Thomas Parsons, a Kentucky Unionist farmer and wartime home guard member, recalled in 1901 how four decades earlier Confederate soldiers from southwest Virginia had gone to Mt. Sterling for parole. The intent, he said, “was to muster out the Rebel armies and get the country back as nearly to its normal condition as possible.” While watching the surrender, which lasted for several days, he recognized many of the ex-Confederates as his former school chums. A little later, one approached him and queried: “Mr., what are they going to do with us fellows?” Presumably, the fear was imprisonment or worse. Parsons pointed out that it depended on how much the questioner respected his parole. The conversation then turned to a nearby contingent of U.S. Colored Troops. The former Rebel sneered with hate at what he called “Smoked Yankees.” Parsons noted ironically that it was the man’s kind who “made it necessary for the Government to call these people into the army to suppress that rebellion.” Even yet, one can imagine the bedraggled prisoner scratching his head before rejoining that the Kentuckians were the “damnedest people out of hell.” What Kentuckians? replied a quizzical Parsons. Why, the Southerners who in the beginning of the conflict “sent their sons out to fight for the South” and then before conflict’s end “sent their Negroes out to kill their sons.” Parsons must have smiled wryly, remembering: “I thought I had never heard the situation better expressed.” In truth, what to do about returning Kentucky rebels, and what to do about the emancipated blacks, basically shaped Kentucky’s transit from war to reconstruction.1
America periodically goes on a nation-building binge. It started, perhaps, in the 1780s when we built our own, and we have not stopped trying to do it for others ever since. Sometimes we are successful—everyone points to the post-World War II rebuilding of Germany and Japan and, by extension, much of Western Europe and Asia before and during the cold war era. More often than not, the results prove mixed—the Philippines, Caribbean and Latin American countries, Somalia, Bosnia. Current efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq await definitive result. As Cynthia Watson suggests, the United States has chosen this theme “as a major course of U.S. policy for the initial years of the twenty-first century,” assuming that, by helping create “a world of democratic, free market states, the attacks resulting from the hatred of nineteen terrorists on September 11, 2001, will be prevented from recurring.” She observes that the belief that the United States offers the rest of the world “a model of freedom, hope, ethics, and equality is not new” but has been “woven throughout our history.” She could just as well observe, however, that actions have often conflicted with these lofty goals. Moreover, Americans might well look to blemishes as well as successes in our past, just as in other countries over the centuries. In what many scholars argue was our greatest failure—post–Civil War Reconstruction—we as a people have averted our gaze from that dreary postwar performance by government and people at all levels.2
The striking difference between then and now, of course, resides with today’s powerful blending of national political crusade with a barrage of well-wishers and prescriptive manuals, an explosion of bureaucratic players, agendas, and goals, and a veritable food fight as to whether military or civilian instruments of national power should stand in the forefront. This rush of resources and enthusiasm cuts vertically through government and nongovernment entities as well as horizontally across the international picture. Nothing like that was possible in 1860s America because the philosophy and structure of governance and, frankly, the biases of hearts and minds hardened by four years of carnage mitigated against such a crusade. As James J. Carafano suggests about today’s weaknesses in postconflict operations—lack of historical memory, unrealistic expectations, and longstanding flaws—so too, “among the traditions, experiences, preconceptions, and routine practices that determine how the military wages the fight for peace, the most powerful force shaping its thinking is a ‘tradition of forgetting.’” He quotes the official army report on U.S. participation in the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I as noting that, “despite the precedents of military governments in Mexico, California, the Southern States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, China, the Philippines, and elsewhere, the lesson seemingly has not been learned.” Explanation of this tradition lies beyond the purview of this essay. However, the theme helps reexplore Kentucky as a case study.3
Watson’s “enduring questions in nation-building” can inform any discussion of post–Civil War Reconstruction. She defines nation building as “ending military conflict and rebuilding economic and political infrastructures,” for which she means basic services, including the armed forces, police, government, banks, transportation networks, communications, health and medical care, and schools, among other basics of a functional society. Stopping violence, constructing a society based on rule of law and other norms so that it can function autonomously and to the benefit of the population, all sounds altruistic enough. And, of course, in a nineteenth-century variant, that is precisely what happened in each of the reconstructed Rebel and border states. Today, this might involve outside intervention—peacekeeping, preemption, humanitarian relief, institution building, conflict avoidance, liberation, or revenge—all good terms lending credence and form to activities of government as well as private-sector intentions and international activities. Whether in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Kentucky, or anywhere else in the South in the 1860s, such concepts can be examined in context.4
In addition to asking what is included in nation building, Watson wonders whether this phenomenon can “be brought to a people or does it need to be home grown?” Many observers, she contends, see the culture of entrepreneurship and suspicion of government in people’s lives, together with optimism and blending of nationalities, as factors in U.S. success. The question can be asked of Kentucky in microcosm, adding, as she does, that the country as a whole “appears to have developed this commitment to democracy because it was a system developed from within.” But, in a sense, for states of the post–Civil War South, the determinant of outside interposition stemmed from national government and nonindigenous contributors, and the results of self-redemption were anything but positive in many cases. In fact, Watson also observes another enduring question of nation building: whether outside intervention actually thwarts accomplishment. Closely related to this issue is that of whether nation building is a military operation or a civilian activity with the U.S. Army, itself a very controversial force in post–Civil War Reconstruction in Kentucky and elsewhere.5
Today, we think of a bounteously funded, technically efficient American military machine as exquisitely equipped for both war and nation building. Such was not the case after the Civil War, for a variety of reasons, although a disturbing similarity surfaces over numerical “boots on the ground” to stabilize and suppress continuing violent insurgency now and then as a stabilizing part of reconstruction. Today, politicians, policymakers, and uniformed professionals have complicated discussion when they ask, “How does nation building relate to peacekeeping operations, humanitarian operations, or so-called ‘operations other than war’?” Frankly, throughout history, these terms flow together, and it remains to be seen whether today’s lexicon gymnastics prove any more effective in result than, say, their application in Kentucky’s postconflict reconstruction.6
Several of today’s “eternal questions” obviously do not relate to postbellum Kentucky. Watson mentions the role of supranational organizations and the international community and how structured military civil affairs or so-called psychological operations fit into the picture (although, arguably, today’s terms have historical counterparts even in the Kentucky experience). More fascinating for Kentucky analysis are Watson’s citations of other modern considerations like:
In each case, extrapolation of such modern didactics to the Kentucky experience fits well with more traditional examination of the Bluegrass experience during war and Reconstruction. Watson concludes that nation building “is as complicated as any other public-policy question facing any state” with trade-offs, “best” or “worst” lying mostly in the eye of the beholder rather than in some empirical answer. Although history does not guarantee the future, nation building, she suggests, proves successful “only when done from within because the challenges facing outsiders in any culture or society are so vast.” Yet was this really the case in Southern reconstruction and Kentucky reconstruction in particular? “Within” lay with native sons, both white and black and how they effected result; “outsiders” identified with the federal government and the victorious North and what they brought to bear in the Bluegrass. Edward L. Ayers saw the epoch as “the interlocking stories of three major groups,” Southern whites, Southern blacks, and white Northerners all in conflict, all part of shifting alliances and alignments and patterns. Kentucky fits that paradigm.7
Whether in modern or historical nation building, the trajectory between cause, crisis, war, pacification/stabilization, reconstruction, and reconciliation forms a continuum. More simply put, there is wartime reconstruction and postwar reconstruction, illustrated nicely by Kentucky. In addition, a vertical dimension also stems from the idea that, not only national, but also local—even tribal—levels configure the subject matter. Massachusetts congressman Tip O’Neill once contended that all politics is local; so too is all history. Increasingly, the lessons of nation building suggest that tribalism remains the key element in broken or uncongealed states. While we as a nation and a people often forget our own preunification history or likewise fail to amalgamate and integrate our past holistically, the Civil War epoch provides opportunity for understanding, not merely a war of consolidation in which revolution nested, but also a time of transformation and reconstitution of structure at state and local as well as national levels. Revolutionary, transformational, remarkably complex is reconstruction, varying “sharply from one place to another in the South and from one year to the next,” suggests Ayers. Yet this part of the experience has been overshadowed by the blood and gore, battles and leaders and glories of the fighting man in American popular mythology. Kentucky provides a case in point.
The Bluegrass State’s own experience with the Reconstruction era should not be separated from the broader spectrum of antebellum to reconciliatory years. One need not belabor the details of prewar Kentucky politics, economics, or society (all intertwined with both region and section) or the state at war. The bright economic progress built on agriculture and expanding transportation infrastructure for commerce, nascent industry, and sociocultural development (at least for the white population) could be seen as marred by the continued existence of slavery as the labor base. However, Kentucky’s politics and politicians spoke to compromise and balm as response to the severely fragmented nation on that issue. Some of this approach carried over to the war period itself as, according to Penny M. Miller, the Civil War and Reconstruction “affected Kentucky far more than would have been expected in a state that remained in the Union.” In a sense, the very location as well as western rivers and the Louisville and Nashville Railroad that commercially and culturally linked Kentucky with sister states to the south sealed its fate rather quickly on the outbreak of hostilities.8
Despite the state’s politicians’ resolve to remain neutral while its national spokesmen spoke of compromise and consequent violation by both warring sections, Kentucky’s fate was quickly sealed via the Union’s relentless military advance to conquer the rebellious states, coupled with Confederate irresolution to stand and defend the upper heartland. A state whose people proved as divided in sentiment and allegiance as the Union itself at the time, Kentucky found that its geographic position conditioned events. Twin rebel defeats at Mill Springs and Forts Henry and Donelson at opposite ends of the Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston’s western defense line in the winter of 1862 effectively extinguished any dream of a Kentucky star in the Confederate national banner. True, there arose a provisional Confederate Kentucky regime under Governors George W. Johnson and Richard Hawes, and the dream of a Confederate western frontier on the Ohio River forever drove strategists in Richmond as well as Kentuckians in exile. But the dream died. Kentucky remained a divided border Union state (under secession-leaning Beriah Magoffin until pushed aside for conservative Unionist Thomas Bramlette), with national military occupation, stabilization, and repression of dissent conditioning the state as much as redemptive attempts by Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith or the periodic heroics of beau ideal cavalryman John Hunt Morgan, much less John Bell Hood’s stillborn goal that perished at Franklin and Nashville, Tennessee, in late 1864.9
Indeed, “the dark and bloody ground” escaped the worst of major battles, fire and sword, compared to that visited on the South in Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi. More like Maryland, but not quite like Missouri in terms of borderland strife, Kentucky slipped into the virulent destabilizing fever of localized partisan activity and eventual banditry, persecution of neighbors, prosecution and repression of dissidence, and edge-teetering allegiance to one side or the other. Miller speaks of the state’s experience as “an internal battleground for its own soul—and politics.” Never wholeheartedly trusted by either Union or Confederate authorities because of wavering positions from neutrality at the beginning to tepid response to Confederate raids as well as the unceasing presence of Federal troops, Kentucky experienced such explosive touchstones as the emancipation of slaves and the suppression of civil liberties. True, it retained civil governance (compared to Andrew Johnson’s military governance of neighboring Tennessee) yet suffered as much disruption as if it had been an occupied area of the conquered rebellion. Older state sovereignty tradition vied with a unifying cathartic revolution of modernism evidenced by centralizing national government carried on the tides of wartime. In a confrontation as old as the Republic itself, Kentucky (the author of the famous Resolutions of 1798) rejected its presidential native son’s policies and programs that would help push a reunited nation on the inevitable path to modernity. Ironically, then, it may have been Abraham Lincoln (until martyred) whose policies and administration tipped the Bluegrass into the notion that the loyal state in wartime could become disloyal on the return of peace. That perception long carried validity in Kentucky political folklore.10
In many ways, Kentucky’s wartime experience (like that of the country as a whole) was more one of reconstitution than reconstruction. True, the two went hand in hand with both internal and external forces at play. Every cause and effect related to change, to transformation, with Kentuckians fighting against or embracing such to some ill-defined degree. Civil War statistics remain suspect, but official soldier count placed some 75,760 Kentuckians in Union blue; perhaps 30,000 went with the Confederacy. Of course, there is no accurate way to know how many “irregulars” participated on either side, while inclusion of partisan rangers and home guards might well raise totals appreciably for either cause. Yet every commentator points to a severely divided populace, and the Unionist apologist Thomas W. Speed wrote after the turn of the century that “every part of the State was Union in sentiment, except the extreme west end,” and from all the other portions of the commonwealth, including the Bluegrass middle, were drawn the men in blue. Given such divisions, wartime Kentucky was destined to remain unsettled, the ultimate decision of the war notwithstanding. With its first families politically torn, their sons enlisting on both sides, the white working class similarly pulled in different directions. Only the African American slave proletariat might have seemed immune, just as everywhere across the Deeper South. In fact, slaves became something of a makeweight for Kentucky in both war and the return of peace. As they were elsewhere, they provided an important ingredient in the war effort, regardless of legal status, and provided the seed for Kentucky’s divisive climate from antebellum, to bellum, to postbellum environment.11
Early threat of secession and ever-present force of arms via invasion, raid, and partisan activity evoked response from loyal state authority (government and politicians), harshly imposed national policies and instruments (military and civil), and second/third-tier effects unanticipated and clumsily handled. The General Assembly legislated restrictions on Confederate sympathizers early in the war (loyalty oaths, penalties against recruiters for Southern forces), and these eventually evolved into both state and national clamps on press freedoms and other expressions of sentiment, disenfranchisement of politically suspect citizens, imposition of martial law, and, by July 1864, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus as well as trade restrictions. When original national requests for state volunteers changed to registration and conscription of manpower (white and black), Kentuckians bridled and balked in dismay. When the Union military (many units and personalities homegrown Kentucky, and all serving under national authority) was not interfering with local, state, and even national elections, it harassed Kentucky citizens and oppressed the populace to the point of a perceived “reign of terror” by the summer of 1864. Gen. Eleazer A. Paine, the culprit in this case (in cahoots with Paducah’s Union League of America), arbitrarily imposed fines and exile on locals in the Jackson Purchase section of the state who were suspected of aiding and abetting partisans. His extortion included taxing the mails, earning a full-scale investigation for crime and corruption. More unpardonable to Kentuckians, however, was that he apparently took it too far, summarily executing innocent combatants among outlawed guerrilla prisoners. Yet Paine only followed in the train of other paranoid authorities from Bramlette to zealous military officials charged with Kentucky affairs such as Jeremiah Boyle, Ambrose Burnside, and Stephen Burbridge.12
In turn, these authorities—even loyal Governor Thomas Bramlette—simply responded to frenetic raids by Kentuckians Morgan, Adam R. “Stovepipe” Johnson, and Hylan B. Lyon as well as outsiders Nathan Bedford Forrest, Roy S. Cluke, and, by the waning moments of hostilities, the infamous Missouri/Kansas war criminals William Clarke Quantrill and M. Jerome “Sue” Mundy, who sought sanctuary in Kentucky’s continued destabilization. The fabled work of Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson and Unionist partisan Tinker Dave Beatty provided the stuff of legends in the Appalachian region of the state, capturing the essence of postwar feuds of even greater fame. Chicanery of a more venal variety enticed General Burbridge and Maj. Henry C. Symonds in the “Great Hog Swindle” whereby the Union commissariat bilked Kentucky hog farmers of at least $300,000 through favored pork speculators and illicit regulations. Lowell Harrison and James Klotter have concluded: “The animosity generated by such federal officials and policies turned most Kentuckians against the national administration.”13
Here, Kentucky “became an early example of the hostility of an aggrieved, occupied population, depressed and injured by the suppression of a guerilla war,” senses Miller. Indeed, one can also see in the destructive actions of raiders like Kentuckian Lyon another inherent thread that would transcend war and peace—state and national conflict. Sent on a late war raid through western Kentucky, Lyon struck a path of fire venting against Federal occupation authority—not merely military targets, but militarily fortified courthouse sites. Symbols of oppression due to occupancy by Federal troops, they might have been spared nonetheless as local government property in a loyal state. Yet those positions at the courthouse towns Hopkinsville, Cadiz, and Princeton, as well as five other places, contained black U.S. defenders. Lyon, termed by one subsequent Kentucky author as “the courthouse bur nine st general” in all the Confederate forces may, thus, have been reflecting another core peeve. One wartime, nationally imposed issue above all else inflamed the senses of Kentuckians (and all Southerners, for that matter), perhaps. That was emancipation, coupled with the enrollment and drafting of black troops.14
Not that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation directly affected Kentuckians per se. Exempt, like citizens of other loyal slaveholding states, they nonetheless saw the handwriting on the wall. Ersatz emancipation or liberation of slaves by transiting Union military followed with national confiscation acts as well as prohibition of slavery in the District of Columbia and then the territories. National recruitment of black soldiers and the tertiary problems of vagabondage, impact on labor productivity (numbers and attitude), and general refugee supplication all hardened racial prejudices as well as raising anti-Washington bile in the Bluegrass State. Washington’s need for manpower to prosecute the war, however understandable, flew in the face of antebellum paranoia about arming black slaves. The Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, plus Lincoln’s proclamation, barely concealed the fact that slavery as an economic as well as a sociocultural institution would be dead come Union victory against the rebellion. Yet, observes Eric Foner, “resistance to change proved greatest in Kentucky.”15
Moreover, Lincoln, according to Harrison, was “anxious to get emancipation in his native state.” His efforts to secure acceptance among its political spokesmen for compensated emancipation form part of a convoluted story leading to the January 1, 1863, proclamation. Absence of any urban or other abolitionist (or antislavery) catalyst of consequence to lead the way, a loyal Union party “distinguished by its timidity” (in the opinion of Gen. John M. Palmer, the last Federal commander responsible for the state), and the obvious economic investment that conditioned Kentuckians’ views above all else made ease of transition to a free labor postwar environment extremely problematic. Kentucky’s reluctance to “anticipate the end of slavery and prepare for it” quietly, notes Harrison, would cause great strain and stress in postwar readjustment. At war’s end, at least sixty-five thousand Kentucky blacks remained in legal bondage, and the state legislature made no effort to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which officially ended slavery in America.16
Indeed, along with the rights of returned Kentucky Confederates— “the Orphans” of wartime fame—the chief issue of the August 1865 congressional and state office elections was the Thirteenth Amendment. Appomattox, in fact, was but a milepost on the road still stretching from wartime stabilization and reconstruction efforts to postconflict restoration/reconstruction and eventual reconciliation. The overt hostilities ended, and Johnny (both blue and gray) came marching home. Many wanted simply to forget; others more grudgingly wished to remember and seek retribution. Factionalism, feuds, and unrequited urges for lawlessness and violence continued past war’s end, with Appalachia and elsewhere witness to clan and community disarray. Whether or not the later famous Hatfield-McCoy feud traced to the violent 1860s, unabated violence all over the Bluegrass State did, “systematized” with murders and other criminality to the point that felons like Frank and Jesse James followed in the train of the Quantrill fugitives entering and exiting the state at will after the war. Such conduct came to symbolize a retarded culture in the minds of outsiders. And, for months, robberies, violence, and social upheaval continued no matter how Kentucky and the nation reacted to Lee’s surrender or Lincoln’s assassination. Such far-distant events affected the Bluegrass as the spring and summer of 1865 resumed the inevitable cycle of seasons. The war’s survivors greeted the future with sorrow, hope, and anticipation as well as trepidation. A so-called Kentucky world at that point was filled “with bitter memories, wartime scars, and long-felt hurts.” The outskirts of a city like Louisville stood abandoned on the sentinels, as one historian suggests, eleven forts that should not have been built, but appropriate monuments to a war that should not have been fought.17
After the fighting subsides, the issues of the demobilization and reconversion of the economy, society, and governance center, in part, on the reinsertion of the living back to some sense of normality. The mustering out of Union soldiers vied with the vast influx of blacks thinking themselves free after the rebellion’s demise and plagued Louisville, bringing peace, but not calm, to that river city. The destitution of the vagabond slaves mixed with the drunken and disorderly demobilizing white volunteers as government authority had no idea of how to deal with the ills of either. If perhaps thirty thousand Kentuckians never returned from the conflict, countless others did—with empty sleeves and psychological damage mixed with the elixir of victory or the gall of defeat. For them, the challenge lay in recovering neglected farms, overgrown paths, and interrupted or defunct businesses while helping restore society’s infrastructure—churches, schools, places of enterprise—as well as coping with the poisoned feelings engendered by the conflict. Congregations, classes, and newspaper readership as well as the commerce of Kentucky’s major towns and cities—Louisville, Lexington, Paducah, Bowling Green, and Hopkinsville, for example—all required rebuilding to some extent.18
Here, then, was one part of Kentucky’s reconstruction, along with replacing nearly 90,000 horses, 37,000 mules, 172,000 cattle, and miles of fence and creating a new labor pool. The state lost 4 million acres in cultivation during the war—as much a reflection of labor problems associated with slavery’s end as anything else. Land values naturally slumped from $225,000,000 to $174,000,000 by 1862 yet rebounded to nearly $200,000,000 three years later. The prewar hemp industry enjoyed momentary revival along with the return of cotton production across the South, but, soon, newer methods (including the use of wood and metal binding) eclipsed that prosperous Kentucky crop. Prices for tobacco and cotton seemed stable, and, despite Miller’s contention that federal aid during the war “was in the form of arms,” one might also suggest that the presence of U.S. money for military-related provisions and services should be factored into such contention. Of course, Kentucky suffered nothing compared to heavier portions of the war zone to the south, in fact just across the border in Tennessee. In conventional American style, recovery in this case would demand the pioneer spirit of individualism and pluck that had built Kentucky in the first place. There would be no national programs for recovery on a scale associated with twentieth-century postconflict situations. Yet the continuation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, run by the War Department, suggested the beginnings of federal welfare for some of Kentucky’s population.19
The major question of postwar readjustment in Kentucky was simply who would guide or even dictate such adjustment—outsiders via the national government or Kentucky insiders at both the state and the local level. Rule of law, civil rights, payment of wartime debt—in short, the major issues of postwar federal-state relations—loomed large. Other issues—especially with economic and social implications—remained very much internal concerns. Traditional dislike or mistrust between proUnion urban centers on the Ohio (notwithstanding Paducah’s secessionist identity) and rural farm communities carried over to postwar issues like railroad, bank, and urban exploitation. Renewed and unregulated river and rail commercialism returned as the Treasury Department lifted wartime restrictions and steamboat ownership and operation returned to private enterprise from government contracts. The war-stressed Louisville and Nashville Railroad regained traction from important infrastructure and rolling stock losses and overuse in logistic support of the Union. The restored power of that line in the state legislature would stymie postwar construction of any competitive north-south lines through the state to tap into a new East Tennessee–Georgia trade axis, reflecting a predictable conflict between monopoly and competition, while blocking for a time more balanced postbellum state economic development and progress. How long such obstructionism might retard natural recovery and pent-up economic expansion for the state and region remained to be seen. Just how much the Civil War retarded the natural march of American commerce and industrialization anyway has long been a historical controversy. In any event, Kentucky played its own role in both the restoration of old, natural economic patterns and the adjustment to the new role, in some might say, a new nation.20
Discussion of Kentucky internal redevelopment in the postconflict phase forms the material of good local history or even specialized history dealing with transportation, education, and the role of minorities as well as government. Louisville’s merchant princes, trying to maintain the same kind of economic and social hegemony when faced with rising industrialism after the war as they had encountered with professional groups before the conflict, are a story of their own. Yet, for this essay, fascination must lie rather with the national-state government contest for control of Kentucky’s postwar direction. While different from the Reconstruction of the Confederate South, in terms of the imposition of a national government struggle for control between branches and agencies of government, the postconflict readjustment story in the Bluegrass State continued the abiding confrontation of states’ rights versus federalism in the American System. A state’s right to secede or leave the Union had been bloodily resolved in the war. A state’s right to control its people, property, and economic and social activities within its own boundaries was decidedly not. As Miller advances: “Reconstruction also pitted many fiefdoms—‘Little Kingdoms’—against the federal government when it attempted to encroach upon their control over local affairs.” While Kentucky’s economy and society remained in disarray, its politics stayed factionalized. And, because political historians long dominated the field of analysis, the central theme of federal-state conflict in Kentucky can be painted against a political canvas. The transition from war to peace scarcely stilled the drumbeat of rhetoric, fervor, and bile in the state’s politics regarding national intrusion.21
While man, woman, and child in Kentucky transitioned along the road of war and reconstruction, the state’s politicians evidenced little break from the power game pitting Frankfort against Washington. Antebellum irresolution of the constitutional issues morphed during the war as new party fault lines soon surfaced over local implementation of national policies and programs, rules, regulations, and restrictions. If Washington officials poorly understood the unique Kentucky predicament, so too Kentucky politicos seemingly looked for every occasion to offer obstruction and opposition without surcease. Perhaps this was a natural breakdown in the antebellum supremacy of the Whig Party, which then transformed into the wartime turbulence of secessionist, democratic conservatism and the new player, republicanism (itself too freely associated with abolition, military rule, and government centralism). Wartime animosity generated by Federal officials on the ground in the state (associated with the absentee domination of the Lincoln administration in Washington) and the vote for McClellan and the Democratic ticket in 1864 both encapsulated an environment soon transferred to a postconflict political maelstrom at every turn. While progress (or the lack thereof) in the restoration of individual and corporate enterprise might take place beyond this turbulence, history (or historians) has placed great, if even undue, attention on that phenomenon in explaining the state’s place in the postwar Union.22
Harrison and Klotter may be correct when they assert that the fluid political situation was “uncertain, unstable and unsteady” in the environment of the late 1860s. They further assert that “three virtually new political parties” sprang up in the commonwealth. A wartime Union Party translated to a postwar Republican entity supporting the three civil rights amendments to the U.S. Constitution. More moderate at the Kentucky level than the national Radical Republican level, the membership included former Unionists and Whigs who sought a progressive, modernizing face for national as well as state consumption. Opponents, however, chose to identify this crowd as radicals, Jacobins, and militarists and pinned on them all the perceived ills of black suffrage and racial equality. Principal among these opponents was a Conservative or States’ Rights Party—Democrats in any other guise, including ex-Confederates and some Unionists as well as old Bourbons who despised Washington on military, constitutional, and racial grounds. They fought all constitutional amendments, any extension of black rights, and sought actively to retain the free and unconquered states’ right approach as the pure tradition of Washington’s and Jefferson’s precepts. Of course, standing apart from the two polarized parties was something termed the Conservative Union or Constitutional Union Democratic Party—a third party that disagreed with both the “radical” policies of the Republicans and the reactionary tide of the resurgent democracy. This third way captured the notion of the Union and that of the Constitution as they had been before the revolutionary tides of wartime change but with less stridency than the competitors, perhaps.23
In truth, this tripartite political split catered to national issues like Southern Reconstruction, racial prejudice, and constitutional interpretation—but with a Kentucky cast. Little wonder that, when a veritable propaganda war opened for the hearts and minds of postwar Kentuckians, voices were muted as Lexington newsman William C. P. Breckinridge, a sometime Confederate, called for a New South and a new postwar Kentucky in October 1866, one with extended railroads, reopened waterways, extracted mineral wealth, and new mills and manufactories so that the state might apply its zeal and energy to compete with other parts of the Union. Such modernism quickly drew rebuttal from agrarian-oriented Bourbons of the old school. It sounded too much like the Republican philosophy of progress—anathema to veterans of the vicissitudes of Kentucky politics during wartime occupation. The political testing in Frankfort came, not over reconstructive issues of valid economic sense, but, rather, over a continuing obsession about Washington intrusion and concern with the black man. The initial sparring as delineated by historians showed the rejection of the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery, the repeal of the wartime expatriation act ensuring former Kentucky Confederates’ pardons and redress from reprisals, and a decided renaissance of favor for those people who had actually brought on the war and the “time of troubles” in the first place. Indeed, little wonder then, despite the return of peace, that martial law continued in the state of Kentucky, that military intimidation continued to be felt at the polls and as a continued stabilizer against insurgency, crime, and disruption. This hyper military activity led President Andrew Johnson to order an end of martial law in the Bluegrass State on October 12, 1865. Still, the fact that Kentucky could not adjust easily to the new world of minority rights brought a threat of federal intervention by early 1866—one quite precedential for modern reconstructive efforts by a national government.24
Kentucky’s continuing intransigence regarding slavery and freed people caused extension of the War Department’s Freedmen’s Bureau activity from Tennessee to its northern neighbor. Kentucky’s steadfast stubbornness regarding the constitutional amendment, the nullification of the state’s own slave code, and the provision for the destitute freed people as well as protection against terrorist actions by the white’s postwar equivalent to wartime guerrillas—soon to be termed Ku Kluxers, Regulators—caused the assistant bureau commissioner, Brig. Gen. Clinton B. Fisk, to make the January 1866 move. By March, the state had been divided into three sub districts by the chief, Gen. John Ely. Sub district headquarters were located in Louisville, Lexington, and Paducah, reflecting that immediate postwar tendency of the freed people to flock to urban sanctuaries while refugee camps had been opened at wartime Union training and freed-people rendezvous like Camps Nelson and Dick Robinson as well as other major towns and cities.25
Bureau responsibility went beyond merely caring for the needy and sick at those facilities, however, as education became a paramount concern for federal authorities as well as the freed people themselves, along with the appointment of citizen agents to assist the new freed labor in fair contract negotiations. At least, some Kentucky newspapers like the Louisville Daily Journal thought that Fisk meant to do right by his subjects as well as administering the bureau “in such a manner as to be the least offensive to the community.” Six months later, however, the editor plumbed for legislative action to rectify the former slaves’ plight, perhaps more under the guise of getting rid of the hated bureau’s presence in the state than any humanitarian epiphany. On the other hand, outraged Kentuckians agreed with the Frankfort Daily Kentucky Yeoman’s stance that the state had been repaid for its wartime loyalty with treatment like a “conquered territory.” Rhetoric appealed to the unapologetic, unrepentant, and decidedly racist masses as “the victors” lost the peace.26
Minor skirmishes before both off-year and state elections, even before the next presidential race in 1868, set the tone for postwar Kentucky politics—the introduction of heroes and villains in the guise of personae as politicians who had served loyally in either blue or gray uniforms. Political shuttlecocks continued to be the constitutional amendments and other national legislation on behalf of blacks, the federal presence in the guise of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and bickering over perceived national government “robbery” of private property through uncompensated emancipation—in essence, the continuation of wartime federalism from Washington as translated to postwar congressional or Radical reconstruction. Eventually, as is typical in American politics, the third party (Conservative Union) effectively died by 1867, and divergent interest groups split apart the commonwealth’s focus into western, central, northern, and eastern blocks with the agrarian conflict with commercial power reshaping populist insurgencies of the future. Crop niche sectionalism (old hemp-growing Bluegrass against tobacco-growing western Kentucky) might be identified. Even more prophetic, as state matters overtook nationally imposed ones in the late 1860s, the wisdom of William Breckinridge surfaced in earnest. Bourbon Democrats reflected the old and seemingly worshiped “at the dead shrine of the dead past,” while New Departure Democrats sought a reborn Kentucky while putting the issues of the antebellum and wartime periods behind them. New Kentucky reflected New South regionalism—one enlightened on the role of blacks (to modest degree), industrialization, education, and internal improvements, in short, progress and change. Both factions of the Democratic Party stood in contradistinction to the Republicans. And Kentucky Republicans could not even get their war hero Ulysses S. Grant the state’s electoral vote in the 1868 election.27
Outside help came for black enfranchisement in Kentucky and, ironically, not through national government intervention. While the state legislature overwhelmingly rejected the Fifteenth Amendment in January 1869, ratification by other states made it the law of the land. Despite the imposition of residence requirements or boundary changes at local levels to inhibit (and prohibit) black male voters, that sector of the population soon did vote in pivotal precincts while generally identifying with the party of Lincoln. Still, that party could not break identification with wartime oppression and postwar readjustment. Democratic control of the state was itself sharply divided, as shown by bitter maneuvering to overcome emergent sectionalism in opposition to the construction of the Cincinnati Southern Railroad to East Tennessee. Yet, by the mid-1870s, Reconstruction began to fade as an issue. Federal military or bureaucratic presence had ended in the state, and even party schisms abated. Black integration took place in places with Jim Crow, segregation, and local rules for vagrancy lying in the future. Unfortunately, Kentucky’s reputation for violence, especially against freed people, never seemed to subside. The commonwealth’s stubbornness on the race issue and Breckinridge’s confidence that slavery would ultimately die without emancipation could be updated to suggest that racial barriers and prejudices would do likewise. But just when was anyone’s guess in the decades after 1865.28
National or formal Reconstruction of the Confederate South ended with the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of the last federal occupation troops the following year. Kentuckian Benjamin H. Bristow played a prominent role in engineering Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’s ascendancy to the White House. Bristow was a progressive exponent of a South influenced by prosperity built on free institutions and untapped resources. Civil War–era issues had become historical anachronisms as he sought North-South reconciliation (reflected in the deal sending Hayes to Washington). Yet, in some measure, Kentucky in reconstruction had ended several years earlier. At least, some historians think so. The Democratic governor J. B. McCreary, himself an ex-Confederate colonel, declared in his 1875 inaugural address that he wished to see “the records of secession, coercion and reconstruction filed away forever,” with the American people advocating peace and reconciliation “under the Constitution as the guarantee of our liberties and the safeguard of every citizen.”29
Even then, the campaign leading to McCreary’s election had underscored new focus. The former Unionist John Marshall Harlan (who eventually became one of the most widely acclaimed justices of the U.S. Supreme Court) honed in on state issues, while McCreary pounded those more closely national. Violence in the commonwealth would plague the victor’s term, as it had for all the wartime and postwar reconstruction phases. Kentucky, even at epoch’s end, still identified with unrepentant destabilization and wistful yearning to join the defunct Confederacy in spirit, masking the modernizing progress everywhere, perhaps, but in the hearts and actions of some leaders and followers. It took another two decades for the 1873 push for constitutional reform to revise the old 1849 basic charter that had condoned slavery so as to give all Kentuckians control of their government and ensure “the new order” springing forth in the breasts of more enlightened politicians and citizens the chance for fruition.30
Shortly after midnight on January 11, 1865, Louisville’s famed hostelry the Galt House burned to the ground. The loss of life was small, but the structure could not saved. “The stately edifice, so long the pride and fame of our city, is now a huge, unshapely mass,” wailed the Louisville Democrat. The building’s destruction somehow symbolized the war years’ cataclysm, the loss of institutions and lives for the American South, if not precisely for Kentucky. Nonetheless, no Kentuckian quite knew what impended in the new year, although rebuilding, if not the hotel, certainly the state and nation, had to occupy old patriarchs and nouveau characters alike. The Galt House had hosted numerous public figures, civilian and military alike, drawn to or through Kentucky by the conflict. The hotel had helped the river town transition to the commercial and technological revolution that wedded steam to boat and then to land rail car. As the Civil War wound toward its close, survivors had to return to harnessing that revolution. Now, while binding up wounds and mourning the dead, they needed to erect a new commonwealth on social as well as other revolutions. The question would be, could they do so, and in what form?31
Native sons and wartime visitors had driven both intrastate and nation-state difficulties. The antebellum Bourbonism of the Clays and Breckinridges as well as the upstart wartime disruptions of Bramlette, Boyle and Burbridge, Morgan, Basil Duke, and “Stovepipe” Johnson all provided a legacy that would drive postwar directions in Kentucky’s world. Crisis and chaos in people’s lives as well among institutions hampered the way toward progress and enlightened decisions. New Departure Democracy may, ultimately, have been as predictable as the immediate simmering embers of bile and gall, and just how and when one would be superseded and the other emerge would remain shrouded in the wake of rebellion’s defeat. The abiding questions of reconstruction, whether during war or peace, were principally the schisms that rent the commonwealth to begin with—states’ rights versus federalism or nationalism and the human and economic dimensions whereby Africans found an adjusted place in Kentucky’s society. If the state never quite fit Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s cryptic “pariah among the elect” in retrospect, those words evoke the bitterness of the age. Kentucky certainly supplied the supreme irony—a loyal border slave state oppressed for its allegiance, confronted with the process of national unification and modernization through artificially imposed nation building, yet saddled by the reactive, protective inclinations of local tribalism seeking to preserve the comfortable stability of the past, the known, and perhaps patriarchal rule. Overlying the scene was a social taboo of racism.
Each generation will reexamine the era of Civil War and Reconstruction, perhaps redefining its parameters and paradigms. Traditional negative definition via the William Dunning school has changed through the reinterpretations of John Hope Franklin and Eric Foner (to name two) and the new synthesis via the work of Richard Curry and Michael Fitzgerald. For a state like Kentucky—avowedly one of the stars missing from the Confederate Stars and Bars—whether or not it seemed to join the Lost Cause after the war remains a moot question today. The generation to which that mattered has long passed. The traditional interpretation of E. Merton Coulter notwithstanding, the more nuanced language of Lowell Harrison, James C. Klotter, Ross A. Webb, and Victor Howard suggests a freshness of new visitation of old evidence and broader scope. Throughout the South, familial curiosity concerning forebears’ participation in Union blue as well as Confederate gray has reshaped the honor of the dead and the appreciation of the living. Perhaps today’s generation will interpret the occupied American South with Kentucky included, in the lens of nation building in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Cynthia Watson’s concluding thought remains prophetic: “Nation-building appears one of the predominant challenges facing the world in this decade, if not this century.” Americans and Kentuckians certainly thought so 150 years ago. Perhaps their experience counsels the lesson of patience amid despair, the need to end outside (if well-intentioned) meddling to resolve inherent problems of internal tribalism, measured readjustment of men, institutions, policies, and programs and not to expect instant reconciliation following rancid rancor of political conflict based on high economic stakes and constitutionalism, familial division, and, above all, ethnic hatred.32
In addition to Watson’s, analysis by another modern scholar, T. David Mason, on sustaining peace after civil war introduces the thought that “outsiders” (in this case, the international community) can reduce the chances of the resumption of armed conflict after civil strife by first “introducing peacekeeping forces,” then “investing in economic development and reconstruction,” and, finally, “establishing democratic political institutions tailored to the configuration or ethnic and religious cleavages in the society.” Confederate general Richard Taylor, born at “Springfields” near Louisville, appropriately entitled his postwar memoirs Destruction and Reconstruction. However, replacing fences, butchered livestock, and disrupted patterns of living—the destruction of war—required less time than anticipated for Kentuckians, left alone to resolve that part of the destruction. By the end of the 1860s, the state and the region had a thirst for new directions—for commerce, enterprise, and self-control of their own destiny. Outside intervention from the national government, which had continued in the postcombat phase, still butted against that destiny, with the central cause for such intervention—matters of race—remaining contentious for decades thereafter. A revolution ending human bondage gravitated but slowly toward human equality. Slow to embrace the realities of emancipation and the protections of constitutional amendment, Kentucky mind-sets concerning lost human property meant that this part of America’s nation building would take longer—perhaps a whole century at least, or even more. There would necessarily be new wine in old bottles to effect the solution of the problem of race and the problems of federalism as they affected the commonwealth. Even today, impatient Americans still cannot grasp the element of time required for democratizing the world, and leading by example is lost where perception speaks as loudly as words to a globalized information age. Kentucky’s sons and daughters of the Tragic Era might teach us something about mindsets and problems. They may even contradict today’s conventional wisdom concerning civil war and reconstruction.33
1. Frank Furlong Mathias, ed., Incidents and Experiences in the Life of Thomas W. Parsons from 1826 to 1900 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), 143–44.
2. Cynthia A. Watson, Nation-Building: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC Clio, 2004), 3. See also Robert C. Orr, ed., Winning the Peace: An American Strategy for Post-Conflict Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.: CSIS, July 2004); U.S. Department of Defense, Directive 3000.05, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations, Washington, D.C., November 28, 2005; James Dobbins et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building, from Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 2003).
3. James Jay Carafano, “Post-Conflict Operations from Europe to Iraq,” Heritage Lectures, no. 844, June 21, 2004 (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, July 13, 2004).
4. Watson, Nation-Building, chap. 2, esp. pp. 10–11.
5. Ibid., 12–13.
6. Ibid., 12, 14.
7. Ibid., 13–19; Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York: Norton, 2005), 148–49.
8. Penny M. Miller, Kentucky Politics and Government: Do We Stand United? (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 24–25; Lowell H. Harrison and James C. Klotter, A New History of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), pts. 1 and 2, esp. chaps. 10–13; E. Merton Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926), chaps. 1–5.
9. Harrison and Klotter, New History, chap. 14; Lowell H. Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), chaps. 1–4. See also my Forts Henry and Donelson: Key to the Confederate Heartland (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), and Fort Donelson’s Legacy: War and Society in Kentucky and Tennessee, 1862–1863 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).
10. Miller, Kentucky Politics and Government, 25 (quoting John Ed Pearce, Divide and Dissent: Kentucky Politics, 1930–1963 [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987], 13); Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, chaps. 6–10; Harrison and Klotter, New History, 195–207; Harrison, Civil War in Kentucky, chap. 5; Schott J. Lucas, “Indignities, Wrongs, and Outrages: Military and Guerrilla Incursions on Kentucky’s Civil War Home Front,” Filson Club Quarterly 73 (1999): 355–76.
11. See Victor B. Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky: Emancipation and Freedom, 1862–1864 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), chaps. 1–2; Thomas W. Speed, The Union Cause in Kentucky, 1860–1865 (New York: Putnam’s, 1907), 15–161; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861–1865, 70 vols. in 128 pts. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), ser. 3, vol. 4, p. 1269, and ser. 4, vol. 1, p. 962; Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 3, 4, 15, 29–32, 42, 127; Mary Clay Berry, Voices from the Century Before: The Odyssey of a Nineteenth Century Kentucky Family (New York: Arcade, 1997); John David Smith and William Cooper Jr., eds., A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky: The Diary of Frances Peter (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000); and Richard Troutman, ed., The Heavens Are Weeping: The Diaries of George R. Browder, 1852–1886 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1987).
12. The details of Kentucky wartime reconstruction can be traced in Lewis Collins and Richard H. Collins, History of Kentucky, 2 vols. (Covington, Ky.: Collins, 1882), 1:85–150 (“Annals of Kentucky”); James Louis Head, Atonement of John Brooks: The Story of the True Johnny “Reb” Who Did Not Come Marching Home (Geneva, Fla.: Heritage, 2001); and Sean Michael O’Brien, Mountain Partisans: Guerrilla Warfare in the Southern Appalachians, 1861–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999), chap. 6.
13. Harrison and Klotter, New History, 205–6; Michael A. Flannery, “Kentucky History Revisited: The Role of the Civil War in Shaping Kentucky’s Collective Consciousness,” Filson Club Quarterly 71 (1997): 27–51; Palmer H. Boeger, “The Great Kentucky Hog Swindle of 1864,” Journal of Southern History 28 (February 1962): 50–70; William J. Davis, ed., The Partisan Rangers of the Confederate States Army: Memoirs of General Adam R. Johnson (Austin, Tex.: State House, 1995); John Sickles, The Legends of Sue Mundy and One Armed Berry: Confederate Guerrillas (Merrillville, Ind.: Heritage, 1999); Thomas Shelby Watson, Confederate Guerrilla Sue Mundy: A Biography of Confederate Soldier Jerome Clarke (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008); and Marion B. Lucas, “Camp Nelson, Kentucky during the Civil War: Cradle of Liberty or Refugee Death Camp?” Filson Club Quarterly 63 (October 1989): 439–52.
14. On Lyon, see B. L. Roberson, “The Courthouse Burnin’est General,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 23 (December 1964): 372–78 (citing Hall Allen, Center of Conflict [Paducah, n.d.], 146; and Edward M. Coffman, ed., “Memoirs of Hylan B. Lyon, Brigadier General, C.S.A.,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 18 [March 1959]: 35–53).
15. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 37–38; see also Silvana R. Siddali, From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
16. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, 258–61; Harrison, Civil War in Kentucky, 88–94; Miller, Kentucky Politics and Government, 25; Foner, Reconstruction, 38.
17. The details of postwar Kentucky reconstruction can be traced in Collins and Collins, History of Kentucky, 1:151–246; Robert Emmett McDowell, City of Conflict: Louisville in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (Louisville, Ky.: Louisville Civil War Round Table, 1962), chaps. 13–14; O. S. Barton, Quantrill: A True Story Told by His Scout John McCorkle (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), chap. 13; Gary Robert Matthews, Basil Wilson Duke, CSA: The Right Man in the Right Place (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), chap. 14; Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); and T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2002), 196–98, 201, 216, 218–20.
18. McDowell, City of Conflict, chap. 14; Harrison, Civil War in Kentucky, 101–2.
19. Harrison, Civil War in Kentucky, 101–2; Harrison and Klotter, New History, chaps. 15–16; Miller, Kentucky Politics and Government, 37; Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, chaps. 12, 15, 17–18; Ross A. Webb, “Kentucky: ‘Pariah among the Elect,’” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States during Reconstruction, ed. Richard O. Curry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), chap. 4; James F. Hopkins, A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1951), chap. 6.
20. Leonard P. Curry, Rail Routes South: Louisville’s Fight for the Southern Market, 1865–1872 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969), chaps. 2–4; George H. Yater, Two Hundred Years at the Falls of the Ohio: A History of Louisville and Jefferson County (Louisville, Ky.: Filson Club, 1987), chap. 9.
21. Miller, Kentucky Politics and Government, 25–27.
22. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, chaps. 9–10.
23. Harrison and Klotter, New History, 239–40; Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, chap. 13; Hambleton Tapp and James C. Klotter, Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865–1900 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1977), chaps. 1–2.
24. Webb, ‘“Pariah among the Elect,’” 118–19.
25. Ross A. Webb, “‘The Past Is Never Dead, It’s Not Even Past’: Benjamin P. Runkle and the Freedmen’s Bureau in Kentucky, 1866–1870,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 84 (1986): 344–57; Richard E. Sears, Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), li-lxiv, chaps. 4–8.
26. Harrison and Klotter, New History, 240; Webb, ‘“The Past Is Never Dead,’” 344–46 (citing Daily Kentucky Yeoman [Frankfort], January 17, 24, 1866; and Louisville Daily Journal, January 4, February 8, June 11, 1866).
27. Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment, 416–17; Harrison and Klotter, New History, 243; Webb, “‘Pariah among the Elect,’” 124–25.
28. See Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky, chaps. 9–11; Harrison and Klotter, New History, 234–39, 247–48.
29. Harrison and Klotter, New History, 239–46; Webb, ‘“Pariah among the Elect,’” 134–40.
30. Harrison and Klotter, New History, 249–58; Tapp and Klotter, Decades of Discord, chap. 12.
31. Yater, Two Hundred Years at the Falls, 95; McDowell, City of Conflict, 185–86.
32. Watson, Nation-Building, 19; Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (New York: D. Appleton, 1879).
33. T. David Mason, Sustaining the Peace after Civil War (Carlisle, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2007), iii, 70–78.