What Happened to Kentucky?

Why did Kentucky, a slaveholding state that became a bastion of segregation and neo-Confederate Old South symbolism after the Civil War, remain loyal to the Union from 1861 to 1865? In the current decade, Anne Marshall, John Inscoe, Aaron Astor, Luke Harlow, Christopher Phillips, and others have examined the extraordinarily fluid and confusing politics of the state before, during, and, especially, after the war, when Kentucky in effect seceded after the Confederacy had been defeated, raising a statue to Jefferson Davis in 1924 and leaving the Thirteenth Amendment unratified until 1976. The question continues to attract scholars, with two new books taking very different approaches to the problem. In For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War, Patrick A. Lewis offers a clear and compelling example of a Kentuckian who supported the Union because of his proslavery views, not in spite of them, so that his seeming about-face after the war from northern to southern sympathies was actually nothing of the kind. Bridget Ford, in Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland, makes a more subtle argument that the Ohio River borderland between Kentucky and Ohio was the setting for various forms of loyalty to the Union.¹

Lewis tells his story through the life of Union military officer Benjamin Buckner (no apparent relation to Confederate general Simon Bolivar Buckner). Buckner was a conservative, slave-owning Democrat who volunteered to fight against the Confederacy in 1861, while at the same time trying to win the heart of a woman whose family supported secession. Buckner recruited a company for the 20th Kentucky Infantry Regiment and fought at Shiloh but became disenchanted with the Union cause after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. He, along with sixteen other officers, resigned from his regiment, and in the postwar era he played an active role in fighting against political and social change in Kentucky, especially the establishment of voting rights for African American men. His initial decision to fight against the Confederacy, Lewis argues, was made not in spite of his devotion to slavery but because of it. In his public statements and in wartime letters to his future wife, Buckner made it clear that he saw the U.S. government as the guarantor and protector of slavery and that he feared the consequences of what he saw as the rash act of secession. When the war failed to bring about a quick victory, restoring the Union as it was, and instead became a war against slavery, Buckner felt betrayed and refused to take further part in it, turning back to politics in an effort to preserve as much of his prewar vision of a racially stratified society as he could and uniting with ex-Confederate Kentuckians who shared the same racial ideology. When a political furor arose in 1867 over the disposition of captured Confederate battle flags, Buckner sided with those who would leave them in the hands of the Democratic-controlled state government, just as he and his fellow proslavery unionists would leave the memory of the war in the hands of former Confederates.

For Slavery and Union will be extremely useful to anyone who frequently addresses public audiences or undergraduate classes, where the first impediment to understanding the Civil War era is resistance to the idea that slavery was the underlying cause of the war, which, as James Loewen has pointed out, still thrives outside of academia. The very title of the book strikes at a stereotype of northern soldiers as freedom fighters, reinforcing southern apologists’ argument that slavery could not be the war’s cause if there were slaveholding Yankees fighting to preserve it. But in making that argument, they unwittingly concede the bigger question, for if Buckner...