During August 1862, Col. John Hunt Morgan led his brigade into Hartsville to use the town as a base for attacks on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad near Gallatin. His objective was to destroy the 800-foot-long Big South Tunnel and disrupt the main supply line from the north to Union Gen. Don Carlos Buell's army in Tennessee. On August 12, a Confederate detachment captured Col. William P. Boone in Gallatin while he was away from his men, and Morgan persuaded him to order the garrison officer to surrender, taking 200 Federal soldiers prisoner without bloodshed. When a southbound train appeared, Confederate cavalrymen seized it, placed obstructions inside the tunnel, then set the train on fire and sent it into the tunnel at full throttle. The locomotive struck the barricade, and the explosion ignited support timbers and a coal seam, collapsing part of the tunnel. Freight then had to be hauled 25 miles by wagon until repairs allowed the tunnel to reopen more than three months later. Buell ordered Gen. Richard W. Johnson to destroy Morgan's brigade, but when their forces met outside Gallatin on August 21, Johnson's 640-man command was overwhelmed, and more than a third of the Federals were killed, wounded, or captured. After Johnson had told Hartsville citizens that he would capture Morgan and bring him back in a band box, he was captured instead. While bivouacked in the area, Capt. Gordon E. Niles and other officers also used Hartsville's abandoned Plaindealer press to print their own camp paper, The Vidette.