Over twenty years ago, Benjamin Franklin Cooling argued that events in Kentucky and Tennessee determined the outcome of the Civil War. Certainly, major campaigns there led to an extensive Federal occupation as well as important Confederate invasions, cavalry raids, and guerrilla activity. In any case, developments in the two states illustrate much about the nature of the war in all the Upper South. This collection offers insights into a wide range of topics beyond the well-known battles.1
From the essays of Gary R. Matthews, Thomas C. Mackey, Derek W. Frisby, Robert Tracy McKenzie, and John D. Fowler, one can conclude that the secession movement faced similar obstacles and opportunities in both states. Neither state experienced the full force of Southern sectionalism’s anxieties, and many voters had imbibed the strong nationalism cultivated in the region during Henry Clay’s long political career. Kentucky and Tennessee yeoman tended to conceive of their economic interests as being like those of Northern farmers. A high volume of trade tied the region to the Midwest. Still, the two states had more slaves and slaveholders than several of the original Confederate states. Those realities fostered Southern identities in some. So deep division of opinion existed, sometimes within the same mind.2
William G. Brownlow, like Clay, greatly influenced political attitudes, although the middle-aged Tennessean did so on a much less idealistic level than the deceased Kentuckian. The strength of Unionism made secessionist leaders feel hard-pressed. In Tennessee, disunionists frustrated in one referendum turned in a second vote to fraud and force, methods that they did not invent but that had appeared periodically in the nation’s prewar mass participation politics.3 President Abraham Lincoln tipped the balance for some citizens (such as Sidney Smith Stanton, according to W. Calvin Dickinson) through his decision to go to war against the seceded states. Yet, by showing more respect than the Confederate army did for Kentucky’s official position of neutrality, Lincoln kept that state on his side.
Recruits from both states, as described by Dickinson, Kenneth W. Noe, and Kent T. Dollar, fit well-known patterns. Not surprisingly, those who joined the Union army generally were nationalists from Unionist communities. Wartime experiences eventually turned a few—fewer than in the Union army as a whole—against slavery. Confederate enlistees motivated themselves by upholding Southern independence, personal liberties, and their families’ security. In both armies, good officers, a sense of brotherhood with comrades, hatred of the enemy, and deepening religious convictions could help troops endure deprivations.4
Ugly, irregular forms of warfare commonly appeared behind Federal lines. Brian D. McKnight points to the roles of paranoia, terrorism, and a dehumanizing hate for enemies in causing preemptive killing by guerrillas such as Champ Ferguson. To be successful, guerrillas needed prudence, caution, and intelligence. Michael R. Bradley demonstrates how both partisan warfare and abuses of civilians easily escalated brutality into a cycle of revenge. Angry men in the ranks most often initiated abuse of the easy targets, those who could not resist. Officers like the notorious Gen. Eleazer A. Paine made matters worse by ordering or encouraging atrocities. Significantly, not everyone succumbed to these temptations. The majority of soldiers in all ranks in both armies probably objected or refused to participate. The Confederate general John Breckinridge ordered Champ Ferguson’s arrest for killing captured Federal soldiers, and the Union general James Garfield condemned depredations against civilians.5 Wartime atrocities are a difficult and sensitive subject. As these essays demonstrate, historians need to document alleged injustices thoroughly with firsthand, contemporary evidence that has been cross-checked whenever possible. Other kinds of evidence can too easily convey rumors or truths embroidered for greater impact.
Two major groups, victimized or empowered in different circumstances during the war, were slaves and white women. The war’s impact on slavery in occupied states is well-known,6 but Marion B. Lucas and Richard D. Sears offer insights into the special situation of Kentucky, the loyal state with the largest number of slaves. Slavery there remained perfectly legal yet floundered amid the disruptive forces of the war. At first, masters received much open aid from Federal authorities in preserving the institution. The 1864 wintertime expulsion of slave women and children from Camp Nelson after their men had enlisted became notorious because many died from exposure or starvation. It was a turning point and resulted in much more use of the Union army’s might against the state’s government and pro slavery masters. Enlistment would give more slave men and their families a Federal freedom in Kentucky than elsewhere.
Defined as dependent, weak, and less important, women were especially vulnerable before heavy-handed armies. The idealized position of the “lady” in Victorian culture has long received careful study.7 Kristen L. Streater shows how “the divisive nature of the war in Kentucky [and the South generally] had made women’s actions significant.” Their familial duties to support and help provide for men led to a partisanship benefited by the culture’s high respect for “ladies” and their responsibilities. Many soldiers were reluctant to be harsh with them and sometimes had to be ordered to act so.
While Kentucky had an existing civilian government to deal with wartime issues, Tennessee fell under Federal military rule after the Union troops’ advances caused the collapse of the Confederate state structure. Handicapped by an unconstructive prewar political record, and challenged by the state’s complexly divided society, the military governor, Andrew Johnson, according to Jonathan M. Atkins, could not avoid controversy. He had to use delays and disfranchisement to get prowar, Unionist electoral victories. He had to accept emancipation, although not racial equality, to keep Lincoln’s confidence. In attaining his goal of restoring civilian state rule, he did the best job possible.8
In the postwar South, charitable aid to transition the needy back to work was inadequate or nonexistent. Sears adds that the Freedmen’s Bureau was in an excessive hurry to end federal support for black and white refugees (the latter group had often been ignored during the war as well). When many Southerners grew hostile toward economic development because the Republican-controlled central government favored it, harmful consequences followed, given the continued decline of agricultural economies. Rebuilding requires an end to violence, but the postwar occupation lacked enough troops to assure order, and not all officers had the prudence exemplified in the case of the 1867 Nashville election. Unionist state governments did not build sufficient popular support for their reconstruction efforts. Fowler and Ben H. Severance emphasize that Tennessee Unionists especially failed at this through suppressing and alienating ex-Confederates. Kentucky’s government represented popular opinion by refusing to enforce emancipation. But that only led to more hostility toward the federal government, when, through the Freedmen’s Bureau, it imposed an end to slavery and rights for freedmen. By refusing to accept the Union victory and viewing all reconstruction as invalid and oppressive, the more recalcitrant ex-Confederates proceeded to turn the majority of Southern whites in a reactionary direction.9
Tennessee and Kentucky are just pieces in the Civil War story. Comparative analysis is very useful here. B. Franklin Cooling does so in a world context, which has general benefits for dissecting the big processes of civil war and reconstruction. Several of the authors consider other Southern states for comparisons, such as Cooling’s observation that guerrilla war in Kentucky (I would add Tennessee) falls between the less intense level in Maryland and the much worse case of Missouri. Such an approach can offer more numerous and specific insights. It is to be hoped that future studies will continue to use comparative analysis to aid understanding of the Civil War’s local, regional, and national impact.
1. Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), esp. 276–78. For synopses of major campaigns in the region, also see Stephen D. Engle, The Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Earl J. Hess, Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Steven E. Woodworth, Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); and Anne J. Bailey, The Chessboard of War: Sherman and Hood in the Autumn Campaigns of 1864 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
2. See also Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
3. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart H. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 73–84; Daniel W. Crofts, ed., “Re-Electing Lincoln: The Struggle in Newark,” Civil War History 30 (1984): 54–79.
4. James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1994).
5. See also Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999); and James Ramage, “Recent Historiography of Guerrilla Warfare in the Civil War: A Review Essay,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 103 (2005): 517–41. George S. Burkhardt (Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007]) argues that retribution became unwritten military policy, while Mark E. Neely (The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007]) rejects that thesis.
6. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979); Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery, vol. 1, ser. 1, of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Selected from the Holdings of the National Archives of the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861–1865 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985).
7. George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 154–79; Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 196–219.
8. See also William C. Harris, With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997).
9. See also Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 34, 48, 58; and James E. Sefton, The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967).