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Overview
In this vibrant and thoroughly researched Civil War study, Dee Brown tells the story of Morgan’s Raiders, the Kentucky cavalrymen famed and feared for their attacks on the North. In 1861, Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan and his brother-in-law Basil Duke put together a group of formidable horsemen, and set to violent work. They began in their home state, staging raids, recruiting new soldiers, and intercepting Union telegraphs. Most were imprisoned after unsuccessful incursions into Ohio and Indiana years later, but some Raiders would escape, regroup, and fight again in different conflicts, participating in the so-called Great Conspiracy in Canada. The Bold Cavaliers is as engrossing in its historical detail as in its rich adventure. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Dee Brown including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781453274156 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 10/23/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 339 |
| Sales rank: | 651,739 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Bold Cavaliers
Morgan's Second Kentucky Cavalry Raiders
By Dee Brown
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1959 Dee Alexander BrownAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4532-7415-6
CHAPTER 1
Kentucky Boys Are Alligator Horses
I
At dusk the town of Lexington was quiet, the gas lamps not yet lighted, and only an occasional horseman was moving along tree-shaded Main Street. From the Lexington Rifles' armory at the corner of Main and Upper streets, passers-by could hear the tramp of marching feet and the hoarse calls of a drillmaster, but the sounds were familiar ones. For the past two or three years the Rifles had been drilling regularly twice a week. Although a month had passed since the pro-Union state government ordered this militia company's members to pack their rifles and ship them to Frankfort, the men continued their semi-weekly meetings, drilling without arms.
The day was September 20, 1861, the soft air of the dying Blue-grass summer deceptive of the time. After months of indecision, of uneasy neutrality, Kentucky was about to enter the Civil War.
During the past eighteen hours events had moved swiftly in Lexington. At midnight of the nineteenth, a regiment marched in from the Federal recruiting post at Camp Dick Robinson, twenty-five miles away, and occupied the Lexington fairgrounds. All day of the twentieth, rumors ran through the town that the Federal commander had issued orders to arrest certain members of the Lexington Rifles, including the company's commander, Captain John Hunt Morgan. Morgan had been flying a Confederate flag over his hemp and wool factory since the fall of Fort Sumter in April, and most of his military subordinates made no effort to conceal their preference for the Confederate cause.
Sometime that afternoon, Captain Morgan dispatched notes to the most trusted members of the Rifles, and in a hurried meeting revealed to those not in the secret that he had not shipped the company's arms to Frankfort after all. The packing cases which some of them had helped to make ready for shipment actually had been filled with stones. The rifles were concealed in the armory and in the homes of the members.
The time had come, Captain Morgan informed them, to leave Lexington and join the Confederate forces. He had information that Kentucky's own Confederate leader, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, had marched up from Tennessee, occupying Bowling Green with five thousand soldiers. From Bowling Green an advance force was moving north to form a Confederate line along Green River, and that was where Captain Morgan would march his Lexington Rifles, a little more than a hundred miles to the southwest.
"We then and there took an oath," one of the Riflemen recalled afterward, "to stand by our arms till death."
And so at dusk they gathered at the armory on Main Street, a dozen or so going through the drills in which they were so proficient, stamping boots firmly on the hard flooring, the drillmaster's voice more strident than usual. At the same time, others were busy in the alley entranceway where two farm wagons piled high with hay were drawn up, the drivers dressed in country jeans. At each end of the alley, guards loitered with a pretended indifference belying the alertness in their eyes, ready to signal any hint of danger—the approach of a stranger, a known Union sympathizer, or a blue-clad soldier from the camp at the fairgrounds.
The men in the armory slipped rifles outside to the wagons where they were buried deep in the hay. When the last weapon was safely packed aboard, the alley guards signaled all clear and the wagons moved out into Main Street. The gas lamps had been lit now against the darkness which bore a hint of autumn chill, a faint scent of autumn smoke. They passed a few Federal soldiers, in town from the fairgrounds to see the sights before taps sounded. After weeks of drilling in the back country at Camp Dick Robinson, the blue-coated soldiers strolling on the brick sidewalks were not interested in a pair of hay wagons rumbling along the hard-packed earth of Main Street.
Entrusted with this first dangerous mission of a militia company which later would form the nucleus of the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry Regiment, Confederate States Army, were Sergeants Henry Elder and William R. Jones, Corporal Tom Logwood, and Privates Tom Howe and Bowlin Roberts. They turned south on the turnpike, heading west for Versailles.
Somewhere along the way they were overtaken by Captain Morgan and about a dozen Riflemen who had remained behind in the armory for a while to continue the deception of drilling. These men were all mounted. Being from the horse country of Kentucky they had already made up their minds they would serve the Confederacy as cavalrymen. They had cartridge boxes belted on their backs and when they reached the wagons they armed themselves with rifles. Already they considered themselves soldiers of the Confederate States of America.
Around midnight the party crossed the Kentucky River at Shryock's Ferry, and as dawn began breaking over the misted, rolling hills they reached their first prearranged stop, pulling the wagons into the barn of one of Captain Morgan's trusted friends.
After making certain that all was secure, Morgan turned back to Lexington to round up other men he was certain would be eager to join his expedition.
Throughout the day, Logwood, Elder, Howe, Jones, Roberts and the others remained concealed in the barn with their wagons and horses, eating good food brought them by their host, resting in the hay and trying to sleep against the excitement of the past night's ride. They talked, joked, and in lapses of silence, they thought and wondered on what was happening to them.
They were all young, most of them a full decade or more younger than their captain, John Morgan, who was thirty-six, a veteran of the War with Mexico. Few were interested in politics, as Morgan was. To his young followers the Civil War was a part of the natural fabric of their lives; it had come upon them as slowly and inevitably as summer turning to winter, gradual as time.
When John Morgan organized the Rifles back in 1857, about fifty-young men joined up for fun, excitement, and perhaps the prestige of the company's gay green uniforms. Almost immediately, the Rifles were much in demand for parties and picnics. In August 1858, the Kentucky Statesman reported a visit of the company to Crab Orchard Springs, a fashionable watering place of the day, noting particularly "their bright and shining uniforms, tail coats, braided trousers, cross-belts and fancy headgear."
The following summer, with John Brown's abolitionist raid only a few weeks away in the future, the Lexington Observer & Reporter took note of the Rifles' presence at Blue Lick Springs. "We are certain that a finer body of men never shouldered a musket—a beautiful uniform, well drilled, and being composed of young and handsome gentlemen, we should advise all beautiful 'young sixteens' at the Springs to guard well their hearts, or perchance some of them will become attached to the 'Rifles' and be persuaded to learn the 'infantry tactics.'"
After John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859, Kentucky organized a state guard, composed of local militia companies, and the Lexington Rifles had the honor of being named Company A of the 1st Regiment. Captain Morgan reported to Governor Beriah Magoffin that he had fifty guns and sixty men ready for duty. But there was to be no immediate call for their services. Radical abolitionist sentiment being scarce in Kentucky, local controversies centered mainly on fine points of states' rights questions, and as 1860 moved into 1861, the Bluegrass remained a comparatively calm center in the raging national storm. Kentucky's leaders generally agreed on the aim of preserving peace.
Then came Fort Sumter, a cold shock of reality, startling the many Kentucky families with close blood ties in the deep South. When President Lincoln called for volunteers, Governor Magoffin replied: "Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States." The legislature, eager to preserve neutrality, approved the Governor's decision 89 to 4, and a sudden quietness fell over the state.
Neutrality became the popular standard. The word "secession" had not yet become a malediction, Kentuckians recalling that New England radicals had proposed secession for that section as recently as 1857. Peace advocates from both parties seriously proposed a separate confederacy of border states—Kentucky, Virginia, and Missouri—to secede and form a buffer nation between North and South to keep the peace.
In the early summer, General Buckner, then still commanding Kentucky's state guard, met with General George B. McClellan and received a promise that Kentucky's neutrality would be observed by the United States military authorities. For a time, all but a few hotbloods relaxed in Kentucky; the state lived under the illusion of neutrality.
Too much was happening, however, everywhere around them, portentous events involving relatives and friends beyond their peaceful borders. Late in July they heard the news from Bull Run; the Confederacy had won the first round.
Almost immediately, hundreds of young men began enlisting for service outside the state. Kentucky might remain neutral, but they would organize local companies and offer their services to Virginia and Tennessee. So many volunteered that Richmond sent word the Confederacy would accept no more from Kentucky—unless the men could furnish their own arms.
As a counter to this wave of Confederate volunteering, Union sympathizers established the recruiting camp for Federal enlistments at Camp Dick Robinson. Union representatives carefully pointed out that the volunteers at Dick Robinson were not an invading force, merely recruits, but Confederate sympathizers claimed the camp's presence was a violation of the state's neutrality.
Events moved swiftly. The first week in September, General Leonidas Polk led a Confederate force from Tennessee to Columbus, Kentucky. "A military necessity," Polk telegraphed Governor Magoffin, "for the defense of Tennessee." As a countermove, a Federal General few had heard of at that time occupied Paducah. The General's name was Ulysses S. Grant.
On September 10, the Confederate War Department ordered Albert Sidney Johnston—a Kentuckian—to command of all forces in the western theater, and by mid-September General Felix Zollicoffer had advanced from Tennessee into the Cumberland Mountain passes of Kentucky. Meanwhile, the state's guard commander, Simon Buckner, had gone over to the Confederate Army, organizing a division of Kentuckians in Tennessee.
One of Sidney Johnston's first orders sent Buckner's Kentuckians marching up to Bowling Green. And thus the Confederates established their first western defense line in neutral Kentucky, a three-hundred-mile front running from the Mississippi River east to the Cumberland Mountains. It was a line thinly held by twenty-five thousand amateur soldiers, but it was a military line, and not only was Kentucky now in the war, it had become a battleground.
2
As soon as darkness fell on their first day out of Lexington, the members of the Rifles hidden in the barn near the Kentucky River resumed their journey westward. Somewhere between Bloomfield and Bardstown, they halted at another prearranged camp in the woods.
This was a neighborhood largely pro-Confederate, and the residents welcomed the young men as heroes. Because these friendly people refused pay for food and supplies brought into camp, some wag in the company named the place "Camp Charity."
Captain Morgan, after narrowly escaping arrest in Lexington, soon joined them, bringing in additional recruits. For five days Camp Charity was a busy place, new recruits coming in almost hourly, the "veterans" making secret journeys by night to obtain additional ammunition, weapons, horses, and whatever gear they felt a man would require for a short war. There was practically no organization, no commander other than Captain Morgan—who was away much of the time on various missions—to enforce discipline, and life at Camp Charity resembled a summer outing much more than a recruiting station.
Most of these young men came from leading Kentucky families, and by the time the 2nd Cavalry Regiment—of which they were the cadre—was formed, many familiar names of the South would be represented on its muster rolls. Undoubtedly they considered themselves cavaliers in the old meaning of the word, certain of their invincibility, overconfident by nature, rash, impetuous, romantic, poetic, sentimental, imbued with the spirit of clanship. They were certain their homeland was "the best place outside of heaven the Good Lord ever made," but they were no more provincial than other Americans of that day, no more so than their opponents who felt the same way about their particular states or regions.
James Lane Allen, who was later to write of the Bluegrass of that time, was too young to join the cavalry, but his older brother was in the 2nd Kentucky, and the younger Allen knew these men well. They were possessed, he said, "of that old invincible race ideal of personal liberty, and that old, unreckoning, truculent, animal rage at whatever infringes on it ... the old sense of personal privacy and reserve which has for centuries entrenched the Englishman in the heart of his estate." For they were of English blood, most of them, "usually of the blond type, robust, well-formed, with clear, fair complexion."
If any one of them had asked himself, or been asked, why he was at Camp Charity, he would likely have replied in the romantic language of the time and place, speaking of duty, home, honor and family. They had inherited a traditional distrust of the North, too, running back to the time of the War of 1812, as Timothy Flint noticed in 1816, "a jealousy, almost a hatred of Yankees, prevailed among the mass of this people, during the late war ... much of this feeling still existing ... the manner in which the slave question is agitated, keeps the embers glowing under the ashes." The observant Yankee, Flint, was generous enough to admit that Kentuckians were "a high-minded people, and possess the stamina of a noble character ... scions from a noble stock—descendants of planters of Virginia and North Carolina ... they seem to feel that they have an hereditary claim to command, place, and observance."
Even Timothy Flint might have been surprised at how long and deep this distrust of Northerners was to run among Kentucky cavaliers. One of Morgan's young followers, a devout Presbyterian, described New England as "the land of intolerant Puritans, the home of witchcraft, the cradle of isms from abolitionism to free-love-isms." Whether they were interested in politics or not, they were aware of the Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case, and as the Civil War approached they generally considered radical Northerners as flouters of the law of the land because they refused to accept the court's decision that slaves were property. And it was not unusual in Kentucky to hear a pro-Southern man refer to Lincoln's call for troops as a "rebellion" that probably would have to be put down.
One may grasp the wide gulf that lay between these young cavaliers and the men they were preparing to fight from a letter written by General William T. Sherman in the midst of the struggle. Sherman was writing to Major General H. W. Halleck about the varying types of Southerners: "The young bloods of the South, sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard players, and sportsmen—men who never did work nor never will. War suits them, and the rascals are brave; fine riders, bold to rashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense. They care not a sou for niggers, land, or anything. They hate Yankees per se, and don't bother their-brains about the past, present, or future. As long as they have good horses, plenty of forage, and an open country, they are happy. This is a larger class than most men supposed, and are the most dangerous set of men which this war has turned loose upon the world. They are splendid riders, shots, and utterly reckless. Stuart, John Morgan, Forrest, and Jackson are the types and leaders of this class. This class of men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace. They have no property or future, and therefore cannot be influenced by anything except personal considerations."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Bold Cavaliers by Dee Brown. Copyright © 1959 Dee Alexander Brown. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- Dedication
- Contents
- 1. Kentucky Boys Are Alligator Horses
- 2. Green River Cavaliers
- 3. Shiloh
- 4. The Lebanon Races
- 5. Return to the Bluegrass
- 6. The Spartan Life
- 7. Dark and Bloody Ground
- 8. Christmas Raid
- 9. Winter of Discontent
- 10. The Great Raid Begins
- 11. Farthest Point North
- 12. The Captives
- 13. The Survivors
- 14. Episode of the Cloak-and-Sword
- 15. No More Bugles
- Image Gallery
- Sources
- Notes
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- V
- W
- Y
- Z
- A Biography of Dee Brown