"The Indeterminate Quantities": Jefferson Davis, Leonidas Polk, and the End of Kentucky Neutrality, September 1861

"The Indeterminate Quantities": Jefferson Davis, Leónidas Polk, and the End of Kentucky Neutrality, September i 86 i Steven E. Woodworth In the fall of 1861, few issues were as vital to the Confederacy's ultimate survival as the status of Kentucky. Its then-declared neutrality was enormously favorable to the South. A neutral Kentucky, stretching from the Appalachians to the Mississippi and inviolable to the armies of either side, shielded the heartland of the South as no Confederate army ever would. Should Kentucky have ended its neutrality by declaring openly for the South, the result might have been even more significant. At least that seems to have been what Abraham Lincoln thought when he remarked , "To lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game."1 Yet in September 1861 the Confederacy fumbled away its opportunities in Kentucky and actually helped drive that state into the arms of the Federal government. These facts have, of course, been well known to historians. However, documents that have come to light only in recent years have shaded this incident in a different color and give new insight into the character of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his relations with both his first secretary of war, Leroy Pope Walker, and his chief western general at that time, Leónidas Polk. It was Polk who initiated the Confederacy's blunder in Kentucky. Davis had appointed Polk to the Mississippi Valley command out of friendship. The two had been together at West Point and forged a bond that Davis, at least, carried with him to his deathbed more than a half century later. Yet in the twenty-five years that followed his graduation from the academy , Polk had neither served in the army nor studied military affairs, 1 Lincoln to Orville Browning, Sept. 22, 1861, The Collected Works ofAbraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basier, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1953-55), 4:532. Civil War History, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4, c 1992 by The Kent State University Press 290CIVIL WAR HISTORY choosing instead a career as an Episcopal bishop.2 It seems likely therefore that aside from Davis's well-known blindness to the shortcomings of his friends, another reason for Polk's appointment may have been the president's hope that Polk's widespread familiarity with and popularity among the people of the Mississippi Valley would make him sensitive to the delicate political situation involving Kentucky.3 Certainly Polk could hardly have been worse than his predecessor in the Mississippi Valley command. Davis had inherited General Gideon J. Pillow from the Provisional Army of the state of Tennessee. A man of small intellect, Pillow had nevertheless made a fairly successful career for himself as a lawyer and political hack, with a brief and undistinguished military interlude during the Mexican War." Despite his primarily political background, or perhaps because leading a bold advance seemed the best way to gain political points with the electorate back home, Pillow acted as if he knew little and cared less about the touchy political situation then existing in Kentucky. In May 1861, Pillow had decided that the town of Columbus, Kentucky, situated on high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, represented a better position from which to defend Tennessee's stretch of the river than anyplace in the northern part of the state. Ignoring the political consequences, Pillow wrote to Kentucky governor Beriah Magoffin and requested permission to occupy the town. At the same time he wrote Davis, informing him of his action and commenting that as he expected Magoffin to refuse permission, he then would "know of no alternative but to take the responsibility of acting on my own judgment."5 Since the occupation of Columbus would have been exactly the sort of breach of neutrality that could have driven Kentucky to cast its lot with the opposing side, Davis had good reason 2 Haskell M. Monroe and James T. Mcintosh, eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 7 vols, to date (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1971- ), l:liii-lxv, lxxxiv; Clement Eaton, 77ie Mind of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1967), 209-12; Joseph H. Parks...