Col. J. Stoddard Johnston, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 9.1, Kentucky
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

[209] forced their way through the lines to form Morgan's cavalry, the First brigade of infantry, the commands of Marshall and others, and the earliest volunteer Federal regiments, were probably the superior element of these Kentucky contributions to the war. They were the first runnings of the press, and naturally had the peculiar quality of their vintage more clearly marked than the later product, when the mass became more turgid with conscripts, substitutes and bounty volunteers. Had the measurements and classified results applied only to the representative native element, the standard of average of manhood would have been shown to be perceptibly higher. Though the ancestors of these soldiers had been fighting people, yet for forty years their children had known and followed only the peaceful pursuits of agriculture and the industries of trade peculiar to the commonwealth, with the limited exception of the Mexican war interlude, which made an inconsiderable draft of a few thousand volunteers during its brief existence. They may be said to have been wholly unused to the spirit and untutored in the arts of war. Yet their record of bold and daring skill, of heroic courage, and of indomitable endurance, was equal to that of the best troops on either side of the combatants in this great civil war, and certainly unsurpassed by the soldiers of Europe of the present or any past age. Take for illustration on the one side the force of Morgan, and we find in this remarkable body of men great capacity at once for dash and endurance. Its leader, suddenly improvised from the ranks of citizenship, not only organized, aligned and led this splendid squadron, but possessed the intuitive genius to develop a new feature in the art of war, in which was a rare combination of vigilance, daring fertility of resource, and an impetuous power of hurling all the husbanded force of body and mind into a period of ceaseless activity. Theirs was the capacity to break through the lines of the enemy, to live for weeks in an atmosphere of battle, fighting and destroying by day, and