JOHN HUNT MORGAN VISITED SOUTHERN OHIO IN 1863
Yes, Southern Ohio does have a Civil War Battlefield!
Buffington Island, in rural southeastern Meigs County, was the site of a battle during summer of 1863 between the home Militia and the Union Army’s pursuers against the Kentuckian Rebel raider, John Hunt Morgan.
Many towns and villages throughout Southern Ohio, from Harrison along greater Cincinnati’s border with Indiana to Lisbon in Columbiana County, still tell of the tales surrounding this Lexington cavalryman and his raiders on their 13-day invasion of the Buckeye State. But it was at this Meigs County site, now commemorated as a nation-now commemorated as a national battlefield park, that the tide turned against the once-feared and dreaded gray coat and his Kentucky Rifles.
John Hunt Morgan was from one of Lexington’s best families. When the Civil War began, he and his brothers dressed in the gray of the Confederacy and marched off to serve in the war brewing between the slave and free states.
It was in Morgan’s brilliant military mind, that a plan was devised to invade the North by crossing the Ohio River after ferreting-out the Union forces at Louisville and taking stands for the rebel cause in southern Indian and Ohio.
Although, the Confederate strategists never approved the plan for Morgan to invade the North, he was the opportunity to do so on his own, as word reached the Tennessee and Kentucky encampments that General Robert E. Lee had invaded Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863.
As early as July 2, while Lee was engaged in the Battle of Gettsburg, Morgan was conferring with his regimental officers near the Cumberland River in eastern Tennessee. At that meeting he laid out his plan to cross the Ohio.
With 2,460 men, Morgan pushed his men northward, crossing the Cumberland, seeing 71 men killed or wounded at Tebb’s Bend Bridge, continuing north to Campbellsville and Lebanon, Kentucky, (where his brother Lt. Tom Morgan) was killed and on to Springfield, Bardstown and the Ohio River town of Brandenburg, east to Louisville.
From Brandenburg, a steamboat and a Union mail boat were commandeered to accommodate the rebels in their river crossing onto the Northern soil of Southern Indiana. A detachment from Morgan’s regiments headed west toward Louisville to create a diversion and make the Union strategists assume Morgan was targeting that city.
The main thrust of Morgan’s Raiders was safely ashore on its way to Corydon while the main Union armies were concentrating on protecting their defenses at Louisville.
Morgan was a master at sending the enemy on wild goose chases. In Indiana, his crack telegrapher, George Ellsworth, climbed telegraph poles, intercepted Union messages and sent bogus messages about Morgan’s plans.
Morgan was virtually unhampered on his five-day march east across Southern Indiana while the Union war leaders holed up in Indianapolis, expecting Morgan and his men to march into the Hoosier capital, sack the city and free confederate prisoners held at Fort Morton.
At noon on Monday, July 13, 1863, Ohio was invaded by a rebel force for the first time during the war when an advance party of Morgan’s Raiders crossed the state line and rode into Harrison.
The Raiders faced no resistance. Most of the men in to town had retreated into Cincinnati to help guard the Queen City from the “real sure enough devils, horns, hoofs and all,” that Morgan and his men represented to the Northerners.
Sam Taylor, a scout for Morgan, reported that Cincinnati was under martial law. Much as the Indiana state capital had trembled at the thoughts of the marauding raiders pillaging and plundering their way through that city, Cincinnati now felt the same false hysteria.
At the last of Morgan’s men entered Harrison, the bridge over the Whitewater River was torched to stall pursuing Union troops, about 24-hours to Morgan’s rear flank.
After only a brief rest in Harrison, Morgan led his regiments on the longest single march of the campaign. Their goal was to sneak around Cincinnati, somewhere between Cincinnati and Hamilton, and find an escape route to the east and back onto the friendly Southern soil of Kentucky or Virginia.
Setting out on a plodding pace, the Confederate raiders continued their march from the afternoon of the 13th for 35 straight hours, covering 90 miles until they felt comfortable enough to bivouac at Williamsburg on the Clermont-Brown County line.
Their marathon march had taken them across the Great and Little Miami Rivers, burning bridges as they safely crossed. At midnight, they passed through the northern suburbs of Cincinnati at Glendale and crossed the Reading Pike at first dawn on the 14th. They came within sight of the Union training camp at Fort Dennison in western Clermont County and on through the county seat of Batavia before arriving in Williamsburg for a much needed rest.
From Williamsburg, Morgan dispatched a small party south to Georgetown and Ripley to check out the possibility of the river crossing. The party, led by another of Morgan’s brothers, Dick, rejoined the raiders at Locust Grove in eastern Adams County with the news that unseasonably high flood waters made the Ohio nearly impossible to cross.
Dick Morgan’s scouting party that went into Ripley seeing if the river was crossable came in sight of one symbolic Northern landmark, and within miles of a second. Little were they aware that just off on the courthouse square in Georgetown stood the white brick home where the Union General Ulysses Simpson Grant had spent his boyhood. It was from this home which stood across the street from his father’s tannery, that the young Hiram Ulysses Grant headed off to West Point and an eventual career in the military and later the presidency.
Morgan’s men were also unaware that within a few miles of their route to the banks of the Ohio at Ripley was the Ohio River hamlet of Point Pleasant where the great Union general had been born.
The raiders foraged for food and horses and sacked local stores along their route for clothing and other items they needed for the long and hard march across this unfriendly land.
On Thursday, July 16, Morgan began to meet some of the harshest resistance of his campaign as he took his men into Pike County (closely following what is now the James A. Rhodes Appalachian Highway).
The home guard or local militia had belled trees and put them across the roads Morgan’s Raiders were sure to follow toward the Scioto River and a possible crossing at Jasper. Bridges were burned in Pike County, but not at first by the rebels. The locals torched their own bridges in hoping to delay to the advance of Kentucky cavalry.
At Jasper, Morgan rode in near sundown and met with strong resistance the locals refer to as The Battle of Jasper. One civilian was mortally wounded by a ball from one of the rebel rifles. He is buried in the cemetery atop of the hill in Jasper.
Morgan was able to meet the Pike County resistors and make a fording of the Scioto. From there it was into Piketon, where it was reported by his brother-in-law, Basil Duke that “at Piketon, we learned that Vicksburg had fallen and that General Lee in Pennsylvania was now lost. An Ohio River crossing had to be found.
From Piketon the raiders continued east, after having burned the Scioto River bridges at Piketon and Waverly. Jackson was the next target.
At dawn on the 17th, the raiders entered Jackson and spent a few hors raiding the local shops for needed goods. One item of peculiar interest to the raiders was a mesh, veil-like fabric that they draped over their hats to combat the pesky flies and mosquitoes of summer. As the rebels rode down Broadway and Main Streets, townsfolk said they look like some Arab sultan’s harem.
From Jackson the raiders split into two columns, one heading through Wilkesville, the other through Vinton. At daybreak on the 18th, they regrouped near Pomeroy just as General Henry M. Judah were approaching the Meigs County landings with Indiana and Illinois cavalry.
Judah’s arrival was too late to stop the raiders before they entered Chester. Morgan reached Buffington Island as darkness fell. He postponed the river crossing until the next morning. Had Morgan not been forced to stop for a needed rest for his men and horses, the rebels would have most probably been successful in crossing the Ohio River into western Virginia.
At first light, the rebels found themselves facing earthworks of what they assumed to be home guard. Storming the earthworks the rebels found them abandoned and the artillery rolled over a bluff. As the morning fog lifted, Morgan saw just how grave the situation at Buffington Island was: He was in the center of a V-shaped hollow with Union defenders in all directions.
With his men running out of ammunition, his only option was to have Basil Duke make a last ditch stand as the bulk of the raiding regiments headed for the undefended narrow outlet toward the river.
As a result of the Battle of Buffington Island, 700 of Morgan’s raiders surrendered, including his brother-in-law Basil Duke, and only a few made it to safety across the flood-swollen Ohio River.
Morgan himself, could have made the escape. It is reported that he was in mid-river, when he turned back because he realized too many of his men would not be successful in making the crossing. He opted to remain in enemy territory with his men, instead of escaping to freedom in his homelands.
From the disaster of Buffington Island on the 19th, Morgan led his men northward, aiming for Lake Erie and a possible escape into Canada.
On the 22nd, the raiders veered back west to the Vinton County village or Zaleski and later that day rode into Nelsonville. On the 23rd they crossed the Muskingum River at Eagleport where another 300 of Morgan’s few remaining men were captured.
On the morning of the 24th Morgan’s men crossed the National Road east of Cambridge, where they learned of a possible Ohio River fording spot, Coxe’s Riffle, near Steubenville. That afternoon and evening they marched east to Harrisville and Smithfield.
Two days later, with at most, 600 men, Morgan met fresh Union regiments from Michigan who had arrived at Mingo Station. The Wolverines struck at Morgan’s column near Salineville at 8 a. m. Morgan’s remaining raiders suffered losses of 75 killed or wounded and 200 prisoners.
Morgan surrendered to a civilian, James Burbick, who had been acting as captain of the home guard. Morgan asked that the surrender be conditional upon the parole of his officers and men that they might be able to go home.
Morgan was taken into custody and jailed at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus along with his brother, Dick, Basil Duke and others of the men.
At sunset on November 17, 1863, after having been in the prison for just less than four months, Morgan and his comrades escaped through a series of tunnels and caught a train from Columbus to Cincinnati. They paid a boy two-dollars to take them across the Ohio River to Newport, Kentucky, where they were welcomed home as heroes.
Morgan died later that year in the eastern Tennessee city of Greeneville, still wearing the gray uniform of the CSA and the plumed hat, which became a signature sign of Morgan, the dreaded raider of Southern Ohio during the summer of 1863.
By: Jim Murray, Editor
The Southern Ohio Traveler
May 1995
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Pike Co Genealogical Society
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