Wolford's Cavalry: The Colonel, the War in the West, and the Emancipation Question in Kentucky by Dan Lee (review)

Frank Wolford, colonel of the First Kentucky Volunteer Cavalry, is the subject of not one, but two recent biographies. Dan Lee's Wolford's Cavalry: The Colonel, the War in the West, and the Emancipation Question in Kentucky is, as the author relates, an exploration of the life of "a crude and complicated but talented man and the unconventional regiment he led in the fight to save the Union" (p. xi). Wolford, a Kentucky lawyer and veteran of the U.S.-Mexican War, did not own slaves, but he did maintain a virulent racism toward black people throughout his life. Despite his views, Wolford was also a Union man, and when the Civil War began he rushed to rejoin the army. He helped recruit soldiers for the First Kentucky Cavalry and was soon promoted to colonel and put in command of the regiment. Wolford proved a popular and effective leader of volunteers, cultivating a rough-and-tumble persona and eschewing discipline and regulations in favor of results. The colonel and his horsemen went on to achieve an impressive combat record in Kentucky and Tennessee until 1864, the year of Wolford's professional downfall.

Wolford's spectacular demise stemmed from his inability to reconcile his desire to preserve the Union with the changing nature of Federal war aims, particularly emancipation. That inner turmoil is at the heart of Wolford's "exasperating" character, and on March 10, 1864, it undid him (p. xii). At a banquet in Lexington, Kentucky, arranged in his honor, Wolford unleashed a bizarre hour-long tirade, damning the Abraham Lincoln administration's emancipation policies and the enlistment of black troops in the Union army. Wolford blasted Lincoln's "'tyranny, aggrandizement, and perpetuation of power'"—which he characterized as "'violations of the Constitution, of the rights of the loyal states, [and] of the President's solemn pledges'" (p. 174). The fiery Wolford called on his fellow Kentuckians to resist black enlistment "'as a violation of their guaranteed right [to own property]'" and promised to arrest recruiting officers seeking to raise black regiments in the commonwealth (p. 174). Finally, Wolford concluded by condemning the "'pimps and informers'" he was certain were present in the audience and demanded that listeners pass on his remarks in minute detail to President Lincoln, "'a tyrant and a usurper'" (p. 175).

Unsurprisingly, this extraordinarily selfish performance was a very public act of career suicide. Within two weeks, Colonel Wolford was brought up on charges, dismissed from the service for violating the Rules and Articles of War, and held under arrest in Washington, D.C., for continuing to make treasonous speeches. In the aftermath of the incident, Wolford engaged in a lengthy war of words with the president that culminated in the officer breaking parole and going on the campaign trail for General George B. McClellan's ill-fated presidential bid. Wolford remained a Kentucky Democrat after the war, serving two terms in the House of Representatives.

Dan Lee presents a readable, even breezy chronicle of Frank Wolford's life, military exploits, and postwar political career. What is less clear from Lee's treatment is how Wolford, by most estimates an intelligent and capable military leader, could exhibit such a disastrous lack of propriety and political judgment in his Lexington tantrum and subsequent seditious actions. Moreover, Lee hopes to "place Wolford's story in the context of the political and cultural crosscurrents that tore at Kentucky during the war" (p. xi). In that regard, Wolford's Cavalry is less successful; the author's straightforward chronicle of Wolford the cavalryman and gadfly often overshadows the portrait of what seems to have been a complex and peculiar man. Part biography and part unit history, Lee's study does not entirely satisfy in either regard; nevertheless, Wolford's Cavalry should be of interest for students of Civil...