John Hunt Morgan and Kentucky's Civil War Within a War

Kentucky in eighteen sixty-one faced a choice that was also a contradiction. It was a slaveholding state whose political leadership declared neutrality in the Civil War, a position that was constitutionally meaningless and strategically untenable. Within months, Confederate and Union forces both moved into the state, the legislature lurched toward the Union, and Kentucky families began splitting apart in ways that would not fully heal for decades.

Lexington sat at the center of this fracture. Henry Clay's son James Clay was a Confederate sympathizer. The Todd family, Mary Lincoln's Kentucky kin, sent men to both sides.

And out of the Bluegrass rode John Hunt Morgan, a Lexington hemp merchant who became one of the most celebrated and most feared cavalry commanders in the Confederate army. Morgan's raids were theatrical, daring, and ultimately strategically inconclusive. He and his men moved at extraordinary speed, cutting telegraph lines, burning railroad bridges, and striking Union supply lines in Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio.

In July of eighteen sixty-three, Morgan led his cavalry on the largest Confederate raid into northern territory, crossing the Ohio River into Indiana and Ohio. It was a bold stroke that ended in disaster. Morgan was captured in Ohio and imprisoned in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

He escaped in November, through a tunnel, in one of the more dramatic jailbreaks of the war, made it back to Confederate lines, and was killed in action in Tennessee in September of eighteen sixty-four. He is buried in Lexington Cemetery. Kentucky eventually claimed him as a hero of a particular stripe: dashing, lost, emblematic of the Confederate romance that the state spent generations elaborating and the present is slowly revising.