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

In one of the greatest paradoxes in Civil War history, the decades following the conflict, not the war itself, solidified Kentucky’s Confederate identity. Although historians have debated various aspects of Kentucky’s role both during and after the Civil War, Anne Marshall’s work creates new conversations on the development of identity and memory in the Bluegrass State. Rather than focusing primarily on the years immediately after the war, Marshall’s work covers a seventy-year period and provides a multifaceted examination on the creation of a false identity that not only produced a detachment between memory and history but continues to weave itself into the cultural fabric of the state.

The end of the war had vastly different ramifications for a state that maintained a Southern identity yet supplied a larger number of troops for the Union cause. Kentucky was not only left to deal with the physical and emotional damages wrought by war but also with new political and economic issues that accompanied the dissolution of slavery. For a population that adhered to a divided social and racial order, the shift from the protection of states’ rights to emancipation along with the federal army’s treatment of civilians during the war caused many Union sympathizers to turn against the federal government.

Consequently, an abrupt political shift occurred after the war. Many white Kentuckians found common ground in the Lost Cause narrative wielded by Democrats as the use of Union memory became entwined with emancipation and Republican agendas. To further compound growing tensions, increased episodes of violence became harder to restrain due to the lack of formal federal Reconstruction in the state. Although violence in Kentucky was not a postwar phenomenon, Marshall argues that, when mixed with existing themes of Southern honor and chivalry, the growing negative reputation of the state played a role in the shift of historical postwar memory (56).

Violent altercations also impacted the way the nation viewed the state. Antebellum images of refined Bluegrass gentry soon existed alongside newspaper articles highlighting feud violence in the eastern mountains and unrest in the tobacco fields in the western part of the state. The mass literature about Kentucky that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century provided a nostalgic counterpoint to the state’s shortfalls, and, Marshall argues, further cemented Kentucky’s link to the Lost Cause (154).

The work of memorial associations also exposes an active historical discussion in which former Confederates, Unionists, women, and African Americans had a hand in shaping and contesting postwar memory. As “keepers of the past,” Marshall argues that women strongly imprinted their own values and ideas through the flurry of memorial activity at the turn of the century (85). Marshall’s examination of the uproar created by local performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin not only reveals unification along color lines but also direct challenges to war memory by the African American community which continued into the twenty-first century.

Overall, Marshall’s work successfully explores the complex transition in historical memory while also capturing Kentucky’s unique position as a border state. Her extensive use of sources paints a vibrant picture of confusion, pride, and anger as Kentucky grappled with its Civil War legacy. A must-read for those interested in Southern, Kentucky, or Civil War history, Marshall’s work expands existing studies and will undoubtedly create new conversations about the construction of identity and postwar memory.