USA > Kentucky > The Union regiments of Kentucky, Vol. I > Part 2
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The Committee on Publication is: Col. John H. Ward, Col. I. B. Nall, James F. Buckner, Col. Richard T. Jacob. The Committee on Finance is: Capt. William II. Mundy, James F. Buckner, Logan C. Murray.
After payment of the expenses of printing, all the pro- coeds of the sale of the volumes are to go to the Monu- ment Fund.
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Union Regiments of Kentucky.
POLITICAL CONDITIONS. By Col. R. M. Kelly.
The soldiers who went into the Union army from Ken- tucky felt that they were doing their duty, both as citi- zens of the United States and citizens of Kentucky, and showing true faith and allegiance both to their state and country. There was doubt whether a state had the right to secede from the Union, but there was no question that a state had a right to remain in the Union. Kentucky de- cided to remain in the Union as voluntarily and emphatic- ally as South Carolina decided to secede, and Kentucky's decision was made under circumstances much more em- barrassing and perplexing than those which surrounded South Carolina. That Kentucky's decision was emphatic and unmistakable was recognized by Gov. Magoffin, who was opposed to it, in his message to the legislature that assembled on September 2, 1861. In that he said: "My respect for state rights and state sovereignty, and for the will of a majority of the people is such as to make me ac- quiesce in their decision and bow in respectful submission to their will as long as I am a citizen of Kentucky."
At a subsequent period, in December, 1861, soon after a convention held at Russellville, then within the Con- federate lines, by Kentucky Secessionists, and composed of delegates who were either self-constituted or chosen by soldiers then in the Confederate service, had gone through the form of annexing Kentucky to the Southern Confederacy, and made a provisional government for the state, Gov. Magoffin said of it: "Self-constituted as it was, it can not be justified by similar revolutionary acts in other states. I condemned their action, and I con- demn this. It has been, and will continue to be, my posi- tion to abide by the will of the majority of the people of the state."
The people of Kentucky had expressed their devotion to the Union and their opposition to secession at various elections before the one which called forth this declara- tion from Gov. Magoffin. At the August election, 1860, in the midst of the exciting presidential campaign of that year, Leslie Combs, the unconditional Union candi- date for clerk of the Court of Appeals, was elected over Clinton MeClarty, Breckinridge or ultra Southern Rights . Democrat, by a majority of 23,233. At the presidential election in November of that year, Bell, the Union candi-
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Political Conditions.
date for President, received 66,016 votes; Breckinridge, the candidate of the ultra Southern Democrats, received 52,836 votes; Douglas, the candidate of the Union Demo- crats, 25,644 votes, and Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the Republican party, 1,366 votes. The candidates representing Union principles thus received in the ag- gregate 40,190 majority over the candidate who repre- sented ultra Southern doctrines and was supported by all holding secession views, although the latter, Mr. Breckinridge, was Vice-President of the United States and a very popular citizen of Kentucky.
The next election was held on May 4, 1861, for dele- gates to a border state convention, to be chosen by con- gressional districts. The Southern Rights candidates, after a canvass in which they were charged with favor- ing secession, were withdrawn by their committee, on April 29th, and the Union candidates were elected, re- ceiving in the aggregate nearly 110,000 votes, or more than two-thirds of the aggregate vote cast for all candi- dates at the presidential election the year before. This vote was cast after the secession of South Carolina and the Gulf states, and the organization of the Southern Confederacy; after the governor had called the legisla- ture together and recommended the calling of a con- vention to consider secession, which the legislature, at the called session and in an adjourned session, had ro- fused to do, and after he had called them to assemble in a third session for that purpose; and in the midst of the excitement caused by the fall of Fort Sumter and the se- ression of Virginia, which followed. At an election held in Louisville for mayor and members of the general coun- cil, on May 6, 1861, J. M. Delph, Union, was elected mayor, receiving 4,822 votes to 1,571 for Devan, the Southern Rights candidate. The members of the general council elected at the same time were all Union men.
On June 20, 1861, a special election for representa- tives in Congress was held, made necessary by the fact that President Lincoln had called an extra session of Congress, to meet on July 4th. The terms of all Ken- tucky representatives had expired March 4th, and the regular time for election was not until the first Monday in August. Candidates were nominated by the Union men and Secessionists in all the ten districts of the state, and the Union men carried every district but the first; their net aggregate majority in the state amounting to 54,760. Hon Robert Mallory, who spoke in favor of co- ercion, received 6,224 majority in the Louisville district. This election was after Arkansas and North Carolina
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Union Regiments of Kentucky.
had followed Virginia in joining the Southern Confed- eracy.
The next election, and the one to which Gov. Magoffin had special reference, was for members of the legislature, held on the first Monday in August. On that day the Union men elected 76 members of the House to 24 elected by the Secessionists, and they elected enough members of the Senate to make, with the hold-over Senators, the vote of that body stand 27 Union to 11 Secession. This elec- tion was held about two weeks after the battle of Bull Run, the first great disaster to the Union armies. The city of Louisville and JJefferson county together were, at that time, entitled to two Senators and five Representa- tives. In one senatorial district, James Speed, the Union candidate, received 4,788 votes to 605 cast for his oppo- nent, Jefferson Brown; in the other, A. B. Semple, the Union candidate, received 4,615 votes, and his opponent, Gamble, received 902. The four Union representatives from the city and the one from the county were elected by corresponding majorities.
Gov. Magoffin was not alone in recognizing these votes as expressing the purpose of the people to remain in the Union. After the election for the Border States convention in JJune, Hon. Joseph Holt, then in Washing- ton, wrote to Hon. Joshua F. Speed that the news of "the overwhelming Union vote in Kentucky had afforded un- speakable gratification to all true men throughout the country." When the news of the overwhelming Union victory on the first Monday in August reached Washing- ton, the venerable ex-Gov. Charles A. Wickliffe, then a Union member from the Bardstown district, rose in his place and, in the midst of great cheering, announced the result and declared that Kentucky, the first state admit- ted to the Union, would be the last to leave it.
All the elections referred to were as free and untram- meled as any ever held. They were not influenced by military force, because they all occurred before there was a Union soldier in the state.
That Kentucky should desire the preservation of the Union was a logical consequence of the geographical po- sition of the state and the political training of its people. The central location of the state made the maintenance of the Union essential to all its interests. Devotion to the Union had been inculcated by all its statesmen. It had never followed the leadership of South Carolina or the extremists of the states further south. During the nullification excitement of 1832, it sympathized with Jackson's sentiment, "The Federal Union-it must be
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Political Conditions.
preserved." During the angry discussions which oc- curred during the pendency of the compromise measures of 1850, the sentiment of its people were in accord with the declaration of Henry Clay: "If Kentucky to-morrow." unfurls the banner of resistance, I never will fight under that banner. I owe a paramount allegiance to the whole Union; a subordinate one to my own state." The in- scription ordered by the legislature to be placed on the stone contributed by the state to the Washington monu- ment was another fair expression of the feelings of Ken- tuckians toward the Union: "Under the auspices of Heaven and the precepts of Washington, Kentucky, the first to enter the Union, will be the last to leave it."
That there should be some division of sentiment among the people of the state, however, was inevitable. Kentucky was united to the South by the common insti- tution of slavery. The merchants in her river towns and cities, and her citizens, engaged in river navigation, had large dealings with the states down the Mississippi. Thousands of mules and horses were raised in the central portion of the state for the Southern market, and almost up to the breaking out of the war hogs were also driven from the same section to that market. Kentucky hemp furnished the bagging for Southern cotton bales. A good many Kentuckians owned plantations in Arkansas and Mississippi, and hundreds of Southerners and their fam- ilies spent their summers at Kentucky watering places. On the other hand, thousands of children of Kentucky had emigrated to Indiana and Illinois, Iowa and Minne- sota, while few had gone South. The merchants of the state bought their stocks of goods in the Northern seaport cities, and hundreds of Kentuckians were dealing in wild lands and city lots in the rapidly developing Northwest. The slavery controversy, which began to take precedence of every other political subject when the settlement of the region acquired of Mexico began, became more acrimonious as the repeal of the Missouri compromise and the troubles in Kansas brought new occasions for excitement. Old parties were broken up and new ones were formed. Under the influence of continued agita- tion the emancipation sentiment, once strong, had al- most wholly died out, and the pro-slavery sentiment was dominant throughout the state. It was after ten years of angry discussion of the slavery question, in the various. . shapes under which it had been involved in political con- troversies, that the people were called on to elect state officers and a legislature in 1859. The Whig party had practically disbanded after the election of 1852; the Know
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Union Regiments of Kentucky.
Nothing of American party had finished its brief exist- ence. The Democratic party nominated for governor Beriah Magoffin, of Mercer county, who favored the Doug- las doctrine, popularly called Squatter Sovereignty. The relies of the Whig and American parties, known as the Opposition party, nominated Joshua F. Bell, of Danville, one of the most noted orators of the state, and afterward one of the staunchest of Union men. Mr. Bell took his stand for the rights of the South in the territories, and maintained that the owner of slaves had the right to take his slaves into any territory of the Union and be pro- tected in his property in them, just as in his other prop- erty, by the whole power of the government.
The campaign was vigorously conducted, and Mr. Bell forced his opponent to abandon his Squatter Sovereignty doctrine, but the fragmentary Opposition party could not stand against the organized Democratic party, and Ma- goffin was elected by a majority of 8,916. The Democrats also carried the legislature, but the Opposition divided the congressional delegation with the Democrats, each party electing five representatives.
After the election of Mr. Lincoln in November, 1860, and after South Carolina and other states had seceded. commissioners from Alabama and Mississippi visited Gov. Magoffin and urged him to call the legislature to- gether for the purpose of calling a secession convention. The governor called the legislature to meet on the 17th of January, 1861. Before it met, a letter from Vice- President Breckinridge was published, urging the call- ing of a convention, and advising that Kentucky and the other border states take their stand with the South as the only way of securing a satisfactory adjustment of the controversy, but ending with a declaration of his pur- pose to abide by the action of the state. When the legis- lature, which had been elected in 1859, under the circum- stances mentioned above, assembled in pursuance of the governor's call, nobody knew how the members were di- vided on the question of Union or secession. It was soon demonstrated that there was a small majority of Union men in the Senate, and that the House was very equally divided. In the meantime, many Union meetings had been held throughout the state, and the conventions of the Bell and Douglas parties had reassembled, and while expressing devotion to the Union and maintaining that "secession was a remedy for no evil," counseled compro- mise. There was still a general hope and belief that some arrangement could be made that would avert dis- union, and it was difficult for the public men of the state.
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Political Conditions.
who had been accustomed to hear threats of disunion for ten years past, to realize that the action of the Southern states was more than a political maneuver to be met by political arrangement. The emancipation feeling, which had considerable strength before 1849, had almost van- ished during the heated discussions of the slavery ques- tion since, and there was hardly the nucleus of an anti-slavery party in the state was shown by the fact that Mr. Lincoln had only received 1,366 votes. The most loyal assemblages, gathered to express their devotion to the Union, felt so bound to make it plain that their disap- proval of an anti-slavery administration was as strong as ever that their purpose to adhere to the Union was not always expressed as strongly as it was meant. One striking exception to this practice was shown in the reso- lutions passed by a large meeting of the workingmen and mechanics of Louisville, held on December 27th, the same day on which the governor's call was issued. They de- clared that they had "no interest in the abstract ques- tions dividing politicians," and pledged themselves, and called on the workingmen, farmers and merchants of the country, to form an organization pledged to vote for no man who was for disunion, and to call on every repre- sentative who voted for disunion to resign. It was the organization growing out of this meeting that elected the Union Mayor Delph, and the Union Council a few months later.
When the legislature assembled, the governor, in his message, stated that the Union was dissolved, and recom- mended a convention to determine the course of Ken- tucky. This recommendation was ignored. The bal- ance of power in each house was held by a small number of men who were opposed to disunion, but unwilling to take any active measures for the support of the govern- ment, and throughout the three successive sessions of this legislature, during the winter and spring, care had to be taken not to drive these men to the disunion side. Among the most active Union men were John A. Prall, in the Senate, and, in the House, R. T. Jacob and R. A. Burton, who had been strong Breckinridge advocates during the presidential campaign.
Resolutions were offered by Jacob that Kentucky should remain neutral and assume the position of medi- ator between the sections. After providing for commis- sioners to attend a peace conference called by Virginia, the legislature adjourned on February 11th till March 20th. On February 8th, a confederacy of seven states- South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi,
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Union Regiments of Kentucky.
Louisiana and Texas-had been organized at Montgom- ery, Ala., and on the next day elected Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, President, and Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, Vice-President.
The legislature assembled, pursuant to adjournment, and after providing for the election on May 4th of a dele- gate from each congressional district, and two from the state at large to a border state convention, to be held May 27th, adjourned sine die on April 3d.
On April 13th, Fort Sumter was fired on. Maj. Rob- ert Anderson, who commanded its small garrison of 80 men, was a Kentuckian, who had numerous relatives in Louisville, and before being ordered to Charleston had been stationed at Newport barracks. His gallant con- duct at Sumter was a source of pride to the Unionists of the state. Directly after that event Mr. Lincoln issued his call for 75,000 militia to serve for three months, and Gov. Magoffin was called on to furnish four regiments. He declined to furnish any troops "for the wicked pur- pose of subduing sister Southern states." On April 22d, the Confederate secretary of war telegraphed him to fur- nish one regiment for the Confederacy. He refused to do so, but conched his refusal in milder terms than he had used in replying to Mr. Lincoln.
On April 24th, the governor called the legislature to assemble in special session on May 6th. When it met he again recommended the calling of a convention, and also recommended the arming of the state. The struggle be- tween the two parties at this session was very bitter and the feeling intense. The terms of the members were about to expire. The excitement caused by the firing on Sumter and the call for troops, which hurried Virginia into secession, was at its height. Arkansas seceded on the day the legislature met, and North Carolina eight days afterward. The Secessionists were urging action, believing that it was their last chance to stampede the state into secession. The Union men believed the new legislature to be elected in August would be more favor- able to the government, and were fighting for time. Pop- ular pressure was brought to bear on both sides. No sooner would delegations of Secessionists appear in Frankfort than the telegraph would summon Union men from all parts of the state.
Personal collisions seemed imminent every day at Frankfort. At the opening of the session a flood of peti- tions poured in from the women of the state in favor of neutrality and keeping out of the strife.
President Lincoln had been approached by Hon. Gar-
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Political Conditions.
ret Davis and Hon. Joseph Underwood, leading Union men, and he had informed them in substance that if Ken- tucky would do nothing against the government, the gov- ernment would not interfere in her affairs. The Union and Secession members had different ideas of neutrality. The Union members favored what they called mediator- ial neutrality, which involved discharge of all duties in the Union except taking part in the war, and meant final adherence to the government; while those of secession leanings favored an armed neutrality little different from absolute independence, and intended to prepare the way for ultimate adherence to the Southern Confederacy.
Parties were so evenly divided that on a test vote in the House, the Union side was successful by only one vote.
Some half dozen waverers in the two houses had to be watched and reasoned with at all times. Resolutions were passed approving, under the circumstances, the gov-' ernor's responses to the President's call for troops, favor- ing friendly relations with both sides, but absolute non- participation in a war not of Kentucky's making or seek- ing, and for arming of the state solely for home defense. Acts were passed for the better regulation of the mil- itia, which recognized the Home Guard organizations as outside the militia and not subject to the orders of the governor, and providing for arming and equipping them; requiring the enlisted men of the active militia or State Guards to take the same oath of allegiance required of commissioned officers, within thirty days; appropriating money for military supplies and appointing a military board, consisting of the governor and four Union men, to disburse it; and, finally, an act introduced and passed by the Union men, showing their confidence in the Union sentiments of the people, changing the time for the meet- ing of the new legislature from the first Monday in De- cember to the first Monday in September. On the 20th of May, the governor issued his proclamation of neutral- ity, in accordance with the resolutions passed, and for- bidding both Confederate and Federal troops to enter the state. On May 24th the legislature adjourned.
The congressional canvass soon opened in full vigor, and resulted, on June 20th, in the election of all the Un- ion candidates except in the first district along the Mis- sissippi. In the meantime, the youth of the state had be- come impatient. Lovell H. Rousseau, a senator from Louisville, said in the Senate on May 21st: "The neu- trality that fights all on one side, I do not understand; troops leave the state in broad daylight, and the gov- 2
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Union Regiments of Kentucky.
ernor sees them going to fight our government, yet nothing is done to hinder them."
The military position of the state was peculiar. An act of March 5, 1860, had provided for the reorganization of the state militia, the active portion of which was to be known as the State Guard. The State Guard had the organization of an army corps, and was under the com- mand of an inspector-general, with the rank of major- general. The governor, the adjutant-general and all the state officers were known to be in sympathy with the se- cession movement. The inspector-general and com- mander of the State Guard was Gen. Simon Bolivar Buck- ner. The report of the adjutant-general of the state, in January, 1861, showed that there were forty-five com- panies of the State Guard fully armed, uniformed and equipped. This number was nearly doubled by spring. Complaints were made during the spring that companies supposed to have Union tendencies had difficulties thrown in the way of organization, while companies of Secession proclivities could be mustered in promptly and without complying with the law about uniform and equipment.
During the spring and early summer, a number of camps of instruction were held for the State Guard. Po- litical discussions were forbidden, and none were allowed unless they had a Southern tendency; the theory was that the State Guard was the army of the state, to do the will of the state. The Union men regarded it as a Secession organization, and it practically controlled all the arms of the state.
The Home Guard organizations, begun early in the year, were originally made without respect to politics, and were meant for home defense; but as the situation de- veloped during the spring, they began to be purely organi- zations of Union men, and the Union men looked on their organization and armament as a necessary offset to the State Guards. A Union club, started in Louisville in the cigar store of Mr. JJohn Homire, with John S. Clark as first president, soon got a membership of about six thousand; and under a vague provision of the city charter the Union city government organized a brigade for home defense, which soon numbered 18 companies of infantry, a squad- ron of cavalry and a battery of artillery. James Speed was the first brigadier-general, succeeded by Lovell H. Rousseau, and then by Hamilton Pope, with John W. Barr as adjutant-general.
About the time the Confederate Secretary of War asked Gov. Magoffin for a regiment of Kentucky troops, Blanton Duncan, of Louisville, had received authority to
Political Conditions. . 19
raise two regiments for the Confederacy and, during the month of April, was actively recruiting in various parts of the state; one of his companies left Louisville by steamer for New Orleans on April 17th, and others left by rail to Nashville on the 25th.
When application for transportation was made to Mr. Guthrie, ex-Secretary of the Treasury, then president of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, who had shortly be- fore been repulsed by Duncan from a stand in the court house, which he was attempting to ascend in order to ad- dress a meeting, he curtly responded that he would only furnish transportation "to troops legally organized and moved by legal authority." He was persuaded, however, by Union men that Duncan and his men would do more harm in the state than out of it, and that the best thing to do was to send them away as soon as possible.
There was little more recruiting for the Confederacy, in Kentucky, till July. Immediately after the governor's refusal to furnish troops to the government, J. V. Guthrie, a resident of Covington, and W. E. Woodruff, of Louis- ville, both well drilled officers of militia organizations, offered their services to the President, and on April 23d received authority to raise two regiments as part of Ken- tucky's quota. To avoid complications they established Camp Clay just above Cincinnati on the Ohio side.
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