Mr. Morgan's Daring Raid - NYTimes.com When, in July 1963, the Confederate guerrilla Henry Lane Stone stepped off the captured steamboat that had ferried him from Kentucky across the Ohio River, he "experienced some peculiar sensations" as he once again "set foot on Indiana soil." Just nine months earlier, Stone had gone south to join the Confederate cavalry in occupied Kentucky under John Hunt Morgan. Now he was not only returning, but also "engaged in a hostile invasion of my adopted State." Stone's family was Kentuckian. Samuel and Sarah Stone, Henry's parents, had moved the family to Putnam County, Ind., when he was 9, to live closer to Henry's maternal uncles, Higgins and Henry Lane. The Civil War divided the Lane-Stone family along many fissures. Samuel Stone was a Democrat, while his brothers-in-law were both Republicans. Henry S. Lane would be elected Indiana's first Republican governor, yet would serve only two days before being elevated to the United States Senate. His namesake, Henry Lane Stone, fought for the Confederacy; on the other side, however, could be found two of Henry Lane Stone's brothers, who served in the Union Army. In September 1862, 19-year-old Henry Lane Stone ran away from Greencastle, Ind., where he was studying law, and headed for Cincinnati. Three weeks later, he had reached Sharpsburg, Ky., where he joined the 9th Kentucky Cavalry, a Confederate unit. Stone attributed his actions to a youthful spirit of adventure, an attraction to the exploits of Kentucky cavalry under the famous (or infamous) raider John Hunt Morgan and loyalty to the South and its "institutions." Although he never specified which institutions he revered, the Stones had been slave owners in Kentucky. Morgan was a Lexington slave owner, businessman and veteran of the Mexican War. He had commanded militia companies in Kentucky in the decade before the Civil War, and received a commission in the Confederate Army in October 1861, shortly after the death of his first wife. Morgan's cavalry had been used in support of generals Albert Sidney Johnston and Braxton Bragg during their campaigns in Tennessee and Kentucky in 1862. Southerners saw Morgan as a gallant, romantic raider - a "Marion of the war," so called after Francis Marion, a hero of the American Revolution who pioneered guerrilla tactics. By the time Stone joined Morgan's cavalry, the Kentuckians were expert raiders, detailed specifically to harass occupying Union forces. Morgan had raided Kentucky in summer 1862, but his effort to liberate the state from the Union proved unrealistic. In Tennessee, his forces destroyed important railroad tunnels, thereby disrupting the Union supply line and impeding its advance on Chattanooga. In late summer 1862, Morgan's forces participated in Bragg's invasion of Kentucky, which culminated in the battle of Perryville. Stone joined Morgan's forces in time to participate in the Christmas raid, an attack on the trestles at Muldraugh's Hill, near Elizabethtown, where the largest railroad bridges between Louisville and Nashville were guarded by Union stockades. Among the prisoners taken was a regiment of Hoosiers, many of them Stone's old friends and acquaintances from Putnam County. Stone chatted with some of the prisoners and even entrusted one with a letter for his family back in Indiana. Morgan's biographer, James A. Ramage, says that the Christmas raid was the pinnacle of Morgan's success. By 1863, the Union was strengthening its forces in that state. When Morgan embarked on his "Great Raid" into Indiana in the summer of 1863, he underestimated the capabilities of the forces against him. Morgan received permission from Bragg to attack Louisville, to divert Union forces from Bragg's army operating in Tennessee, but instead Morgan's forces swung west of that city and moved over the Ohio River into Indiana. The first incursion came in June 1863, when Capt. Thomas Hines led a company of Morgan's men across the Ohio River at Cannelton, Ind., looking for horses. Many of his men were killed or captured by the Indiana Legion, as the state's militia was known, and Hines escaped back into Kentucky with only a small band of about 15 men. The ease with which Hoosiers repelled the Hines raid did little to alert the state to the threat of invasion. Then, in early July, Morgan moved northward with a force of about 2,500 men. They moved through Kentucky rapidly, often at night, avoiding the main Union forces. The Confederates captured two steamboats, and on the night of July 8 they ferried the men across the Ohio River. The Indiana Legion did manage to fire some cannons at the steamboat, but was quickly driven away. The next day, the Confederates reached Corydon, the former territorial capital, in southern Indiana. About 450 militiamen formed on a hill south of town. After a short battle, the militia surrendered and Morgan's men looted the town. Some called the excursion the "Calico Raid," after the bolts of cloth Morgan's men carried away from stores. Many Hoosiers in southern Indiana also remembered Morgan as a horse thief, for the Kentuckians replaced tired mounts with horses taken from Indiana farms. Henry Lane Stone rode down eight horses during the raid. He noted that Morgan's men expected to take horses, forage and provisions as needed from farmers in Indiana and Ohio, but the Confederates also took store goods, personal items, and even bird cages - items that had no military value. Along the route through Indiana and Ohio, Morgan's men demanded food from local women, and then ate on horseback as they continued their flight from pursuing Union forces. After looting Corydon, Morgan's force moved on to Salem. "The women & children went about screaming and hollowing fit to kill themselves," wrote one observer. There was fear that Morgan would attack the state capital, but the Confederates moved away from the route to Indianapolis and eastward, entering Ohio. Although it was easy to laugh at the pitiful performance of the Indiana Legion, which Morgan's cavalry so easily swept aside at Corydon and en route to the Ohio border, the militiamen did gain credit from some historians for delaying the Confederates, and thus aiding their pursuit by regular Union troops. In Ohio, militia felled trees across roads and created obstructions with fence planks to delay the Confederates" progress. The Union commander Benjamin Judah guessed correctly that Morgan would try to cross back into Kentucky at Buffington Island in Ohio. Morgan's subordinate, Col. Basil Duke, had informed him that the river was too shallow there for the Union gunboats, unaware not only of the slight draft of these boats but also of the heavy rains in West Virginia that had raised water levels. Judah reached Buffington Island just as Morgan's troops began to cross. Surrounded on three sides, and under fire from the gunboats, Duke and almost 600 men surrendered. Morgan and another 400 men made it to New Lisbon, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, before their capture eight days later. Indiana Republicans blamed Morgan's raid on antiwar Democrats, known as Copperheads, whose "repeated threats of resistance of law and denunciations of the Government" led Morgan "to believe that there was large party in Indiana and Ohio who were favorable to his cause," according to Henry Lane Stone's hometown newspaper, The Putnam Republican Banner. But Indiana Democrats in turn blamed Republican accusations of disloyalty for misleading Morgan into believing that Hoosiers sympathized with the Confederacy. In any case, when captured, Morgan evidently expressed surprise at the resistance he had encountered from civilians. He had expected to find more sympathy for the Confederacy in Indiana and Ohio than existed. Yet even if there had been such sympathy, the subsequent pillaging and seizure of horses from local farmers would have destroyed it. Even Henry Lane Stone, who had mixed feelings about the invasion, quickly came to regard Indiana as "the enemy's country," subject to the "horrors of war." Stone, who had lived in Indiana for a decade while growing up, was also confused about Hoosier loyalties. At the raid's outset, he wrote his father, "If the Democrats want to put down despotism let them turn out now." But rather than rally to join Morgan, tens of thousands of Hoosiers instead poured into Indianapolis to defend the state. From Greencastle, Mary Vermilion reported: "The Hoosier blood is up wonderfully." In Greencastle alone, 200 men had volunteered to fight the raiders. "Many of the worst Copperheads enlisted at once," according to Vermilion. She concluded that "Morgan did good service" to the Union cause in Indiana: "The people there are more united now than they have ever been." Unity proved short-lived, however. Very quickly, Republicans and Democrats in Indiana returned to partisan quarreling. When Republicans praised Governor Oliver P. Morton for his response to the invasion, Democrats began to criticize his performance. As for shortcomings in the military's handling of Morgan's raid, Republicans blamed federal troops and suggested that Indiana Democrats had actively aided Morgan - providing him with guides and money - although many of the guides Morgan impressed had either led him astray or refused to cooperate. Captured at Buffington Island, Henry Lane Stone was imprisoned first at Camp Morton in Indianapolis and then at Camp Douglas in Chicago. But he escaped, made his way to Canada, and back into the United States, rejoining the Confederate cavalry and serving until the end of the war. After the fall of Richmond, Stone's cavalry unit escorted President Jefferson Davis's entourage on part of its flight southward. Stone settled in Kentucky after the war, where he became a successful lawyer. He reconciled immediately with his family in Indiana, and through the efforts of his uncle, Indiana's Republican senator, received a presidential pardon. Morgan and the officers captured with him were imprisoned at the Ohio State Penitentiary, an insult indicating that the Union viewed them as criminals rather than prisoners of war. The Confederates tunneled out and escaped in November 1863, returning to Confederate lines in Tennessee by Christmas. Morgan then received a new command made up partially of men who had served with him previously. He made another raid into Kentucky in June 1864. Although Morgan was supposed to be protecting lead and salt mines needed by Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia, he instead preferred to destroy railroads, capture a Union garrison and loot civilian stores and homes. In early September, Union forces surrounded Morgan at Greeneville, Tenn. Determined never again to be a prisoner, Morgan tried to escape but was shot dead. Nicole Etcheson is a professor of history at Ball State University and the author of the prize-winning "A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community."