he bore so extraordinary physical resemblance
that the vitality of the story that Booth was
alive after So arose from people seeing Captain
Hines and thinking it Booth. Hines was
perhaps the most reeklessly competent man in
the Confederacy, and the only mind at work in
the conspiracies; his manner of war was secret
service, plot. escape-the very antithesis Of
Duke" Then there was the English soldier of
fortune, ST. Leger Grenfell,-"a man out of a
book by G. A. Henty rather than life, an incred-
ible figure who had been a Chasseur d'Afrique
and became inspector-general, at sixty years Of
age. in Braggs army"-and "that Ariel of the
brigade Ellsworth. the telegraph operator whose
malicious military comedy to cause havoc
in Northern headquarters His face had the
tragic mask Of the great comedian
After joining Buckner's army. Morgan and his
Lexington Rifles engaged In scouting and patrol
work. In it he began that career of swift. sud-
den raids, gobbling up Yankee pickets and in
every way possible harassing the Union lines,
which laid the foundation for his reputation in
the North of being a guerilla leader. 1t was a
reputation which northerns propagandsts sedu-
lousy promoted. though he was a regu-
larly commissioned officer in the Confederate
army, first as colonel of the Second Kentucky
cavalry and later brigadier- general. COM
manding a brigade of horsemen from that state.
By the spring of 1862 he was already his
way to fame in both the North and the South.
At Shiloh he showed great courage under fire
and when Beauregard fell back after that bat
tie T. was Morgans cavalry who covered his
retreat Then came his first great raid into Ten