OCR Text |
Show 44 ffA PJ g the PiaiderJ! By ELMO SCOTT WATSON , ,-r I' YOU nre a Northerner, you probably r". ' 1 think of (Jen. John Hunt Morgan j US 11 fierce, bowhiskered llril c 1t of Jh; !Xt'! r:i mi I ly I'u.tci?, bewhi.skered horse- AI A tni'ii, it gueri ll:i, a highwayman and I V' pi " li'"'si;-l hicf. That menial linage Is VZ a","! compounded of one, or all, of three rvySj-. You remember the stories your I grandfather told you of how he and his neighbors In Indiana or Ohio seized their squirrel rifles or inuskels, bark In the Rummer of 1W3, and rushed forth to defend their home land from being ravaged by a party of "rebel raiders." You recited at school a poem called "Kentucky ' ilelle" by Oorislance Kcniniore W'oolson with those unforgettable lines: "Morgan, Morgan the Kalder, and Morgan's . terrible men, With bowle knife and pistol, are galloping up the glen." Your childish eyes studied with fascinated In-lerest In-lerest the illuslrallons in some old book prob-nhly prob-nhly Harper's Illustrated History of the Civil War and you saw for yourself how terrible Morgan Mor-gan and his "terrible men" looked. If you are a .Southerner, you probably think cf Gen. John Hunt Morgan as a combination of Ileau Sabreur and Prince Rupert, as the veritable veri-table symbol of the ante-bellum South In which till the women were lovely and all the men were modern knights errant, 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 "The I.lttle Shepherd of Kingdom Come" by John Fox, Jr., you remember In It the glimpses of what seemed to be one of the most flashing, romantic figures In American history, this same Gen. John Hunt Morgan. Somewhere between tlio.se two extremes lies the true picture of this man anil It is that sort which Howard Swiggott, whose book "The Rebel Haider A Biography of John Hunt Morgan" lias Just been published by the Bobbs-Merrill company, has tried to paint. 1 lot h Northerners and Southerners as described Ot the beginning of this article will find much In Mr. Swiggett's book to confirm their views, but no one, except an extreme partisan, can seriously seri-ously quarrel with his conclusions about Morgan nor doubt that this biography Is as honest, as fair and as accurate a portrait of him as can be painted from the evidence available after the 70 years which have elapsed since he died. In brief, this Is the life story of John Hunt Ilorgan. Born In Iluntsville, Ala., June 1, 1S25, lie grew up In Lexington, Ky., under the code of the young gallants of the P.lue Grass aristocracy who ". . . learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery And how to scale a fortress or a nunnery." A student at Transylvania college at the age of sixteen, he was twenty-one when he enlisted In the First Kentucky cavalry to serve In the Mexican war. lie was at P.uena Vista but saw little oilier fighting before he was mustered out the next year and returned to Lexington to encage en-cage In the manufacture of hemp and the gen-oral gen-oral merchandising business left him by his prandfather. In 1S-IS lie married Rebecca Grntz llruce, named for her ancestress, Rebecca Gratz, whom Washington Irving described to Sir Walter Wal-ter Scott and who was the model for the character char-acter of "Rebecca" In "Ivanhoe." In 1S57 Morgan founded the Lexington Rides, 11 militia company of the young bloods of that town. At the outbreak of the War P.etweeu the States, Kentucky as a state tried to remain neutral. neu-tral. P.ut not so her high-spirited young men. Some of them joined the Union army and others the Confederate. P.efore 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 Illoody Ground." After the firing on Fort Sumter Morgan began drilling his Lexington Itifles In the armory in that city and all through the summer of 1SG1 continued to drill them under the suspicious eyes of Union troops stationed at Camp Dick Iloblnson which had been established near Lexington. Lex-ington. Then, one moonlight night in September, some of the Lexington Rilles, eluding the vigilance vig-ilance of Union watchers, slipped away down the pike toward the Confederate camp of Gen. Simon Bolivar P.uckner at Bowling Green. Almost as romantic figures as Morgan himself were some of the men who rode with him. There were his five brothers, the youngest. Key Morgan, Mor-gan, named for their famous relative who wrote "The Star Spangled ranner." There were "two others who symbolized the two sides of Morgan's nature: P.asil Duke, long his second-in-command, chivalrous, generous, soldierly . . . and T. II. Ilines, a scholar and wit, charming to his comrades, 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 lie bore so extraordinary a physical resemblance that the vitality of the story that Booth was alive after 'Go arose from people seeing Captain Ilines and thinking It was Booth. Ilines was perhaps the most recklessly 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. I.eger Grenfell, "a man out of a book by G. A. llenty rather than life, an incredible incred-ible figure who bad been a Chasseur d'Afrique and became Inspector-general, at si-ity years of age, In Bragg's army" and "that Ariel of the brigade, Ellsworth, the telegraph operator whose malicious military comedy was 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 Rilles engaged In scouting and patrol work. In It he began that career of swift, sudden 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. It was a reputation which northern propagandists sedulously sedu-lously promoted, even though he was a regularly regu-larly commissioned officer In the Confederate army, first as colonel of the Second Kentucky cavalry and later as a brigadier-general, commanding com-manding a brigade of horsemen from that state. By the spring of 1SG2 he was already on his f " V ' xs d f A' ' .. ? . - f ' V . ' I - j - . , -) . - V . y - ;;..-... . t capt :' ZM ' :t : -: Thomas H Efcj :a- , ' L ' ' " & I J- , V : John Hunt JAorqan 1 f ."f,-'"4 . r " - r U r , f--T7T- ,r Where Alorqan Surrendered l-.s--;s&e-i5'--' " Yiluams House m (jreenevillej Tezin. f v V, - - i V I , "I - - g i X ' -t N A V 4 . f , - 1 . ' - V t ' ' I ' i A ' e . x - !, - - ', " " ' ,' ! Gen. andMrs.John Hunt Morqan. Pictures from Swiggett's "The Rebel Raider," courtesy Bobbs-Merrill company. S . -3. way to fanie in both the North and the South. At Shiloh he showed great courage under fire and when Beauregard fell back after that battle. bat-tle. It was Morgan's cavalry who covered his retreat. Then came his first great raid into Tennessee, Ten-nessee, during which he proved to the Federals that he was a tricky as well as a brave adversary. On more than one occasion he and his men succeeded suc-ceeded in passing themseves off as Union cavalry cav-alry and fooled not only northern sympathizers In that region but the men In blue as well. His next raid took him into Kentucky, as a part of the movement made by Gen. Kirby Smith to threaten Cincinnati, a movement which had the state of Ohio in something of a panic for awhile. Lexington, Morgan's home town, was their first objective "They rode north for the beloved blue-grass through green forests and beside be-side the clear Tennessee waters. There was nothing like it again, the long column singing from end to end. delirious with the glowing September Sep-tember weather and the beauty of their beloved state. Duke was intoxicated with the romance of the rendezvous and wrote the 'Song of the Squadron' on the march." Thus, the romantic kind of warfare which fits so well into the southern south-ern version of the Morgan myth. Another element of the same kind came the follow ing winter. During the Christmas season Morgan was married again (Rebecca (Iratz Bruce Morgan had died in 1SG1) this time to Martha Ready, a young girl scarcely half his age. President Jefferson Davis himself came to Murfreesboro for the wedding and they were married by Leonidas Poll;, the bishop-general, who wore his Episcopal robes over his lieutenant-general's uniform. Of this wedding, more later, for It marked a turning point In Morgan's career. In 1SG3 came the great raid Into Indiana and Ohio w hich has been the subject of so much legend leg-end and upon which his fame is principally based. It ended disastrously with his capturn near East Liverpool and the imprisonment of Morgan and his ollicers in the state penitentiary at Columbus from which he and six of his officers of-ficers escaped a few months later. Making his way through the lines Morgan went to Richmond where he was given a great ovation and a new command. But his next raid Into Kentucky was not only a failure but brought down upon him suspicion of Incompetence or worse. The star of John Hunt Morgan was waning fast and it set forever for-ever on September 3, 1SG4, when he was killed by Union troopers In the garden of the Williams home In Greeneville, Tenn. Dashing and romantic a figure as Morgan was and successful as he was in the short, swift raiding type of warfare, he may have been a magnificent fighter In battle but he was not a great soldier. Says his biographer: "A technical military book asserts that he permanently altered al-tered cavalry tactics and operations by giving up the saber and fighting his command as riflemen. The final judgment of the Confederate high command, com-mand, however, was pretty much that of Braxton Brax-ton Bragg who said that, If he came back at all from one of his raids, It would be as usual after severe losses and with a demoralized command." For Morgan allowed himself to be surprised and defeated by the enemy too often to be considered consid-ered a great soldier and the way In which he alienated his best lieutenants and eventually lost the confidence and respect of his men weakens weak-ens any claim he may have to being a great commander. Although he may have altered cavalry tactics, he seems to have been lacking In an understanding understand-ing of the principles of strategy and unable to view the conflict in which he was fighting in its larger aspects. Some of his raids were not only futile but foolish and apparently based solely upon his vanity. In the early clays of the war he experienced the thrill of riding In triumph at the head of his troopers into his home town of Lexington, there to be given a tremendous ovation. ova-tion. "After that he tried above almost anything else to make a triumphal entry Into Lexington, cost what it might In military advantage." But Morgan is not to be entirely blamed for the futility of his famous raid of 'G3 into Indiana and Ohio. According to the evidence presented in this book, he made this raid under direct orders from President Jefferson Davis as a part of the Copperhead conspiracy in the Old Northwest. North-west. It was timed to correspond with Lee's advance into Pennsylvania and if, as Davis hoped, southern sympathizers rallied to the Stars and Bars as Lee crossed the Mason and Dixon line and Morgan crossed the Ohio, the North's support of Lincoln's prosecution of the war would collapse and there would be a demand for peace which the northern President dare' not disregard. But Davis undoubtedly had been deceived de-ceived as to the power of the Copperheads In the North and they did not rally to the Confederate Con-federate flag as he had hoped. Morgan, pushing on through Ohio, found the populace celebrating the victories at Gettysburg and Yicksburg and most certainly not in a receptive re-ceptive mood toward him and his raiders. So he became the victim of Davis' mistake, although he must bear some of the responsibility of his failure because he allowed his men to get out of hand and their looting of the property of Southern South-ern sympathizers as well as Northern (a mistake mis-take that was later repeated in Kentucky and Tennessee) probably would have doomed the expedition ex-pedition to failure If nothing else had. However, Morgan's connection with the Copperhead conspiracy con-spiracy had one important result for him later. It aided him to escape from the Columbus penitentiary peni-tentiary by means of bribery, and not by tunneling tunnel-ing his way out under its walls as the familiar lei-end has it. There are a number of factors In Morgan's failure as a military leader, according to this biographer. "It appears that during the months from April to July, 1SG3, there began in Morgan Mor-gan a subtle decay of will. He had to compromise com-promise with himself. . . . He seenis to lack all balance of mind. He Is one time too gay, another too depressed. ... In July, 1SG1 . . . he was going to pieces rapidly. His mental Instability In-stability was now close to mania. . . . "His whole career followed the tragic pattern of those lives which never effectively emerge from the irrational and imaginative ideas of a child. . . . The great Issues of the war became personalized for him so that, like a child, he thinks himself the center of it all. He is occupied occu-pied with impossible fantasies, there is seldom assurance that he can hold to a decision. . . . There is no doubt of his vast attraction for both men and women, but gradually even these relations rela-tions turn to conflict and antagonism, so that in the end his whole command turns away from the place where he is dying. "After the war his body was brought back to Lexington to lie in the lot with the Morgans, the Hunts, the Dudleys and the Dukes. Morgan lies In the Inner ring of standing stones next to his mother. The ring of stones is very close and curves slightly outward as though all the great clan had rallied close around lilm against his enemies." Ct by Western NewsDaDar Union. |