But after most of his men had been intercepted by U.S. Navy gunboats, including the USS Moose,[1] Morgan surrendered at Salineville, Ohio, the northernmost point ever reached by uniformed Confederates.

[citation needed] John Wesley Hunt, Morgan's grandfather, was a leading landowner and businessman in Kentucky and was the first millionaire west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Morgan grew up on the farm outside of Lexington and attended Transylvania College for two years but was suspended in 1844 for dueling with a fraternity brother.

In 1846, Morgan enlisted with his brother Calvin and uncle Alexander in the United States Army as a cavalry private during the Mexican–American War.

After the death of John Wesley Hunt in 1849, his fortunes significantly improved as his mother, Henrietta, began financing his business ventures.

She contracted septic thrombophlebitis, popularly known as "milk leg", an infection of a blood clot in a vein, which eventually led to an amputation.

Immediately after Lincoln's election in November 1860, he wrote to his brother, Thomas Hunt Morgan, then a student at Kenyon College in northern Ohio, "Our State will not I hope secede I have no doubt but Lincoln will make a good President, at least we ought to give him a fair trial & then if he commits some overt act all the South will be a unit."

Just before the Fourth of July, by way of a steamer from Louisville, he quietly left for Camp Boone, just across the Tennessee border, to enlist in the Kentucky State Guard.

[2] Morgan and his regiment fought at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, and he soon became a symbol to secessionists, in their hopes of occupying Kentucky for the Confederacy.

A Louisiana writer, Robert D. Patrick, compared Morgan to Francis Marion and wrote that "a few thousands of such men as his would regain us Kentucky and Tennessee.

He reported the capture of 1,200 U.S. soldiers, whom he paroled, acquired several hundred horses, and destroyed massive quantities of supplies.

Historian Kenneth W. Noe wrote that Morgan's feat "in many ways surpassed J. E. B. Stuart's celebrated 'Ride around McClellan' and the Army of the Potomac the previous spring."

In July, at Versailles, Indiana, while Confederate soldiers raided nearby militia and looted county and city treasuries, the jewels of the local masonic lodge were stolen.

Morgan and Hines jumped from the train before reaching the depot and escaped into Kentucky by hiring a skiff to take them across the Ohio River.

Though Morgan's Raid was breathlessly followed by the Northern and Southern U.S. press and caused the U.S. leadership considerable concern, it was little more than a showy but ultimately futile sidelight to the war.

The raids of this season were in risky defiance of a strategic situation in the border states that had changed radically from the year before.

Nevertheless, on August 22, 1864, Morgan was placed in command of the Trans-Allegheny Department, embracing the Confederate forces in eastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia at the time.

Yet around this time, some Confederate authorities were quietly investigating Morgan for charges of criminal banditry,[citation needed] likely leading to his removal from command.

For their part, the "Tennessee Yankees," led by Alvan C. Gillem, had inaccurate intelligence from the boy that Hunt was with maybe 300 men when, in fact, he had 1,500 soldiers and two cannons.

[13] Gillem and his colonels, John K. Miller, W. H. Ingerton, and John "Belt" Brownlow,[14] determined they must seize the moment and organized what was intended to be an encirclement of the town, dividing their forces in two, with Ingerton's locally raised soldiers taking "a trail used by wood haulers,"[15] and the bulk of the force under Gillem and Brownlow taking the main road.

[13] The night ride was beset by thunderstorms, which conferred two meager advantages: Confederate scouts stayed inside, and "almost constant lightning" lit their way down the muddy, mostly empty, country roads.

[13] Near morning, three civilians informed the advancing U.S. troops that they were facing a considerably larger Confederate force than they understood and that John Hunt Morgan had spent the night at the Williams mansion, where he dined with the ladies and the servants.

"[15] As Col. Ingerton approached the town, "an excited young black man" was one of the three civilians who described Morgan's whereabouts to U.S. soldiers.

Wilcox rode into town, rousted what rebel sentries were to be found, and engaged in just enough gunfire with Confederates along Main Street to awaken Morgan.

[13] As U.S. soldiers entered the Williams property, they spotted "a man clad in a white shirt and trousers near the summer house.

Hart County High School, in Munfordville, Kentucky, the site of the Battle for the Bridge, nicknamed their athletic teams the Raiders, in memory of Morgan's men.

Trimble County High School, in Bedford, Kentucky, also nicknamed their athletic teams the Raiders in memory of Morgan's men.