John Hunt Morgan's 1863 Raid: 2,000 Stolen Hams and an Ohio Prison Tunnel

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In June 1863, with Vicksburg under siege and Robert E. Lee heading toward Gettysburg, General Braxton Bragg sent Confederate cavalry commander John Hunt Morgan to screen and distract the Union Army of the Ohio, with one firm limit: do not cross the Ohio River. Morgan told his officers privately he would cross anyway, betting that raids in Indiana and Ohio would panic northern governors into pulling troops from the front. He left Sparta, Tennessee on June 11 with about 2,460 men, took heavy losses at Tebbs Bend, and lost his youngest brother, Thomas, in street fighting at Lebanon, Kentucky. His telegrapher, George Lightning Ellsworth, tapped Union lines and fed General Ambrose Burnside false reports that inflated Morgan's force to 7,000.

On July 8 Morgan seized the steamboats Alice Dean and John B. McCombs at Brandenburg, Kentucky, ferried about 1,800 men into Indiana, burned the Alice Dean, and brushed aside home guards at Corydon. Living off the land, his men looted towns, and he ransomed mills while punishing troopers who stole silver from a Masonic lodge in Versailles, Indiana. After he waited overnight at Buffington Island, Union cavalry and river gunboats captured 1,025 of his men, including his brother Richard and Basil Duke, and Morgan was taken on July 26 at Salineville, the farthest north Confederate troops ever reached. Held in the Ohio Penitentiary as a common convict, he escaped in November, only to be killed in Greeneville, Tennessee less than a year later.

• At DuPont, Indiana, raiders took 2,000 hams that rotted in the July heat and were dumped along the road.
• Morgan and six officers tunneled from an air shaft with dining knives, scaled the wall with bedsheets and caught a train to Cincinnati.
• Northern newspapers mocked the campaign as the Calico Raid.
• The raid covered more than 1,000 miles, paroled 6,000 Union troops and destroyed 34 bridges.
• Basil Duke argued the raid delayed the Union capture of East Tennessee and kept reinforcements from Chickamauga.