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

In graduate school, as I traipsed back and forth between Illinois and Georgia on Interstate 24 in western Kentucky (my paternal ancestors’ home), I regularly read the brown signs beckoning tourists to the Jefferson Davis Birthplace State Memorial at Fairview. One day, no longer able to resist the siren’s call, I exited and wandered north through the bucolic countryside toward what I imagined as a stately complement to Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace site, less than a hundred miles northeast at Hodgenville. Nothing could have prepared me, miles before I reached the site, for my first glimpse of a 351-foot obelisk dedicated to a Confederate president to whom the state did not swear allegiance, at least not officially. Sic semper tyrannis.

Anne E. Marshall’s superb book offers an overdue enhancement of E. Merton Coulter’s nearly century-old, oft-quoted observation that “Kentucky waited until after the war was over to secede from the Union.” What Coulter argued so enduringly in 1926 with his largely political history, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, Marshall has updated and expanded with her largely postwar cultural history of the politics of memory in this complicated border state. With graceful prose and solid reasoning, she deepens Coulter’s large-“P” political interpretation of the state’s postwar transformation from Whig nationalism to Democratic sectionalism. The authors share a publisher and a number of premises, among them that Kentucky was always a southern state, albeit one that remained politically loyal to the Union during the Civil War; that this loyalty sowed the seeds of the state’s bitter wartime and postwar experience; that the border state was more internally divided than any other during the war; that emancipation and black enlistment were the central events provoking the state’s white proslavery population’s turn away from the federal war effort (only Louisiana produced more volunteers for the U.S. Colored Troops, and most black Kentucky soldiers garrisoned in their home state rather than being sent to war fronts farther south); and that racial supremacy was the defining characteristic of the state’s ideological and political landscape during and especially after the war.

Foundational to Marshall’s arguments about the state’s contest for memory is the shocking level of racial and partisan violence that swept up Kentucky in the last years of the war and for at least a decade following. White Kentuckians demanded maintenance of the traditional racial order and accomplished it by taking advantage of the state’s exclusion from most Reconstruction mandates. Horrified at armed freedmen in their midst and the Republicanled Congress’s enactments for black citizenship, including the Thirteenth Amendment (which Kentucky’s legislature and then its voters resoundingly rejected) and especially the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, these Kentuckians waged an insurgency equal to that in Deep South states that has received far more attention from historians. In December 1865, the legislature, furious at the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, reenfranchised former Confederates, and the Democratic Party soon swept into power.

Marshall expertly weaves together the impediments that largely prevented the emergence in Kentucky of what David Blight has termed an interracial “emancipationist” memory, noting that most white unionists were as resistant to postwar racial progress as these former Confederates and thus failed largely to ally with or aid freed people, even those who had fought in the army. Indeed, northerners regarded Kentucky as a rebellious southern state long before the Grand Army of the Republic’s celebrated 1895 Louisville encampment, which crystallized Kentucky, she argues, as “a former Confederate state in the eyes of the nation” (110).

Kentucky’s former Confederates, now joined by many embittered conservative unionists, wielded memory as a weapon, constructing a narrative that placed their state firmly, if inaccurately, in the Confederacy. After 1870, Confederates and their newfound adherents, with women as...