The Only Battle Fought in Indiana

On the morning of July ninth, eighteen sixty-three, the sound of artillery echoed through the hills south of Corydon, and Indiana experienced the only pitched land battle ever fought on its soil.

Confederate General John Hunt Morgan had crossed the Ohio River the day before with roughly twenty-four hundred cavalry troopers in what became the longest Confederate raid of the Civil War. Morgan, a dashing Kentucky horseman known for bold strikes behind Union lines, was pushing north on a mission that combined legitimate military disruption with something closer to a wild gamble. His men were deep in enemy territory, hundreds of miles from any Confederate support.

Defending the town was Colonel Lewis Jordan commanding around four hundred Indiana Legion militiamen, many of them farmers and shopkeepers with little combat experience. They threw up a hasty barricade of felled trees one mile south of Corydon and took their stand. For a time they held. Morgan's advance guard ran into stiffer resistance than expected, and the Confederates took eleven killed and forty wounded before flanking the militia line. Jordan's men were surrounded, captured, and paroled on the spot. Four defenders died.

Morgan's troopers rode into Corydon that afternoon and, as one account put it, plundered to their hearts' content. They levied ransom on the county flour mills, with the total plunder at Corydon later estimated at roughly twenty-six thousand dollars, helped themselves to food and horses, and traded their worn Kentucky thoroughbreds for five hundred fresh local mounts. Then they rode north.

The raid lasted six more days across Indiana before Morgan crossed into Ohio. Governor Oliver Morton's frantic call to arms brought well over a hundred thousand Hoosier volunteers rushing to the field, but Morgan slipped past most of them. He was finally captured in Ohio three weeks later.

Corydon had been Indiana's first state capital until eighteen twenty-five. The town where Indiana's constitution was drafted under an elm tree in eighteen sixteen now had a different kind of history to carry: the one day the war actually came to Indiana.