War upon Our Border by Stephen I. Rockenbach

Author:Stephen I. Rockenbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

6

“The Wolf Was upon Us”

While Frankfort experienced turmoil during the Confederate invasion, the people of Corydon enjoyed relative peace and quiet throughout 1862. In Kentucky resistance to emancipation intensified the conflict between secessionist citizens and their loyalist neighbors. Harrison Countians paid attention to the situation below the Ohio River, especially in Meade County, but the prospect of guerrilla war in Indiana appeared unlikely. Yet during the summer of 1863, the people of Corydon experienced a side of war they had hoped to avoid. When John Hunt Morgan led a sizeable force of Confederate raiders into Harrison County in early July 1863, politics divided the community. Subsequently it suffered from the economic effects of the war, while volunteerism and conscription left the town virtually undefended. The raid brought further financial loss and political division, but more importantly it demonstrated the vulnerability of the Indiana border to attack from Confederate cavalrymen including those, regular and irregular, from Kentucky. In the aftermath of Morgan’s raid, many of Corydon’s leading citizens turned away from the bitter fighting in Kentucky and looked to their town’s preservation and prosperity. In so doing, these Hoosiers erected a border barricade that changed relations with their neighbors on the south side of the Ohio River.

Southern Indiana’s introduction to border war was significant because it occurred as the war steadily hardened and civilians were swept into the conflict, which was no longer solely between enlisted armies. Especially in the West, Civil War armies began to rely on foraging, taking what they needed from local civilians. Military commanders, including the infamous Gen. William T. Sherman, also began to adopt the strategy of destroying valuable resources, such as railroads, factories, or supplies, to keep them out of enemy hands. Guerrilla war affected the evolution of Union strategy because it distorted the distinctions between combatants and noncombatants. Morgan, though not a guerrilla in the true sense, often operated behind enemy lines in Kentucky.1 Indeed, in the summer of 1863 Morgan dared to take his force north of the Ohio River. In so doing, he released the very forces that Sherman and others were holding back for fear of receiving criticism from the Northern public and fostering resentment among Southern civilians. The main difference in the Union and Confederate intensification of warfare was that Morgan’s raid into the Old Northwest was a method of retaliation, with no real strategic value to the Confederate war effort.

Hoosier residents of the river border experienced the whole spectrum of irregular war from 1863–64, including violence between Indiana citizens—a true civil war. Throughout the succession of cavalry raids, guerrilla attacks, and crowd violence, civilians and military officials alike uniformly characterized the perpetrators of all of these incidents as guerrillas. Historians have since developed a more nuanced approach to the characterizations of irregular warfare. Cavalry raiders like those serving with John Hunt Morgan were uniformed soldiers using irregular tactics, unlike guerillas, who operated without official sanction.2 Recent scholarship on Missouri indicates that political and ideological factors greatly influenced the actions of guerrillas in that state.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.