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By the time he reached Portland the militia were closing in around him, and the next morning two detachments of United States cavalry struck him, while the gunboats which had been watching for him on the river, opened fire on him. In a few minutes the fight was over. Morgan left seven hundred of his men prisoners behind him, and with twelve hundred others fled north and east to seek a new way out of Ohio. The fight at Buffington Island took place on the 18th, five days after Morgan crossed the Ohio line into Hamilton County, and on the 26th he surrendered with the constantly lessening remnant of his force seven miles from New Lisbon in Columbiana County.

The prisoners were all sent for safe keeping to the penitentiary at Columbus, but on the night of November 7th, Morgan and six of his comrades made their escape, by digging into an air-space under the floor of his cell with their table-knives, passing through this to the prison walls, and letting themselves down with ropes made of their bed-clothes. At the station where they were to take the train for Cincinnati, Morgan was dismayed to realize that he had no money to buy a ticket; but one of his officers had been supplied by a young lady who sent him some bank notes concealed in a book. They rode all night in great fear and anxiety, and just before the train drew into Cincinnati they put on the brakes and slowed it enough to drop from it with safety. Then they lost no time in making for the Ohio River, where they hired a boy to set them over to Kentucky in his boat. Morgan had not found the Ohio people too plodding for him, as Aaron Burr had, but he was quite as glad to leave their state, which he never revisited, for he was killed the next year in Tennessee. He left behind him in Ohio by no means a wholly evil name, and some stories are told of him that more than hint at a generous nature. A Union soldier whom his men had taken tried to break his musket across a stone, and one of the Confederate officers drew his pistol to shoot him. Morgan forbade it. “Never harm a man who has surrendered,” he said. “He was only doing what I should have done in his place.”

We may be sure that such an enemy inflicted no wanton injury upon the country, and there was something in Morgan’s presence that corresponded with this magnanimity of his character. He was a man of powerful frame, large beyond the common, of great endurance, and able to outride any of his men, without sleep or rest. He had a fresh complexion, with fair hair and beard, and his face was rather mild. When he gave himself up at last, it was with an apparently cheerful unconcern at the turn of luck which in other raids had enabled him to break bridges, capture trains, and destroy millions of value in military stores.

Ohio is herself built upon so grand a scale that even her enemies seem to have been cast in a noble mold; and the jokes upon her own people that form the life of most of the stories of Morgan’s raid are as large as he. At one point, forty miles from their line of march, a good lady saved the family horse from the southern troopers by locking him into the parlor, where his stamping on the hollow floor kept the neighborhood awake the whole night through.

One of Morgan’s men, who plundered wildly, but not very wickedly, carried for two days a bird cage with three canaries in it; another, at the looting of a country store, filled his pockets with bone-buttons; they were only dangerous when they met reluctance in their frequent horse trades. They called at the house of a gentleman in Hamilton County at one o’clock in the morning, and asked for breakfast; when he objected that there was no fire at that time, they suggested that they could kindle one for him that it might be hard to put out; then he made one himself and they got their breakfast.