In 1926, E. Merton Coulter, Kentucky’s Lost Cause historian, published The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, his still widely cited interpretation of the Bluegrass commonwealth in the era of the U.S. Civil War.1 Included in it is a December 7, 1864, report by Asst. Insp. Gen. E. H. Ludington to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. In that report, Ludington noted the pro-Confederate guerrilla bands that had appeared in the commonwealth and the hostility of the “loyal” state citizens toward the recruitment of black soldiers for the Union army. He blamed Governor Thomas E. Bramlette for encouraging these signs of disorder and disloyalty. “He knows his people are disloyal,” Ludington wrote, “so he qualifies his Unionism.” Worse, for Ludington, but perhaps capturing the mood of many Kentuckians in late 1864: “The Governor’s policy is simply self first, State second, Union last.”2
With this interpretation in mind, Coulter added in a footnote: “The feeling was unquestionably rather general throughout the North that Kentucky was a pariah among the elect.” It is that word and image, pariah, that pro-Kentucky modern historians have built on to describe the state in the Union and its relationship with the federal government during secession and the Civil War.3 But the image does not fit well over the course of the Civil War, and it especially does not fit well in the crucial time of 1860–1861—the era of the secession winter through the ending of Kentucky’s illusion of neutrality. Rather, far from being a pariah, Kentucky played a key role in the secession drama of those months, and the actions of the state’s political leadership and of President Abraham Lincoln’s administration demonstrate the importance of Kentucky to the Union cause. Securing Kentucky to the Union constituted one of the major goals and turning points in the eventual success of the Union in the western theater even if some Kentuckians were frustrated in their desire both to remain in the Union and to retain their property in persons, a frustration that extended to both the commonwealth and the federal government.4
Secession was a political process that started as early as the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions in the summer of 1860 and was not completed until the last of the border states, Kentucky, fell willingly into Union hands in September 1861. And, while the major newspapers of the era focused on the East and what would become the eastern theater of military operations, it was the West (what today is the Middle West of the Ohio River valley from the western counties of Virginia to Kentucky to Missouri) where the key actions actually occurred. And, without disparaging or downplaying the importance of Delaware, the need to cross Union troops over Maryland to secure the capital city of Washington, D.C., or the shifting tides of loyalties and politics in Missouri, Kentucky formed the keystone of the border states.
Setting aside for a moment the natural resources of the commonwealth—from horses, to crops, to human-power—geography demonstrates the significance of Kentucky. Its waterways—the long, winding northern border of the Ohio River (one of the major natural water highways of the nineteenth century) and the western border on the Mississippi—formed a natural southern border with the loyal states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. To lose Kentucky to the Confederacy meant placing the front lines of the war at Cincinnati, Ohio, New Albany, Indiana, and Cairo, Illinois, not the Cumberland Gap and Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis, Tennessee. Furthermore, two of the four major rivers into the Upper South drain into the Ohio River at or near Paducah, Kentucky—the Tennessee and the Cumberland. Therefore, just considering Kentucky’s western rivers in terms of defending the Union homeland and pressing the military front south, the state’s significance as the keystone of the West is hard to overstate.
While geography explains why the Lincoln administration pursued different policies toward Kentucky than it did other border states like Maryland or Missouri, geography alone does not explain the significance of Kentucky in terms of secession. Ties of blood and livelihood must also be factored in. It is often overlooked that three of the four primary residents of the two White Houses of the Civil War years were Kentucky born—Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis. Furthermore, Kentucky’s ties to the rest of the nation ran east and west. From the East had come Daniel Boone and other settlers through the Cumberland Gap, and, by 1860, the largest number of non-Kentucky-born residents of the state came from Virginia, not surprising as Kentucky constituted the farthest western county of Virginia until its separation and statehood in 1792. As a result of this heritage, Kentuckians looked to Virginia (and, to a lesser but notable extent, North Carolina) for political leadership even if that leadership was a love/hate relationship. The historian Russell Weigley describes Kentucky as a “self-conscious daughter of Virginia,” as indeed it was.5
In addition, Kentuckians had been a restless people, populating at least the southern parts of the western states of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. The distinguished historian James A. Rawley went so far as to call Missouri “the child of Kentucky” because of the 100,000 residents of that state who claimed Kentucky birth.6 Thus, kinship and family ties stretched from the Old Dominion to the muddy banks of the Ohio to the Missouri River and beyond.
With these attachments came Kentucky’s ambiguous political responses to the secession crisis and its attachment to the “peculiar institution” of the South, slavery. No person better symbolizes Kentucky’s importance in the Union prior to the Civil War than the Virginia-born Henry Clay.7 Clay loomed over Whig politics and Kentucky like no other figure, and, although he was frustrated four times in his bid for the presidency, his personality, his vision of the American System, and his sheer political weight cannot be overlooked or discounted. Although he died in 1852, his shadow hung over the commonwealth through the 1850s because of both his nationalism and his slaveholding. Not only did Kentuckians search for the next Henry Clay among their political leadership to maintain their national significance (in vain, it turns out);8 they also resisted the drift of the Northern and Midwestern parts of the country into antislavery (opposing slavery, not because they were sympathetic to the plight of African Americans, but because of the economic threat posed by slavery to free, white labor), as opposed to abolitionism, as they thought Clay might have done. Kentuckians read Clay’s heritage as one of both prosperity in the Union because of the state’s natural resources, rivers, and geographic position and maintaining their mixed labor force of free and slave laborers. As a result, many in the Bluegrass found themselves Unionist in their wallets and Southern in their sentiments.
What made many Kentuckians culturally Southern was not just their predominant roots in Virginia but their attachment to a labor system based on master and slave. Slavery, unevenly present across the state, constituted a political and social issue in the commonwealth from colonial times into the late 1850s. The mountain areas of the eastern part of Kentucky had few to no slaves, yet the far western part of the state, with its strong economic ties to Tennessee, had some slaves and embraced the institution, while the central part of the state, the classic Bluegrass area, held the bulk of Kentucky’s slave population. Urban slavery existed as well, especially in the river cities of Covington and Paducah, and also in the most important city in the state then and currently, Louisville. By 1860, Kentucky ranked ninth among the states supporting slavery, and it held more slaves than three of the states that joined the Confederacy. While few farms held large numbers of slaves, Kentucky ranked third in the nation in slaveholders, suggesting that, in those areas that employed slave labor, the practice was widespread among the white population. While the slave percentage of the overall population had been dropping in Kentucky, slaves constituted 19.5 percent of the state’s 1860 population.
Thus, by 1860, combining the Union heritage of Henry Clay with the Southern heritage of slavery resulted in a mixed message being sent to the rest of the nation. As the Kentucky historian Lowell Harrison put it: “Many Kentuckians who cherished the Union saw nothing wrong with slavery.”9 This duality and Kentuckians’ failure to grasp that the current was shifting against slaveholding in the Midwest and the North placed the state out of step with both the nation and certainly the policies of the Lincoln administration. Kentuckians’ efforts through the secession crisis and the war both to stay within the Union and to maintain their property in persons looked back to the world before the war and resulted in disenchantment and resentment on the part of both the Union and Kentuckians.
And so, with these geographic, cultural, and economic values, Kentuckians confronted the election of 1860. They heard the secessionist rhetoric of the Fire-Eaters of the Deep South and the Republican Party’s position on the nonextension of slavery into the federal territories and reacted ambiguously. Again, Rawley nicely captures the dilemma with which Kentuckians were confronted: “[They were] Southern in their hearts, but they thought as national citizens. They were conservatives, who disapproved unilateral exercise of the right of secession—as well as the use of force against seceded states.”10 Not surprisingly, Kentucky’s political leaders searched for a middle path that, if it ever existed, quickly disappeared during the secession crisis of 1860–1861.
With the collapse of the national Whig Party by 1854–1855, Kentucky’s Whigs found themselves wandering in a political desert. They flirted with the Know Nothings in 1855 when that party won the governorship of the state. Then, in 1859, they opposed the Democratic Party candidate, Beriah Magoffin, a lawyer and rising pro-South politician from Harrodsburg, Kentucky, to whom they lost the election.11 As a result, when the political crisis came, the political leadership of the commonwealth fell to the Democrat Magoffin and to what turned out to be a fickle and Unionist state legislature made up of old Whigs, Unionist Democrats, and a few Republicans.
A four-way race for the presidency developed in 1860 featuring two native Kentuckians—Abraham Lincoln for the Republicans and Senator John C. Breckinridge for the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. The other candidates were Stephen Douglas of Illinois, representing the Northern portion of the Democratic Party, and John Bell of Tennessee of the Constitutional Union Party, which sought to buy time and craft a middle political ground that avoided further sectional battles. In November 1860, a plurality of Kentuckians eschewed their favorite son candidate, Breckinridge, and split their votes, giving 45 percent to Bell, 36 percent to Breckinridge, 18 percent to Douglas, and less than 1 percent to the national winner, Lincoln. Moderation appeared to be the message of the Kentucky voters at a time when the middle ground held less and less weight in other slaveholding states.
During the secession crisis from November 1860 to March 4, 1861, it was Kentucky’s other senator, John J. Crittenden, who sought to play Henry Clay’s role of compromiser and Governor Magoffin who sought to gather support for a regional proposal to counter both the threat of secession by Southern states and the use of coercion by Northern states to preserve the Union. On December 9, 1860, Magoffin acted first by sending a circular letter to slave-state governors restating their terms for a compromise of the political crisis. Magoffin’s letter called for the federal government to beef up its enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the division of the remaining federal territories along the thirty-seventh parallel so that slavery could move into the southern half of that area, the continued guarantee of the use of the Mississippi River for commerce, and a Southern veto in the Senate for federal legislation touching on slavery. Magoffin proposed a two-part process for adopting these demands: first a conference of the Southern states to adopt his proposals and then a second conference of all the states to approve them. Nine days later, on December 18, Crittenden introduced into the Senate his more famous compromise proposals, which included the extension of slavery into the federal territories—thereby dooming its chance of passing because it violated the fundamental value of the Republican Party, the nonextension of slavery into the federal territories.
In any case, the advanced wing of the Southern secessionists was not listening to proposals of compromise as the heart of secession, South Carolina, declared itself seceded from the Union on December 20. Six other Deep South states rushed to assert their exit from the Union and, along with South Carolina, set up their Gulf Coast–centered Confederacy before the new federal administration took over on March 4, 1861. Opening shop in Montgomery, Alabama, the Provisional Confederate Congress set about the work of nation building, which included the calling for and gathering of military forces. On February 18, 1861, the Confederacy’s only president, the Kentucky-born Mississippian Jefferson Davis, took the oath of office. These events, all before the Lincoln administration took office, established the context of the crisis that came to be focused on the harbor fortification in Charleston, South Carolina—Fort Sumter.
Both sides understood that, while that last federal installation constituted an important symbol of federal authority in the Confederacy, the deeper question was what the states of the Upper South and the border states would do if the Lincoln administration used force to maintain its officers, men, and property. Thus, parallel to the better-known events unfolding in Montgomery and Charleston, the story of the border states is crucial to understanding the larger context of secession. And that shifts the focus back to Governor Magoffin and Kentucky’s struggle with where its loyalties lay.
Events moved at a faster pace than Magoffin’s (and Crittenden’s) calls for more talk and more meetings; therefore, by late December, after South Carolina had declared its secession, Magoffin believed that he had to seize the leadership of the pro-South, prosecession movement in Kentucky from Breckinridge, and he did so by calling a special session of the state legislature. Magoffin admitted that events had passed by his suggestion of a Southern convention, so he urged the legislators to authorize a separate Kentucky convention to chart a path for the commonwealth through the dangerous political waters. “We, the people, of the United States are no longer one people, united and friendly,” Magoffin told the legislature in his message. He pointed to Virginia and North Carolina, both of which had called for a special convention within their states to discuss the situation, and he urged the Kentucky legislators to take the same action to determine “the future Federal and interstate relations of Kentucky.” Of the Gulf Coast Confederacy, Magoffin stated: “Their cause is right and they have our sympathies.” He also called on the legislature to provide funding for arms and equipment for the state guard. He also urged the legislators to participate in a scheduled February border states conference, but his efforts to appear noncommittal fooled no one. As a Frankfort, Kentucky, newspaper explained: “The Governor of Kentucky is a secessionist.”12
Not surprisingly, Magoffin’s December actions and statements motivated Kentuckians of Unionist sentiment to secure Kentucky for the Union. Men such as Robert J. Breckinridge, Garret Davis, James and Joshua Speed, and the Louisville newspaper editor George Prentice opened communications with each other and other Unionists as well as the Lincoln administration. And, in the legislature, the John C. Breckinridge faction failed to manage a majority to call for a state convention or to raise funds for arming the state guard.13 Both houses, however, revealed the state’s difficult position: they issued a resolution that warned the federal government against using coercion against the South and condemned Southern secession. Kentuckians, it was clear, saw themselves between the rock of coercion and the hard place of secession.
A sort of political ballet between a governor who wanted to move Kentucky south and a legislature with some Southern sympathies but enough Union sentiments to frustrate any definitive movement one way or the other occurred during the months of the secession winter. The legislature adjourned from February 11 until March 20, 1861, but not before supporting a call for a border convention in Frankfort on May 27, a meeting that went nowhere toward resolving the crisis in Kentucky, much less in the nation.
On April 12, as the South fired on Fort Sumter, Kentucky’s situation remained foggy. When the legislature met again after the military beginning of the Civil War, the legislators, not Magoffin, took the lead in setting the state’s course and public policies. Magoffin rejected a call for troops from both Jefferson Davis and, in much more emphatic and emotional language, from Abraham Lincoln, yet he was hardly neutral. In an April 16, 1861, letter to Secretary of War Simon Cameron, he stated his position in one sentence: “In answer, I say emphatically that Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States.”14 Plus, Magoffin supported the state guard (headed by Simon B. Buckner) and allowed Confederate recruiting agents to enter the state. In response, the legislature stripped Magoffin of control of the state guard and placed it in a Unionist-dominated military board. At the same time, Lincoln followed a generally hands-off policy toward the commonwealth; nevertheless, with the arming of the state guard, and after speaking with William Nelson, a former naval officer, in Louisville, Lincoln agreed to supply covert aid in the form of the shipment and distribution of “Lincoln guns” to supporters of the Union. As a result, two armed forces began to form in Kentucky, the pro-South state guard and the pro-Union home guard.
On the political front, leadership fell on the members of the Kentucky House. On May 16, 1861, by a vote of 69–29, the House, without the support of the state Senate or Governor Magoffin, voted in favor of a resolution of neutrality. It read:
Considering the deplorable condition of the country and for which the State of Kentucky is in no way responsible, and looking to the best means of preserving the internal peace and securing the lives, liberty, and property of the citizens of the State; therefore,
Resolved, by the House of Representatives, that this State and the citizens thereof should take no part in the civil war now being waged, except as mediators and friends to the belligerent parties; and that Kentucky should, during the contest, occupy the position of strict neutrality.
Resolved, that the act of the governor in refusing to furnish troops or military force upon the call of the executive authority of the United States under existing circumstances is approved.15
Four days later, this House resolution became the template for Magoffin’s May 20 statement supporting neutrality. In that statement, he urged that the troops of all states, Union and Confederate, not enter or pass through Kentucky, and he told Kentuckians not to make “any warlike or hostile demonstration.” He urged his fellow state citizens “to refrain from all words and acts likely to engender hot blood and provoke collision,” telling them that the only reason to arm themselves was self-defense.16 Kentucky’s Senate adopted a similar resolution on May 24, 1861.
Neutrality reflected the divided state government, but it also reflected the divided opinion of the population. While wholehearted Unionists such as James and Joshua Speed and wholehearted supporters of the South such as Simon B. Buckner could be found, the evidence suggests that, in April and May 1861, Kentucky’s general population was as befuddled by what was happening to the Union as were the legislators and the governor. A negative public policy such as neutrality—the argument that the state of Kentucky had a right not to participate—while far from perfect for all parties at least constituted enough of an ad hoc policy that all parties could agree on it. With Kentucky neutral, the historian Lowell Harrison has speculated, an outside observer might conclude that the United States had “become three countries: the Union, the Confederacy, and Kentucky.”17
Modern historians agree that neutrality formed a viable, though clumsy, public policy option. For example, Russell Weigley concludes that “no policy could have accorded more closely with the mixed feelings engendered by Kentucky’s Southern heritage and the legacy of Henry Clay,”18 and the noted Civil War historian James M. McPherson believes with Lincoln and “other pragmatic unionists” that “neutrality was the best they could expect for the time being. The alternative was actual secession.”19 Rawley provides the fullest assessment of the policy, saying: “Neutrality was the expression of Kentucky’s uniqueness; it was not the outgrowth of timidity.” Concluding that “neutrality was a wise response to the state’s dilemma and a logical result of her history,” he explains that this policy “meant an interim victory for the anti-secessionist forces, and was perhaps the only course that could keep the state from seceding. Neutrality also served the short-range political ends of both extremes during a period of agonizing incertitude.” Perhaps most important, and often overlooked and underemphasized in historical accounts, “neutrality provided a cooling-off period for the sorely divided commonwealth until sentiment could crystallize.” Neutrality, then, was, according to Rawley, “the happiest expedient that could be devised in that hour’s quandary.”20 Because the state was genuinely divided and most of the political leadership and the population preferred fence-sitting to taking a definitive position and defending it, buying time to both watch and participate in unfolding events constituted an acceptable option. At that point in their history (to use a modern metaphor), Kentuckians punted—they played it safe, played for more time, pursued their own self-interest, and waited.
While waiting, Kentuckians set about profiting from the fluid economic and political situation in the state and the West. Trade across Kentucky via wagons and the Louisville and Nashville Railroad increased as the state’s natural resources (including manpower) went south. Weigley nicely describes the situation as “Kentuckians gladly proceed[ing] to act as though their state was Switzerland, maintaining their commercial ties across both their northern and southern borders.”21 Trade boomed from late spring through early fall 1861, engendering concern among the pro-Union home guard and Kentucky Unionists, but the Lincoln administration tolerated the situation. Hoping that, in time, Kentuckians’ ties to their economic well-being and Unionist heritage would trump their Southern sentiments, the president pursued a policy of toleration and covert aid. Even after Congress prohibited trade with the Confederacy and especially the trade across Kentucky, Lincoln deftly administered the policy by issuing permits that, while cutting the trade, did not end it. He believed that, through careful cultivation, the apple of Kentucky would fall from the tree of secession and land in the Union basket.
Kentucky, it was clear, could not remain a domestic Switzerland forever. Kentuckians took sides regardless of official state policy; moreover, over the course of the summer of 1861, Lincoln’s gamble that a majority of Kentuckians would support the Union proved correct. Led by Simon Buckner, and tacitly supported by Governor Magoffin, the state guard championed the Southern cause; and, led by William “Bull” Nelson, who was openly supported by the legislature, the home guard backed the Union cause. Both sides wanted recruits, both sides sought arms, and both sides desired recognition from either Washington, D.C., or Richmond. By June 1861, Buckner had worked out a gentleman’s agreement with the Union general George B. McClellan and Tennessee governor Isham Harris for both sides to uphold Kentucky’s neutrality. While friction existed between these armed factions of the state, no open conflict occurred—an interesting lack of military and political action if ever one existed.
Nor did Lincoln overlook Kentucky’s decisions. After all, Kentucky was a part of the Union, and its failure to comply with his request for troops and its insistence that federal troops not be allowed to trespass on Kentucky soil challenged his, and the nation’s, authority. In this situation, Lincoln’s forbearance (what Rawley has called “pragmatic circumvention of the issue”)22 proved a virtue. Four days after Magoffin’s announcement of neutrality on May 28, Lincoln established the Military Department of Kentucky, which covered an area within one hundred miles of the state nearest the Ohio River (and, thus, those areas of the state with the most Union loyalties), and placed in command of that department a native son, the Union hero of Fort Sumter, Maj. Robert Anderson. Prudently, Anderson set up his command in Cincinnati, just across the river from Kentucky, but, by setting up this military department, Lincoln sent a message about his wishes for his native state. With the bureaucratic structure in place and Nelson on the ground recruiting troops and seeing that the covert arms reached the right people, long-term Union goals could not be clearer.
Lincoln himself made it clear in his July 4, 1861, message to Congress that, because of his oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution, he could not recognize neutrality. As the president pointed out about the states that followed a policy of “armed neutrality”:
An arming of those States to prevent the Union forces passing one way, or the disunion, of the other, over their soil . . . would be disunion completed . . . for, under the guise of neutrality, it would tie the hands of Union men, and freely pass supplies from among them, to the insurrectionists which it could not do as an open enemy. . . . It recognizes no fidelity to the Constitution, no obligation to maintain the Union; and while very many who have favored it are, doubtless, loyal citizens, it is, nevertheless, treason in effect.23
Thus, in public, Lincoln repudiated the idea of a state acting as a Switzerlandlike neutral body while privately tolerating the delicate situation in the Bluegrass so as not to lose the key border state.
At the same time, Buckner’s Southern faction interacted and opened correspondence with Confederate military and political leaders.24 Some Kentuckians traveled across the state’s southern border to join Kentucky and Tennessee Confederate units forming in northern Tennessee. Manpower, horses, and food all traveled south over the course of the summer of 1861, and, though no open hostilities broke out in the commonwealth, both sides recognized opportunity in Kentucky’s neutrality.
Two elections in Kentucky track the state’s political drift and political choices over the course of the summer of 1861. On June 20, the state held congressional elections, and, in nine of the state’s ten election districts, voters sent Unionists to Congress—conservative Unionists perhaps, but Unionists nonetheless. The only congressional district not to support the Union lay in the far western part of the state where the four rivers of the Mississippi, Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee flowed; that district returned Henry C. Burnett to office.25 Coulter and later Harrison claimed that Southern supporters deliberately did not vote in these elections and that, if they had, Southern support would have manifested itself. As a gauge to measure who did not vote has not yet been devised, the argument that Southern support was stronger in the state than the June elections suggest amounts to a verdict of not proved.
Less than two months later, on August 5, Kentuckians went to the polls to select state legislators, and, once again, Union men won. Once the tally came in, Unionists controlled the Kentucky House 76–24 and held a 27–11 margin in the Kentucky Senate. These results may reflect the actions of Southern supporters who stayed away from the polls; but, if they did stay away, they in fact conceded what almost everyone suspected—a majority of the Kentucky population did not favor the Confederacy or secession as the state’s future path. But the vote may not have signaled support for the Lincoln administration either; rather, it may have signified only that the population voting desired peaceful relations and a continuation of the status quo.
Regardless, Unionists took these election results to heart and acted on them. On August 6, 1861, now General Nelson moved his headquarters into Kentucky to about thirty miles south of Lexington in Garrard County, where he established Camp Dick Robinson. Nelson concentrated his home guard in this camp and continued his recruiting and training efforts.
While Magoffin protested the establishment of Camp Robinson to President Lincoln, he also wrote to Jefferson Davis to protest a buildup of Confederate forces along the Tennessee border, including the establishment of Camp Boone for the organizing and training of Kentuckians who wished to support the Confederacy.26 On August 28, Davis wrote Magoffin and tried to reassure him about the good intentions of the Confederacy toward Kentucky’s neutrality, but Davis was clearly troubled by the establishment of Camp Robinson and Magoffin’s reaction to it. Davis warned Magoffin: “Neutrality to be entitled to respect, must be strictly maintained between both parties.”27 Davis’s shot across Magoffin’s bow reminded Magoffin about the dangers of neutrality and the high stakes at play.
Lincoln’s August 24 response to Magoffin’s protest letter of August 19 reminded the governor of the president’s position on secession and Union.28 Lincoln acknowledged the presence of Camp Robinson and admitted that it was established by the authority of the United States, but he added that the force was “not very large, and is not now being augmented.” He clarified that “this force consists exclusively of Kentuckians, having their camp in the immediate vicinity of their homes, and not assailing, or menacing, any of the good people of Kentucky.” Warming to his topic, Lincoln argued that everything he had done came at the “urgent solicitation of many Kentuckians” and was in line with “what I believed, and still believe, to be the wish of the majority of all the Union-loving people of Kentucky.” Like a lawyer layering on his evidence, he stated that no one other than Magoffin, the individual bearers of the letter Magoffin sent to Lincoln, and “one other very worthy citizen of Kentucky” had urged him to remove the camp and that, in fact, a large number of people urged him to maintain it. “I do not believe,” Lincoln warned Magoffin, “it is the popular wish of Kentucky that this force shall be removed beyond her limits; and, with this impression, I must respectfully decline to do so.” This exchange might have ended here, but Lincoln could not resist taking a poke at Kentucky’s pro-South, prosecession governor. Claiming that he sympathized with Magoffin “in the wish to preserve the peace of my own native State, Kentucky,” Lincoln noted his great regret that, in Magoffin’s “not very short letter,” there was no “declaration, or intimation, that you entertain any desire for the preservation of the Federal Union.”29 Thus, Camp Robinson remained.
Occasional incursions occurred, both Confederates testing the Kentucky waters and Federals crossing into Kentucky to break up informal pro-South camps of men. When the break came, it was not in the political centers of Frankfort, or Washington, or Richmond, but in the far western part of the state. The Confederate generals Gideon Pillow and Leonidas Polk (the “fighting bishop” of the Confederacy and West Point friend of Jefferson Davis) had long considered the heights overlooking the Mississippi River at Columbus, Kentucky, as a key strategic location.30 Whoever controlled those heights, they thought, would have a choke point on the river; control Columbus, and control the upper Mississippi. More enticing still, the residents of the area possessed Southern sympathies and had, as early as April 22, 1861, invited the Confederates into the town as a starting point to seizing the Mississippi River town of Cairo, Illinois. Not surprisingly, the day after the residents of Columbus asked for Confederate intervention, Illinois troops countered by occupying Cairo.31
Confederate desires for Columbus could be postponed only so long, and, on September 1, 1861, Polk wrote Magoffin and warned him that he, Polk, believed that he ought to be “ahead of the enemy in occupying Columbus and Paducah.”32 On September 2, the commander of Illinois’s volunteer forces in the area, Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, ordered his forces into Belmont, Missouri, across the river from Columbus. In response, Polk ordered his forces to violate Kentucky’s neutrality and enter the state. They did so the next day. Moving north, the Confederates entered and took Columbus on September 3, 1861.33
While Polk hailed this movement as a great achievement, neither Grant, the Kentucky legislature, nor the Confederate authorities in Richmond were so convinced. Grant fought war on a map better than Polk and most other generals, North or South. Having received confirmation of the Confederate capture of Columbus, on September 6, 1861, on his own initiative, he ordered his men to move, not against Columbus, but against a town nicknamed “Little Charleston” because of its Southern sympathies: Paducah, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He ordered them to seize the mouth of the Tennessee River and then move up the Ohio around the large bend to seize the mouth of the Cumberland River at Smithland, Kentucky. By using those waterways, Union forces could travel upriver and flank and then get behind Columbus and the Confederates, thus making the town an indefensible position on the Mississippi. Militarily, Grant checked and checkmated Polk’s move into Columbus.
On the political front, the Confederate move also backfired. While Polk found some of the people of Columbus happy to see him and his forces, his actions enraged the Kentucky legislature and embarrassed Governor Magoffin. On September 7, the legislature ordered the flag of the United States flown over the state capitol in Frankfort, and four days later, on September 11, the legislature passed a resolution demanding that Magoffin order the Confederate forces to leave Kentucky. Magoffin had called for both sides to withdraw from Kentucky and had said that he held both sides responsible for “equally palpable and open violations of the neutral rights of Kentucky.” But the legislature rejected Magoffin’s language and called for only a Confederate withdrawal. After Magoffin vetoed its resolution, the legislature overrode him by overwhelming margins: 68–26 in the House and 25–9 in the Senate. On September 18, the pro-Union legislature effectively took over the running of the commonwealth and implemented its policies: it placed the Union general Robert Anderson in charge of loyal forces to expel the Confederates, instructed the governor to call out the militia, and petitioned the federal government for aid and assistance.34 With this series of resolutions, Kentucky cast its lot with the Union and Abraham Lincoln. While Magoffin vetoed all these actions, the legislature overrode his vetoes and refused to ask Union forces to leave the state. Magoffin had become superfluous; the pro-Union legislature controlled the state and its future involvement in the conflict.35
Not only did Kentuckians doubt the political and military wisdom of Polk’s actions; some of the Confederacy’s highest political leaders doubted his actions as well. The Confederate secretary of war, Leroy P. Walker of Alabama, opposed the move into Columbus as unnecessary and unwise. Polk appealed to his old West Point colleague and friend Jefferson Davis, claiming that federal actions in Belmont, Missouri, necessitated his move into Columbus. Some controversy exists as to what and when Polk told Davis. The evidence suggests that Polk modified the story he told Davis, changed the language and dates of dispatches between himself and Davis, and manipulated Davis into supporting him.36 Regardless, Davis did back Polk and defended the move into Kentucky to the Confederate Congress on November 18, 1861.
Sharing Davis’s position, Kentuckians with Confederate sympathies called a convention in Russellville, Kentucky, along the Tennessee border, on hearing of the actions of the state legislature. That convention drew up a declaration of independence and put together a provisional Confederate government of Kentucky with its capital at Bowling Green, Kentucky. On December 10, 1861, the Confederate Congress “admitted” Kentucky into the Confederacy and added a star on its flag for the state. But this “Confederate Kentucky” reflected a thin minority of the overall population of the state; as Rawley describes this provisional government, it “never amounted to more than a rump of the people.”37
Lincoln understood just how close a call Kentucky had been and how delicately the state had to be handled because, at the same time that these military movements and political events unfolded within the commonwealth, he had problems with his general in Missouri, John C. Fremont, who threatened that state’s loyalty. On August 30, Fremont had issued a proclamation to deal with disloyalty and the low-intensity conflict that had developed in Missouri. In it, he designated a line across Missouri and stated that any person who took up arms against the United States north of that line would be court-martialed and, if convicted, shot. His proclamation was so broad that it included properly enlisted Confederate soldiers and, thus, all but asked for reprisals by the Confederates in Missouri against Union soldiers. Worse for Lincoln and the Kentucky situation, it stated that any and all personal and real property of persons who took up arms against the United States would be confiscated, including slaves, whom Fremont declared to be free.38 While abolitionists cheered Fremont’s proclamation, border states men cringed. Raising the issue of uncompensated military emancipation at just the moment when Kentucky looked to be dropping into the Union fold worried Lincoln.
On September 2, Lincoln sent Frémont a letter by special messenger urging the general to reconsider both parts of his proclamation. The president pointed out the problem of retaliation and called attention to the First Confiscation Act of 1861, which provided for the forfeiture of slaves only when they were actively engaged in support of the rebellion. Fremont remained obstinate in defense of his proclamation despite Lincoln’s letter and despite visits by prominent Union commanders and politicians attempting to change his mind. Because Frémont would not take the hint, he forced Lincoln into ordering him to bring his proclamation in line with the First Confiscation Act. Nevertheless, the damage had been done; emancipation arose to worry Kentuckians.
That Kentucky’s situation and Frémont’s action became linked in Lincoln’s thinking can be seen in the president’s September 22, 1861, letter to his friend O. H. Browning. Browning had written Lincoln on September 17 defending Frémont’s actions regarding emancipation and criticizing Lincoln’s actions in reversing Frémont’s policy. Most of this letter deals with Lincoln’s conception of the limits of confiscation under the law and the Constitution, but Kentucky’s situation loomed. “The Kentucky Legislature would not budge till [sic] that proclamation was modified,” Lincoln lectured Browning. He then stated that he had heard of “a whole company of our Volunteers” throwing down their weapons and disbanding rather than support emancipation. Lincoln was aghast that “the very arms we had furnished Kentucky would be turned against us.” Then he touched the heart of the matter, stating: “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”39 Frémont overstepped his authority in his August 30 proclamation, he embarrassed his political leader without providing him prior knowledge of his actions, he raised emancipation as a potential war goal far too early, and he potentially derailed the Kentucky situation. As a result, he was forced to rescind parts of his proclamation and, in time, was sacked. By chastising Frémont and repudiating emancipation at that point in the conflict, Lincoln had reassured Kentuckians about the stability of their property in persons while the Union maintained the loyalty of the keystone state of the West, Kentucky.
Emancipation and the enlistment and use of black troops in the state went a long way toward souring the relationship between the Union and Kentuckians, but that difficult relationship lay in the future.40 In 1860–1861, just as Magoffin’s and Buckner’s efforts to effect Kentucky’s secession failed, so too did the halfway house of neutrality. Ironically, while Kentucky’s population drifted toward the Union—a drift tracked in the summer 1861 election results—it was not the drift but a bad choice by Confederate General Polk that triggered Kentucky to abandon neutrality and declare for the Union on September 18, 1861. No doubt Kentuckians were a divided people, but a political majority of them initially believed that their best interests lay in crafting a middle-ground policy between secession and support for the Union. Only later did they realize that no such middle ground exists in civil war. Thus, by the late summer of 1861, Kentucky shifted toward supporting the Union, even if only in a begrudgingly and conservative Unionist fashion. Lincoln’s light touch with the land of his birth and his fending off the hydra of emancipation raised by General Frémont’s August 30 proclamation helped keep Kentucky in the Union. On the other side of the battle lines, the Confederate government acted rashly. While Lincoln tolerated the trade across Kentucky, the Confederacy moved to cut off all trade with the Union. The Confederate Congress required that the South’s goods had to be moved through the Confederacy’s own seaports or across the Mexican border, thereby strangling the Kentucky trade lines. As Coulter summed up the situation: “The South, too impatient to be tolerant and too impetuous to be tactful [on the trade issue], lost the greatest prize of the West—Kentucky.”41 Polk’s impatience, ineptitude, and political deafness in “invading” Kentucky pushed the state’s pro-Union lawmakers to go where they had wanted to go for a while—not onto the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy, but to stay a star in the blue field of the Stars and Stripes of the United States. Thus, contrary to E. Merton Coulter’s 1926 claim that “the feeling was unquestionably rather general throughout the North that Kentucky was a pariah among the elect,” Kentucky was no pariah. Instead, the Bluegrass state is better understood as the keystone—geographically, logistically, militarily, and politically—of the Union cause in the western theater even if it took a few extra months for the people of the commonwealth and its political leaders to reverse their governor’s emphasis on “self first, State second, Union last.”
1. E. Merton Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966).
2. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861–1865 (hereafter cited as OR), 70 vols. in 128 pts. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), ser. 1, vol. 45, pt. 2, pp. 93–94.
3. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, 210 n. 118.
4. Kentucky’s history in this era is in much need of updating and rethinking. In addition to Coulter’s Civil War and Readjustment, the standard secondary sources are Robert M. McElroy, Kentucky in the Nation’s History (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909); James R. Robertson, “Sectionalism in Kentucky from 1855 to 1865,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 4 (June 1917): 49–63; Wilson P. Shortridge, “Kentucky Neutrality in 1861,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 9 (March 1923): 283–301; Edward C. Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1927); and Thomas Speed, Union Cause in Kentucky, 1860–1865 (New York: Putnam’s, 1907).
5. Russell F. Weigley, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 46.
6. James A. Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War (1966; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 16.
7. While a large historiography exists on Henry Clay, the best modern biography and historical assessment is Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: Norton, 1991). Clay as a constitutionalist is nicely analyzed in Peter B. Knupfer, The Union as It Is: Unionism and Sectional Compromise, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
8. Not until the likes of Albert B. “Happy” Chandler (1898–1991) and Addison Mitchell “Mitch” McConnell Jr. (1942-) would a Kentucky politician possess a reputation and influence on the national political stage anywhere close to Henry Clay’s.
9. Lowell Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), 1.
10. Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War, 16.
11. Lowell H. Harrison, “Beriah Magoffin,” in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, ed. John E. Kleber (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 603–4.
12. Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky, 7.
13. In time, Breckinridge cast his lot with the Confederacy (see William C. Davis, Breckinridge: Statesman, Soldier, Symbol [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974]; and Frank H. Heck, “John C. Breckinridge in the Crisis of 1860–1861,” Journal of Southern History 21 [August 1955]: 316–46).
14. Beriah Magoffin to Simon Cameron, April 16, 1861, quoted in J. Stoddard Johnston, Kentucky, vol. 9 of Confederate Military History: A Library of Confederate States History, ed. Clement A. Evans, 12 vols. (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1899), 19.
15. Quoted in ibid., 22–23.
16. Robert W. Goebel, ‘“Casualty of war’: The Governorship of Beriah Magoffin, 1859–1862” (master’s thesis, University of Louisville, 2005), 88; Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, 55.
17. Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky, 9.
18. Weigley, A Great Civil War, 46.
19. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 294 (see also 293–97).
20. Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War, 32.
21. Weigley, A Great Civil War, 46.
22. Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War, 33.
23. Ibid., 34; Don E. Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865 (New York: Library of America, 1989), 251–52.
24. In time, Buckner too cast his lot with the Confederacy (see Arndt M. Stickles, Simon Bolivar Buckner: Borderland Knight [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940]). On the dilemmas faced by Southern Unionists, see Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
25. Berry F. Craig, “Henry Cornelius Burnett: Champion of Southern Rights,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 77 (Autumn 1977): 266–74.
26. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, 104–5.
27. Beriah Magoffin to Jefferson Davis, August 1861, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 4, p. 378. The letter was hand delivered to Davis. For the response, see Jefferson Davis to Beriah Magoffin, August 28, 1861, OR, ser. 1, vol. 4, pp. 396–97.
28. Beriah Magoffin to Abraham Lincoln, August 19, 1861, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, ser. 1, General Correspondence, 1833–1916.
29. Abraham Lincoln to Beriah Magoffin, August 24, 1861, in Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln, 265–66.
30. For more on Pillow, see Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Roy P. Stonesifer Jr., The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). For more on Polk, see Glenn Robins, The Bishop of the Old South: The Ministry and Civil War Legacy of Leonidas Polk (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2006); Joseph H. Parks, General Leonidas Polk, C.S.A.: The Fighting Bishop (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962); and Bryan Bush, “‘My whole life must speak for me’: Southern Honor and Confederate General Leonidas Polk” (master’s thesis, University of Louisville, 2005).
31. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, 106. On Cairo, see Matthew E. Stanley, ‘“City of soldiers’: The Military Occupation of Cairo, Illinois, 1861–1862” (master’s thesis, University of Louisville, 2007), 1–19.
32. OR, ser. 1, vol. 4, p. 179.
33. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, 108–9; Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War, 38–39; Weigley, A Great Civil War, 48; Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky, 12.
34. Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War, 39; Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky, 13.
35. Magoffin lasted in office until August 18, 1862, when he finally resigned and was replaced by James F. Robinson, a conservative Unionist (Weigley, A Great Civil War, 48).
36. Bush, ‘“My whole life must speak for me,’” 84–88.
37. Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War, 40.
38. Weigley, A Great Civil War, 88–89.
39. Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln, 269 (see also 268–70).
40. See Jacob F. Lee, “‘The Union as it was and the Constitution as it is’: Unionism and Emancipation in Civil War Kentucky” (master’s thesis, University of Louisville, 2007).
41. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, 80.