Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State by Anne E. Marshall (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 90 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State Anne E. Marshall E . Merton Coulter’s The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (1926) presentedhistorianswithaprovocativeidea : Kentucky’s decision to remain in the Union in 1861 was essentially an accident, motivated by urban economic desires, while its fictive “secession ” in 1865 fulfilled the white populace’s real will. Coulter’s Bluegrass opus was published by the University of North Carolina Press; appropriately the same publisher has produced the latest and to date most comprehensive response to Coulter. In Creating a Confederate Kentucky, Anne Marshall argues that Kentucky was a decidedly loyal state during the Civil War— albeit an embattled one. Only after the war did the state’s white natives compose the memory of a Confederate Kentucky. Other explanations of neo-Confederate Kentucky have dealt primarily with the Reconstruction era. Marshall takes a much longer view, showing that over the course of six decades many different versions of the war memory competed with one another; a monolithic “‘Kentucky Mind,’ a single shared consciousness among Kentuckians,” simply did not exist (4). Creating a Confederate Kentucky follows in the path of David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). Kentucky never had the “postwar emancipationist consensus among whites” that Blight insists existed throughout the North in 1865 (6). Marshall argues that this consensus may not have been that strong in many loyal states; what she finds in Kentucky, a state that Blight did not scrutinize, proves an important exception to a seldom questioned dogma that Race and Reunion established about the nineteenth -century North. Marshall does not debunk one established interpretation: No other border state was more internally divided than Kentucky during the Civil War. But she also reminds the reader that the state contributed far more troops to the Union cause than to the Confederate (although, notably, the number of Kentucky generals on each side was almost even). That Kentucky remained loyal to the Union after its 1861 experiment with neutrality should not disguise white Kentuckians’ horror in the face of armed freedmen and the implications of black citizenship. Only Louisiana produced more volunteers for the U.S. Colored Troops and most black Kentucky soldiers patrolled their home territory, angering whites of both northern and southern sympathies. Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner endorsed placing Kentucky under military control for its opposition to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, as well as for the violence perpetrated against black and white Unionists, a statewide record of murder and harassment that nearly equaled that of South Carolina and other Deep South states. Although it never seceded, white Kentuckians’ resistance to postwar change encouraged northerners to remember Kentucky as rebellious. Even the Grand Army of the Republic’s celebrated 1895 Louisville encampment somehow reified Kentucky as “a former Confederate state in the eyes of the nation” (110). BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2011 91 During the twenty years following the war, white Kentucky Unionists grew more disillusioned with what they had accomplished in 1865. Confederate veterans and their devotees dominated war eulogies. Publications, organizations , and monuments that celebrated the state’s Confederate contributions began emerging in the 1870s and up until its recent celebration as the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, “Kentucky was a former Confederate state in the eyes of the nation” (110). The Bluegrass State’s cottage industry of literary sentimentalism about the Old South provided readers with a sunny antebellum past notable for an interracial harmony that implicitlydependedupontheexistence(oratleast the vestigial phantom) of slavery. Novelist Annie Fellows Johnston and other historical fiction purveyors created a storybook landscape defined by timelessness and nostalgia. Kentuckians’ exaggerated Confederate identity served to defend “a persistently agrarian society and a region of refined domestic comfort” (141). Meanwhile, the historians of Unionist Kentucky, especially Thomas Speed and Kentucky’s esteemed public intellectual Nathaniel Shaler, omitted the role of black soldiers, the most politically provocative part of the story. Marshall’s chapters dedicated to memorials and literature are remarkable historical studies of memory and southern letters. Marshall’s discussion of the eastern Kentucky mountainsdemonstratestherelationshipbetween competing war memories and the late nineteenth century anthropological construction of the...