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Civil War, Part One

Fighting Spirit, Divided Families, and
the Confederate War of Proclamations

Kentucky was the only state that declared neutrality in the Civil War; when neutrality ended, the state endured an inner civil war over the hearts and minds of the people, a war of proclamations that moved the Louisville Journal correspondent in Paducah to joke that, when something was to be done, the order of the day was to publish a proclamation. “We are blessed,” he wrote, “with a ‘make proclamation' President, and ‘make proclamation' Generals, if with nothing else.” But this war was in dead earnest and involved extreme rhetoric that produced excessive actions and generated fear, uncertainty, and violence. Fellow Kentucky natives Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis both won the contest—Kentuckians joined the South in sentiment, but Lincoln won his highest goals of saving the Union and freeing the slaves of Kentucky. The commonwealth remained in the Union, but the dynamic propaganda war for the loyalty of the people made the position of Union military commander in Kentucky one of the most challenging in the war. General George McClellan said that “the delicate post” required uncommon sensitivity; General Ulysses S. Grant observed that it required extraordinary wisdom and common sense.¹

Lincoln's most challenging year was 1864, and one of the worst developments that could have occurred would have been the reality of the greatest fear of Union commanders in Kentucky—a transformation of the conflict for the hearts and minds of the people from thought into action—a general uprising of pro-Confederate citizens against Union authority. On March 15, 1864, the moment of greatest crisis in the history of the war in Kentucky, the state stood on the brink of such a rebellion. Serving as the Union commander of Kentucky was so stressful that the first general had to resign and leave the state for his health; the second had a nervous breakdown and went home on leave to recover; and others were removed against their wishes, including one who was a hero to unionists and African Americans but so despised by most Kentuckians that he and his family fled from the state into exile.

Henry Clay's devotion to the Union was deeply ingrained in Kentucky tradition, but with it came the assumption that slavery was a necessary evil and the belief in a state's right to determine what to do about slavery. Kentuckians were divided over which side to take in the war, and, therefore, they agreed initially to unite behind Clay's vision of saving the Union through compromise. When all the compromises failed, state leaders agreed to declare neutrality. Five months into the war, troops from both sides entered Kentucky and forced the General Assembly to choose, and it declared for the union. At that point, with both sides considering the state vital, they began competing for the soul of Kentucky in a war of proclamations to the people. In some of the most immoderate propaganda in American history, both sides predicted disaster if the other side won. Confederates challenged the people to rise in armed rebellion, and Unionists demanded unquestioned loyalty and positive action in support of the Union cause. The Union army occupied Kentucky and secured its cities, but, in the countryside throughout most of the state, guerrillas favoring one side or the other and outlaws interested only in themselves terrorized the people. By Lincoln's reelection, most Kentuckians sympathized with his Confederate opponents.

The Kentucky military tradition remained strong, and orators who defended the state's neutrality proclaimed that the men of Kentucky were willing to fight when necessary. Over five thousand people attended the Union meeting in Louisville on April 19, 1861, and heard former lieutenant governor and U.S. senator Archibald Dixon declare: “Kentucky is always ready to fight. She was born to fight when necessary, and when the soil of Kentucky is stained with blood, and the spirit of her sons aroused, let her enemies tremble!” Kentucky's fighting men on both sides were among the most courageous, aggressive soldiers their commanders had ever seen. They were admired as fighters par excellence, eager to rush into combat where the battle was most bloody and contested. About 40,000 men served in Confederate forces and over 100,000 in the Union military, including African Americans. Physicians examining Kentuckians entering the Union army in the last two years of the war reported them to be athletic and muscular with the intelligence and courage of ideal soldiers. A surgeon declared that Kentucky's typical African American recruit was as “well calculated to make as good a soldier as ever marched to the field of battle.” Kentucky troops had unusually high morale under difficult circumstances, and this inspired men from other states.²

The Civil War in Kentucky. Dick Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab.

The First Confederate Infantry Brigade, known as the Orphan Brigade, was one of the most famous units in the Confederate army. The men were “orphans” because the official government of their home state had not seceded and had not joined the Confederacy—they were fighting for a nation that did not include their state. When they bravely attacked in the Battle of Stones River and took heavy casualties, their commander, General John C. Breckinridge, exclaimed: “My poor orphan brigade! They have cut it to pieces!” In the same battle on the other side, the troops in the Union Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry Regiment were orphans as well in a different sense. As Kentucky became less and less Union in sentiment and more and more Confederate, the men found themselves fighting a war that made them as unpopular at home in Kentucky as Vietnam War veterans were in the 1970s. At Stones River, General William S. Rosecrans watched them marching by on the Murfreesboro-Nashville Turnpike and declared them his “Orphan Regiment.”³

Both these Kentucky orphan units earned reputations as extremely dedicated, self-sacrificing fighters. For the Confederate orphans, the Battle of Shiloh was their baptism of fire, and on the morning of the first day they had the frustrating assignment of being in reserve. Captain D. E. McKendree formed his company in the road and said: “Boys, we are about to be engaged with the foe for the first time. It will pain me to see any man falter; and for heaven's sake don't let it be said, by those whom we love at home, that one member of Company D disgraced himself.” The battle began, and brigade commander Colonel Robert P. Trabue said to General William J. Hardee: “General, I have a Kentucky brigade here. What shall I do with it?” Hardee, one of the most respected authorities on tactics in America, said: “Put it in where the fight is the thickest, sir.” According to Private Johnny Green: “In a few minutes we were in the thickest of the fight.” They fought the rest of the day where the fighting was the hardest, attacking once with bayonets fixed; in the afternoon they were advancing on the Hornets Nest when Union general Benjamin M. Prentiss raised the white flag and surrendered. On the second day, they were in the thickest of the fight again, on the Confederate left in front of Shiloh Church along the road that led to the public landing. They attacked in heavy timber near the Hornets Nest and were caught in a cross fire of enemy cannon that cost them fifty-five men, who fell within thirty square yards. They went into the battle with twenty-four hundred men, and one-third were killed or wounded, a heavy casualty rate. They continued fighting in the major campaigns in the West, and, when the war ended, only about six hundred came home from a total of over four thousand on their roll. Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston declared: “The Kentucky Brigade was the finest body of soldiers I ever saw.”⁴

The Union orphans, the Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry Regiment, were organized in Louisville in September 1861. When a unit first experienced combat, it was called seeing the elephant, and the Fifteenth Regiment saw the elephant in the largest Civil War battle on Kentucky soil, the Battle of Perryville, the climax of Confederate general Braxton Bragg's invasion of Kentucky in 1862. Bragg gained the initiative because of John Hunt Morgan's raid on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (L&N) tunnels north of Gallatin, Tennessee, an incursion that closed Union general Don Carlos Buell's supply line for ninety-eight days. Throughout the invasion, Bragg failed to coordinate with Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith's army, and only about one-third of Bragg's army and about half of Buell's actually fought at Perryville on October 8, 1862. The clash began when foraging soldiers accidentally discovered each other while searching for scarce drinking water in Doctor's Creek. Skirmishing began, and, at 2:00 P.M., Confederate infantry advanced across the creek and marched up the hill against Squire Bottom's house on the Union left, where the Union Fifteenth Kentucky was waiting in battle line.

Defending the angle of the Bottom house salient, the men of the Fifteenth were in the hottest and most crucial location on the battlefield. They were assaulted on their front and right and at one time were outnumbered seven to one. They fought until they ran out of ammunition and then fixed bayonets and withdrew in order about a mile to the Russell house, where a new Union line was forming. They caught their breath over the brow of a small hill at the Russell house, and, when brigade commander General Lovell H. Rousseau from Louisville ordered them to move to the crest of the rise and form in line again to meet the advancing Confederates, they went quickly, without any hesitation—Rousseau took off his cap, placed it on his sword, and waved it back and forth shouting, “Hurrah for Old Kentucky!” They held the Russell house hill for thirty minutes until relieved by a Union brigade, and as they withdrew into the woods a member of Buell's staff recalled that they “seemed to stagger and reel like men who had been beating against a great storm.” In the battle, they had 66 men killed and 136 wounded, and, of the 969 men who volunteered for the regiment, only about 250 came home at the end of the war. Tactically, Perryville was a draw; when the fighting ended at dark, the battle lines of both sides were still intact, and the Fifteenth Kentucky deserved much of the credit for the success on the Union side.⁵

General John Hunt Morgan, the most famous Kentuckian in the war, is respected by military historians as one of the greatest special-forces commanders in history. He organized the Confederate Second Kentucky Cavalry Regiment, whose troops were feared, not only as guerrilla raiders, but also as ferocious fighters in stand-up cavalry fights. World War II general George S. Patton admired Morgan for marching light and fast and keeping the enemy off balance. Morgan sent out scouts in all directions and confused the enemy with messages from his telegraph operator, George Ellsworth—he was never surprised when he was on the move. And, when a fight came, his men dismounted and, armed with rifles and standing in a curved skirmish line with several feet between each man, welcomed Union cavalry charges into a cross fire called Morgan's jaws of death. On August 21, 1862, near Gallatin, Tennessee, Morgan's men fought a Union cavalry force of equal size under fellow Kentuckian General Richard W. Johnson, a West Point graduate born near Smithland. Johnson ordered a standard saber charge across a large meadow into Morgan's line, and, when the Confederates fired, so many of Johnson's men and horses went down that the others wheeled and galloped away, according to one of the Union official reports, like “a drove of stampeded buffaloes.” Morgan proclaimed: “Officers and men, your conduct makes me proud to command you. Fight always as you fought yesterday and you are invincible.”⁶

Morgan's most famous and effective opponent in the Union cavalry was fellow Kentuckian Colonel Frank Wolford. Wolford recruited the Union First Kentucky Cavalry Regiment and led the men in hard fighting that earned them the sobriquet “Wild Riders.” His men respected him greatly and called him “Old Wolford” and “Old Warrior.” He was a Mexican War veteran, a former state legislator, and an outstanding criminal lawyer from Liberty, Kentucky. He was five feet, ten inches tall and sturdy in build with unruly black hair and a large nose, powerful chin and fiery gray eyes—people said he looked like an angry hawk about to attack. An exemplar of Kentucky's tradition of fighting spirit, he ingrained the same spirit in his men, who were quite as aggressive. According to the Cincinnati Commercial, when three or four of his men were captured and imprisoned in North Carolina, after about thirteen months, they decided they were not to be exchanged, and, since smallpox had been reported in the area, they created a ruse to escape. They heated a pointed shard of iron and burned small sores on their faces and bodies that resembled smallpox lesions. Their Confederate guards isolated them in a small building far from the camp, and they escaped and returned to duty in Kentucky. The story might be legendary, but that it appeared in the news shows how Wolford's men were regarded in public opinion.⁷

John Hunt Morgan respected and feared Wolford more than any of his opponents because, in Morgan's estimation, Wolford was unmatched in the Union cavalry in energy, indefatigability, and gallantry. Morgan knew that, unlike most Union cavalry officers, Wolford was not afraid of him. The Wild Riders proved that they were equal to Morgan's men early in the war by giving them their only defeat in their first twenty months of fighting. On May 5, 1862, Wolford's men were the advance of a Union cavalry force that surprised Morgan at Lebanon, Tennessee, but Morgan's men rallied on the town square and returned fire in a sharp fight during which Wolford was struck twice, once in his left side above the hip and again in his pelvis. Ignoring the wounds, he withdrew his men to reload and led them in another mounted charge. As the fight continued, he was captured and was taken out of town with Morgan's men, who were retreating in a rout called the Lebanon Races. Bleeding and feeling faint, Wolford fell behind his fleeing captors and reunited with his own men, who took him back into town in a carriage. Morgan and his men fled across the Cumberland River; Morgan's horse, Black Bess, was lost, and his men scattered.⁸

The bullet that entered Wolford's left side apparently perforated his intestines and exited from his body. Surgeons removed the bullet from his pelvis and sutured both wounds, and he went home to Liberty to recover. After two and one half months, he was back in the saddle chasing Morgan once more, even though the wound in his side remained unhealed. This became public knowledge announced in the Louisville Journal, and people were astounded that he continued fighting and that he led his regiment in the one-thousand-mile pursuit of Morgan the next summer through Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. Riding hard and taking only brief naps, this was almost an unbelievable feat for a man with an unhealed, draining wound. When Morgan surrendered in northeastern Ohio, he honored Wolford by giving him his silver spurs—a gift Morgan had received from admirers in Lexington—and his sword and horse.⁹

As Margaret Mitchell stated in Gone with the Wind, people in most states welcomed the coming of the Civil War. On both sides, they gathered eagerly for flag presentations and watched their boys march off to war. But Kentucky was more evenly divided in sentiment than any other state, and, with many families and friendships shattered, the hearts of Kentuckians were filled with sadness and great gloom. “Kentucky, more than any other state, would live the ‘Brother's War,’” wrote Stephen Berry, historian of the family of Mary Todd Lincoln. Kentuckians had strong family, cultural, and commercial ties with both the North and the South. Many settlers had emigrated from Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, but other Kentuckians had family members in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other northern states. Steamboat trade delivered Kentucky hemp and many other products to southern customers along the Mississippi River, but canals, steamboats, and railroads connected the Louisville trade of tobacco and manufactured goods to Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and New York. As discussed above, Kentucky had a smaller percentage of slaves in the population than the Deep South states, but this did not mean that Kentuckians were weak in their resolve to preserve slavery. Kentucky Unionists supported the Union of Henry Clay, the Union that protected the constitutional right to own slave property.¹⁰

Probably no family in the nation was more tragically divided than that of Abraham Lincoln. His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was from the wealthy Lexington family of Robert Smith Todd, and they were slaveholders. Lowell H. Harrison, in Lincoln of Kentucky, tells how rumors in Washington asserted that Lincoln's wife was pro-Confederate and that she was spying for the South. There was nothing to the rumors; indeed, few were more emotionally committed to the Union cause than Mary, who said that she hoped her brothers fighting in the Confederate army would be killed. She explained: “They would kill my husband if they could, and destroy our government—the dearest of all things to us.”¹¹

Mary was one of fourteen children of Robert Todd, and Berry in House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War—the first study of the Todd family—reveals that six siblings supported the Union and eight the Confederacy. Mary had a brother, three half brothers, and three brothers-in-law who fought for the South. By the end of 1861, the two sides had broken the bonds of family affection and bitterly regarded each other as enemies. Her half brother David Todd expressed the contempt of the prosouthern Todds for Lincoln in his often-repeated statement: “I would like to cut ‘Old Abe's' heart out.” Another one of Mary's half brothers, Samuel Todd, fought as a private in a Louisiana regiment and was mortally wounded on the second day at Shiloh. Northern reporters, full of criticism for Mary, joined the southern faction of the Todd family in blaming Lincoln for the war that caused Samuel's death.¹²

Among the family before the war, Lincoln and Mary were closest to her younger sister Emilie and her husband, Benjamin Hardin Helm, commander of the Orphan Brigade who was mortally wounded at Chickamauga. Before the war, Helm was one of the most prominent lawyers in Kentucky with a practice in Louisville. Son of the former Kentucky governor John Larue Helm, he graduated from West Point and the University of Louisville law school and studied advanced law at Harvard. After President Lincoln offered him the favored position of Union army paymaster with the rank of major, Helm recalled: “The most painful moment of my life was when I declined the generous offer of my brother-in-law.” When Lincoln learned that Helm was killed leading a charge of the Orphan Brigade at Chickamauga, the news was particularly painful because Helm died fighting for the other side. “I feel as David did of old when he was told of the death of Absalom,” he said. “Would to God that I had died for thee! Oh, Absalom, my son, my son.”¹³

Widowed Emilie, her three children, and her mother, Betsy, attempted to return through the lines to Lexington, but Union officials refused them passage because Emilie refused to take the loyalty oath. “Send her to me,” telegraphed Lincoln. She traveled to Baltimore and left her mother and the two younger children and went with four-year-old Katie to visit Mary and Abraham in the White House. They stayed for a week, and once during the visit Katie and her ten-year-old cousin Tad Lincoln were looking at family photographs. Tad held up one of his father and said: “This is the President.” Katie replied: “That is not the President, Mr. Davis is President.” Tad said, “Hurrah for Abe Lincoln!” and she answered, “Hurrah for Jeff Davis!” People in Washington complained about Emilie's presence in the White House, and Union general Daniel Sickles told Lincoln: “You should not have that rebel in your house.” Lincoln replied: “Excuse me, General Sickles, my wife and I are in the habit of choosing our own guests. We do not need from our friends either advice or assistance in that matter.”¹⁴

Reverend Robert J. Breckinridge, Lincoln's friend and Kentucky's most faithful supporter of the Union throughout the war, had two sons in the Union army and two sons, a son-in-law, and a nephew in Confederate military service. The oldest son and namesake, Robert Jr., left to join the Confederate army without saying good-bye to his father. Second son William C. P. Breckinridge joined Morgan's command during the First Kentucky Raid in July 1862, and by the Christmas Raid that year he was a colonel in charge of one of Morgan's two brigades. With the other brigade commander, Colonel Basil W. Duke, he fought in the successful rearguard skirmish at Rolling Fork Creek against Union colonel John Marshall Harlan. “Willie,” as he was called, later led his Ninth Kentucky Cavalry Regiment in the Atlanta campaign, and one night, when he learned that his younger brother Joseph, in the Union army, had been captured, he rode through the night twelve miles to visit him and give him some gold coins. Robert Breckinridge's son-in-law Theophilus Steele distinguished himself as an officer in Morgan's command.¹⁵

Like most Kentucky families, Unionist Breckinridge and his Confederate family members reconciled at the end of the war, with the exception of his daughter-in-law, Issa Desha Breckinridge, Willie's wife. Robert Breckinridge lived in both Danville and Lexington, and, even though he was frequently in Lexington, she refused to allow him to see his granddaughter Ella. “I assure you,” she wrote, “that neither I nor our child expect or desire anything from you.” One day he happened to see Ella and her nurse, Jane, on a street in Lexington, and Jane handed Ella to him. Embracing her and holding her up to look into her eyes, he said: “God bless the child. She is the prettiest thing I ever saw.” Willie visited his father frequently after the war, and he attempted to persuade Issa to forgive her father-in-law, but she and Willie had two additional children, and she refused to allow Robert to see any of them until over two years after the conflict—the painful estrangement lasted five years.¹⁶

Because of the intense emotions generated by the Civil War in Kentucky, one of the most tragic family experiences was when a parent lost a son fighting for the other side. This happened to Henry Clay's biographer George Prentice, who had become one of the most prominent and colorful newspaper editors in the nation. On the editorial page of the Louisville Journal, Prentice reminded his readers that, in supporting the Union but opposing emancipation and enlistment of African American soldiers in the Union army, he was following the legacy of his hero, Henry Clay. Prentice's wife, Harriet Benham, was a Louisville native, and they had four children, two of whom died as infants. Harriet was pro-Confederate, and it broke Prentice's heart when both sons, William Courtland and Clarence Joseph, enlisted in John Hunt Morgan's command. However, this gave Prentice a special interest in Morgan, and he realized that readers enjoyed reading Morgan sagas and humorous gibes. When Morgan was captured and incarcerated illegally in the Ohio State Penitentiary, Prentice quipped: “I hope John Morgan may live five thousand years to serve one year in the penitentiary for each horse he has stolen!” Morgan's regimental newspaper, the Vidette, answered: “If Prentice could live one minute for every lie he has uttered, he would outlive John Morgan at that rate.”¹⁷

Courtland had recently joined Morgan's men when he had his baptism of fire in possibly the most intense small battle pitting Kentuckians against Kentuckians—the Battle of Augusta, September 27, 1862. It occurred during the Confederate invasion of Kentucky in 1862 when Lieutenant Colonel Basil Duke, Morgan's second in command and brother-in-law, led 450 men—half of Morgan's brigade—on a raid that was intended to attack Cincinnati. The Home Guard in Augusta, under Colonel Joshua Bradford, took cover on the second floor of the brick buildings on Upper Street and, when Duke's men appeared, opened on them with deadly rifle cross fire from both sides of the street and at very close range. Duke's men returned fire with their rifles and two cannon, and, when they crashed into doorways, the home guards met them in hand-to-hand fighting. As a Confederate artilleryman recalled: “Wherever Kentucky met Kentucky; it was horrible.” The home guards were outnumbered over three to one, and, when Duke's men set fire to the buildings they occupied, they surrendered. The Home Guard had nine men killed and fifteen wounded, and Duke lost so many that he canceled his plan to raid Cincinnati—he had twenty-one killed and eighteen wounded.¹⁸

Some of Duke's men were too seriously wounded to be moved, and Courtland Prentice was one of them; he was shot through the lungs. His father rushed to Augusta to attend him, and two physicians attempted to save him, but he died forty-eight hours after the fight. He was twenty-five years old. His father published a tribute, reprinted in the Richmond Enquirer, the New York Times, and other papers, and a father's grief and anguish emanated from every word: “O, if he had fallen in his country's service, fallen with his burning eyes fixed in love and devotion upon the flag that for more than three-fourths of a century has been a star of worship to his ancestors, his early death, though still terrible, might have been borne by a father's heart; but alas! The reflection that he fell in armed rebellion against that glorious old banner…is full of desolation and almost of despair.” Readers sent Prentice poems. One of them had the following verse:

Would God the Stars and Stripes had waved above thee,

Thy star of worship, on the battle-plain:

Yet not the less my heart shall mourn and love thee,

I only know Kentucky's son is slain!¹⁹

George Prentice's heart was doubly broken because, along with many others at the time, he believed that Kentucky was crucial in the Union war effort and Clarence had died fighting with secessionists who were determined to take Kentucky out of the Union. The editor and many Unionists appreciated how vital Kentucky was to the Union war effort. McClellan, when he was general-in-chief of the armies of the United States, observed on November 7, 1861: “It is absolutely necessary that we shall hold all the State of Kentucky. Not only that, but that the majority of its inhabitants shall be warmly in favor of our cause.” In 1860, among the thirty-three states, Kentucky was ninth in population, fifth in value of livestock, seventh in value of farms, and fifteenth in manufacturing, slightly above average. Kentucky led the nation in the breeding of Thoroughbred horses, and Louisville had one of the largest tobacco markets in the United States. The economic future looked bright in 1859 when the L&N opened, and Thomas D. Clark stated that the decade of the 1850s was the most prosperous and happiest time in Kentucky history.²⁰

As Lincoln observed, Kentucky was the bellwether for the border states, and, if Kentucky had seceded and taken the border states out of the Union, it might have shifted the balance to the Confederacy. James McPherson wrote that, if Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri had seceded, it would have increased the Confederacy's manpower by 45 percent and would have added 80 percent to its manufacturing sector and nearly 40 percent to its number of horses and mules. Lincoln said at the beginning of the war that Kentucky was the “turning weight in the scale.” When Indiana governor Oliver Morton realized that Kentucky neutrality was coming to an end and the Confederate army was poised to invade the state, he wrote: “If we lose Kentucky now, God help us.” A New York Times correspondent in Danville, Kentucky, on October 21, 1861, wrote that Kentucky was more important than Washington, DC. Struggling for words strong enough to express his opinion, he declared: “It will be decisive of the National existence and of Constitutional liberty and popular self government…. The vastest interests of the nation are imperiled by the mighty energies of the rebellion in Kentucky.”²¹

In most states, the decision on which side to take was clear soon after the firing on Fort Sumter, but, in Kentucky, the conflict was still in the future. The struggle for hearts and minds began quietly in the five months of neutrality, and, in refraining from forcing the issue, Lincoln accomplished one of his great victories in the war. He gave time for Unionist sentiment to develop and express itself in electoral majorities in the General Assembly. During the first few months of neutrality, he was very sensitive to opinion in Kentucky, so much so that he allowed Kentucky merchants to export a large quantity of products to the Confederacy on the L&N. This was amazing, allowing a railroad in a neutral state to transport supplies to the enemy. As Stephen Berry pointed out: “Lincoln played a masterful game of chess in the state.” Unionists in Kentucky and other states complained that Lincoln's lenience with Kentucky was harmful to the war effort. The Treasury Department ordered trade closed through Kentucky on May 2, 1861, but the order was ignored, and the ban did not become effective until July. When neutrality ended, the tremendous struggle began for the hearts and minds of the people as the Confederates launched a concerted effort to persuade Kentuckians to rise up and cast out the Unionist legislature and the Union army. Lincoln's victory in keeping Kentucky in the Union can be appreciated fully only through an understanding of Kentucky's approaching civil war within the Civil War.²²

“War in Kentucky has fairly begun,” wrote the Louisville correspondent for the New York Times on September 7, 1861, four days after forces under General Gideon Pillow occupied Columbus and the day after Grant's troops occupied Paducah. Also on September 7, General Robert Anderson, the first Union commander in Kentucky, moved his headquarters from Cincinnati to Louisville. The New York reporter explained that he meant, not a clash of arms, but a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of Kentuckians. The journalist reported that at the moment it was going well for the Union because on the streets of Louisville citizens were speaking favorably about the first of many proclamations to the people of Kentucky, Grant's to the people of Paducah, assuring them that Union troops would not interfere with their slaves. “That's right and proper,” “That's to the point,” and “That's just what the Purchase has needed a long while,” people said on the streets.²³

Confederate soldiers entered Kentucky first, and Confederates conducted the first offensive in the propaganda war. One can hardly imagine a better commander for the Confederate campaign than its first leader, Simon Bolivar Buckner. It was important that he was a Kentuckian with a family background and career identifying him with the Kentucky patriotic and military tradition. He was a military man born in Hart County, son of Aylett Buckner, veteran of the War of 1812. He was six feet tall, athletic, handsome, and strong; among the cadets at West Point he was an outstanding gymnast and the champion of his class in saber fighting. Graduating eleventh of twenty-five in 1844, he returned to West Point as a faculty member. He fought in Winfield Scott's army in Mexico, and it seemed that success followed him wherever he went. When the Civil War began, Buckner was a prominent and respected state official, inspector general of the State Guard, the prosouthern state militia created in 1860, and, by the time Kentucky declared neutrality in May 1861, he had enrolled four thousand men. He supported neutrality with enthusiasm and viewed with concern the creation by the state legislature of the alternate, pro-Union Home Guard. When neutrality ended, both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis offered him a commission as brigadier general. Shrewdly, he declined both; therefore, when on September 11, 1861, the Unionist legislature passed a resolution ordering the Confederate soldiers occupying Columbus to leave the state, he was free to lead most of the state guards south to join the Confederate army. From Nashville, he sent word to the Confederate War Department that he was ready to accept a commission in the Confederate army.²⁴

Meanwhile, on September 12 from Russellville, Kentucky, Buckner published the first Confederate proclamation, “To the Freemen of Kentucky.” The Richmond Dispatch published it under the headline “Soul-Stirring Address from Gen. Buckner” and predicted that, now that all eyes were turned toward Kentucky, people could expect the document to “arouse to action all true men in the State who are worthy of the name of freemen.” In this proclamation, Buckner took on the role of the great Athenian orator Demosthenes, who warned against the rising threat of Philip II of Macedon with such powerful invective that philippic came to mean a discourse filled with vitriolic condemnation. The proclamation mentions Philip, along with several other references to history, to literature, and to the Kentucky military tradition. Buckner called Lincoln a despotic usurper of the principles of liberty in the Constitution and a deceiver who used the period of neutrality to organize Union military units “to overawe the true sentiment of Kentucky.” He challenged the freemen of Kentucky to resist Union authorities, who were attempting to enslave them with illegal orders of arrest comparable to lettres de cachet issued by Louis XIV, and he exaggerated by calling the prisons for Kentucky civilians “water-girt Bastiles,” symbolically encircled with moats like the Bastille had been in Paris. He compared Union troops to the hosts of Attila the Hun and warned that, where they passed, grass would never grow again. He accused northern politicians of spewing forth hatred as deadly as the poisonous vapor of the upas tree, which in legend killed everything it touched, accused the General Assembly of going with the Union for gold, and called Union commander Robert Anderson an assassin with his dagger aimed at the heart of the state, a man preparing to rivet the chains of slavery on Kentuckians. “Let us rise, freemen of Kentucky,” he exhorted, “and show that we are worthy of our sires.”²⁵

Two days after the proclamation, on September 14, General Albert Sidney Johnston, newly named Confederate commander in the West, appointed Buckner to the rank of brigadier general and directed him to lead troops into Kentucky. Johnston was a close friend of Jefferson Davis's, and, according to Charles P. Roland, he “was perhaps the most distinguished field officer of the U.S. Army” when the war began. Grant wrote in his memoirs that, when the war began, Union army leaders feared Johnston more than any other Confederate general. Johnston was born in Washington, Kentucky, and, after graduating from West Point, had a lengthy and distinguished career in the army. He was six feet tall and powerfully built and had a strong and dignified presence. Davis realized that, in the battle for the minds and hearts of Kentuckians, it would prove valuable that Johnston was a Kentucky native, and Johnston sent Buckner into Kentucky with the political contest for the state in mind. Johnston believed that many Kentuckians would rally to the Confederate cause and join the Confederate army.²⁶

On September 17, Johnston sent Buckner and a force of fifteen hundred men—mostly Kentuckians—from Camp Boone in Tennessee into Kentucky to capture Bowling Green, the key railroad junction in southern Kentucky located on the main stem of the L&N where it met the branch line to Memphis. Buckner's advance into Kentucky was a masterpiece of bluff and bluster. First, he used his contacts as former head of the State Guard to direct State Guard captain Thomas H. Hays of the Salt River Battalion south of Louisville to capture the L&N trains at Elizabethtown and Lebanon Junction and bring them to Bowling Green, burning the L&N trestle on Rolling Fork River south of Lebanon Junction after the trains passed. Buckner knew that this raid, only thirty miles south of Louisville, would thrill southern sympathizers and send Unionists in Louisville into a frenzy.²⁷

Hays and his state guards captured the trains on September 17 and burned the Rolling Fork bridge and the railroad bridges over Nolin River and Bacon Creek. On the same day, Buckner captured the Memphis branch of the railroad and the remainder of the main stem south to the Tennessee state line. Suddenly, without warning, Confederate forces captured the L&N from Lebanon Junction south to Tennessee along with nearly half the rolling stock of the railroad, sixteen engines, and several passenger and freight cars. The L&N would remain closed south of Elizabethtown for the rest of the year. Buckner used captured trains to transport his men to Bowling Green, arriving on the morning of September 18. From there, he sent the Second Kentucky Infantry Regiment to Munfordville to guard Green River bridge and recruit. Within the next few days, he sent a raid to close the Green River to prevent enemy gunboats from attacking his left flank. When his men arrived at Lock Number Three near the mouth of the Mud River at Rochester, local civilians persuaded them to spare the valuable lock, and they consented—they closed traffic by filling the lock with logs.²⁸

On September 18, having accomplished all this, Buckner published his second proclamation, this time from Confederate-occupied Bowling Green. He addressed the broadside “To the People of Kentucky” and signed it “Brigadier-General, C.S. Army.” It was far more moderate in tone. “I return amongst you, citizens of Kentucky, at the head of a force the advance of which is composed entirely of Kentuckians,” he wrote. He assured the people that Confederate troops would not deny any citizen his or her civil rights, in contrast to Union authorities, who were arresting people without grounds and converting all prisons into Bastilles. He promised that Confederate forces would withdraw from the state if the faithless state legislature would return to neutrality. On the same day, he published an audacious letter to James Guthrie, president of the L&N, denouncing the Union embargo on trade and demanding that Guthrie reopen the railroad with unrestricted trade for all. “With this view I have possessed myself of a considerable portion of the rolling stock of the road,” he reported. The proclamation circulated in Louisville, and the correspondent for the New York Times quoted it in his report of September 21. The Richmond Dispatch published the document on September 23. The New Orleans Picayune published the letter to Guthrie and commended Buckner for determining to reopen the railroad for travel and traffic, which would highly benefit the people of the Confederacy. The letter was pure propaganda to celebrate with pro-Confederate Kentuckians and Confederates everywhere that Confederate forces had captured most of the L&N.²⁹

Confederate advances, September 17-18, 26-30, 1861. Dick Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab.

Buckner sent recruiting agents into several parts of the state to enroll volunteers inspired by his campaign. He sent Joseph H. Lewis to Cave City, and on September 23, 1861, Lewis published a proclamation announcing that he was raising a company of infantry. He accused Lincoln of corruption and despotism and charged the state legislature and Kentucky congressmen with betrayal and violation of civil rights. He promised that his men would not disturb peaceful citizens simply because they were Unionists, and, adopting the ominous tone that would characterize most of the debate for the rest of the war, he wrote: “The only hope for Southern Rights men is to unite now…. Let every man come to the camp. Come at once. Delay is sure destruction.” A few days later, General Johnston issued a proclamation to the people of the state ghostwritten by Jefferson Davis. President Davis had told the Confederate Congress on September 18 that Confederate forces had invaded Kentucky to defend the Confederacy and “to aid the people of Kentucky.” Johnston's proclamation did not mention that Davis wrote the document; as far as readers knew, it came from Johnston. In the president's words, Johnston explained that the invasion was for self-defense, and he assured the people that Confederate troops would respect property rights and allow Kentuckians to choose between the North and the South—if the people wanted to return to neutrality, he promised to withdraw if Union troops were removed. He stated that it seemed reasonable to him that the people would desire to join the Confederate states “to whom they are already bound by so many ties of interest.”³⁰

Through the remaining months of 1861 and into early 1862, Confederate proclamations continued, repeating the warning that Union victory would be disastrous to Kentucky. On December 16, 1861, Confederate general Felix K. Zollicoffer in southeastern Kentucky issued a proclamation to the people of that area. He warned that the Lincoln government intended to usurp the Constitution of 1787, free and arm the slaves, and give them political and social equality, ruining the “present structure of society.” “Strike with us for independence and the preservation of your property,” he exhorted, “and those Northern invaders of your soil will soon be driven across the Ohio.” On January 6, 1862, General George B. Crittenden, Zollicoffer's superior in southeastern Kentucky, published a proclamation to the people of Kentucky calling for volunteers to join the Confederate army now that Kentucky had a new Confederate government. “Can Kentuckians doubt which Government to sustain? To the South you are allied by interest, by trade, by geography, by similarity of institutions, by the ties of blood, and by kindred courage…. Come to these headquarters, as individuals or in companies, and you will be at once accepted and mustered in with pay and arms from the Government of the Confederate States.”³¹

From the Confederate view in Bowling Green by the end of 1861, Southerners were winning the war for the people. Another powerful blow came when one of the most popular Kentuckians, former vice president John C. Breckinridge, resigned from the Senate, accepted a commission as a Confederate brigadier general, and on October 8, 1861, issued a proclamation to the people of Kentucky advocating the cause of the Confederacy and indicting Lincoln for replacing the Constitution with despotism. By October 4, Buckner's army had increased to about six thousand men, and, after Johnston arrived, he reported to Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin that the rate of enlistments was less than expected but that thousands of Kentuckians were ardent for the South and that he hoped “that the love and spirit of liberty” still lived in Kentucky. About two weeks later, volunteers were flocking in, and he was greatly encouraged that there were more than he could arm and equip. One historian estimated that ten thousand Kentuckians had joined Confederate forces by October 1, 1861.³²

Confederate volunteers were voting by enlisting, and Johnston and Buckner were encouraged that many other Kentuckians supported the new provisional government of Kentucky. On October 29, 1861, soon after Johnston arrived in Bowling Green, delegates from thirty-two counties met in Russellville and called a convention to meet in Russellville on November 18. At that convention, sixty-five counties were represented, and the two hundred members approved an ordinance of secession, appointed George W. Johnson as governor, and established Bowling Green as the capital. On December 10, the Confederate Congress admitted Kentucky into the Confederacy, with ten members of Congress and a star in the flag. Governor Johnson wrote General Johnston recommending that the Confederate army protect commerce, protect civil rights, and avoid the arrest of civilians, which would provide “a proud and noble contrast” to the despotism of the Union authorities.³³

Johnston and Buckner had been conducting “soft” war in Kentucky from the beginning, just as their proclamations promised. Buckner sent raids on Burkesville and Albany to drive out Union troops, and he reported that one of his purposes was to relieve the civilians in that area from Union army violations of their rights. He ordered his men not to search private homes except when necessary and to cooperate with civil authorities. “My object is to protect the civil rights of all citizens, without regard to their political opinions,” he wrote. Regular Confederate troops occupying Kentucky generally respected the rights and property of civilians, but, beginning in the summer of 1862, when the Union army occupied the state, Confederate raiders and guerrillas raided the horse barns and meat houses of Unionist civilians, and the Union army reacted with its extreme counterguerrilla campaign, which strengthened sympathy for the South in Kentucky.³⁴