Introduction: Irregular Violence and Trauma in Civil War Kentucky

On January 4, 1864, an exasperated Thomas E. Bramlette issued an official proclamation. As the wartime governor of Kentucky—a state that remained, tenuously, within the Union but harbored its fair share of Confederate sympathizers—it was Bramlette to whom citizens complained when guerrillas ran roughshod over their communities. And complain they did. Letters and petitions poured into the executive department; they described homes put to the torch, horses and livestock pillaged, men gunned down in their fields, corpses mutilated, and women and children pulled involuntarily into a whirlwind of domestic depredations. Above all else, these correspondents expressed desperation for the one thing that Bramlette and his military counselors had been unable to provide thus far: consistent protection from irregular violence.¹

The proclamation began by stating what was already obvious to afflicted Kentuckians: "the frequent outrages perpetrated in various parts of the State by lawless bands of marauders, can in large degree be traced to the active aid of rebel sympathizers in our midst." Such sympathizers, he continued, "abuse the leniency extended them by concealing the movements of rebel guerrillas, by giving them information, affording them shelter, supplying them with provisions, and otherwise encouraging and fomenting private raids, [and] are in criminal complicity with all the outrages perpetrated by the marauders whom they secretly countenance." In other words, anyone who helped make irregular warfare logistically possible had just as much blood on his or her hands as the guerrillas themselves. This amounted to a major shift in counterinsurgency policy in Kentucky and prompted Bramlette to unveil a new set of tactics.

I, therefore, request that the various Military Commandants in the State of Kentucky will, in every instance where a loyal citizen is taken off by bands of guerrillas, immediately arrest at least five of the most prominent and active rebel sympathizers in the vicinity of such outrage for every loyal man taken by guerrillas. These sympathizers should be held as hostages for the safe and speedy return of the loyal citizens. Where there are disloyal relatives of guerrillas, they should be the chief sufferers. Let them learn that if they refuse to exert themselves actively for the assistance and protection of the loyal, they must expect to reap the just fruits of their complicity with the enemies of our State and people.²

Bramlette's transition to "eye for an eye" tactics was based on a correct analysis of the household's prominent role in waging guerrilla warfare. Detached from war departments and quartermasters, guerrillas could only operate effectively with support from the home-front. Food, clothing, intelligence, ammunition: all were essential to staying alive in the bush, and all had to come from sympathetic households. Bramlette sought to disrupt the arrangement once and for all. But the governor, in his attempt to drop the proverbial hammer on Kentucky's irregular menace, drastically misjudged how guerrillas and their communities would respond to the state making war upon people formerly perceived as "civilians." In the end, Bramlette's hostage-taking would have the opposite effect of what was intended. The ill-fated policy created new insurgents—the fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, and friends of those arrested—more quickly than it could eliminate those already fighting in the bush, and it would be eventually be abandoned. But this experiment in antiguerrilla operations illuminated two fundamental and interconnected characteristics of the Bluegrass State's wartime experience: 1) through sheer volume, guerrillas played a seminal role in defining it; and, 2) where those guerrillas prowled, no such thing as a civilian could truly exist.

In recent years, scholarly attention paid to irregular violence during the American Civil War has increased significantly. Historians have addressed the influence of guerrillas on the overall outcome of the war; how guerrilla logistics worked and the critical role of women in waging war from and upon the household; why men chose to fight as irregular combatants in an era that generally frowned upon divergence from accepted modes of violence and masculinity; and even how collective memories of the conflict employed guerrilla violence as a springboard for glorifying the...