Battle of Cynthiana: Morgan's Last Ride

By the summer of eighteen sixty-four, General John Hunt Morgan's legendary reputation was wearing thin. The bold Confederate cavalryman who had terrorized Ohio and Indiana with his Great Raid of eighteen sixty-three had spent months in the Ohio State Penitentiary after his capture, escaped with a handful of men through a tunnel, and returned to command in Kentucky , where his forces had grown undisciplined and hard to control. His superiors doubted him. His raid into Kentucky that June was his last attempt to prove them wrong.

Morgan approached Cynthiana before dawn on June eleventh with about twelve hundred men. The town's defenders , a small Union force of some three hundred soldiers of the One Hundred Sixty-Eighth Ohio Volunteer Infantry under Colonel Conrad Garis, bolstered by home guard troops , had no chance against his numbers. Morgan divided his cavalry into three columns, surrounded the town, and launched coordinated attacks on the covered bridge over the South Fork of the Licking River. The Federals were driven back toward the depot. Confederate troopers set fire to parts of the town.

But Morgan's situation reversed with remarkable speed. That same afternoon, Brigadier General Edward Hobson arrived north of town with roughly six hundred Union soldiers, most of them from the One Hundred Seventy-First Ohio National Guard. Fighting along Kellar's Bridge lasted hours. And the following dawn, June twelfth, Brigadier General Stephen Burbridge arrived with more than two thousand mounted infantrymen , fresh, well-armed, and completely encircling Morgan's exhausted force.

Burbridge attacked at sunrise. The Confederate lines broke. Morgan's men flooded back through Cynthiana in a rout, many being captured in the streets, while Morgan and a remnant escaped south through the chaos. It was the decisive end of his final Kentucky raid. Two months later, in September of eighteen sixty-four, Morgan was killed by Union cavalry in Greeneville, Tennessee. The Last Raid was over.