INTRODUCTION
John Marion Porter was born at Sugar Grove in eastern Butler County, Kentucky, in 1839. The month and day of his birth were never recorded. The Sugar Grove settlement grew up along Little Muddy Creek, a tributary of the Barren River. Porter was the second child and first son of Reverend Nathaniel Porter and his second wife, the former Sarah Elizabeth Helm. Altogether, there were nine children born to the Porters. Three died in infancy; the others, Mary Thomas, Nancy Virginia, Martha Cullie, Elizabeth Margaret Alice, and Nathaniel Anthony—along with Francis and Sarah Ann, the children of Reverend Porter's first marriage—grew up with John M. Porter on a farm located at Sugar Grove, not far from the Little Muddy Cumberland Presbyterian Church where their father was the preacher.1
Porter's grandfather, Francis Porter, was a Virginia yeoman farmer. He and two of his four brothers moved to Kentucky from Prince Edward County, Virginia, around 1800. Francis Porter's brothers, William and John, were veterans of the Revolutionary War. William Porter, a first lieutenant, had been wounded at the Battle of Cowpens; John Porter had attained the rank of colonel. Porter's grandfather, Francis Porter, had something else in common with his brother William, besides being his sibling; the two brothers married sisters. Francis married Sallie Carson, and William married Susan Carson back in Virginia. If that is not enough, Francis's and William's sister, Anna, married Thomas Carson, brother to Sallie and Susan. Little else is known about them. John M. Porter's knowledge of his ancestors was scant, and the fact that there were no records or writings about them was of great regret to him.2
As was so common in the settlement of the lands beyond the Cumberland Mountains, Little Muddy Creek was settled by not only the three Porter brothers and their wives and growing families, but by large numbers of their extended families. The Little Muddy Creek area became the settlement for the Porter, Carson, and Helm families, among others. There, those families flourished, and subsequent generations frequently intermarried. As the years passed, the area became home to a bewildering array of uncles, aunts, cousins, and “kinfolk.”
It seems some of those families, like many Virginians who settled Kentucky, were slaveowners. They brought their slaves with them to Kentucky, and they and their slaves, together, cleared the lands, built their houses, and planted and harvested their crops. How many slaves were owned by any of those families was never recorded, but the number was probably very small, as they had little financial resources and the lands they farmed were generally not as large as those in central Kentucky, where slaveowning was on a somewhat larger scale.3
John M. Porter's father, Nathaniel Porter, was born on February 8, 1797. Before his marriage to his first wife, Martha Ann Chapman, he became swept up in the great revival movement of the early 1800s. The Porters, like their neighbors, were Presbyterians. As a result of a great revival, Nathaniel Porter became a Cumberland Presbyterian at Mount Moriah Church in Logan County in 1819. The next year, he placed himself under the tutelage of the Logan Presbytery as a candidate for the ministry. Nathaniel was ordained in 1829, three years after his first marriage. It was hardly coincidental that his first wife's father, Reverend Alexander Chapman, was also a Cumberland Presbyterian minister.
For the next fifty years, Reverend Nathaniel Porter preached on a circuit that, at times, included Ohio, Daviess, Breckinridge, and Grayson counties, as well as counties along the upper Green River. For much of that ministry, Nathaniel was the preacher at Little Muddy Cumberland Presbyterian Church, a one-and-one-half-story structure just north of Sugar Grove made entirely of large chestnut logs.4
Reverend Nathaniel Porter was a very enterprising man. He successfully operated a dry goods store with his brother, Frank Porter, and his wife's brother, Owen Helm, out of a log structure he constructed in 1844 on his farm at Sugar Grove. Nathaniel farmed parts of more than 1,200 acres of land. It was Reverend Nathaniel Porter who gave Sugar Grove its name, and the village still bears that name today.5
Nathaniel would live until 1871; his second wife, Sarah Elizabeth, died the next year. They both joined many of their kinfolk who had predeceased them in the little graveyard alongside Little Muddy Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Those not buried there hadjoined the earliest settlers of Porters, Carsons, and Helms in the old family graveyard at Sugar Grove.6
Little is known of John M. Porter's childhood. Neither Porter nor any family member left any record of it. One has to assume he spent it helping his family farm the land. If he wasn't working in the fields, he was helping with the dry goods store. He fished, hunted, and went swimming in the creeks and the Barren and Green rivers. Many of his social interactions probably came about through functions held at the Little Muddy Cumberland Presbyterian Church.
As with many deeply religious families, reading the Bible was the evening routine for the Porters. John M. Porter reflected fondly on that aspect of his life at Sugar Grove in his war reminiscences. His reading skills undoubtedly enabled him to study law. In the census of 1860, John M. Porter was still living in his parents' house, but he was listed as a “law student.” He studied law under Vincent S. Hay, Esq., in Morgantown, Kentucky, the county seat of Butler County. By 1860, Porter may well have joined the local Masonic lodge; he seems to intimate that he was a Freemason when he recalls his months as a prisoner of war.7
War interrupted Porter's plans to become a lawyer. He joined the cause of the fledgling Confederate States. Unlike many families in Butler County, the Porters were slaveowners, as were many of their immediate neighbors in Sugar Grove. Maybe because of that, but most likely because so many of his family members and friends in and around Sugar Grove and in neighboring Logan, Simpson, and Warren counties supported the Southern cause, Porter identified with those in the seceding states. Porter, however, never articulated exactly why he fought for the Confederacy, other than to say he fought for freedom and against tyranny. To say more than what has been written by Porter here would be pure speculation. Interestingly, most people in Butler County were proUnion, a fact that must have made Porter's decision to fight for the Confederacy all the more difficult for him and his family.
Porter joined the Confederate Army at nearby Bowling Green, in Warren County, Kentucky. He entered the service with his friend and kinsman Thomas Henry Hines. The Hines family hailed from Campbell and Charlotte counties in Virginia. The first Hineses to settle in Kentucky found lands in Butler and Warren counties. They too were Revolutionary War veterans. Like the Porters, the Hineses were mostly Presbyterians, although some were Methodists. Also like the Porters, the Hineses were modest slaveowners.8
Thomas Henry Hines was born on October 9, 1838, to Warren Walker Hines and his wife, the former Sarah Jime- son Carson of Woodbury, Butler County, Kentucky. Woodbury was, and is, a small hamlet on the Green River only a few miles north of the Little Muddy Cumberland Presbyterian Church. It was through the Carson family that John Marion Porter and Thomas Henry Hines were related.9
John Marion Porter and Thomas Henry Hines knew one another well before the Civil War. They were almost inseparable during the war as commissioned officers in Company E of the Ninth Kentucky Cavalry, part of John Hunt Morgan's command. Porter was a lieutenant; Hines was a captain.
Hines would lead an almost larger-than-life role after he and most of John Hunt Morgan's command were captured in eastern Ohio in July 1863. Hines became the mastermind behind Morgan's escape from the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, in November 1863, and then, from Canada, he became the organizer of a conspiracy among Confederate operatives and anti-Lincoln “Copperheads” in Illinois and Indiana to free Confederate prisoners of war at Camp Douglas Prison and Rock Island Prison in Illinois and Camp Morton Prison in Indiana, and to take over the governments of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Although the conspiracy collapsed, Hines gained the reputation of being “the most dangerous man in the Confederacy.”10
John M. Porter was a prisoner of war at Johnson's Island Prisoner of War Depot in Sandusky Bay, Ohio, for nineteen months; he returned to his native Butler County at war's end. Porter married Mary Bell Burch of Hart County, Kentucky. The couple had one daughter, Minnie Bell, who, wrote Porter later, was “the light of [his] life.” Porter's wife died on July 11, 1868, probably from