For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War by Patrick A. Lewis (review)

In For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War, Patrick A. Lewis uses Benjamin Forsythe Buckner (1836–1901), a slaveholder who fought on the Union side, as a lens through which to understand proslavery Unionism in Kentucky. The book’s title suggests that it is a story of the Civil War years, but it also deals with the antebellum and postwar eras. Lewis emphasizes continuity, focusing on conservatism, paternalism, racism, and honor among members of the state’s economic and political elite, especially in the Bluegrass. The book’s strengths include the span of years it covers, the depth of research into complex issues, and its usually clear prose. The book’s great weakness is the paucity of information about Buckner, whose surviving personal writings are confined to letters he wrote to his fiancée between 1861 and 1863.

Recently, several historians have challenged the long-held assumption that Kentucky and other border states chose to remain in the Union in 1861 because the institution of slavery had weakened there, showing instead that many slaveholders believed they had a better chance to keep their human property if their states stayed in the Union. Lewis’s first four chapters, which analyze the values and circumstances of the Kentucky master class, strengthen this new interpretation. As Lewis emphasizes, Buckner was one of many white Kentuckians who joined the Union army in 1861 to help preserve the Union and slavery.

Buckner, like others in the border South, distrusted the Republican Party because of its ties to abolitionism and doubted President Abraham Lincoln’s ability to counter those ties. But Buckner, like many others, believed a short victorious war to preserve the Union could bring defeated secessionists back into Congress, where they could prevent the passage of antislavery measures. As the war dragged on and Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, Buckner began to despair for slavery and prepared to resign his commission. When he finally left the army in April 1863, he returned home to work with other proslavery Unionists and Confederate sympathizers to preserve slavery and white supremacy in Kentucky.

Lewis calls the two chapters where he discusses Buckner’s experiences during the Civil War as “the heart of the book” (p. 9). In these chapters Lewis analyzes Buckner’s views regarding “honor, prestige, respectability, whiteness, masculinity, [and] political advancement” (p. 9). Lewis cannot do this in the book’s first two chapters. These cover the history of slavery in Kentucky and the increasing fear among the state’s master class that, as more slaves escaped northward, United States government protection would be required to maintain their economic and social system. In these chapters there are relatively few references to Buckner and his family. Similarly, Lewis is not able to focus on Buckner in the two chapters on the postwar period. As Lewis puts it, “the two postwar chapters have a different feel” (p. 10). Buckner appears only briefly as a state legislator, a locally prominent attorney and judge, and the successful defender of a racially motivated poll tax before the United States Supreme Court in 1875.

Although Buckner is by necessity reduced to being one of many characters in the book’s antebellum and postbellum chapters, these portions are interesting and useful. The concluding chapters in particular provide insightful analysis of the politics employed by the former master class to preserve white supremacy and their power in the face of increasing black activism and poor white discontent.