James Duane Bolin

“Home and Away”

Murray Ledger & Times

 

[This brief series on the Civil War ran in 2011, the first year of the 150^th commemoration of the war. Of course, the remembrance of the war will never end, but to bring an end to the sesquicentennial commemoration of the war in this column, I have decided to run this brief series again. The war rent the nation, but it especially split apart the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and the repercussions we still feel today.]

 

A Divided Kentucky

 

            Historian Thomas D. Clark referred to Kentucky as a “land of contrasts.”  Never were those contrasts more evident than during the Civil War.  Kentucky novelist John Fox, Jr. wrote, “When the great news [of the war] came, it came like a sword that, with one stroke, slashed the state in twain, shearing the strongest bonds that link one man to another.”  Father fought against son, brother against brother.  Rev. Robert J. Breckinridge of Lexington, perhaps the leading voice for the Union in Kentucky, even though he owned over thirty slaves, saw two sons ride south, and two sons ride north.  His nephew, John C. Breckinridge, former Vice-President of the United States and now U. S. Senator, explained, “I exchange with proud satisfaction a term of six years in the Senate for the musket of a [Confederate] soldier.”  Even President Lincoln’s family was divided.  Mary Todd Lincoln had a brother, three half-brothers, and the husbands of three half-sisters who took up arms against the First Lady’s husband.  Again, John Fox, Jr. wrote, “As the nation was rent apart so was the Commonwealth;  as the state, so was the county;  as the county, the neighborhood;  as the neighborhood, the family, so brother and brother, father and son.”

            Of course, the war also had an impact on those left behind.  One wife wrote, “even as I write my eyes are blinded by tears and every breath I draw, every throb of my heart is a passionate prayer for your safety.”  Still, the lives of women were changed forever as they assumed leadership roles on farms and in towns and cities that had once been reserved for men only.

            In military action, soldiers clad in blue and gray fought over 400 battles and skirmishes all over Kentucky, from Columbus, “The Gibralter of the West,” to Bowling Green in the center, to Mill Springs in the East.  Exotic names such as Felix Zollicoffer and Braxton Bragg and Don Carlos Buel and Albert Sydney Johnston played significant roles on various battlefields.  At the Battle of Richmond on August 30, 1862, one Confederate soldier remembered, “We charged through the open field . . . and scattered the enemy. . . . We mowed them down like grass.”  At Perryville, the most devastating engagement on Kentucky soil with 4,200 Union casualties and 3,400 Confederate losses, a survivor recalled that “In every hospital that could be established, there was piles of arms and legs as high as tables.”  Another said that “The ground all around was slippery with blood.”

            The Battle of Perryville (October 9^th and 10^th, 1862) ended in a draw, but with the rapid withdrawal of Confederate troops, the South never mounted another major offensive in the state.  Instead, Confederate raiders such as “the Thunderbolt of the South,” John Hunt Morgan, a former Lexington hemp merchant and the grandson of a millionaire, frustrated the Union occupiers with sweeps through the Commonwealth, destroying military stores, capturing prisoners, and stealing horses.  Unionists chanted this jingle to express their contempt of the man they dubbed “the King of the Horsethieves”:

“John Morgan’s foot is on thy shore,

His hand is on thy stable door,

You’ll see your good gray mare no more

He’ll ride her till her back is sore

And leave her at some stranger’s door

            John Morgan.”

            The Union had an answer to Morgan in Col. Frank L. Wolford of the “Wild Riders” of the First Kentucky Cavalry (USA), but Wolford was eventually dishonorably dismissed over comments he made about Lincoln after Kentucky African Americans were allowed in the Union army.  The Civil War in Kentucky represented nothing less than a revolution.  And most white Kentuckians rejected the revolution as we shall see next week.

Duane Bolin teaches in the Department of History at Murray State University.  Contact Duane at jbolin@murraystate.edu