The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home (2 page)

P
HILIP
L
IGHTFOOT
L
EE
of Bullitt County said it best when he declared in 1860 why he supported the Union. Should it be dissolved, then he was for Kentucky. If Kentucky fell apart, he would stand by Bullitt County. Bullitt dissolved, his sympathies lay with his hometown of Shepherdsville. And if the unthinkable should happen, and Shepherdsville be torn asunder, then he was for his side of the street.
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In no other state of the Union in 1860 were the choices so hard, the loyalties so strained and divided, as in the dark and bloody ground of Kentucky. Every act of civil and military strife of that decade played in microcosm on this troubled stage. It traced in large part from the geographical location of the state, but far more from the very nature of its people. Kentuckians
were
different from other Americans. No one knew so better than they did themselves.

They were born of the Revolution, the stepchild of the Scotch-Irish by their natural mother, Virginia. In infancy they teethed on Indian wars and came to adulthood in the War of 1812 when, left to their own devices by a preoccupied war administration in Washington, they independently managed the defense of the trans-Allegheny West against the British. More anxious to belong to the Union than to Virginia, Kentucky strove for years to achieve statehood. The goal attained, the struggle did not end. Already the eastern states assumed a condescending attitude toward Westerners. For years to come Kentuckians fought for the respect and equality in national counsels that
their statehood should have insured. The ascendancy of Jefferson and the performance of Kentucky in the second war against the British finally won them their deserved respect. One proper Bostonian was moved to declare that Kentuckians “are the most patriotic people I have ever seen or heard of,” and a New York editor asserted that “there are no people on the globe who have evinced more national feeling, more disinterested patriotism, or displayed a more noble enthusiasm to defend the honor and rights of their common country.” By 1815 Kentuckians arrived on the national scene as first-class Americans.
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Or almost. For in making that trip these sons of the Bluegrass traveled at different speeds. Some overshot their destination, becoming more ardent Unionists than their compatriots in the East. Others never made the full journey at all, since it came at a price. Those years of being seemingly ignored by the Washington government and looked down upon by the establishment in the seaboard states took a toll. Faced with the fact that they, and only they, had their interests and future in mind, Kentuckians developed in those early years a powerful individuality and an iron self-reliance. This melded naturally with the temperament of the state’s people, since the majority of the population came from the southern states, where local interests and prerogatives generally held greater claim on loyalties than things national. It is hardly surprising that quite a few Kentuckians’ first priority was their “side of the street.”

In the first decades of the nineteenth century the Bluegrass managed to function with this dual personality—intense Unionism and ardent localism—without great difficulty. Indeed, the state made major contributions to both causes. In the Nullification crisis of 1833, Kentucky stood squarely with the Union against John C. Calhoun and South Carolina in their attempt to threaten secession. Kentucky would not consent, said her governor, “that her sister state shall give to our children waters of bitterness to drink.” Yet ironically, one of the cornerstones of Calhoun’s nullification policy was in large part the spawn of Kentucky. In 1798 and 1799 the Frankfort legislature passed the so-called Kentucky Resolutions, a declaration that Congress, as the creation of the compact of individual states, was subject to the judgment and approval of those states in its acts. Should the federal body ignore the will of the states and attempt to impose unjust legislation, then it was their right to nullify such acts and prevent their imposition, even
to the point of force. The Kentucky Resolutions, chiefly the product of Jefferson’s pen, also bore the stamp of a Kentuckian, Jefferson’s confidant and the man who presented them to the legislature, John Breckinridge of Lexington. As President, Jefferson would later make Breckinridge his Attorney General.
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What kept Kentuckians together with this dichotomy in their nature was largely their common heritage of struggle against adversity. They were cemented as well by an intense pride in the progress of the state. Thanks to her position, with vital waterways like the Ohio River, her northern boundary, the Mississippi on the west, and the Cumberland Gap, the nation’s chief gateway to westward movement, at her southeastern corner, Kentucky was a vital link for trade North and South, East and West. Economically, the Bluegrass identified more with the Union as a whole than with any section. Then, too, a remarkable society burgeoned in the rolling grasslands of the state’s central region. Newly wealthy sons of Virginia’s first families built magnificent homes, started universities, bred arguably the best blood horses in the nation, and unquestionably distilled the finest whisky in the hemisphere. Indeed, some regarded Kentucky as a “deluxe edition” of Virginia.
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Above all, however, the force that bound Kentucky and Kentuckians together in the first half of this century was a man, the incomparable Henry Clay. Born of Virginia, like Kentucky herself, he moved early to Lexington, and thereafter made the fortunes of the state his own. Not for nothing did he become known throughout the nation as the “Great Pacificator.” The craft of persuasion and compromise that he exercised so deftly on the national scene was merely an outgrowth of the same diplomacy and tact by which he single-handedly melded the disparate elements within his own state. He kept men of all stripes together, nationalists, state righters, protariff, anti-tariff, Whigs, Democrats. Along with Lincoln, he stands as the most remarkable American of his century. It is no accident that, in her own way, Kentucky produced them both.

As the state approached midcentury, affairs local and national became ever more complex, and so did the strains and pulls on the affection and loyalties of the people of the Bluegrass. Following the nullification controversy, state rights became an increasingly volatile issue. Lurking in its shadow was its motive force, southern nationalism. The chosen battleground in the whole controversy was the issue of slavery, and here Kentucky stood particularly divided. Clay and a substantial
portion of the state’s people in principle and practice opposed slavery. Yet with the exception of Virginia, Kentucky held more small slave-owners than any other state. Probably a majority of emancipation movements had their origin in the Bluegrass. Kentuckians like Cassius Clay and James G. Birney stood among the foremost abolitionists in the Union. More moderate solutions to slavery such as gradual emancipation and African colonization enjoyed wide popularity in the state’s ruling families, the Clays, Crittendens, and Breckinridges. Yet every attempt to abolish slavery within Kentucky’s borders met failure. It was an outgrowth of that fierce independence nurtured in infancy. Slavery was a right guaranteed in the federal and state constitutions. No matter that many Kentuckians disapproved of the institution. It was a right, and no one would take that right away, regardless of whether or not they chose to exercise it.

Despite this preoccupation with constitutional prerogatives, Kentuckians in no way saw state rights as being incompatible with a fervent love for the Union. Indeed, the two naturally went together in their minds and were to be defended with equal fervor. To Clay the latter took precedence over the former. “If Kentucky tomorrow unfurls the banner of resistance,” said he during the crisis leading to the Compromise of 1850, “I will never fight under that banner. I owe a paramount allegiance to the whole Union; a subordinate one to my own state.” When a convention met in Nashville, Tennessee, that year to discuss secession, Kentucky declined participation, and instead made her position known by sending a block of native stone to be built into the Washington Monument, then under construction. “Under the auspices of Heaven and the precepts of Washington,” they chiseled into the stone, “Kentucky will be the last to give up the Union.”
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Henry Clay could not live forever. In 1852 he went to rest beneath Lexington’s sod, and the erosion of Kentucky’s unity dates from his passing. Indeed, it had already begun before his death, marked by the rise of the Democratic Party in the state. Clay made Kentucky a Whig bastion for decades, but in 1851 Clay’s old congressional district fell to a charismatic young Democrat, John C. Breckinridge, grandson of Jefferson’s Attorney General. The rise of a Democrat in Clay’s home district signaled a slow explosion all over the state. Within a few years the governor’s mansion, the state house in Frankfort, and the congressional delegation all lay in Democratic hands. To be sure, the Democrats of Kentucky were just as much attached to the Union as
Clay and his Whigs. Relations between Clay and young Breckinridge were such that most in the state believed the elder statesman, before his death, spiritually adopted him as his successor. Yet there was a more strident attachment to state rights in these new men than in their Whig predecessors, a closer identification with their neighbors to the south. As crisis followed crisis in this troubled decade, Kentuckians became increasingly polarized, increasingly divided. By 1860, as a friend of Senator John J. Crittenden saw it, there were three Kentuckys. Along her southern border—and sprinkled throughout the state—were those who now avowed secession, those who would see Kentucky out of the Union. At her northern border, along the Ohio, were their opposites, men like Clay whose allegiance would always be first to the Union. The third Kentucky, “the great, sound, conservative, central heart of the Commonwealth, who are for the Union the Constitution—the whole flag, every stripe & star in its place,” could be found everywhere. They would support the Union so long as compromise without forfeiture of their rights could be achieved. But should the Union be sundered, warned Crittenden’s friend, then “this party goes South.”
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Sad to say, numbered among these last was Henry Clay’s own son, James B. Clay. So did the solidarity Henry Clay had built for the Union crumble in his passing.

In the election year of 1860 the crumbling pieces plummeted away from each other. Kentucky had basically two functioning party organizations: the Democrats, powerful, largely prosouthern, but falling from grace with those Kentuckians of firm Union attachments; and a Constitutional Union Party whose chief platform was the naïve hope that if everyone ignored the sectional crisis and stopped talking about it, maybe it would go away. John Brown’s electrifying raid on Harpers Ferry the previous October, and his hanging two months later, drove the proslave state rights element farther toward their southern brethren, while the boastful posturing of South Carolina’s fire-eaters only made the Union element in Kentucky more determined. Therefore, to both extremes, the middle road, the do-nothing Constitutional Union approach, seemed the only safe solution. In November 1860, with two native sons in the presidential race—Republican Abraham Lincoln, and John C. Breckinridge, reluctantly the nominee of the state rights Democrats—the state gave her vote to John Bell, the Constitutional Union candidate. Surrounded by extremists North and South, Kentucky
declared for peace and Union, and seemingly buried her head in the Bluegrass.

Of course, it could not last. Immediately after the election of Lincoln, South Carolina declared the Union dissolved, and seceded. Other states followed in rapid succession. Once again Kentucky found herself caught squarely in the middle. Those in the North expected the state of Clay to stand with them. Meanwhile, hard on the secession of South Carolina, commissioners from southern states arrived in Frankfort to persuade Governor Beriah Magoffin to join with them. Here was a dilemma. Most Kentuckians did not favor secession, yet most did not favor forceful coercion to keep states in the Union either. Barring compromise, a confrontation, perhaps even armed conflict, seemed inevitable. Already thousands of volunteers formed companies in the South. Should a war come, Kentucky would have to pick a side, or else take her stand in the middle, and probably defend herself against both North and South. The state provided too natural a pathway for invasion, too vital a territory for southern defense, too indispensable to any Union strategy, for her to sit out the war that might come. Kentucky needed an army of her own.

In fact, Magoffin began his “army” sometime before the election of 1860. Kentucky’s militia had been moribund for some years after the Mexican War. But then came Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid, and with it the resurrection of old paranoid fears of slave insurrections, now multiplied by the aggressively antislavery pronouncements of the Republicans. “The Harper’s Ferry affair warns us that we know not at what moment we may have need of an active, ardent, reliable, patriotic, well-disciplined, and thoroughly organized militia in Kentucky,” the governor warned the legislature. The lawmakers responded with unaccustomed speed. On March 5, 1860, they enacted a measure that revamped the state’s militia system entirely. Every man of sound mind and body between the ages of eighteen and forty-five would be henceforward a member of the “enrolled militia.” And from their number were to come the volunteers to form the strong arm of the state’s military forces, the Kentucky State Guard. An inspector general would supervise the enrollment and training and equipping of the Guard. He would muster them into service, see to the election of their officers, drill them, and oversee the state’s arsenals. It was an ambitious undertaking, creating a small army out of nothing. As a result, the post of inspector general called for an ambitious man, a man of talent and enterprise.
Not surprisingly, the post of inspector went to the chief architect of the new legislation, and the man who conceived the idea for the position he was now to fill, Simon Bolivar Buckner.
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