Neutrality became the popular standard. The word “secession” had not yet become a malediction, Kentuckians recalling that New England radicals had proposed secession for that section as recently as 1857. Peace advocates from both parties seriously proposed a separate confederacy of border states—Kentucky, Virginia, and Missouri—to secede and form a buffer nation between North and South to keep the peace.
In the early summer, General Buckner, then still commanding Kentucky’s state guard, met with General George B. McClellan and received a promise that Kentucky’s neutrality would be observed by the United States military authorities. For a time, all but a few hotbloods relaxed in Kentucky; the state lived under the illusion of neutrality.
Too much was happening, however, everywhere around them, portentous events involving relatives and friends beyond their peaceful borders. Late in July they heard the news from Bull Run; the Confederacy had won the first round.
Almost immediately, hundreds of young men began enlisting for service outside the state. Kentucky might remain neutral, but they would organize local companies and offer their services to Virginia and Tennessee. So many volunteered that Richmond sent word the Confederacy would accept no more from Kentucky—unless the men could furnish their own arms.
As a counter to this wave of Confederate volunteering, Union sympathizers established the recruiting camp for Federal enlistments at Camp Dick Robinson. Union representatives carefully pointed out that the volunteers at Dick Robinson were not an invading force, merely recruits, but Confederate sympathizers claimed the camp’s presence was a violation of the state’s neutrality.
Events moved swiftly. The first week in September, General Leonidas Polk led a Confederate force from Tennessee to Columbus, Kentucky. “A military necessity,” Polk telegraphed Governor Magoffin, “for the defense of Tennessee.” As a countermove, a Federal General few had heard of at that time occupied Paducah. The General’s name was Ulysses S. Grant.
On September 10, the Confederate War Department ordered Albert Sidney Johnston—a Kentuckian—to command of all forces in the western theater, and by mid-September General Felix Zollicoffer had advanced from Tennessee into the Cumberland Mountain passes of Kentucky. Meanwhile, the state’s guard commander, Simon Buckner, had gone over to the Confederate Army, organizing a division of Kentuckians in Tennessee.
One of Sidney Johnston’s first orders sent Buckner’s Kentuckians marching up to Bowling Green. And thus the Confederates established their first western defense line in neutral Kentucky, a three-hundred-mile front running from the Mississippi River east to the Cumberland Mountains. It was a line thinly held by twenty-five thousand amateur soldiers, but it was a military line, and not only was Kentucky now in the war, it had become a battleground.
2
As soon as darkness fell on their first day out of Lexington, the members of the Rifles hidden in the barn near the Kentucky River resumed their journey westward. Somewhere between Bloomfield and Bardstown, they halted at another prearranged camp in the woods.
This was a neighborhood largely pro-Confederate, and the residents welcomed the young men as heroes. Because these friendly people refused pay for food and supplies brought into camp, some wag in the company named the place “Camp Charity.”
Captain Morgan, after narrowly escaping arrest in Lexington, soon joined them, bringing in additional recruits. For five days Camp Charity was a busy place, new recruits coming in almost hourly, the “veterans” making secret journeys by night to obtain additional ammunition, weapons, horses, and whatever gear they felt a man would require for a short war. There was practically no organization, no commander other than Captain Morgan—who was away much of the time on various missions—to enforce discipline, and life at Camp Charity resembled a summer outing much more than a recruiting station.
Most of these young men came from leading Kentucky families, and by the time the 2nd Cavalry Regiment—of which they were the cadre—was formed, many familiar names of the South would be represented on its muster rolls. Undoubtedly they considered themselves cavaliers in the old meaning of the word, certain of their invincibility, overconfident by nature, rash, impetuous, romantic, poetic, sentimental, imbued with the spirit of clanship. They were certain their homeland was “the best place outside of heaven the Good Lord ever made,” but they were no more provincial than other Americans of that day, no more so than their opponents who felt the same way about their particular states or regions.
James Lane Allen, who was later to write of the Bluegrass of that time, was too young to join the cavalry, but his older brother was in the 2nd Kentucky, and the younger Allen knew these men well. They were possessed, he said, “of that old invincible race ideal of personal liberty, and that old, unreckoning, truculent, animal rage at whatever infringes on it…the old sense of personal privacy and reserve which has for centuries entrenched the Englishman in the heart of his estate.” For they were of English blood, most of them, “usually of the blond type, robust, well-formed, with clear, fair complexion.”
If any one of them had asked himself, or been asked, why he was at Camp Charity, he would likely have replied in the romantic language of the time and place, speaking of duty, home, honor and family. They had inherited a traditional distrust of the North, too, running back to the time of the War of 1812, as Timothy Flint noticed in 1816, “a jealousy, almost a hatred of Yankees, prevailed among the mass of this people, during the late war…much of this feeling still existing…the manner in which the slave question is agitated, keeps the embers glowing under the ashes.” The observant Yankee, Flint, was generous enough to admit that Kentuckians were “a high-minded people, and possess the stamina of a noble character…scions from a noble stock—descendants of planters of Virginia and North Carolina…they seem to feel that they have an hereditary claim to command, place, and observance.”
Even Timothy Flint might have been surprised at how long and deep this distrust of Northerners was to run among Kentucky cavaliers. One of Morgan’s young followers, a devout Presbyterian, described New England as “the land of intolerant Puritans, the home of witchcraft, the cradle of isms from abolitionism to free-love-isms.” Whether they were interested in politics or not, they were aware of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case, and as the Civil War approached they generally considered radical Northerners as flouters of the law of the land because they refused to accept the court’s decision that slaves were property. And it was not unusual in Kentucky to hear a pro-Southern man refer to Lincoln’s call for troops as a “rebellion” that probably would have to be put down.
One may grasp the wide gulf that lay between these young cavaliers and the men they were preparing to fight from a letter written by General William T. Sherman in the midst of the struggle. Sherman was writing to Major General H. W. Halleck about the varying types of Southerners: “The young bloods of the South, sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard players, and sportsmen—men who never did work nor never will. War suits them, and the rascals are brave; fine riders, bold to rashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense. They care not a sou for niggers, land, or anything. They hate Yankees per se, and don’t bother their-brains about the past, present, or future. As long as they have good horses, plenty of forage, and an open country, they are happy. This is a larger class than most men supposed, and are the most dangerous set of men which this war has turned loose upon the world. They are splendid riders, shots, and utterly reckless. Stuart, John Morgan, Forrest, and Jackson are the types and leaders of this class. This class of men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace. They have no property or future, and therefore cannot be influenced by anything except personal considerations.”
Sherman’s views may or may not have been representative of other Federal generals’ opinions. Certainly Kentuckians could not be typed, no more so than any other Americans. Since they thought of themselves as being different from others, as cavaliers, more likely the image took the for
m of the frontiersman ideal—a Daniel Boone-Davy Crockett type, the trusty rifleman hero of the Dark and Bloody Ground.
After the Battle of New Orleans in 1814, Samuel Woodworth, author of “The Old Oaken Bucket,” wrote a song for the heroes, “The Hunters of Kentucky”:
We are a hardy freeborn race,
Each man to fear a stranger,
Whate’er the game, we join in chase,
Despising toil and danger;
And if a daring foe annoys,
Whate’er his strength and forces,
We’ll show him that Kentucky boys
Are “Alligator horses.”
These verses hold the key to Camp Charity’s reason for existence. Each man there believed himself to be a member of a special free-born race, with an inbred disregard for personal danger, a readiness to join in a hard chase against any annoying foe, and a sureness they would endure to victory because “Kentucky boys are Alligator horses.”
Any attempt to consider these men as Cavaliers engaged against Roundhead Puritans fails at the outset. Almost every “Cavalier” family in Kentucky was divided by the war; there were knights, squires, and yeomen on both sides. “My parents are opposed to my going into the army and opposed to my politics,” wrote James B. McCreary, one of Morgan’s officers who in later life became a Governor of Kentucky. “God knows I love them dearly and as their only son I would have remained at home their comforter and the solace of their declining years, but I cannot stay in peace and I believe it my solemn duty to assist in hurling back oppression and ruin from people of whom I am a part.”
Three of Henry Clay’s grandsons went to the Union, four to the Confederacy. The Crittenden family was likewise split. Robert Breckinridge had two sons in the Union Army, two in the Confederate. George D. Prentice went through the war a staunch Union editor of the Louisville Journal while his two sons were fighting for the cause he hated, one of them in the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry Regiment. Mary Todd Lincoln, late of Lexington, had a brother who was in the Confederate Army. The list is long.
If the Lexington Rifles were bluebloods, so were their rivals, the Lexington Chasseurs, a militia company commanded by Sanders Bruce, who was John Morgan’s brother-in-law. Bruce and Morgan were good friends during the prewar years. They owned race horses in partnership, and each visited regularly in the other’s home. But when the war came, Sanders Bruce joined the Union Army, taking many of the Chasseurs with him.
The Morgan brothers were exceptions—John, Calvin, Richard, Charlton, Tom, and Key—clinging together as a feudal clan. (And there were Morgan cousins and nephews who would fight and die with the 2nd Kentucky.) The oldest, John, was the complex personality of the clan, outwardly easygoing, soft-voiced, more courteous to his inferiors than to equals or superiors, a lax disciplinarian, subject to alternate moods of despondency and elation.
When John was twenty-one in 1846, he and nineteen-year-old Calvin enlisted for the Mexican War. John returned with the rank of captain, and if his friends thought his war experiences had destroyed his taste for civil pursuits they were soon reassured. He established a hemp factory and a woolen mill, importing thousands of pounds of raw wool all the way from New Mexico to be processed in the plant.
In 1848, he married Sanders Bruce’s sister, Rebecca, but their life was marred by tragedy, the death of their young son. His friends believed that the reason why Morgan waited five months to offer his services to the Confederacy was the illness of his wife, whose brother’s sympathies were with the Union. After Rebecca’s death in July, 1861, Morgan immediately began arranging his affairs so that he would be free for Confederate military service.
Six feet tall, weighted at about 185 pounds, bearded with a Van Dyke—when he was seated in his saddle with his keen gray-blue eyes flashing fire, Captain Morgan was the very model of a cavalier. It is doubtful, however, if even his most devoted followers would have described John Morgan as an alligator horse. He was too fond of luxurious living; he preferred feather beds to blankets on the ground. Besides, he had been born in Alabama, and only Kentucky boys are alligator horses.
3
On their foraging expeditions out of Camp Charity in search of requirements for their short war, a few of the Lexington Riflemen who owned slaves made arrangements for their body servants to join them at the secret rendezvous. Not many of Morgan’s men, however, were to keep their servants with them throughout the war. While it was not too difficult for an infantryman to retain a servant in camp, raiding cavalrymen with temporary bases, at best, found it almost impossible to do so.
To keep a servant close at hand, a cavalryman had to support two horses, and as the war wore on it became increasingly difficult to keep one serviceable mount, virtually impossible to ration two men and two horses. A few officers, however, managed to retain their personal servants to the end, and it was typical of the Morgan clan that its surviving members were still encumbered with their faithful Negro attendants—dressed in captured blue Yankee uniforms—on the very day they surrendered.
In 1861, slavery was a dying institution in Kentucky, and probably would have been outlawed long before but for the continual pressures of abolitionists from outside the state. As early as 1833, the legislature enacted a law prohibiting further importation of slaves into Kentucky, and another law forbade the separation of slave families by selling them singly. As James Lane Allen explained it: “the general conscience of Kentuckians was always troubled” over the question of human bondage, but they were implacable enemies of “the agitators of forcible and immediate emancipation…they resented any interference with their own affairs, and believed the abolitionists’ measures inexpedient for the peace of society.”
They particularly resented Northern attempts to make the South a scapegoat for the national sin of slavery, and were quick to reply to abolitionists from New England that it was their own people who had established the diabolical institution—the Yankee slave traders who had made their fortunes trading Africans to Southerners after it was discovered that slavery was unprofitable in New England.
In the Bluegrass, the average slaveholder owned no more than six or eight slaves. The plantation system of the deep South did not exist here, the farms being small with much of the land in meadows and woodland. Life was slow and leisurely, the slaves usually being considered a part of the owner’s family, oftentimes given opportunities to earn money with which to buy their freedom.
Even the critical Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was aware of the Kentuckians’ light attitude toward the institution. “The mildest form of the system of slavery,” she said, “is to be seen in the State of Kentucky.”
And so it was that a Kentucky Confederate could leave his farm, his home, his wife and children, with all the confidence in the world, knowing that crops would be planted and harvested, livestock tended, buildings kept in order. If he worried at all, it was not about the loyalty of his slaves, it was what the marauding abolitionist Yankees might do to them.
4
By September 26, the Lexington Rifles and the other recruits who had slipped away from Lexington and neighboring towns numbered almost two hundred men. Only about twenty of the Riflemen were mounted, most of them on blooded Bluegrass horses, but they had acquired several additional wagons to transport their assembled supplies, and the additional volunteers were prepared to march on foot.
Midafternoon of that day, Captain Morgan gave the order to march out, and they turned southwest toward Green River and the Confederate outposts. “We threw out scouts,” said Tom Berry, one of the Riflemen, “with videttes in front and on each flank, with a rear guard, so as not to be surprised by any enemy.” Few other Confederate units of that early period of the war in the West had the experience brought by these Riflemen, with their four years of drilling and of studying military evolutions and tactics. Their knowledge lent polish to the march column.
They moved on into the night, into the darkness of the wooded hills below Bardstown. When the alert forwa
rd scouts saw fires burning ahead, they sent back a warning of enemy campfires. The column halted, forming in line of battle, but closer investigation revealed the flames as only autumn forest fires burning in the underbrush.
At daybreak the main body entered the turnpike running south to Munfordville. A few minutes later gunfire sounded from the advance scouts’ position. Immediately, Captain Morgan ordered the column’s pace quickened. A small force of home guards, loyal to the Union, had fired on the scouts, but the unexpected Confederate squad galloping down upon them sent the guards scattering into the woods.
This was the only incident of the march. No blood was shed, but it was a memorable occasion. The Lexington Rifles had exchanged their first shots of the war.
5
While Captain Morgan was marching his column south toward Munfordville, a former officer of the Lexington Rifles was riding north into Kentucky from Tennessee, on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. The officer was Lieutenant Basil Duke, and his future association with the organization—as it developed into the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry—was to be so close and of such duration that the regiment was often referred to in official reports as Duke’s Cavalry rather than by its numbered designation.
A slightly-built young man of only twenty-three, Basil Duke had been engaged in the war almost from its beginning in Missouri, where he had gone to practice law after his graduation from Transylvania College in Lexington. He was in the vanguard of a number of Kentuckians who had left home to make their fortunes and who were now returning to offer their services against what they considered an invasion of their native state. They were coming from as far away as California and Texas, hundreds of alligator horses who had followed the frontier star as naturally as their fathers had followed it long ago into Kentucky.