This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [174]
Vallandigham represented many things, all of which could be summed up under one general heading: trouble for the Lincoln government. He was appealing to Northerners who were tired of the war. Many of them were basically sympathetic to the South. They had a shadowy, semi-military, semi-secret organization, cross between political chowder club and village lodge, known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, and some of them at least talked as if they favored a new secession movement in the Northwest, with further fragmentation of the Federal Union. Somehow, the Davis administration reasoned, it ought to be possible to make use of them.
So while Vallandigham flitted off stage — he went by sea to Canada, and in Ontario waited the right moment to return to the United States — John Hunt Morgan took off on a strange, abortive, extra-military sort of expedition north of the Ohio River.2
Morgan was a Kentuckian: one of the legendary southern horsemen, all dash and gallantry and unrestrained individualism, who looked more important at the time than they do in retrospect. He commanded cavalry under General Joe Wheeler, who in turn was answerable to Bragg, and while Grant was tightening his net around Vicksburg and Rosecrans at last was showing signs of activity Bragg had Wheeler send Morgan and some twenty-five hundred troopers up into Kentucky on a raid designed to break up the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and destroy Yankee supply depots. Morgan set out, calmly ignored his instructions, got his command across the Ohio River west of Louisville, circled up through southern Indiana, and then went zooming off across Ohio, commandeering horses and supplies as he went, while Burnside spattered the Middle West with telegrams to get militia and Federal troops up to head him off.
As a military move, Morgan’s raid was totally ineffective. Ohio was presently aswarm with troops, and Morgan and nearly all of his men were at last rounded up and captured after a wild dash that accomplished little more than to dampen the sympathies that a number of Ohio farmers had previously felt for the Confederacy. (Morgan’s troopers treated Ohio farms the way Grant’s men had been treating the farms in Mississippi, and the Ohioans did not like it.) Morgan and his principal officers were lodged in the Ohio penitentiary (from which place, some months later, they mysteriously contrived to escape) and a Federal general who had helped to capture them wrote that the whole affair had been a great lesson on the weakness of Copperheadism in Indiana and Ohio: “He who witnessed the great exhibition of patriotism and love of country in these mighty states on the passage of the Union army and then could doubt the ability and purpose of the people to maintain the government has certainly been ‘given over to hardness of heart, that he may believe a lie and be damned’.”3
Which was probably quite true. Yet the Morgan raid was an odd business altogether. Whether or not it grew out of the vision created by Vallandigham’s visit to Richmond, it was at least a significant symptom: the Confederacy would fight behind the lines in the North if it saw a chance, and it would strike at home-front morale and home-front economics as well as at Federal armies in the field. It had, in other words, no faintest intention of quitting; it would go on fighting with any weapon that was handy as long as it had the capacity. Still clinging to legalism,