Thunderbolt of the Confederacy, or King of Horse Thieves William E. Wilson* Zigzagging across southern Indiana and Ohio in the sum- mer of 1863, John Hunt Morgan wove a trail as raddled as turkey tracks. Although his pursuers were never more than a few hours behind him, they were never sure of the where- abouts of the man known variously as The Thunderbolt of the Confederacy and The King of Horse Thieves,* until they stumbled upon him. Today, plaques and monuments mark Morgan’s route from Mauckport, Indiana, where he crossed the Ohio River on a July day almost a century ago, to Salineville, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania line, where he surrendered eighteen days later. But the modern tourist who attempts to follow that trail of some six hundred miles will find himself almost as confused as the Federal cavalrymen Morgan was dodging in 1863. The legend of Morgan’s Raid along the north shore of the Ohio has grown as ubiquitous as Morgan himself once seemed to be.2 At times, the vitality of the legend gives the visitor the impression that the country has not changed since Morgan swept across it. There have been changes of course, but off the main highways there is much that remains the same. If those slumbering, isolated hill-villages dream at all, they can dream now only of the past. On their quiet streets the houses where Morgan dined and slept have a certain lustre upon them, and nearby, at crossroads and along creekbanks, the old battle sites remain as they were when home guards stood and fought or, more often, dropped their inadequate arms and fled. In the back-country lanes where Morgan rode, it is possible still to imagine that distant thunder on a sultry summer day is the echo of his horsemen’s passing. And all along the way there are, still living in that country, men and *William E. Wilson is a professor in the Department of English, Indiana University. 1 Cecil Fletcher Holland, Morgan and His Raiders (New York, 1943), 3. 20n several journeys along Morgan’s Indiana and Ohio trail, the author has never had difficulty in finding people ready and willing to direct him; the difficulty has always been to find two people who agree. 120 Indian& Magazine of History women whose forebears sat on rail fences in their childhood and watched the raiders gallop by.8 Surviving also in southern Indiana and Ohio, almost as vital as the legend of Morgan, are the bitterness of 1863 and the contempt that was added to it when at last the Confeder- ate raider was captured and imprisoned in the Ohio State Penitentiary, head shaved and beard shorn like a common criminal’s. In that country, The Thunderbolt is only The Horse Thief, and the descendants of the people he robbed console themselves, like their forebears, with the conviction that his unauthorized invasion was a failure. Actually, it was not. It is true that Morgan lost to the Confederacy an organ- ization of 2,400 seasoned cavalrymen. He did fail to rally to his support the Copperheads believed numerous in the area through which he passed. He turned eastward only sixty miles south of Indianapolis, which indeed he might have captured and where he might have released and armed from the city’s arsenal some three thousand Confederate prisoners.’ And he failed to unite with Lee in Pennsylvania, as some say he intended to do.6 But the arguments in Morgan’s favor are stronger. The damage to railroads, steamboats, bridges, and public stores inflicted by the raid amounted to at least ten million dollars. The cavalry unit of 2,400 was disintegrated, but most of the men escaped and lived to fight for the Confederacy again. In contrast with their own small losses, the raiders captured and paroled six thousand Federal home guards and regulars and killed or wounded some six hundred more, they kept thousands of Yankee citizens in a paralyzing state of panic for a fortnight, and by their penetration behind the lines they immobilized 28,000 troops under General Ambrose Burnside, who otherwise would have joined General William S. Rosecrans three weeks before the battle of Chickamauga.e * From time to time the Louisville and Indianapolis newspapers have published interviews in recent years with people who remember seeing Morgan on his raid. Anyone who remembers Morgan today, however, must be nearly a centenarian. 4 Orlando B. Willcox, “The Capture,” Century Magazine, XLI (January, 1891), 412-417. &BasilW. Duke, History of Morgan’s Cauaby (Miami, Ohio, 1867), 411. 0 Don D. John, The Great Indiana-Ohio Raid (Louisville, no date), 6. Thunderbolt of the Confederacy 121 On only one score can Morgan’s raid be truly said to have failed, and here the argument, like most of the arguments against him, must rest on hypothesis. Since Morgan was destined to disobey the orders of his commanding officer and cross the Ohio eventually, it is too bad that he did not disobey nine months earlier, when he first conceived and proposed the Indiana and Ohio raid. Then, even with the same tactical mistakes and the same‘losses, he might have accomplished much more than he was able to accomplish in 1863. Nine months earlier, Morgan’s men were less war-weary, less starved for luxuries, and better disciplined.’ Although the number of Copperheads in Indiana and Ohio was probably exaggerated by the Republican canard that all Democrats were traitors of one degree or another, what Southern sympathizers there were in the states north of the Ohio might have wel- comed the raiders more warmly if Morgan had been able to keep them under control. Of more significance was the opportunity which lay within the grasp of General Braxton Bragg in 1862 and which was never to come again. That summer Bragg invaded Kentucky. If he had joined forces with General Kirby Smith while Morgan harassed the Federals’ rear on Northern soil, he could easily have taken the entire state out of the Union. All that was needed was to prevent General Don Carlos Buell’s being reinforced at Louisville, and Morgan could have accomplished that, just as he prevented Burnside from reach- ing Rosecrans in Tennessee a year later. But Bragg said no, and Morgan obeyed him. Buell got back to Louisville, con- solidated his forces, and returned to the offensive; and the Confederates’ opportunity was lost. All this is based on the assumption that Braxton Bragg would have acted swiftly and vigorously in conjunction with a raid by Morgan in 1862, and that of course is a large as- sumption. Still it can be soundly argued that the tragedy of Morgan’s disobedience lies in its postponement. Morgan’s original proposal was a good one, but when finally his patience with his over-cautious and short-sighted chief was exhausted and he took matters into his own hands, the most propitious time for insubordination had passed. 7 Duke, History of Morgan’s Cavalry, 290. 122 Indiana Magazine of History By the best accounts, Morgan was an even better strate- gist than tactician. Nature had endowed him with “gifts which she very rarely bestows, and which give the soldier who has them vast advantages; a quickness of perception and of thought, amounting almost to intuition, an almost unerring sagacity in foreseeing the operations of an adversary and in calculating the effect of his own movements upon him, wonderful control over men, as individuals and in masses, and moral courage and energy almost preternatural.”* These are the words of Basil W. Duke, who commanded the first of the two brigades Morgan led across the Ohio. In his Reminiscencess and his History of Morgan’s Cavalry, General Duke regards his commanding officer always with admiration and respect. So, in The Partisan Rangers, does Adam R. Johnson, who commanded the second brigade. Both these men were able and intelligent soldiers and both lived after the war to become distinguished and respected citizens, Duke as a prominent lawyer in Louisville, Johnson as the founder and patriarch of a prosperous town in Texas.*O Their estimates of Morgan should prove that he was neither the lawless brigand that his enemies in Indiana and Ohio called him nor the unruly hothead that some historians have concluded he was because of his insubordination on the banks of the Ohio. By all standards of military conduct there is no justification for his action of course, but if he had disobeyed Bragg earlier and achieved a greater success, the insubordination would have been more generously regarded afterwards. Writing about the raid at the close of the war, Duke said that when Morgan revealed his plan to ignore Bragg’s in- structions to confine his movements to Kentucky, “all who heard him felt that he was right in the main, and although some of us were filled with a grave apprehension, from the first, we felt an inconsistent confidence when listening to him.”” Shortly after the raid, when there was the threat of a Confederate court of inquiry, General Johnson wrote to 8 Ibid., 22. 0Basil W. Duke, Reminiscences of General Basil W. Duke (New York, 1911). loMarble Falls. See Adam R. Johnson, The Partisan Rangers (Louisville, 1904), chap. 28. 11 Duke, History of Morgan’s Cavalry, 411. Thunderbolt of the Confederacy 123 Morgan, “I am willing to share any part of the blame attached to crossing the river. I approved it then and will do so again if the opportunity offers.”’* The only officer in Morgan’s command who ever dis- agreed with him to the point of leaving him was the fantastic English soldier of fortune, George St.