was no fighting worthy
of the name; the list of casualties on the National side showing
only 19 killed, 47 wounded, and 8 missing in the whole campaign,
from the 2d of July to the final surrender. [Footnote: Official
Records, vol. xxlii. pt. i. p.637.] For this the whole Confederate
division of cavalry was sacrificed. Its leader was never again
trusted by his government, and his prestige was gone forever. His
men made simply a race for life from the day they turned away from
the militia at Vernon, Indiana. Morgan carefully avoided every
fortified post and even the smaller towns. The places he visited
after he crossed the Ohio line do not include the larger towns and
villages that seemed to lie directly in his path. He avoided the
railroads also, and these were used every day to convey the militia
and other troops parallel to his route, to hedge him in and finally
to stop him. His absence was mischievous to Bragg, who was
retreating upon Chattanooga and to whom the division would have been
a most welcome reinforcement. He did not delay Burnside, for the
latter was awaiting the return of the Ninth Corps from Vicksburg,
and this did not begin to arrive till long after the raid was over.
None of the National army's communications were interrupted, and not
a soldier under Rosecrans lost a ration by reason of the pretentious
expedition. It ended in a scene that was ridiculous in the extreme.
Morgan had pressed into his service as guides, on the last day of
his flight, two men who were not even officers of the local militia,
but who were acting as volunteer homeguards to protect their
neighborhood. When he finally despaired of escape, he begged his
captive guides to change their _role_ into commanders of an
imaginary army and to accept his surrender upon merciful and
favorable terms to the vanquished! He afterward claimed the right to
immediate liberation on parole, under the conditions of this
burlesque capitulation. Shackelford and his rough riders would
accept no surrender but an unconditional one as prisoners of war,
and were sustained in this by their superiors. The distance by the
river between the crossing at Brandenburg and the ferry above
Steubenville near which Morgan finally surrendered, was some six
hundred miles. This added to the march from Tennessee through
Kentucky would make the whole ride nearly a thousand miles long. Its
importance, however, except as a subject for an entertaining story,
was in an inverse r