ABOUT GENERAL MORGAN
John Hunt Morgan was born Wednesday, June 1, 1825, at 310 South Green Street in
Huntsville, Alabama. In 1831, his father, Calvin, lost his Alabama home because he
couldn’t pay the taxes.
He accepted his father-in-law’s offer to move to Lexington, Kentucky,
and manage one of the Hunt farms in Fayette County. Their family moved into a two-story
farmhouse on Tates Creek Road. John Morgan was six years old when they relocated to
Kentucky.
At age seventeen, John enrolled at Transylvania College in Lexington in 1842 and joined the Adelphi Society, a literary fraternity. In June of 1844, he had a duel with a fraternity brother. Neither was seriously hurt. Following this incident on July 4, 1844, the college’s Board of Trustees expelled him from the school.
He was married twice. First to Rebecca Gratz Bruce of Lexington (1830-1861) was
eighteen-years-old when she was married November 21, 1848 to John, twenty-three. In
September 1853, she had a stillborn son. As an aftereffect of her pregnancy, Rebecca
developed a blood clot in her leg.
After eight years of suffering, she died an invalid and childless at age thirty-one.
John would be a widower for two years before he met and married his second wife, Martha
"Mattie" Ready of Murfreesboro, Tennessee (1840-1887). She was twenty-two when
she married John who was then thirty-seven. They had two daughters. The first was born
November 27, 1863, and lived only one day. Their second, Johnnie, was born April 7, 1865,
following John’s death.
His grandfather, John Wesley Hunt, was an early founder of Lexington and one of the wealthiest men west of the Allegheny Mountains. It is said that he was Lexington’s first millionaire. He had significant investments in merchandising, manufacturing, banking and government securities
John Morgan stood arrow-straight at six feet tall, weighed 185 pounds. He had curly
sandy hair and gray eyes. 
Early in the Civil War, Carrie Pyncheon of Huntsville
wrote in her diary, "Before the town was occupied by the Yankees, I spent an evening
with Captain Jack [John] Morgan, our second Marion. He was so mild and gentle in his
manners that I would not have taken him for a soldier but for his boots and spurs, so
unwarrior-like did he seem."
As the war began, he was elected captain of the Morgan Squadron, which formed the nucleus of the 2nd KY cavalry. By the end of 1862, he rose through the ranks and was a brigadier general at the time of the Ohio-Indiana raid.
To the South, he was one of their greatest, their Robin Hood. Northern newspapers called him "The King of Horse Thieves, a bandit, a freebooter, no better than a thug." In the South, he was admired as the "Thunderbolt of the Confederacy."
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