For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War by Patrick A. Lewis (review)

On November 5, 1862, Maj. Benjamin Forsythe Buckner of the 20th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry Regiment (U.S.) wrote his fiancée, Helen Bullitt Martin, and vented his frustrations about his service in the Union army and President Abraham Lincoln’s recently announced preliminary Emancipation Proclamation: “No Kentuckian can have any heart for this contest.” Warming to his rhetoric, Buckner continued, “We joined the people of the North (a people whom we did not love) to fight the South (a people with whom we were connected by ties of relationship, interest, the identity of our hearts and institutions) merely upon principle and to preserve that Constitutional form of government which was the wonder and admiration of the world. But the president has by the shake of the pen taken away all that” (103). Lincoln’s announcement of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation revealed to Buckner the real president: “It is a most abominable & infamous document, and falsifies all” of Lincoln’s “pledges both public and private” (102). Fighting to preserve the legal order symbolized by the 1787 Constitution constituted a noble deed while aiding Buckner in his quest to marry Martin. Yet, when Lincoln struck at the core value of white Kentuckians—slavery—Buckner could not support that action. As a result, in early 1863, Buckner resigned from the Union army, returned to the Bluegrass State, married Martin, and spent the rest of his life building a white Kentucky. He personified conservative proslavery unionism in Kentucky and the white power structure that dominated the Commonwealth after the Civil War years.

This revised dissertation constitutes a case study of white political and cultural leadership in Kentucky. Patrick Lewis, an assistant editor of the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society and the project director of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, highlights the dilemma secession posed to Buckner. Kentuckians had lived long and well under the original constitutional order, where local custom and state law established property in persons overseen by a proslavery federal constitution. Secession threatened white, slaveholding Kentuckians more than abolitionists because secession threatened order and stability—black order and stability on white terms. Destroying their world that embraced slavery and Union threatened upwardly mobile white Kentuckians more than vague abolitionist threats. Preserving the Union became his goal, or, as Lewis states, “the full status quo ante bellum” (73). Thus, Benjamin F. Buckner provided a window into that world of building white supremacy in Reconstruction and Gilded Age Kentucky.

Lewis covers his material in six chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue. In his introduction, he challenges accepted arguments about Kentucky and slavery; no, slavery was not softer in Kentucky. Neither were proslavery unionists as committed to the Union, as previous authors have argued. Chapters 1 and 2 analyze Buckner’s historical context, which extended into the later part of the century. Lewis interprets Buckner’s family’s history, Kentucky slavery, his early education, his courtship of Helen Martin, and his legal education. Chapters 3 and 4 cover the war years and stress Buckner’s dilemma of choosing between loyalty to the nation and to his region. Chapters 5 and 6 survey his life and work after the war, when he helped form a local militia to deny African Americans the vote through force and later, as an attorney and state jurist, resisted black rights. Buckner grasped that the new Fifteenth Amendment did not prohibit poll taxes. His brief in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Reese (1876) persuaded the justices that poll taxes did not discriminate because they were not race-based. In time, Buckner withdrew to rural Kentucky, where the tides of change had hardly touched the antebellum world he sought to perpetuate.

Archive-based and in control of the secondary literature, Lewis presents a clear, engaging, and persuasive narrative about Buckner...