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 Ohio people were becoming every moment madder and
more mischievous. At first they only cut down trees to check Morgan’s
march after he got by, but they soon began to obstruct the roads in
front of him; and though they burned one bridge over a river that
he could easily ford, it was not long before they learned to destroy
bridges where the streams were otherwise impassable.
By the time he reached Portland the militia were closing in around him,
and the next morning two detachments of United States cavalry struck
him, while the gunboats which had been watching for him on the river,
opened fire on him. In a few minutes the fight was over. Morgan left
seven hundred of his men prisoners behind him, and with twelve hundred
others fled north and east to seek a new way out of Ohio. The fight at
Buffington Island took place on the 18th, five days after Morgan crossed
the Ohio line into Hamilton County, and on the 26th he surrendered
with the constantly lessening remnant of his force seven miles from New
Lisbon in Columbiana County.
The prisoners were all sent for safe keeping to the penitentiary at
Columbus, but on the night of November 7th, Morgan and six of his
comrades made their escape, by digging into an air-space under the floor
of his cell with their table-knives, passing through this to the prison
walls, and letting themselves down with ropes made of their bed-clothes.
At the station where they were to take the train for Cincinnati, Morgan
was dismayed to realize that he had no money to buy a ticket; but one
of his officers had been supplied by a young lady who sent him some
bank notes concealed in a book. They rode all night in great fear and
anxiety, and just before the train drew into Cincinnati they put on the
brakes and slowed it enough to drop from it with safety. Then they lost
no time in making for the Ohio River, where they hired a boy to set them
over to Kentucky in his boat. Morgan had not found the Ohio people too
plodding for him, as Aaron Burr had, but he was quite as glad to leave
their state, which he never revisited, for he was killed the next year
in Tennessee. He left behind him in Ohio by no means a wholly evil
name, and some stories are told of him that more than hint at a generous
nature. A Union soldier whom his men had taken tried to break his musket
across a stone, and one of the Confederate officers drew his pistol to
shoot him. Morgan forbade it. “Never harm a man who has surrendered,” he
said. “He was only doing what I should have done in his place.”
We may be sure that such an enemy inflicted no wanton injury upon the
country, and there was something in Morgan’s presence that corresponded
with this magnanimity of his character. He was a man of powerful frame,
large beyond the common, of great endurance, and able to outride any
of his men, without sleep or rest. He had a fresh complexion, with fair
hair and beard, and his face was rather mild. When he gave himself up at
last, it was with an apparently cheerful unconcern at the turn of luck
which in other raids had enabled him to break bridges, capture trains,
and destroy millions of value in military stores.
Ohio is herself built upon so grand a scale that even her enemies seem
to have been cast in a noble mold; and the jokes upon her own people
that form the life of most of the stories of Morgan’s raid are as large
as he. At one point, forty miles from their line of march, a good lady
saved the family horse from the southern troopers by locking him into
the parlor, where his stamping on the hollow floor kept the neighborhood
awake the whole night through.
One of Morgan’s men, who plundered wildly, but not very wickedly,
carried for two days a bird cage with three canaries in it; another, at
the looting of a country store, filled his pockets with bone-buttons;
they were only dangerous when they met reluctance in their frequent
horse trades. They called at the house of a gentleman in Hamilton County
at one o’clock in the morning, and asked for breakfast; when he objected
that there was no fire at that time, they suggested that they could
kindle one for him that it might be hard to put out; then he made one
himself and they got their breakfast.
In Carroll County Morgan himself called for dinner at the house of a
lady whose maiden name was Morgan, and at table they fell into such
kindly chat about their cousinship, that she ended by giving him a clean
shirt, which he needed badly, and gratefully wore away.
[Illustration: Hiding with the pigs 242R]
A farmer in Morgan County took refuge in his pigpen, where one of the
raiders found him trying to hide behind a fat mother of a family, who
was suckling her farrow. The raider grinned: “Hello! How did you get
here? Did you all come in the same litter?” A stuttering hero who had
been bragging of what he would do to the enemy if he got at them, was
surprised by Morgan’s men with a demand for his surrender. He flung up
his hands instantly. “I s-s-surrendered f-f-f-five minutes ago!”
One of the greatest jokes of all was played upon a friend of the South
in Hamilton County. My younger readers may not suppose that there could
be any friends of the South in Ohio, at that time; but in truth there
were a great many, and far more than there were at the outbreak of the
war. Then most of us believed that it would be quickly fought to an end;
but after it had dragged on for two years, when its drain on the blood
and the money of the nation was severest, and the end seemed as far
off as at the beginning, those who had never loved the cause of freedom
could easily blow the smoldering fires of discontent into a wide and
far-raging flame. It must not be imagined that the Northern enemies of
the North were all bad men; they were sometimes men of conscience, and
sincerely opposed to the war against the South as unjust and hopeless.
But they were called copperheads, because for a long time they lurked
silently among the people, like that deadly snake which used to haunt
the grass of the backwoods, and bite without warning. They were still
called copperheads when they lifted their heads and struck boldly at
the Union cause, under the lead of a very able man, Clement L.
Vallandigham, whom we shall presently learn more of; and it was an
old copperhead who followed Morgan’s rear guard with the best horse the
hard-riders had left him, and who tried to get speech with the officer
in command. He explained that he was a follower of Vallandigham and
against the war, and he pleaded that on this ground he ought to have his
horses back. The Morgan colonel said they could not stop to listen, but
they would hear him if he would drive along with them. He added that as
some of his soldiers were worn out, the copperhead had better give them
his wagon; and when the copperhead said that he could not ride, the
colonel answered that he should be allowed to walk. After walking
awhile, he complained that his boots hurt him, and the colonel ordered
them taken off. The copperhead was obliged to follow in his stockings
till the raiders camped. Then, to amuse their leisure, they taught him a
Morgan song, and obliged him to dance, fat and fagged as he was, to his
own music, while they applauded him with shouts of “Go it, old Yank!
Louder!” till their commanding officer ordered them to harness a
worn-out crow bait to his wagon, and bring him three wretched jades for
the horses he wanted to recover, and let him go.
[Illustration: A Copperhead walks with General Morgan 243L]
It is not known whether this behavior of his friends turned the
copperheads against them or not But in spite of the Morgan raid, and in
spite of all the reasons and victories of a North, the largest vote that
the Democratic party had ever polled, up to that time, was cast in favor
of a man who had been bitterest against the war, and who was then in
exile from his native country because of his treasonable words and
practices. Even three thousand soldiers in the field voted for him, and
this is far more surprising than that forty thousand voted against him.
As we look back through the perspective of history, our state seems to
have been solid for the Union and for freedom; but this is an appearance
only, and it is better that we should realize the truth. It will do no
harm even to realize that the man who embodied the copperhead feeling
was by no means a malignant man, however mistaken.
Clement Laird Vallandigham was born in 1820 at New Lisbon, of mixed
Huguenot and Scotch-Irish ancestry, a stock which has given us some of
our best and greatest men. His father was a Presbyterian minister,
who eked out his poor salary by teaching a classical school in his own
house. Clement was ready for college long before he was old enough to
be received; and when he was graduated from Jefferson College, at
Cannonsburg in Pennsylvania, he came back to New Lisbon and began to
practice law.
So far all the influences of his life should have been at least as good
for the generous side of politics as for the ungenerous; but from the
first he cast his lot with the oppressor. In 1845 he was sent to the
legislature, where he took a leading part in opposing the repeal of the
Black Laws, which kept the negro from voting at the polls or testifying
in the courts. Two years later he fixed his home in Dayton, where
he quickly came to the front as a States Rights Democrat in the full
Southern sense. He was given by a Democratic house the seat to which
Lewis D. Campbell was elected in 1856, and he remained in Congress till
defeated in 1862. Up to the last moment he never ceased to vote and to
speak against the war, because he believed it impossible to conquer the
South; and when he came back to Ohio he kept on saying what he believed.
This brought him under condemnation of General Order No. 38, issued
by General Burnside at Cincinnati, forbidding any person to express
sympathy for the enemy under pain of being sent out of the Union lines
into the lines of the Confederates. Vallandigham defied this order; he
was arrested by a company of the 115th Ohio, and taken to Cincinnati
from Dayton, where a mob of his friends broke out the next day, and
burned the office of the leading Republican newspaper. General Burnside
sent a force and quelled the mob, and promptly had Vallandigham tried by
a court-martial, which sentenced him to imprisonment in Fort Warren at
Boston during the war. President Lincoln changed this sentence to
transportation through our lines into the borders of the Southern
Confederacy, and Vallandigham was hurried by special train from
Cincinnati to Murfreesboro, in Tennessee, where General Rosecrans was in
command. In a long interview, General Rosecrans tried to convince him of
his wrongdoing, and asked if he did not know that but for his protection
the soldiers would tear him to pieces in an instant. Vallandigham
answered, “Draw your soldiers up in a hollow square to-morrow morning,
and announce to them that Vallandigham desires to vindicate himself, and
I will guarantee that when they have heard me through they will be more
willing to tear Lincoln and yourself to pieces than they will
Vallandigham.” The general said he had too much regard for his
prisoner’s life to try it; but the charm of the man had won upon him.
“He don’t look a bit like a traitor, now, does he, Joe?” he remarked to
one of his staff, and he warmly shook hands with Vallandigham when they
parted at two o’clock on the morning of May 25.
Vallandigham mounted into the spring wagon provided for the rest of
his journey, and was driven rapidly out of the sleeping town toward the
Confederate lines. It was still in the forenoon when, in response to a
Federal flag of truce, Colonel Webb of the 51st Alabama sent word to
say that he was ready to receive him; two Federal officers crossed the
enemy’s lines with him, where he was met by one private soldier, and
after some hours taken into the presence of the commander. General Bragg
received him very kindly at Shelbyville, and allowed him to report on
parole at Wilmington, North Carolina. There he took a blockade runner
for Nassau, where he found a steamer for Canada.
He arrived in the British province early in July, to find that the Ohio
Democrats had nominated him for governor, and that his party throughout
the country had expressed its sympathy with him. President Lincoln met
one of their committees, and agreed with them that Vallandigham’s arrest
was unusual, but he quaintly added: He could not be persuaded that the
government should not take measures in time of war which must not be
taken in time of peace, any more than he could be persuaded that a sick
man must not take medicine which was not good food for a well one.
So thought the great majority of the Ohio people, who duly chose John
Brough, a War Democrat, for their governor in October. Vallandigham
remained in Canada until 1864, when he returned to Dayton, where he was
warmly received by his friends, and not molested by the authorities. But
he had never afterwards any political importance, in spite of his great
abilities and the peculiar charm of his manner for all kinds of people.
After the war was over, he accepted its conclusions with earnest good
faith, and three years later he met his death by a curious accident.
He was showing a friend, in behalf of a client in whom he was greatly
interested, how a pistol might go off in a pocket and cause a mortal
wound such as his client was accused of inflicting on another. The
pistol in his hand was really discharged; Vallandigham was fatally
wounded and died shortly afterwards.
XXIII. FAMOUS OHIO SOLDIERS
First among these I count the great chief Pontiac, who led the
rebellion of the mid-western tribes against the English after the French
had abandoned them, and who was born in Auglaize County. I count
the renowned chief Tecumseh, too, that later and lesser Pontiac, who
attempted to do against the Americans what Pontiac tried to do against
the English.
It was some time before the great white men of Ohio began to be born
here, but in the meanwhile there were those born elsewhere who, like
General Harrison, became Ohioans, and so did what they could to repair
the defect of birth. There is no reason to think that such men were
shaped by Ohio influences, but it is the habit of our generous Ohio
state patriotism to claim as Ohioans not only those who were born here,
and those who came to live here, but those who were born here and then
went to live elsewhere.
Valiant and able generals came from the different parts of Ohio, and
from the different races which settled there. But the Scotch race,
descending through New England, has the highest place in our soldiers’
ancestry, and the county of Clermont has the deathless glory of being
the birthplace of Ulysses Simpson Grant, one of the greatest captains of
all time, one of the purest patriots, one of the best and gentlest men.
I need not speak of his career as a soldier, for that has become a part
of the nation’s history. The beginnings of his life were rude and hard;
it was afterwards often clouded with failure; it brightened out into
such splendid success as few lives have ever known; it was again
darkened by trouble and disaster, and it closed in a long anguish of
suffering. But if ever a life was worth living it was his, and his
memory is safe forever in the love of his country and the honor of the
world.
His parents removed soon after he was born to Brown County, where
Georgetown was his home until he was sent to West Point at seventeen.
His whole boyhood, therefore, was spent in Southwestern Ohio, where a
boy may live the happiest life on earth, and where Grant played, worked,
planned, and studied not only without a dream of the place he was to
take in history, but without special thought or liking for the calling
in which he was to stand with Caesar and with Napoleon.
When he was eight years old, he began to work in his father’s tannery,
where he drove the horse that turned the bark mill, and broke the bark
into the hopper. He did not like the work, and he escaped from it when
he could, and did jobs of wagoning about the village. He loved his
horses and kept them sleek and fat; and it is told of him that when
he first traded horses he was so eager to get a certain colt that he
offered the man even more than he asked. He was fond of all boyish
sports, but he was never rough, or profane, or foul-mouthed, and he was
noted among his mates for his truth and honesty. The girls liked him for
his gentleness, the younger children for his kindness; he never teased
them, and he never tormented any living creature. There may have been
better boys, but I have never heard of them; and if Grant passed only
his first seventeen years in his native state, they were years of as
true a greatness relatively as any that followed. From the first he
was self-reliant, and taught himself to trust to his own powers and
resources. When seven years old, he got an unbroken colt from the stable
in his father’s absence, hitched it to a sled which he loaded with wood
in the forest, and then drove home with a single line. He once wished
to ride his father’s pacer on an errand he was sent upon; but his father
could not spare it and the boy took his colt. “I will break him to
pace,” he said, and he came back with the colt pacing. At twelve he
hauled logs with a heavy draft team. Once the men who were to load for
him did not come, and Grant managed with the help of a fallen tree to
get the logs on the truck alone and drove home with them. After eleven
he had scarcely any schooling except that of hard work, until he was
appointed to West Point.
From Georgetown, another Ohioan famous in the great war was sent about
the same time to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. This was the boy Daniel
Am-men, who was destined to become Admiral Ammen. He had saved Grant’s
life when they were bathing together in White Oak Creek, and Grant
remembered him with his high office and title when he became President.
But Ammen had won both by his services during the war, for the Ammens
were fighters. The admiral’s brother Jacob had early distinguished
himself by gallantry that won him a generalship. Long before this
their father had begun the good fight by printing John Rankin’s letters
against slavery in his newspaper at Ripley.
From Carroll County came that wonderful race of fighters, the McCooks.
Daniel McCook, Presbyterian elder and Sunday-school superintendent,
went into the war at sixty-three with his sons, and two years later was
killed in the engagement with Morgan at Buffington Island. Latimer A.
McCook died in 1869 of wounds received during his service as surgeon in
the battles of the war. General Robert Latimer McCook was murdered by
guerrillas as he lay sick and wounded near Salem, Alabama, in 1862.
General A. McDowell McCook was a West Pointer who won his major
generalship by his gallantry at Shiloh. General Daniel McCook, Jr., led
the assault at Kenesaw Mountain, where he was mortally wounded. Edwin
Stanton McCook was graduated at Annapolis, but preferred the land
service, and rose to the rank of brevet major general, through the
courage and ability he had shown at Fort Henry, at Fort Donelson, at
Chickamauga, and in Sherman’s March to the Sea. Charles Morris McCook
was killed at the first Bull Run in 1861, while in his Freshman year at
Gam-bier. His father saw him overwhelmed by the enemy and called out to
him to surrender; but he answered “Father, I will never surrender to
a rebel,” and was shot down by one of the Black Horse Cavalry. John
J. McCook served in the campaigns of the West and with Grant from the
battle of the Wilderness onward to the end. He was severely wounded at
Shady Grove, and left the army with the rank of colonel.
Dr. John McCook, another Sunday-school superintendent, was the father of
Edwin Moody McCook, who rendered brilliant service early in the war and
left the army at its close with the rank of major general. His greatest
exploit was breaking through the enemy’s lines before Sherman began his
march to the sea, and effecting a diversion by the damage he did and the
prisoners he took. His brother Anson George McCook was at the first
Bull Run and in the great battles of the Southwest, and was brevetted
Brigadier General at the end of the war. Rev. Henry C. McCook enlisted
first as a private soldier and became chaplain of a regiment, but did
no actual fighting. He is well known as a naturalist and theologian,
and his youngest brother John James is distinguished as a linguist. His
brother left the army as colonel after seeing some of the first fighting
and became an Episcopal minister. Roderick Sheldon McCook left Annapolis
in 1859 and promptly shared in the capture of a slaver off the African
coast. From 1861 to 1865 he was engaged in all the naval movements at
Newbern, Wilmington, Charleston, Fort Fisher, and on the James, and
suffered lasting injury to his health on the monitors. He left the navy
with the rank of commodore. All these McCooks, except the Rev. J. J.
McCook, now professor in Trinity College, Hartford, remained of the
Presbyterian faith, which seems natural to their Scotch-Irish race.
[Illustration: Rutherford Hayes 253R]