John Hunt Morgan
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John Hunt Morgan (June 1, 1825 – September 4, 1864) was a Confederate general and cavalry officer in the American Civil War. He led 2,460 troops in a daring raid, called Morgan's Raid, racing past Union lines into Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio in July 1863. This was the farthest north any uniformed Confederate troops penetrated during the war.
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[edit] Early life and career
John Hunt Morgan was born in Huntsville, Alabama, the eldest of 10 children of Calvin and Henrietta Hunt Morgan, and uncle of geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. He was the grandson of John Wesley Hunt, an early founder of Lexington, Kentucky, and one of the first millionaires west of the Allegheny Mountains. Morgan's father lost his Huntsville home in 1831 due to an inability to pay the property taxes after the failure of his apothecary. The family moved to Lexington so that Calvin could run one of Hunt's sprawling farms. John attended Transylvania College for two years before being suspended in June of 1844 for dueling with a fraternity brother. In 1846, Morgan joined the Freemasons, as had his father before him.
Enlisting in the U.S. Army, he served as a cavalry private in the Mexican-American War, including the Battle of Buena Vista. Returning to Kentucky after the conflict ended, he became a hemp manufacturer and eventually took over his grandfather's prosperous mercantile business. In 1848, he married Rebecca Gratz Bruce, the 18-year-old sister of Morgan's business partner. Morgan, still interested in a military career, raised an artillery company in 1852 in the state militia, which was disbanded two years later.
In 1853, the Morgans had a stillborn son. Becky Morgan contracted septic thrombophlebitis, an infection of a blood clot in a vein, which eventually led to an amputation. Relations with his wife's family suffered over differing views of slavery and with her health issues. In 1857, Morgan raised an independent infantry company known as the "Lexington Rifles," and spent much of his free time drilling with them.
[edit] Civil War
An invalid, Becky Morgan died July 21, 1861. In September, Captain Morgan and his militiamen joined the Confederate States Army. He soon became the colonel of the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry. During operations near Selma, Alabama, in August 1862, Morgan's partisans killed a wounded Union general, Robert L. McCook, who was lying in an ambulance. The incident was widely described as "murder" in Northern newspapers and brought Morgan's reputation under question.[1]
He was named a brigadier general (his highest rank) on December 11, 1862. He received the thanks of the Confederate Congress for his raids on the supply lines of Union Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans in December and January, most notably his victory at the Battle of Hartsville on December 7. Also that December, Morgan married Martha "Mattie" Ready, the daughter of Tennessee congressman Charles Ready and a cousin of Tennessee congressman William T. Haskell.
Hoping to divert Union troops and resources in conjunction with the twin Confederate operations of Vicksburg and the Battle of Gettysburg in the summer of 1863, Morgan set off on his operation, which would become known as the Great Raid of 1863 by Confederates, or derisively as the "Calico Raid" by Federals. After many skirmishes and battles during which he captured and paroled thousands of Union soldiers, Morgan's Raid almost ended on July 19, 1863, at Buffington Island in Ohio, when approximately 700 of his men were captured while trying to cross the Ohio River into West Virginia. (Less than 200 succeeded in making the crossing.) Most of the raiders 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. Near Salineville, Ohio, on July 26, exhausted, hungry and saddlesore, Morgan and his remaining troops were forced to surrender to pursuing Union forces.
On November 27, Morgan and several of his officers, most notably Thomas Hines, escaped from the Ohio State Penitentiary—the only successful escape from the prison in the 19th century—and returned safely to the South. Ironically, that same day his wife gave birth to a daughter, who died shortly afterwards before Morgan could return home.
Although Morgan's Raid was breathlessly followed by the Northern and Southern press at the time and caused the Union leadership considerable consternation, most historians now consider it to have been little more than a showy but ultimately futile sidelight to the war. Furthermore, it was done in violation of his orders from Gen. Braxton Bragg. Despite the Raiders' best efforts, the Federal massing of nearly 110,000 Union militia in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, dozens of U.S. Navy gunboats along the Ohio, Mississippi and Tennessee rivers, and strong Federal cavalry forces doomed the raid from the beginning. The cost of the raid to the Federals was extensive, with claims for damage compensation still being filed against the U.S. government well into the early years of the 20th Century. However, the Confederacy's loss of some of the finest light cavalry in American history far outweighed the Union loss of equipment and supplies. When taken in conjunction with the defeats that month at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the loss of Morgan's Raiders dealt another serious blow to Confederate national morale.
After his return from Ohio, Morgan was placed in command of Confederate forces in eastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. The men he was assigned were hardly comparable to those he had lost on his raid. Nevertheless, Morgan did what he could. However, he was surprised and shot while attempting to escape capture during a Union raid on Greeneville, Tennessee on September 4, 1864. (His men charged that he had been murdered to prevent a second escape from prison, but this seems unlikely.) Morgan was buried in Lexington shortly before the birth of his second child.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Mackey, Robert R., The UnCivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861-1865, Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8061-3624-3.
- Ramage, James A., Rebel Raider: The Life of General John H. Morgan, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8131-0839-X.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Harper's Weekly August 30, 1862
[edit] Further reading
- Duke, Basil W., Morgan's Cavalry New York, 1906.
- Johnson and Buel (editors), The Battles and Leaders of the Civil War New York, 1887.
