In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 The Rebel Spirit in Kentucky the politics of readjustment, 1865–1877 “The Psalmist and I are alike in one respect at least,” wrote Lizzie Hardin of Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in her diary in July 1865. “We both have seen the wickedflourishlikeagreenbaytreeandthevilestmenexalted.IwishIhad the power to describe the state of this country. The Constitution so much wasted power, the civil law a dead letter, slavery in such a condition that neither masters nor Negroes know whether it exists or not, lawlessness of every shade, from the lawlessness of the government at Washington to that of the Negro who steals his master’s chickens, and in the midst of it all, between the Southerners and Union people a hatred, bitter, unrelenting , and that promises to be eternal.” When Hardin penned these words, she had been back in Kentucky for less than a month. Two years earlier, in July 1863, Hardin and some of her family members had joined a crowd in the streets of Harrodsburg to cheer the arrival of famous Kentucky Confederate cavalryman John Hunt Morgan and his men. As prominently disloyal citizens, the Hardin family quickly drew the attention of federal authorities, who arrested them as part of an effort to quell rebellious activity in Kentucky. Banished from the state, the Hardins spent much of the remainder of the war in Madison, Georgia.1 Although Hardin’s somewhat extraordinary experience of arrest and dislocation, as well as her grief for the doomed Confederacy, may have caused her particular rancor about the condition in which she found her home state, her feelings of bitterness and confusion were far from unusual . The concerns she raised—the failure of constitutional rights to protect slavery, the abrogation of racial order, and sectional tensions— plagued Kentuckians long after the great struggle ended. But as white Kentuckians argued among themselves about the significance of the Civil the politics of readjustment · 33 War in the coming years, they would find surprisingly quickly that, contrary to Hardin’s prediction, the hatred among them was not as bitter or unrelenting as might have been expected. only a month after writing her dispirited sentiments, Lizzie Hardin gained some vindication from the results of the August statewide elections . Colonel William E. Riley, the provost marshal who had arrested Lizzie and her family three years earlier, ran for a seat on the state Court of Appeals. In a state where people had grown tired of the federal government ’s heavy-handed treatment of civilians, the Hardins actually became rhetorical weapons in the campaign against Riley when one of his opponents publicly charged that he had “arbitrarily caused the arrest of several ladies of high social position, without warrant and without authority for so doing.” An acquaintance of Riley wrote a letter to a Louisville newspaper defending his actions. “The state was then full of rebel spies and guerrillas ,” he charged, “and these ladies were notorious and babbling rebels, and in full sympathy with Jeff Davis.” But such appeals based on sectional bitterness had lost much of their resonance with white Kentuckians, even those who had been staunch Unionists, in the face of their current concerns. As Hardin wrote with satisfaction in her diary, “The Colonel’s friend could not save him.”2 In the coming years, many Unionist politicians would share Riley’s fate as Conservatives would seek and receive vindication in ballot boxes across the state by consistently voting conservative Democrats into office. Never disenfranchised, white males in Kentucky used the polls in their attempt to shape the state’s postwar society. For some, voting Democrat was retaliation for the tight reign of martial law during the war, for the perceived injustice of Reconstruction further south, and, most of all, for the violation of racial order in their own state. As a Lexington paper stated in 1866, “Whether they have been Federal or Confederate soldiers, or neither; whether they served in Camp Chase or were exiles in Canada, or unmolested during the war; were Union or anti-Union in the past,” the people would endorse the Democratic Party “with an almost unanimous majority.”3 Indeed, politics became one of the first meeting grounds for former foes as they soon realized that their wartime sympathies were less important than their postwar problems. Even if the phenomenal level of Unionist Democratic voting was, as some historians have argued, a bitter reaction to past grievances, it was for many whites not simply an attempt to redress the past but rather to seize control of...

Share