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io in 1863 237] Ohio men shed their blood on all the battlefields of the South, but only once was the war which consumed her children by tens of thousands brought home to her own hearths. This was when the state was invaded by John Morgan and his hard-riders in 1863. Morgan was born at Huntsville in Alabama, and was of the true Southern type, gallant, reckless, independent. He was one of the bravest and luckiest chiefs of Confederate cavalry, and when he was ordered to march northward from Tennessee through Kentucky, and attempt the capture of Louisville, but not to pass the Ohio, he trusted to his fortune, and crossed the river into Indiana at the head of some twenty-three hundred horsemen. On the 13th of July he entered the state of Ohio, a few miles north of Cincinnati, and passed eastward unmolested by the Union general Burnside, who preferred not to bring him to battle in the neighborhood of the city, but to wait some chance of attacking him elsewhere. The militia had been called out by the governor, and the whole country was on the alert. But Morgan's men passed through Clermont, Brown, Adams, Pike, Jackson, Vinton, Athens, and Gallia counties into Meigs with comparatively little molestation, though the militia learned rapidly to embarrass if not to imperil his course. His men suffered terribly in their long ride. They had to live on the country as best they could, and they were literally dropping with sleep as they pushed their jaded horses along the roads, everywhere threatened by the Ohio sharpshooters. They fell from their saddles and were left behind; they crawled off in the darkness and threw themselves down in the woods and fields, glad to awaken prisoners in the hands of their pursuers. At first the large towns were alarmed by the fear of pillage, but Morgan had hardly got into Ohio before it became his chief aim to get out again. His hard-riders were confined in their depredations mainly to the plunder of the country stores on their route. They stole what they could, but they stole without method or reason, except in the matter of horses, which they really needed and could use. They commonly left their worn-out chargers in exchange, but they took the freshest and strongest horses they could get, at any rate. In their horse stealing they were not so very unlike the Kentucky pioneers, who used to cross into the Ohio country for the ponies of the Indians, and they practiced it at much the same risk; for the
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