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