A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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