Death of John Morgan September 4, 1864

Morgan was under a cloud when he died. Reports of looting by his men during a failed raid near Cynthiana, Kentucky, in June 1864 had led to his suspension and a court of inquiry set for September 10. Federal soldiers surprised him in Greeneville six days before it could meet, and he was killed trying to escape. An earlier unauthorized raid had already angered the Confederate high command, though he had been restored to command. He was first buried in Richmond, Virginia, and in 1868 his body was moved to Lexington, Kentucky.

What the plaque says

Death of John Morgan September 4, 1864 The center of the present block was once the garden of the Williams house where Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan of Morgan's Raiders fame and his staff were billeted. Just after dawn a detail from Brig. Gen. Alvan C. Gillem's Federal forces slipped past Confederate outposts, surrounded the house, surprised and killed Morgan, and captured his staff.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — steps away
  The tailor shop, homestead and grave of the seventeenth president in Greeneville, where the people he enslaved are named and where the Eighth of August emancipation celebration took root.
• Rogersville Historic District — 19 mi
  Tennessee's first newspaper was printed in this Hawkins County seat in 1791, and Swift Memorial College, founded in 1883, educated Black students after the state's 1901 law forced Maryville College to expel them.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 22 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
• Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 25 mi
  A museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.

More markers nearby

• Greeneville Union Convention — steps away
• Ellen "Nelly" VanVactor Free Black Female Landowner — steps away
• Sgt. Elbert L. Kinser — steps away
• Capitol of State of Franklin — steps away