General Who?

If I asked most people who General John Hunt Morgan was, they would say, “General who?”

But there are a few others who would say, “What have you found out about him?”

I found out quite a bit about the General, during the period when he escaped from an Ohio Union prison in 1863 and fled to Kentucky with his assistant, Captain Thomas Hines. They were searching for my great-grandfather Pryor. They figured he would help the pair get back into the fighting between the Confederate Army and the Union Army.

And they were right. Pryor managed to get them through Union Army lines and back to the South. But Pryor had to flee to Canada, where he waited out the Civil War.

I always wanted to know why my great-grandfather went to Canada. With the help of family papers, papers from the family of the author/poet Wendell Berry (his great-grandfather Pollard worked with Pryor to help Morgan escape) and memoirs of Thomas Hines about written 1893, I managed to put the full story together. It is in a book due to come out soon called General Morgan’s Legacy—a Modern Civil War Story.

I called the book by that title because Pryor and Hines owed partially their political and judicial careers to their part in the escape of Morgan. It is a novel about a modern industrialist who dug into his past and found the story. His story is a novel, but Morgan’s story is about as true as I could make it.

I believe I have added new information to the existing body of Civil War lore.


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