Shedding Light on Kentucky’s Jackson Purchase Region during the Civil War

Heretofore, Patricia Ann Hoskins had authored the only book-length study of the Jackson Purchase region of Kentucky with her unpublished 2008 dissertation from Auburn University, “‘The Old First is with the South’: The Civil War, Reconstruction, and Memory in the Jackson Purchase Region of Kentucky.” An understudied portion of the state, the Purchase consists of Kentucky’s eight westernmost counties bound by the Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee Rivers. Although seldom addressed by historians in their studies of the Ohio Valley or Kentucky, the Purchase has received recent attention with the 2014 publications of Dan Lee’s The Civil War in the Jackson Purchase, 1861-1862: The Pro-Confederate Struggle and Defeat in Southwest Kentucky and Berry Craig’s Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase. Considered in tandem, the works by Lee and Craig offer important insights into the military, political, and—to some degree—social affairs of the Civil War in the West, the Border South, Kentucky, and, in particular, the Jackson Purchase.¹

As both titles indicate, the majority of citizens in the Purchase remained Confederate in sympathy, prior to, during and after the war. Scholarship previously written about the Purchase, including the work of Hoskins and Craig, focused on explaining why the region aligned itself with the Confederacy when the rest of Kentucky proved overwhelmingly Union in sympathy. Hoskins, Craig, and others attributed the Confederate sympathies to the region’s economic ties to the South, the rise of slavery in the region during the antebellum period, the area’s connection to southern evangelical Protestantism, and the region’s secessionist politicians and press. Both Lee and Craig address these factors in their introductions and opening chapters, as well as provide a brief history of the Purchase from its development in 1818 through the antebellum period. In addition, both The Civil War in the Jackson Purchase and Kentucky Confederates include a description of the secession crisis and the geographical significance of the Purchase during the war’s early months. Following the opening chapters, however, the works differ in focus, scope and content.

An independent historian with degrees in history from Murray State University and Western Kentucky University, Lee offers a narrative-based military history of Union victories during the first two years of the war in the Purchase and northwest Tennessee. With chapters that provide abridged summaries of the battles at Columbus-Belmont, Forts Henry and Donelson, and Island Number Ten, much of content in The Civil War in the Jackson Purchase has been published before. Overall, Lee’s work contains little that professional historians will consider new analysis or a fresh interpretation of events or people from the region.²

It should also be noted that most of the military history Lee discusses did not occur within the boundaries of the Purchase. Forts Henry and Donelson and Island Number Ten belonged to Tennessee, and the majority of fighting at the Battle of Columbus-Belmont took place across the river from Columbus, Kentucky on Missouri soil. Apart from guerilla activity or minor skirmishes, the only fighting that transpired in the Purchase involved an attack in March 1864 led by men under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest against Fort Anderson in Paducah. Although an image of Fort Anderson adorns the cover of the book, its construction and the fighting that occurred there account for only eleven pages of The Civil War in the Jackson Purchase.

Although Lee provides a readable narrative that chronicles the opening events of the Civil War in the West, The Civil War in the Jackson Purchase would prove useful only to the inexperienced student. Had Lee’s final chapter been his primary focus, he might have offered something “new” to the study of...