John Hunt Morgan was the only member of the Confederacy's famed trio of renegade cavalry generals not to survive the war. He died ingloriously September 4,1864, in the streets of Greeneville, Tenn., shot in the back as he tried to escape during a Federal raid. Unlike fellow cavaliers John Singleton Mosby and Nathan Bedford Forrest, he never had the chance to reminisce in his twilight years about brazen raids that wreaked havoc on the Union. Born in Huntsville, Ala., in 1825, Morgan moved with his family to Lexington, Ky., when he was 6. He showed an early affinity for the military, and received his training not at West Point but with the U.S. cavalry in the Mexican War. Morgan spent the antebellum years as a Lexington-area merchant, though he could never completely abandon his love of the military. In 1857, he formed an independent infantry company known as the Lexington Rifles.
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