Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State

5 TWO KENTUCKYS: Civil War Identity in Appalachian Kentucky, 1865–1915

5 Two Kentuckys civil war identity in appalachian kentucky, 1865–1915 In 1896, James Lane Allen penned an article in Harper’s magazine in which he claimed that there were “two Kentuckys.” “It can never be too clearly understood,” he explained, “for those who are wont to speak of ‘the Kentuckians,’ that this state has within its borders two entirely distinct elements of population—elements distinct in England before they came hither, distinct during more than a century of residence here, and distinct now in all that goes to constitute a separate community— occupations, manners, and customs, dress, views of life, civilization.” The two “populations” of which Allen spoke were the one that inhabited the Bluegrass plateau in the central and western parts of the state and the one that populated “that great mountain wall which lies along the southeastern edge of the State.” They formed two discrete “human elements,” the Kentucky highlander and the Kentucky lowlander, “long distinct in blood, physique, history, and ideas of life.”1 Allen’s writing fell amid a growing stream of travel and local-color literature about southern Appalachia that had, by the 1880s, introduced the American reading public to the idea that the area composed a distinctive civilization populated by a unique people. Within this context of Appalachian exceptionalism emerged the idea that Kentucky had endured two divergent Civil War experiences. One featured the landed, slave-owning BluegrassaristocratswhosidedwiththeSouthoutofcustom,kinship,and a proslavery position. In the other, the Kentucky mountaineer, who, according to contemporary literature, had little or no contact with the peculiar institution, had, by virtue of his century-long isolation and undiluted 112  ·  appalachian kentucky devotion to democratic institutions and nationalism, sided with the Union. At the same time as the memory of the state’s Civil War experience was increasingly shaped by Confederate influences and interpretations, theideaofaUnionisteasternKentuckycametotheforefrontandprovided a powerful alternative narrative. Yet, ultimately, because Appalachian Kentucky was almost always cast in opposition to the rest of the state and was considered to be the nonnormative area of the commonwealth, the supposed blanket Unionism of Appalachian Kentucky ultimately served only to reinforce the state’s general Confederate identity.2 the idea of eastern Kentucky as distinct from the rest of the state was not new in 1865. Significant geographic and demographic differences had existed between highland and lowland portions of the state for a nearly a century before the Civil War. By the late nineteenth century, however, the broader notion that southern Appalachia was unlike the rest of the nation seemed to heighten publicly perceived differences between eastern Kentucky and the rest of the state. In the 1870s and 1880s, local-color writers, geographers, and ethnographers began their “discovery” of a distinctive region called Appalachia. They had a receptive American audience that, in the face of the increasingly homogenized national culture, enjoyed reading about what Henry Shapiro calls “the peculiarity of life in the ‘little corners’ of America.” These local-color accounts found their way into millions of homes within magazines such as Century, Scribner’s, Cosmopolitan , and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, marketed to a growing middleclass readership.3 Fromthepagesofthesepublicationsmaterialized“astrangelandanda peculiar people” known as Appalachia. In countless stories and sketches, writers cataloged almost every aspect of mountain life: the mountaineers’ strange physical characteristics; their ignorant simplicity; their log cabin homes; and their melancholy music—all elements seen as anachronistic to mainstream modern American life. Eastern Kentucky became one of the most frequently profiled parts of the region, with some of the most notable accounts coming from Kentuckians themselves. Lexington native James Lane Allen was among the most influential local colorists, and after he explicitly defined the notion of “two Kentuckys” in two articles for Harper’s, the state would rarely be referred to as a single entity. Instead, writers divided the state into two or three discrete sections. In his 1889 “Comments on Kentucky,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote that, “like Gaul,” the state was “divided into three parts”—the eastern mountains, the central Bluegrass, and the western portion. Furthermore, Warner claimed appalachian kentucky  ·  113 that these divisions, “which may not be sustained by the geologists or the geographers, perhaps not even by the ethnologists, is, in my mind, one of character.”4 Often, however, writers ascribed to Kentucky only two discrete sections : the Bluegrass and the mountain. Many times they used these two regions as points of contrast. Warner considered the Bluegrass to be “an open garden-spot...