USA > Kentucky > The history of Kentucky, from its earliest discovery and settlement, to the present date, V. 2 > Part 22
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603
KENTUCKY'S NEUTRALITY DISTURBED.
JEFFERSON DAVIS, president of the Confed- erate States, was born in Todd, then Christian, county, Kentucky, June 3, 1808; moved to Mis- sissippi. Educated at Transylvania, Lexington, Kentucky, until sixteen, and graduated in 1828 at West Point. Served gallantly in the North- west Indian wars, in the Black Hawk and Mexican wars. Filled a number of political positions of trust ; in Congress as a representa- tive, in 1845; in the Senate, in 1847, and in both . again, subsequently. In the States' Rights con- tests for fifteen years, until the civil war, he was an able leader of his party, of invincible firmness and courage. After the acts of secession, and the establishment of the Confederacy, he was elected its president. It is a remarkable coinci- dence that the presidents of the United States FPES CENT JEFFERSON DAVIS and Confederate States were native-born Kentuckians, taking themselves ominously- the one South, the other North-in their boyhood days, to be schooled and trained to act their parts in the great drama of the " Irrepressible Conflict."
that the former were generally in sympathy with the cause of the South, and the latter, with that of the Union. These facts placed the State in a preca- rious attitude. There were fifty-four companies of State Guards, the only available military force in the Commonwealth, and their officers were gen- erally men of Southern sympathies. On the 24th of June, General Buckner ordered six companies of these troops to Columbus, Kentucky, under Gen- eral Lloyd Tilghman, to protect neutrality there, threatened by the Confed- erate forces. Very soon after, General Tilghman passed over the line, after resigning, and cast his fortunes with the Confederate cause. He was suc- ceeded in command by Colonel Ben Hardin Helm. About the middle of July, at Camp Clay, opposite Newport, and at Camp Joe Holt, opposite Louisville, four regiments were being recruited from Kentucky, for the Federal service. At the same time, at Camp Boone, near Clarksville, Ten- nessee, the Kentucky volunteers to the Confederate ranks were making their way, and the like number of regiments, the Second, Third. Fourth, and Fifth Kentucky, were rapidly filling. These camps, on either side, served as temporary safety escapes to the irrepressible war elements.
The first overt act of violation of the neutrality of Kentucky was soon to follow. General William Nelson, gathering a nucleus of Home Guards, established a recruiting station at Camp Dick Robinson, in Garrard county, and there rendezvoused companies of volunteers from Northern, Southern, and Central Kentucky, and organized them into regiments. It was unques- tionably a move sanctioned and aided by the Government at Washington. On the protest of Governor Magoffin, President Lincoln refusing to remove these intrusive and obnoxious forces, replied to Commissioners William A.
604
HISTORY OF KENTUCKY.
Dudley and Frank K. Hunt, that this force consisted exclusively of Ken- tuckians, in the vicinity of their own homes, and was raised at the "urgent solicitations of Kentuckians." The president added: "Taking all means to form a judgment, I do not believe it is the popular wish of Kentucky that this force shall be removed beyond her limits, and with this impression, I must respectfully decline to so remove it."
The same day, August the 19th, the governor had dispatched George W. Johnson to Richmond, as a commissioner to the Confederate Government, with a like request that the neutrality of the State be not invaded from that direction. President Davis replied in most courteous and respectful terms : ." In view of the history of the past, it is barely necessary to assure your excellency that this Government will continue to respect the neutrality of Kentucky, so long as her people will maintain it themselves. If the door be opened on the one side for the aggressions of one of the belligerent par- ties upon the other, it ought not to be shut to the assailed, when they seek to enter it for purposes of self-defense."
The door had been thrown widely open by the bold act of General Nelson at Camp Dick Robinson; and no longer even the thin disguise of pretext could conceal that the authorities at Washington and the positive leaders of the Union cause, grown bold enough by the advantages they had won in the Fabian strategies of delay, were now concuiring to throw off the mask of neutrality, and to lead the great mass of her people to a committal to the policy of coercion, under plea of loyalty and patriotic duty. The great majority of the people, who had been profoundly sincere and honest in the adoption of neutrality before, beheld now the misleading illusion vanish before their visions of hope. There had been to the date of this develop- ment, an able, positive, and powerful element of coercive Union men, and as able, positive, and powerful an element of secessionists, counteracting and balancing, each, the other, and thus enabling the sincere neutralists to hold in check the aggressive tendencies in either direction. The functions of neutrality ceased with the close of the first scene in the great war drama. and there was only left the choice of entering one of the encroaching and opposing armies, or to remain in the privacy of citizenship, subject to the vicissitudes of civil war.
On the 21st of July, the great battle of Manassas was fought on the soil of East Virginia, and the signal defeat, the total rout, and the wild, dis- orderly flight of the Union forces back upon Washington heralded through- out the land. If one party was elated, the other was correspondingly depressed ; but from their different standpoints and with different emotions. both were more intensely wrought up to hostile defiance and determined re- sistance. The war spirit, once aroused, is terribly infectious among a peo- ple, and, once in conflagration, they do not reck of danger or pause to reason. The adoption of the fallacy of secession as the sovereign right of a State, and the formal respect of its observance, had lost the border States.
605
CAUSES THAT LED TO WAR.
except Virginia, to the Southern Confederation, and mainly to the support of its.cause. The sovereignty .of the people, original and unquestioned. is greater than the measure of sovereignty they delegate to any government, and their right of revolution, for sufficient cause, is of universal concession. On plea of this right, our fathers justified their act of revolution and the war for independence before an approving world. Secession was but an- other style and form of asserting the right of revolution, but with restrictive and technical embarrassments that fatally forbade those measures in the out- set most vital to the life of the colossal rebellion. Had the people of the seceding States planted themselves on the right of revolution, as did the colonies, and, recognizing that necessity, safety, and independence were paramount to States' rights, marched their armies across Maryland, Ken- tucky, and Missouri, and established their military lines upon the front bor- ders of these, there is not a doubt that the soldier element would have gone into the ranks of the Confederate army as solidly in the three States mentioned as in Virginia, Tennessee, and"Texas. This would have with- held West Virginia, lost one hundred and fifty thousand good soldiers to the Union cause, and added this number to the ranks of the Confederate army. It would have doubled the resources for army supplies and paralyzed ' the effective naval armaments of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. It would have qualified the South to become invasive and aggressive. The military arm of the Confederate Government was led by as able generals and sus- tained by as brave soldiers as the world knew, but its controlling statesman- ship was beset and blinded by idealistic abstractions of State sovereignty, which it seemed incapable of subordinating to the most evident and crit- ical emergencies of war, even at the moment of providential opportunity. The foresight of statesmanship, the skill of military leadership, the bravery of willing soldiers-all were sacrificed to the Moloch of doctrinairism. Mil- itary necessity, in the presence and demand of such a destiny, can not afford to halt and worship at the temple of abstractionism. There never was an occasion more urgent for Napoleonic logistics and Napoleonic action ; the etiquette of abstractionism could not admit of it.
Nullification was the first extreme interpretation of the doctrines set forth in the resolutions of 1798; secession was the second, and the most exhaust- ive demonstration. It is a shallow, if not an absurd, view to treat secession as a cause of the gigantic and destructive civil war between the North and South sections. The conspiring events of a century connected with the in- stitution of slavery had brought about a divided sentiment, a conflict of interests and irreconcilable passions, which made war between the peoples of the two sections an impending and inevitable catastrophe. It is puerile and illogical to rail at secession as the ogre of the rebellion and strife. Se- cession had nothing to do with generating the causes of the war; it was pow- erless to arrest or avert its certain precipitation. It was but a method preferred by the discontented and aggrieved party to accomplish revolution
606
HISTORY OF KENTUCKY.
of government. It is only a question we discuss whether it would not have been wiser and more practical for the Southern people to have based their action on the right of revolution, and thus given themselves the widest lati- tude for military and diplomatic strategies while justifying their action before the consenting judgment of the civilized world. The experiment tried may make an end of secession as a doctrine of States' rights, but the right of revolution will ever live as a remedy to a wronged and oppressed people, and it would be but conjecture to say that, in the mutations of the affairs of governments and peoples, some States of the North section may not next be driven for refuge to its adoption as readily as those of the South to the more questionable remedy of secession. Who will next rebel? No one knows.
As it became apparent that neutrality was at or near its end, the soldierly element, sympathizing with the Confederate cause, made their way out of the State to the recruiting camps just across the Tennessee line, to be en- rolled and formed into regiments. One regiment had previously been or- ganized, under Blanton Duncan, colonel, and incorporated in the army of East Virginia. The State Guards moved out almost bodily, with the State arms retained, following their commander, General Simon B. Buckner. The roads were thronged with the hurrying volunteers, eager to join their fort- unes with their Southern kinsmen, and in a few months it is estimated that well-nigh ten thousand Kentuckians had gone to the Confederacy.
Those of decided Union tendencies as busily flocked to Camp Dick Rob- inson and other recruiting posts, which were now being multiplied over the State. The Confederate volunteers followed the fortunes of such distin- guished men as William Preston, Humphrey Marshall, S. B. Buckner, Roger W. Hanson, John S. Williams, Ben. Hardin Helm, John C. Breckinridge, George W. Johnson, John H. Morgan, and others of note. In the active lead of recruiting men for the suppression of the rebellion were William Nelson, Thomas L. Crittenden, Jerry T. Boyle, Speed Smith Fry, Frank L. Wolford, Thomas J. Wood, Walter C. Whittaker, J. J. Landrum, T. T. Garrard, John M. Harlan, John Mason Brown, and their commissioned comrades. The field of Kentucky having been abandoned to the military and civil jurisdiction of the Union authorities, now in open concert with the Federal Government, gave to the same an immense advantage. That equit- ocal and moltable element, which but too often passively forms a large per- centage of the mass of the population of countries at war, and are liable to be operated on by the positive men of conviction on the one side or the other, were now at the entire disposal of the active Union authorities in the pro- cesses of recruiting.
By appointment, General Robert Anderson was called to the command of the Union forces in Kentucky. On September the 25th, the Legislature passed an act directing the governor, by proclamation, to call out forty thousand Kentuckians, from one to three years, "to repel the invasion by armed forces from the Confederate States." The accretions to the Federal
607
GENERAL JOHNSTON COMMANDS THE WEST.
army swelled to large proportions. General Grant having moved a body of several thousand Union troops to Belmont, opposite to and threatening Co- lumbus, Kentucky, about the Ist of September, on the 3d of that month a body of Confederate forces, under General Leonidas Polk, occupied and fortified at Hickman and Columbus. On the 5th, the Federal army in force occupied Paducah and other points in Kentucky. On the 6th of Novem- ber, General Grant left his quarters at Cairo with a land and naval force, and landed some miles above Columbus, on the Kentucky shore, at the same time moving in the same direction a detachment from Paducah, as though designing an attack on Columbus. General Polk, observing the landing of a considerable body of Federal troops on the Missouri shore, seven miles above Columbus, divined at once that the former moves were to divert, and that the real aim was to overwhelm and capture the small garrison near Bel- mont. He dispatched General Pillow with four regiments across the river to re-enforce the garrison. Very soon after his arrival, General Grant com- menced an assault, which was stubbornly resisted, and with varying fortune, for several hours. The Confederates, being outflanked, were forced back toward the river, when three regiments more were sent to the support of Pillow, and two others led into the action by General Polk. 1 The Federal army was soon driven back and forced upon a retreat, with very consider- able loss. They were followed for seven miles up the river, and compelled to seek safety in their boats, repeatedly under destructive fire until at a safe distance. The Confederate loss was six hundred and forty-one in killed, wounded, and missing; that of the Federals about one thousand, among whom were two hundred prisoners.
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2 On the 10th of September, 1861, General Albert Sydney Johnston, having resigned his commission in the United States regular army in Cali- fornia, was assigned to the command of the department of the West, includ- ing Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, and contiguous territory. On his arrival at Nashville, on a survey of the situation, he determined to advance his military line into Kentucky. By his orders, General Buckner occupied Bowling Green, on the 18th, with five thousand men. At the time. General Polk moved his main forces to Hickman and Columbus: General Zollicoffer, with four thousand troops, on the extreme right of the line, was sent to occupy the valley of the upper Cumberland as far as Wayne county, or Cumberland ford. This formal invasion of Kentucky was claimed to be an act of self-defense rendered necessary by the action of the government of Kentucky, and by the evidences of intended movements of the forces of the United States already within the State. Fast of Columbus, Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Hopkinsville were garrisoned with small bodies of troops ; and the territory between Columbus and Bowling Green was pos- sessed by moving detachments which caused the supposition that a large military force was near and threatening an advance. Cumberland Gap was
I General Polk's Report.
a Jefferson Davis" History, Vol. I., P. 400.
608
HISTORY OF KENTUCKY.
fortified on the extreme right, to protect against any move on East Ten- nessee. Thus,' General Johnston, when he took command at Bowling Green, on the 28th of October, found himself entrenched there, with his right wing reaching to Cumberland mountains, and his left to Columbus, on the Mississippi.
1 General Johnston afterward reports: "The enemy's force increased more rapidly than our own, so that by the last of November it ran up to fifty thousand, and continued to increase until it ran up to seventy-five thousand or more. My force was kept down by disease until it numbered about twenty-two thousand." He was fearfully deficient in arms and muni- tions of war, and, on the 19th of September, telegraphed President Davis: "Thirty thousand stand of arms are a necessity to my command. I beg you to order them procured and sent with dispatch." The response was that but only one thousand stand could be spared. During most of the autumn, one-half of this Western command were without arms. Later on, it was greatly strengthened by the addition of four thousand troops from Arkansas, under General Hardee, six regiments that had been recruited mainly from Kentucky, and twelve thousand men on requisition from Mis- sissippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, making a total of some forty thousand composing the entire forces.
On the 24th of September, General Anderson issued a proclamation that "no Kentuckian shall be arrested who remains at home attending to his business, and takes no active part against the authority of the General or State Government, or gives aid or assistance to our enemies."
In the last week in September, within four days. William Preston, William E. Sims, George B. Hodge, George W. Johnson, John C. Breck- inridge, and other noted Kentuckians, with one thousand armed volunteers, passed through Prestonsburg, on their way to the Confederacy. James B. Clay, Charles S. Morehead, R. T. Durrett, and quite a number of well- known sympathizers with the South, were about the same time arrested, borne off, and shut up in prisons, some in Fort Lafayette, New York.
2 On the 21st of October, General Zollicoffer, with five thousand men. advanced into Rockcastle county, and attacked the Seventh Kentucky Fed- eral infantry, under Colonel T. T. Garrard, on Wildcat mountain. With the advantage of the forest undergrowth, and the deep gorges and ravines of the country, Colonel Garrard held him in check. until re-enforcements of six Federal regiments and a battery of artillery came upon the ground. After a severe fight, the Confederates were driven off, with a loss of one hundred and thirty killed and wounded, that of the Federals being not over twenty- five. Frequent skirmish fights took place, at West Liberty, at Hazel Green. in Green, Gallatin. Butler, Whitley. McLean, Lyon, and other counties. with not very important results to either side. At Ivy mountain, in Pike
I Davis' Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, Vol. I., p. 407.
2 Collins' Annals of Kentucky.
609
SORROW THROUGHOUT THE LAND.
county, a regiment of indifferently-armed troops, under General John S. Williams, was engaged in a spirited contest of an hour, with three regi- ments, a battalion, and a battery of artillery, under General Nelson, and compelled to retreat before the superior numbers, with some loss.
The Commonwealth was now a seething cauldron of active animosities, of unbridled license and violence, and of both petty and flagrant outrages on the persons and property of private citizens, as well as of those who, by overt speech or act, had avowed their hostility. It is not the province or privilege of the historian, however his sympathies and prejudices may in- cline, to indulge the charity that would conceal the motives of men, by burying their actions in the tomb of silence. that only the better side of humanity may appear. The functions of history require the hand of the faithful chronicler, if it must ever become "philosophy teaching by ex- ample." The distresses and horrors of civil war were widespread over the land, like the Upas shadows of wild chaos and disorder : while the tempest roar and beating waves of passionate fury but partially drowned the piteous wails and anguish that went up from broken hearts and desolate homes. Kentucky suffered her measure of retributive and penitential sorrows for the partial, and not entirely guiltless, part she played in the tragedy of war ' begun ; yet her sorrow and sufferings were not to be compared with those that fell upon Virginia, Missouri, and some other of her sister Common- wealths, where the lawlessness of military license met no restraint from the assertion of civil authority. and where the habitations of men, over great areas of country, were converted again into resorts for wild beasts and birds of the wilderness.
Truly says Shaler : 1 ". A great sorrow fell upon the land. It was common enough to see strong men weeping for the woe that no hand could avert from coming upon their beloved State. One of the most painful features was the sundering of households that now took place. When the division came, very often the father went one way, the sons another. Usually the parting lines in civil war are drawn by neighborhoods and clans, but in this battle the line of separation went through all associations. Families, churches, friendships, business relations, seemed to have no influence what- ever on the way men went. It was the most singular instance of independent mindedness that is recorded in history. There was an absolute forgetfulness of the moneyed value of the slave, as there was an absence of desire to secure other property. There was no drifting out of capital, of property, or of population, to escape the perils of strife, as usual in the beginnings of civil wars, and this shows the overwhelming intensity of the moral shock brought upon the consciousness of the people by the swift and appalling changes of the times.
The difficulty of maintaining the active authority of the civil law in this period of conflict was made the greater by the action of the Home Guards,
I Shaler's Kentucky Commonwealths, pp. 254-6.
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610
HISTORY OF KENTUCKY.
a force that could not be kept in proper control. These were a local sort of military police, organized and armed at the same time with the State Guards, but maintained at home around the towns and neighborhood centers. While many men of character and integrity were associated with these, and ren- dered good service in restraining violence, yet they offered the tempting. opportunity of gathering into their organizations the shiftless, prowling, and lawless element which, more or less, infest every community, at the expense of its peace and good name. The unusual compensation, the subordination of civil authority to a dispensation of military license, and the free and easy service, with little risk or sacrifice, made for them a long holiday of each year of their visitation upon the country. Too frequently, for the honor and good repute of our civilization, officers and privates availed themselves of this armed license to perpetrate needless and barbarous murders, to spoliate upon and appropriate or destroy property, to arrest and imprison men, and to injure, terrify. and annoy, with ruthless and cruel inhumanity. And these wrongs were most frequently done to neighbors and old acquaint- ances. The causes were variously traceable to partisan or personal malice, to covetous cupidity, or to the wantonness of drunken or passionate brutality. These phases and experiences of depravity are not phenomenal with Ken- tucky, nor were they a peculiar outgrowth of one cause militant, or the other. We shall see that from the ranks of the splendid manhood of the Confederate army there came out, to prowl and prey upon communities, in defiance of all restraints of civilized warfare, marauding bands of outlaws, who perpetrated murders, robberies, arsons, and outrages, and, under the abuse of Confederate authority, as wantonly as did the worse element of the other side. These are but few of the experiences invariably incident to civil war; and we picture them but feebly to reality, that the pages of his- tory, from the pen of a present witness, may testify to another generation the calamities of such a war, which it would be ever better to avert by pacific and rational compromise, if men could only pause to consider in the midst of resentments. A very few vicious and violent men, in any community or organization, may serve to stigmatize the good order and good name of the whole.
In the first periods, the chief commandants sought to restrain all military outlawry. October the 7th, General Anderson issued Order No. 5, in ref- erence to the conduct of Home Guards arresting and carrying off peaceful citizens, and directs a " discontinuance of these ill-timed and unlawful arrests." On his resignation and succession by General Sherman, soon after, the latter announced that "the removal of prisoners (except spies and prisoners of war) from the State, without trial by the legal tribunals, does not meet my ap- proval." General Nelson, a man of hasty and furious passions, had recently had arrested, and sent to be imprisoned in Fort Lafayette, R. H. Stanton, W. T. Casto, Isaac Nelson, B. F. Thomas, and George Forrester, of Maysville. In the United States Court, at Frankfort, Judge Bland Ballard
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