The Newburgh Raid was an incident that occurred during the American Civil War. In it, Confederate colonel Adam Rankin Johnson captured the town of Newburgh, Indiana on July 18, 1862, using a force of only 35 men, mostly partisans he had recruited from nearby Henderson, Kentucky.
Prior to the raid, Johnson served as a scout for Nathan Bedford Forrest, just missing the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, in south-central Tennessee, rejoining Forrest at the Confederate base of operations in Corinth, Mississippi. Johnson was ordered by Forrest to go to Henderson, Kentucky, to give a secret message to Mr. D. R. Burbank, a former employer of Johnson's.
Just before launching the raid, Johnson's partisans camped at the Soaper Farm in Henderson. With 35 men by Johnson's later count (other counts say 32), formed by combining three-man guards for John C. Breckinridge with recruits from Kentucky, to form a group of partisan rangers that would engage in guerrilla warfare.
Read more about Newburgh Raid: The Raid, Consequences, Court Docket Transcripts of Resulting Trial, Newspaper Transcripts of Resulting Trial, See Also
Famous quotes containing the word raid:
“John Brown and Giuseppe Garibaldi were contemporaries not solely in the matter of time; their endeavors as liberators link their names where other likeness is absent; and the peaks of their careers were reached almost simultaneously: the Harper’s Ferry Raid occurred in 1859, the raid on Sicily in the following year. Both events, however differing in character, were equally quixotic.”
—John Cournos (1881–1956)