Читать книгу A Vast and Fiendish Plot: - Clint Johnson - Страница 9

“A Born Gentleman to the Tips of His Fingers”

In the early morning of September 4, 1864, just days after the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Confederate general John Hunt Morgan lay dead in a gooseberry bush in the garden of a house in Greeneville, Tennessee.

The boldest of the Confederacy’s cavalry leaders did not die on a battlefield with a saber in one hand, a pistol in the other, and his horse’s reins in his teeth. He died facedown in a bush clad in a nightshirt, trousers, and boots. He was unarmed, shot down by several Union cavalrymen who never called to him to surrender. They then hoisted his body facedown across a saddle and paraded him around to show what they had done to one of the most famous Confederates of the war.

Morgan the man had nothing to do with the Confederate Secret Service, Copperheads (Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War), Canadian commissioners, planned attacks on Northern prison camps, or the burning of the nation’s largest cities.

Morgan the legend had everything to do with such things.

Morgan the man trained the Confederate officers who would carry out the attacks on Union cities behind their lines. Morgan the legend inspired the men to undertake such dangerous, seemingly impossible missions.

John Hunt Morgan was born the eldest of ten children in 1825 in Huntsville, Alabama, to a pharmacist whose shop failed while John was still a small child. The family moved to Lexington, Kentucky, so that the senior Morgan could find work managing the farm of a wealthy relative.

Life in Kentucky was good for the growing Morgan. He had fine, strong, thoroughbred horses to ride, wide expanses of neighbors’ property on which to ride them, and fences to jump. As he grew out of his teenage years, his family was finally restored to a measure of wealth so that Morgan could go to college.

Just being accepted into prestigious Transylvania College, founded in 1780 in his adopted hometown of Lexington, proved that the 17-year-old Morgan was an intelligent youth. The college at the time was considered on the educational par with Harvard and Yale with luminaries such as Senator Henry Clay serving as a law professor and a member of the board of trustees.

It was at Transylvania that the young Morgan first established the reputation he would retain for the rest of his life for rebelling against authority. To the disappointment of his family, Morgan often skipped classes and fell in with the wrong kind of crowd with whom he practiced the unsavory habit of swearing at passersby on campus. On at least one occasion, he fought a duel with one other member of his college fraternity. That was enough misbehavior for the college dean. The dean suspended him for the rest of the term, and he never returned to college.

In 1846, the 21-year-old got his first taste of military life when he and one brother volunteered for a cavalry regiment forming to join the regular U.S. Army fighting the Mexican War. He fought in only one battle, Buena Vista, where he and his brother acquitted themselves well, according to their commanding officers.

By 1849, Morgan, having found that a nation at peace had little use for self-trained army officers, was growing and processing hemp for the manufacture of rope, paper, and other goods. So in 1854, bored with keeping track of the weather and sales, Morgan founded his own company of militia called the Lexington Rifles.

Morgan’s wife, Becky, was continually sick after delivering a stillborn child and developed a blood clot that resulted in the amputation of one of her legs. Rather than watch as his once young, vivacious wife wasted away, Morgan spent much of his free time drilling his men.

Morgan’s seemingly insatiable need for adventure and military life was finally fulfilled in July 1861 when his wife of thirteen years died. The 36-year-old businessman who had always wanted a military career was now free to become the adventurer he had always wanted to be. He started his career with the Confederacy, showing the guile that would be his trademark. On the night of September 20, 1861, Morgan and fifty men absconded with the rifles that the Union governor of Kentucky had ordered turned over to federal authorities.

Morgan had seemingly complied with the governor’s order by loading the rifles onto wagons. But instead of sending the wagons north toward the capital, Morgan sent them south. He diverted attention from the wagons by noisily drilling his men inside the armory to give the impression that the Lexington Rifles would cast their lot with the Union. Late at night, after the drill had been finished, he and the Lexington Rifles rode south and caught up with the wagons. The rifles from the Lexington arsenal were delivered to the Confederacy.

Over the next several months while awaiting orders or a fight, Morgan amused himself by dressing in Union uniforms and regularly crossing into Union-held territory to spy on his new enemy. He was developing tactics and techniques that would come in handy both for military operations and for the spy network he was unintentionally creating.

Morgan seemed born to be a Confederate cavalier, an adventurer who could attract other adventurers to his side. One contemporary described him as standing six feet tall and 185 pounds. Balding at 36, Morgan made up for the lack of hair on his head by growing a luxuriant goatee and mustache that he always kept closely trimmed. On his head, he wore an elegant hat that he pinned up on one side.

In trying to describe him in print, some contemporaries sounded like Sir Walter Scott, the writer of Ivanhoe, which was a book Southerners relished as a description of how heroes should act and look. One man who knew Morgan described him as “a born gentleman to the tips of his fingers and to the ends of his eyelashes. He was blue-blooded, romantic and chivalry incarnate.” Another described him with:

His personal appearance and carriage were striking and graceful. His features were eminently handsome and he wore a pleasing expression. His eyes were small, of a grayish blue color, and their glances keen and thoughtful…. His constitution seemed impervious to the effects of privation and exposure, and it was scarcely possible to conceive that he suffered from fatigue or lack of sleep.

Morgan was also loquacious. He composed a broadside in July 1862 when he was looking for recruits: I come to liberate you from the despotism of a tyrannical faction and to rescue my native State from the hand of your oppressors. Everywhere the cowardly foe has fled from my avenging arms. My brave army is stigmatized as a band of guerrillas and marauders. Believe it not. I point with pride to their deeds as a refutation to this foul aspersion. We ask only to meet the hireling legions of Lincoln. The eyes of your brethren of the South are upon you. Your gallant fellow citizens are flocking to our standard. Our armies are rapidly advancing to your protection. Then greet them with the willing hands of fifty thousand of Kentucky’s brave. Their advance is already with you. Then “Strike for the green graves of your sires!” “Strike for your altars and your fires!” GOD, and your NATIVE LAND.

Kentuckians, Tennesseans, Alabamans, Texans, and some Virginians flocked to Morgan’s side, swelling his original fifty men to several thousand. His core command, however, remained fifteen regiments of Kentucky cavalry, including the Second Kentucky Cavalry, which grew out of his original fifty-man Kentucky Rifles.

There were character traits that Morgan and his men shared. Bennett Young, one of Morgan’s officers who would later lead a raid into Vermont from Canada, said that the young men who joined Morgan’s command “shared the full chivalry and flower of the states of Kentucky and Tennessee…. They were proud and that made them brave.” Another of Morgan’s men claimed that they were such good horsemen they were like centaurs.

Thomas Hines, a top Morgan aide, wrote of his fellows “[The] rank and file was of the mettle which finds its natural element in active and audacious enterprise, and was yet thrilled with the fire of youth; for there were few men in the division over 25 years of age.”

Morgan and his men loved and knew horses. The most prized were Denmarks, a type of high-tailed, long-necked horse first bred in Kentucky in 1850. Morgan himself sometimes rode Gaines Denmark, a dark brown horse that was son to Denmark, the namesake of the breed. Morgan’s men could recognize other Kentuckians at a distance by the breed they were riding. They could even recognize Union cavalry at a distance too far away to distinguish their uniforms because the Yankees did not ride as well as they did.

Morgan and his cavalrymen were too restless to be cooped up in camp where other, lesser men such as the infantry were forced to drill and drill again. These young men and boys of Kentucky and Tennessee were eager to be doing something worthwhile for the war effort against the Union. They wanted to have fun accomplishing their missions. They had been brought up knowing how to judge a fast horse, sit still in the saddle without bouncing around like a city slicker, ride for hours without getting saddle sore, and shoot and hit at what they were aiming. All that was part of being a Southern horseman. To do all that and shoot at Yankees was the entertainment of war.

Morgan and his partisan ranger contemporaries Nathan Bedford Forrest (operating in Tennessee and Mississippi) and John Singleton Mosby (operating in northern Virginia) did not have formal military training. Unrestrained from learning the tactics of war from a West Point textbook, all three men developed remarkably similar techniques of fighting. The textbook cavalry command before the war carried carbines, single pistols, and heavy sabers and fought usually from horseback in grand charges on any enemy, whether or not it was infantry or other cavalry. When they were not banging sabers with an opponent, the cavalry’s primary job was to scout out the location of the enemy’s army and report back.

Morgan, Forrest, and Mosby all started the war leading small numbers of men on raids behind enemy lines where their goal was to disrupt communications, gather intelligence, and steal supplies. Instead of always fighting from horseback, if confronted with an enemy, they usually dismounted so they could better aim their rifles. Many of the men discarded their sabers as unpractical during a time when a rifle could hit a man at three hundred yards. Instead, they carried multiple pistols or pistol cylinders that they could change out if they got involved in lengthy close-in fighting.

Throughout the winter of 1861–62, Morgan and his men honed to a fine art their type of swift raiding around Tennessee and Kentucky. They learned how to spread turpentine and pine knots in order to fire wooden bridges and railroad trestles quickly. They learned how to look like and talk like Union soldiers so that they could don captured uniforms and walk around a military camp listening for details on future military movements and rumors as to what they, Morgan’s men, were doing. They put on their civilian clothes and mingled among townsfolk to gather information on when trains would be leaving town so that they could set up ambushes.

Had they been caught wearing Union uniforms or civilian clothes, Morgan’s men would have been shot as spies. The men came to accept those risks as part of war. Their ease at playing someone they were not would come in handy when walking the streets of New York City.

Morgan liked surrounding himself with characters, particularly when those men were also hard fighters who could inspire other men. To name an instance, when British soldier of fortune George St. Ledger Grenfell had come calling with a letter of introduction from Robert E. Lee, Morgan took an instant liking to the 62-year-old man with the huge chin whiskers. When Morgan asked why he was fighting for the Confederacy, Grenfell replied, “If England is not fighting a war, I will go find one.” Grenfell would help train Morgan’s men, turning them from undisciplined boys into fighting men.

Morgan needed men like George “Lightning” Ellsworth, a Canadian by birth, who was living in Texas when he received a note from his old friend Morgan to rush to Kentucky. Ellsworth was a wizard at telegraphy, learning how to listen to the rapid stream of dots and dashes that was Morse code and read out the words without even needing to put the letters down on paper to form messages. Within days of starting on the job with Morgan, Ellsworth learned how to imitate the telegraph keying style of civilian and Union telegraphers.

Whenever Morgan was leading a raid, Ellsworth would tap into a telegraph line running between towns, listen for news, and then spread his own version of the news to throw off Union garrisons looking for Morgan. Ellsworth acquired the nickname Lightning when amused troopers watched him sitting in a river calmly tapping out his messages as a lightning storm raged overhead.

Basil Duke, thirteen years younger than Morgan, was a lawyer and Morgan’s brother-in-law, having married one of his commander’s sisters just before the war began. Dark skinned compared to Morgan’s light complexion and cool and collected compared to Morgan’s impulsiveness, Duke proved to be the perfect second in command to Morgan. He also seemed to attract Yankee gunfire. Wounded at Shiloh in April 1862 by a musket ball through his shoulder that came close to his spine, Duke recovered only to be wounded again in December 1862 when an artillery shell fragment crashed into his body. He recovered from that, too, but would spend nearly a year in a prison after being captured in July 1863.

Thomas Hines was a 23-year-old schoolteacher when he joined Morgan’s Ninth Kentucky Cavalry as a private reporting to Captain John Breckinridge Castleman, an officer who he would later recruit to free the Confederate prisoners in Illinois. Hines and Morgan both realized that Hines’s best skill was acting as an independent scout for the cavalry, slipping in and out of enemy territory to gather information that could be passed on to the officers who would lead the raids. Hines had great powers of observation, a skill that would come in handy when he, Morgan, and others would be locked up in a seemingly unescapable prison.

All through 1862 and into the summer of 1863, Morgan’s men struck terror in the hearts of Unionists in Kentucky and Tennessee. In June, Morgan decided that it was time to act on a long-held personal goal—to invade the North. Morgan obtained permission from his commanding officer, General Braxton Bragg, to lead a 1,500-man raid into Kentucky from his base in Sparta, Tennessee. Bragg readily agreed. Once he had permission for the raid, Morgan took 2,500 cavalrymen, 1,000 more than he had permission to take, and started north.

What Bragg did not know, besides the fact that Morgan had taken far more men than had been ordered, was that Morgan did not intend to stay in Kentucky on the southern side of the Ohio River. On July 8, 1863, just days after two different Confederate armies had surrendered at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and retreated from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Morgan crossed the Ohio River into Indiana at the head of 1,800 men, having lost about 700 to skirmishes in Kentucky.

For the next two weeks, Morgan and his men, including brother-in-law Duke, his spy protégé Hines, his telegrapher Ellsworth, and future Canada-based agents Captain Robert Martin and Lieutenant John Headley, fought a skirmish nearly every day as the militias of Indiana and Ohio turned out to fight Confederates on Union soil.

Morgan had not made the raid rashly—or so he thought. The general had been told by Confederate sympathizers that the Copperheads in southern Indiana and Ohio would welcome his approach and would even join his ranks. None did. Irritated that these supposed Confederates in waiting did not flock to his side, Morgan did not offer them any protection when his men swapped out their tired horses for the fresh ones found on farms.

Morgan’s raid panicked lower Indiana and Ohio. The July 25, 1863, edition of Harper’s Weekly reported:

The raid of the rebel Morgan into Indiana, which he seems to be pursuing with great boldness, has thoroughly aroused the people of that State and of Ohio to a sense of their danger. On July 13th General Burnside declared martial law in Cincinnati and in Covington and Newport on the Kentucky side. All business is suspended until further orders, and all citizens are required to organize in accordance with the direction of the State and municipal authorities. There is nothing definite as to Morgan’s whereabouts; but it is supposed that he will endeavor to move around the city of Cincinnati and cross the river between there and Maysville.

Finally, on July 19, 1863, the raid came to an effective end at the Battle of Buffington Island, Ohio, when large numbers of Union soldiers started to press Morgan’s men down to the Ohio River. Morgan himself was escaping halfway across the river, holding onto the tail of his swimming horse, when he saw a Union gunboat come around the bend. Looking back to the Ohio side, Morgan saw that hundreds of his men would be unable to follow because the gunboat would soon be in range to shell them both in the water and on the river’s banks. Instead of escaping himself, Morgan swung his horse back toward Ohio and returned to the remnants of his command. Those men escaped capture for just another few days until Morgan surrendered the rest of his command on July 26.

The greatest and longest cavalry raid in the war’s history was over. Though they had been captured, Morgan and his men considered it a rousing success as they had inflicted more than 600 casualties on the Federals, and captured and paroled more than 6,000 Union soldiers and militiamen, nearly four times their own size force. More than 10 million dollars’ worth of Union war material was destroyed before it could be deployed against the Confederacy. The Union army had been thrown into disarray, forced to deal with enemy soldiers in its rear rather than countering the movements of Confederate general Bragg to its front.

Morgan and his officers expected to be sent to the Confederate officer’s prison camp on Johnson’s Island, Ohio, in Lake Erie, opposite the town of Sandusky. To their angry surprise, they were sent to Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. Treated like common criminals instead of Confederate officers, Morgan and his officers were shorn of their beards and hair and dressed in prisoners’ civilian clothes.

Morgan’s men were targeted for punishment for any infraction. They were put in a dungeon for doing virtually anything such as making comments that were considered anti-Union or for talking after lights out. Escape from the block walls that were twenty-five feet high seemed impossible.

The wily Hines was the one who discovered that escape was possible. He noticed that the floor of his prison cell was always dry, instead of damp as it would have been had it been resting on earth. A few questions of an elderly prison guard confirmed that an air chamber did indeed run under the floors of the cells.

Over the course of several weeks in October 1863, Hines and the other prisoners dug through the concrete floor using knives pilfered from the dining hall. Using a spade they had sneaked into their cellblock, they dug into the earth on the other side of the air shaft. They fashioned a thirty-foot rope made from shredded bedding and a grappling hook from a fireplace poker. On the night of November 27, seven members of Morgan’s cavalry, including Morgan and Hines, broke through the floors of their cells, dropped into the air chamber, and then dug their way into the prison yard where they successfully climbed the outer wall.

Hines and Morgan made their way to the train station and bought tickets to Cincinnati, the city Morgan’s men had bypassed rather than attack back in July. Morgan sat next to a Federal major on the train south. As the train passed the prison, the major pointed it out and commented that that was where they were keeping the rebel Morgan. Morgan replied, “I hope they will always keep him as safe as he is now.” Before dawn, Morgan and Hines had found a young boy to row them across the Ohio River to freedom in Kentucky.

Once word got out that the infamous General Morgan was on the loose, a Southerner in Canada got a bright idea. To throw off what he anticipated to be a pursuit by Union soldiers of the real General Morgan, the man started moving around that country registering at hotels using his real initials of J. H. Morgan. Once word got back to the United States, Union agents began scouring Canada looking for the elusive Confederate general.

Almost immediately, embarrassed Ohio officials charged that Copperheads had somehow sneaked into the prison and helped Morgan break out when the truth was much simpler. Just as he and his men had always done, Morgan had exploited the enemy’s weaknesses to their advantage.

Morgan would make his way to Richmond, Virginia, in January 1864, expecting a hero’s welcome for the strike he had made against the North. Instead, Confederate officials gave Morgan the cold shoulder, angry that he had ignored his commander’s direct orders not to cross the Ohio River. Happily, Morgan was reunited in Richmond with Hines, who had been recaptured in Tennessee on his way south after the Ohio penitentiary escape. Hines had escaped yet again from Union hands.

Morgan expected Hines to rejoin his command so that the two of them could start rebuilding the cavalry force that had been literally broken apart by the raid. Hines sadly told his mentor that he could not put on his gray uniform and strap on his pistols. From this point in the war forward, he would be wearing civilian clothes. He had been ordered to Canada. Hines told Morgan that he had been asked by Jefferson Davis to join Jacob Thompson and Clement Clay, Commissioners in the Confederate Secret Service, in the effort to convince the Copperheads in Illinois and Indiana to throw off the yoke of Union domination.

Morgan may have envied the adventure Hines was undertaking. Morgan himself never regained the old vigor that he had early in the war. When his brother-in-law Duke, who had been exchanged for some Union officers, saw him in early September 1864 for the first time in nearly a year, Duke was shocked at Morgan’s appearance: “He was greatly changed. His face wore a weary, care-worn expression, and his manner was totally destitute of its former ardor and enthusiasm.”

Several days later, in Greeneville, Tennessee, Morgan’s sentries were surprised by Union calvarymen in the predawn darkness as the sentries waited for daylight to clean their weapons of the moisture from the rain that had been steadily falling all night long. When Morgan rushed from the house where he had been sleeping, he was shot down by several Union cavalrymen who had been tipped to his presence by a young slave boy who had heard of the Union patrol.

Once Morgan was shot down, one Union cavalryman shouted, “I’ve killed the horse thief!” He then jumped down from his horse, retrieved Morgan’s body, threw it across the neck of his horse, and paraded it before his commander. The Union commander reprimanded his soldier and had him leave the general’s body in Greeneville so that it could be properly buried. Morgan’s death shocked the few remaining survivors of the regiments he had formed in the fall of 1861.

“Any one of us—all of us—would gladly have died in his defense, and each one would have envied the man who lost his life defending him. So much was he trusted that his men never dreamed of failing him in anything that he attempted. In all engagements he was our guiding star and hero,” wrote Lieutenant Kelio Peddicord.

Hines must have grieved over the senseless murder of his former commander at the hands of jubilant Union cavalrymen who could have easily taken an unarmed man prisoner. But in September 1864, Hines had a mission to complete, so he had no time to consider the death of his friend. Before Election Day in November, Hines wanted to free his old friends from the Second Kentucky Cavalry who were then imprisoned along with seven thousand other Confederates at Camp Douglas, outside of Chicago. In Hines’s mind, that would be the best revenge for Morgan’s murder: the release of battle-hardened, angry, hungry soldiers into the streets of Chicago.

Up in Canada, other officers who had ridden with Morgan were regularly gathering in their hotel rooms winnowing down the number of Confederate volunteers who were willing to go back into the United States for behind-the-lines missions. By early November, their anger had grown and metastasized into the need for action. The murder of their beloved general coupled with the destruction of the Shenandoah Valley farms and Sherman’s burning of the city of Atlanta had given them plenty of motivation for revenge.

Now they would take that revenge. What they imagined was a mission that would express the South’s disgust with the Union’s wartime tactics, disrupt the reelection bid of President Abraham Lincoln, and strike terror in the hearts of Northern civilians all at the same time.

They reasoned that there was no better way to do all that than attack Northern towns and cities. First on the list would be a training mission on the little town of St. Albans, Vermont, just across the border from Canada. If that mission went well, there were other, much bigger targets that could be hit.

New York City was just 330 miles south of St. Albans. It was an easy train ride from Niagara Falls.