hment law.

When quite a young man he had two or three personal difficulties in
Lexington, in one of which he was severely wounded. To those who
recollect the tone of society in Kentucky at that day, it will be no
matter of astonishment to learn that a young man of spirit became
engaged in such affairs. His antagonists, however, became, subsequently,
his warm friends. The stigmas upon General Morgan's social standing, so
frequent in the Northern press, need not be noticed. Their falsity was
always well known in Kentucky and the South.

The calumnies, so widely circulated regarding his private life, must be
noticed, or the duty of the biographer would be neglected in an
important particular. And yet, except to positively deny every thing
which touched his integrity as a man and his honor as a gentleman, it
would seem that there is nothing for his biographer to do in this
respect. The wealth at the disposal of the Federal Government attracted
into its service all the purchasable villainy of the press--North and
South. It was not even necessary for the Government to bid for
them--they volunteered to perform, gratis, in the hope of future reward.
To undertake a refutation of every slander broached by this gang against
a man, so constantly a theme for all tongues and pens, as was Morgan,
would be an impossible, even if it were a necessary, task. It is enough
to say that he was celebrated, and therefore he was belied. General
Morgan was certainly no "saint"--his friends may claim that he had no
right to that title and not the slightest pretension to it. While he
respected true piety in other men, and, as those who knew him intimately
will well remember, evinced on all occasions a profound and unaffected
veneration for religion, he did not profess, nor did he regulate his
life by religious convictions. Like the great majority of the men of his
class--the gentlemen of the South--he lived freely, and the amusements
he permitted himself would, doubtless, have shocked a New Englander
almost as much as the money he spent in obtaining them. Even had the
manners of the people among whom he lived have made it politic to
conceal carefully every departure from straight-laced morality, he, of
all men, would have been the least likely to do so, for he scorned
hypocrisy as he did every species of meanness. To sum up, General
Morgan, with the virtues, had some of the faults of his Southern blood
and country, and he sought so little to exte