Newburgh Raid: Stovepipe Johnson's Bluff
Near Evansville, Indiana
On July eighteen, eighteen sixty-two, a Confederate colonel named Adam Rankin Johnson crossed the Ohio River from Kentucky with only about thirty-five men and captured Newburgh, Indiana, making it the first town in a northern state seized during the Civil War. Johnson had a problem: he had no cannons. His solution was to aim a stovepipe, a charred log, and some wagon wheels across the riverbank.
The defenders of Newburgh, convinced they were staring down artillery, surrendered without a shot fired. Johnson's raiders collected supplies and ammunition and slipped back across the river. The stunt earned him a nickname he kept for life: Adam "Stovepipe" Johnson.
The episode is a footnote in the war's larger story, but right here it left a mark on how Newburgh remembers the summer the Confederates came calling and left without firing a single round.
