Despite this preoccupation with constitutional prerogatives, Kentuckians in no way saw state rights as being incompatible with a fervent love for the Union. Indeed, the two naturally went together in their minds and were to be defended with equal fervor. To Clay the latter took precedence over the former. “If Kentucky tomorrow unfurls the banner of resistance,” said he during the crisis leading to the Compromise of 1850, “I will never fight under that banner. I owe a paramount allegiance to the whole Union; a subordinate one to my own state.” When a convention met in Nashville, Tennessee, that year to discuss secession, Kentucky declined participation, and instead made her position known by sending a block of native stone to be built into the Washington Monument, then under construction. “Under the auspices of Heaven and the precepts of Washington,” they chiseled into the stone, “Kentucky will be the last to give up the Union.”5
Henry Clay could not live forever. In 1852 he went to rest beneath Lexington’s sod, and the erosion of Kentucky’s unity dates from his passing. Indeed, it had already begun before his death, marked by the rise of the Democratic Party in the state. Clay made Kentucky a Whig bastion for decades, but in 1851 Clay’s old congressional district fell to a charismatic young Democrat, John C. Breckinridge, grandson of Jefferson’s Attorney General. The rise of a Democrat in Clay’s home district signaled a slow explosion all over the state. Within a few years the governor’s mansion, the state house in Frankfort, and the congressional delegation all lay in Democratic hands. To be sure, the Democrats of Kentucky were just as much attached to the Union as Clay and his Whigs. Relations between Clay and young Breckinridge were such that most in the state believed the elder statesman, before his death, spiritually adopted him as his successor. Yet there was a more strident attachment to state rights in these new men than in their Whig predecessors, a closer identification with their neighbors to the south. As crisis followed crisis in this troubled decade, Kentuckians became increasingly polarized, increasingly divided. By 1860, as a friend of Senator John J. Crittenden saw it, there were three Kentuckys. Along her southern border—and sprinkled throughout the state—were those who now avowed secession, those who would see Kentucky out of the Union. At her northern border, along the Ohio, were their opposites, men like Clay whose allegiance would always be first to the Union. The third Kentucky, “the great, sound, conservative, central heart of the Commonwealth, who are for the Union the Constitution—the whole flag, every stripe & star in its place,” could be found everywhere. They would support the Union so long as compromise without forfeiture of their rights could be achieved. But should the Union be sundered, warned Crittenden’s friend, then “this party goes South.”6
Sad to say, numbered among these last was Henry Clay’s own son, James B. Clay. So did the solidarity Henry Clay had built for the Union crumble in his passing.
In the election year of 1860 the crumbling pieces plummeted away from each other. Kentucky had basically two functioning party organizations: the Democrats, powerful, largely prosouthern, but falling from grace with those Kentuckians of firm Union attachments; and a Constitutional Union Party whose chief platform was the naïve hope that if everyone ignored the sectional crisis and stopped talking about it, maybe it would go away. John Brown’s electrifying raid on Harpers Ferry the previous October, and his hanging two months later, drove the proslave state rights element farther toward their southern brethren, while the boastful posturing of South Carolina’s fire-eaters only made the Union element in Kentucky more determined. Therefore, to both extremes, the middle road, the do-nothing Constitutional Union approach, seemed the only safe solution. In November 1860, with two native sons in the presidential race—Republican Abraham Lincoln, and John C. Breckinridge, reluctantly the nominee of the state rights Democrats—the state gave her vote to John Bell, the Constitutional Union candidate. Surrounded by extremists North and South, Kentucky declared for peace and Union, and seemingly buried her head in the Bluegrass.
Of course, it could not last. Immediately after the election of Lincoln, South Carolina declared the Union dissolved, and seceded. Other states followed in rapid succession. Once again Kentucky found herself caught squarely in the middle. Those in the North expected the state of Clay to stand with them. Meanwhile, hard on the secession of South Carolina, commissioners from southern states arrived in Frankfort to persuade Governor Beriah Magoffin to join with them. Here was a dilemma. Most Kentuckians did not favor secession, yet most did not favor forceful coercion to keep states in the Union either. Barring compromise, a confrontation, perhaps even armed conflict, seemed inevitable. Already thousands of volunteers formed companies in the South. Should a war come, Kentucky would have to pick a side, or else take her stand in the middle, and probably defend herself against both North and South. The state provided too natural a pathway for invasion, too vital a territory for southern defense, too indispensable to any Union strategy, for her to sit out the war that might come. Kentucky needed an army of her own.
In fact, Magoffin began his “army” sometime before the election of 1860. Kentucky’s militia had been moribund for some years after the Mexican War. But then came Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid, and with it the resurrection of old paranoid fears of slave insurrections, now multiplied by the aggressively antislavery pronouncements of the Republicans. “The Harper’s Ferry affair warns us that we know not at what moment we may have need of an active, ardent, reliable, patriotic, well-disciplined, and thoroughly organized militia in Kentucky,” the governor warned the legislature. The lawmakers responded with unaccustomed speed. On March 5, 1860, they enacted a measure that revamped the state’s militia system entirely. Every man of sound mind and body between the ages of eighteen and forty-five would be henceforward a member of the “enrolled militia.” And from their number were to come the volunteers to form the strong arm of the state’s military forces, the Kentucky State Guard. An inspector general would supervise the enrollment and training and equipping of the Guard. He would muster them into service, see to the election of their officers, drill them, and oversee the state’s arsenals. It was an ambitious undertaking, creating a small army out of nothing. As a result, the post of inspector general called for an ambitious man, a man of talent and enterprise. Not surprisingly, the post of inspector went to the chief architect of the new legislation, and the man who conceived the idea for the position he was now to fill, Simon Bolivar Buckner.7
Here was a man to stir martial ardor. A young man, just one month short of thirty-seven, tall, handsome, broad forehead, wide mustache, with the graceful demeanor and almost exaggerated courtesy that had come to be associated with Kentucky “gentlemen,” Buckner came from Hart County. He won appointment to the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, and graduated eleventh in his class in 1844. With a commission in the 2d United States Infantry he went back to West Point as an assistant professor of ethics before the Mexican War called him into the field. Buckner fought at Cerro Gordo, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, and Chapultepec, winning promotion, taking a wound, and standing among those who first entered the capital of the Montezumas. With the war behind him, now Captain Buckner remained on post and garrison duty until 1855, when he resigned. Promotion was too slow in the peacetime Army. He had a family to support. For two years he practiced law in Chicago, then moved back to Kentucky, to Louisville. Still, Buckner gravitated toward things military, and in 1858 he organized a local militia company, the Citizens’ Guard. Thus, he was a natural choice for Magoffin’s inspector general of the new State Guard.8
Buckner jumped into his new assignment with will and enthusiasm, but little else. There was almost no money available to arm and equip a standing militia, no uniforms, and a scattering of weapons of all descriptions. Undaunted, Buckner started his task with those various militia companies, like his own Citizens’ Guard, that were already armed and equipped. These would be the nucleus of the new State Guard, and from their number he hoped to train enough men of promise to act as officers in the much larger organization he
envisaged. In August of 1860 he brought the dozen or more companies together in an encampment on the state fairgrounds at Louisville for training. Most of these units had their origins in informal, even ignominious, beginnings, frequently with the expectation of the formation of the new State Army. The company from Henderson organized the month after John Brown’s raid, in the counting office of a commercial firm, conducting its first drill in the front room of the Hord House hotel thanks to the good offices of the company’s captain, the hotel’s manager. Other companies like John Hunt Morgan’s Lexington Rifles had been in existence since 1857.
A festive air swirled about the encampment. An ice-cream and refreshment salon served the men beside the parade ground. A local photographer persuaded the various companies to pose for his camera. He caught the Lexington Rifles in a casual camp pose, several of the men apparently taking a cool drink, others reading and writing letters home, some talking or lounging on the grass. No matter that every man posed in full-dress uniform as if on parade. The Citizens’ Guard and National Blues and other companies with sobriquets equally expressive of their ardor and patriotism, all postured in like manner. The camera even caught the entire assemblage drawn up on the parade, their uniforms a potpourri of cockades and kepis, tricorns, stripes, buttons, and brass. Some companies appeared outfitted more for an eighteenth-century war than for any modern conflict. They were all in varying degrees motivated by what one of their number called the “inflated military ardour and love for brass buttons and gold lace, which so attracts the variety of young men.” Spurred largely by this encampment, that “ardour and love,” he said, “broke out with the violence of a prairie fire in many places of the State.”
The encampment even attracted some national notice. One of the photographs taken turned up in Harper’s Weekly, the country’s leading illustrated newspaper. The success of the affair prompted many citizens in the commonwealth to make donations for the training and equipping of the companies now to be formed. And Buckner’s hopes of identifying suitable officers from among those at the encampment were admirably realized. His own staff already included Thomas L. Crittenden, son of the senator, and President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s brother-in-law Ben Hardin Helm. Now more than a score of “alumni” of the Louisville encampment went home to raise new companies of their own. Thomas Hunt, who came to Louisville commanding a company, showed so much promise that Buckner promoted him to colonel in the Guard and gave him charge of one of the two regiments to be formed. A few months later he would send Hunt to organize a camp of instruction for new recruits. Joseph Nuckols of Glasgow went forth and with his own purse equipped a company in beautiful gray uniforms, providing them with the finest arms. Martin Cofer whipped into shape a company in Elizabethtown. By the end of the year Buckner’s State Guard numbered more than 4,000 men in 61 companies. Sufficient arms had been acquired—with the men in the ranks often providing their own—so that there were, in fact, nearly five rifles or muskets for every man. Magoffin was understandably proud. There was not a state in the Union, he declared, that had “a more gallant corps than our ‘State Guard,’ composed as it is, of the very best material in the State, and embracing men of all parties. The soldiers are gentlemen, and the officers men of the highest tone and character.”9
But hard times lay ahead for the Guard, as for Kentucky and the Union. Following the adjournment of the festive Louisville encampment came Lincoln’s election and the secession of South Carolina. With the once-unthinkable prospect of civil war now a real threat, Union men in Kentucky took a stern look at the Guard. What they saw had a distinctly prosouthern flavor. Since these companies were in part an outgrowth of the unrest in slave states following the Harpers Ferry raid, it was natural that they would be filled chiefly by those who felt common cause with the other slave states. “It is not surprising,” wrote a young Kentuckian, Basil W. Duke, “that the State Guard … should have conceived a feeling of antagonism for the Northern, and an instinctive sympathy for the Southern, people.” Indeed, the younger men of the state were generally southern sympathizers and, with few exceptions, these were the men now composing the rank and file of the Guard. Duke even admitted that the officers of the various companies frequently won their posts in part because of their attachment to the southern viewpoint.10
This hardly disquieted Union men. Here, in their midst, sat an armed and organized “army” that, in a crisis, would almost surely side with the South and against the Union. Soon they accused Magoffin and Buckner of deliberately organizing a corps of secessionists. The Union men retaliated in the legislature. Buckner estimated that he would need $3.5 million in 1861 to continue the organization and arming of the full quota of the Guard. The legislature gave him less than $20,000.
There was worse to come. The firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 set the nation ablaze. Kentucky’s parent state, Virginia, finally, and reluctantly, joined her southern sisters in secession. President Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteers to quell the rebellion, and informed Governor Magoffin that Kentucky’s quota would be four regiments. The Kentuckian responded tersely. “Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States,” he notified Washington. Instead, just as the state refused to take a stand in the election the year before, Magoffin and Buckner sought to avoid one now. Kentucky would remain neutral in the coming conflict. On May 16 the legislature approved that course and endorsed the governor’s refusal to send troops to Lincoln, but Magoffin was deluded if he thought their action implied unqualified support. For at the same time the Union men in Frankfort began eroding the governor’s control over the state’s military affairs. Appropriations for the Guard became so minuscule that Magoffin sent agents out to neighboring states to try to acquire more arms. Buckner himself went to the North, while Magoffin actually began dealing with the Secretary of War of the newly formed Confederate States of America, trying to cajole arms and supplies from him. With hostile armies glaring at each other from Ohio and Tennessee, the no-man’s-land of Kentucky in between could not hope to enforce her neutrality without a powerful State Guard.11
The effect of these events on the companies of the Guard was hardly unmixed. The threat of imminent warfare impelled many hotspurs to volunteer while, at the same time, the more ardent Union men in the Guard rethought their decision to enlist. Very few companies retained their 1860 rolls, and several actually fell apart entirely. Men refused to march or parade under certain banners that expressed unpalatable sectional sentiments. Internal struggles developed over who would control the unit colors and arms, often resulting in minor violence. Many Guardsmen simply took their rifles home with them and failed to report for further muster. And at least one company, Nuckols’ Glasgow men of Barren County, actually unfurled the Confederate colors and marched under them that spring. Some Guardsmen joined informal companies that left the state in May, bound for Virginia and the service of the Confederacy. Clearly, neutrality or no, the day rapidly approached when Kentucky, and the men comprising her State Guard, could no longer avoid taking a stand North or South.12
That same month the legislature hastened the time for decision. Reflecting the divided counsels of the state, its lawmakers now provided for a second militia “army,” these to be called Home Guard. A clear move to raise a force that could counter the prosouthern State Guard, the call brought forth Union men with fervor equal to that of Buckner’s enlistments the year before. Soon rival companies paraded in the same towns, one to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the other to “Dixie” and the “Bonnie Blue Flag.” Ed Thompson, then still a civilian, saw that “blue coats and gray coats rubbed against each other in public places with a smothered energy that told too plainly the conviction of the wearers of each that the other would furnish a most desirable and beautiful target for practice at musket range.” Thanks only to the preoccupation with recruiting, and the mad scramble for arms, was violence between the rivals averted. Few saw promise in the future. “If it requires all thes
e men and all this money, to keep up an armed neutrality,” moaned one editor, “God save the Commonwealth from active war.”13
Both factions in the state now abandoned restraint in the race to arm and prepare for confrontation. Union sympathizers began smuggling guns into the state to arm the Home Guard. Indeed, the federal government covertly assisted in equipping the loyal men of the state, sending thousands of “Lincoln guns” by a variety of routes. It was an ill-kept secret that only spurred the southern sympathizers in their own mobilization, and considerably enhanced the already hot feud between State Guard and Home Guard. Magoffin was quickly losing control of the state’s military forces, and of the course of state affairs. In mid-July the Union press in the state declared that the State Guard must be disbanded, or at least strangled by withholding appropriations and equipment. “Our State has supported a camp of instruction for the Southern Confederacy quite long enough,” shouted a Frankfort editor. Soon the legislature required renewed oaths of allegiance to the Union from State Guardsmen. As the summer progressed, all funds stopped, and an attempt was made to call into the arsenals the arms in the hands of the Guard.14
The Orphan Brigade: The Kentucky Confederates Who Couldn't Go Home Page 2
