After pushing through Bardstown, Kentucky, the lead elements of Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s command arrived in Brandenburg, where Captains H. Clay Merriwether and Samuel Taylor and their men encamped on farms in and around town and were soon joined by Capt. Thomas Hines, who had led a scouting raid into Indiana and escaped alone by swimming across the Ohio after his party encountered Union soldiers. The Confederates in Brandenburg placed one cannon on East Hill and a second on West Hill. Shortly after lunchtime on July 7, 1863, the mailboat John T. Combs arrived and docked at the foot of Main Street, and the Confederates stormed and captured it without firing a shot. They then moved the John T. Combs to midstream and hoisted distress flags. When the Alice Dean, a luxury boat carrying passengers to Louisville, came into sight, the side-wheel packet, owned by the Dean Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, shifted course and came alongside the John T. Combs to offer assistance. The Confederates boarded the Alice Dean and took control, again without firing a shot, then lashed the boats together and steamed into the Brandenburg dock. All passengers were put ashore with a warning not to raise the alarm, and the Confederates treated the passengers of both boats with the utmost respect, even returning $10,000 the passengers of the Alice Dean had placed in the safe in the purser’s office. The Alice Dean was less than a year old when Morgan captured it; it was a 411-ton wooden-hull sidewheel packet boat built in Cincinnati, and its captain was James Pepper. Taylor and Merriwether, both of the 10th Kentucky Cavalry, were aboard the John T. Combs when they captured the Alice Dean after being sent ahead by Col. Adam R. Johnson with orders to capture boats for the Ohio River crossing.