11. Recent literature on what has been popularly labeled eastern Kentucky’s “feud” violence has tended to dissociate the war’s legacy from later instances of factional brutality. The revisionist interpretations of “feud” violence (Waller’s Feud and Billings and Blee’s The Road to Poverty) detract from the Civil War’s importance in influencing later violence. While Billings and Blee fail to give the war significant mention (perhaps considering that their setting, Clay County, was thoroughly Unionist), Waller asserts that the war probably played a small role in the Hatfield-McCoy feud, since extramartial hostilities did not emerge between the factions until more then a decade after the war’s cessation. However, Waller concedes that the same issues that had determined allegiance in the Tug River Valley in the 1860s were still present when the “feud” emerged years later. Lacy Ford’s review of Waller takes issue with this ambiguity. Waller, Feud, 18, 194–95; Ford, review of Feud, 726; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 57–80.
12. Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 57–80; Paludan, A People’s Contest, 200; Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 37–40. In fact, the strength of Kentucky’s two-party system in the 1850s may have been the key to its failure to secede and/or join the Confederacy. See Gary R. Matthews, “Beleaguered Loyalties,” 9–24; Volz, “Party, State and Nation,” 477–81.
13. Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 60–61, 72, 112–13; Lowell H. Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky, 8.
14. Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 65–66, 89–90, 94–102; Volz, “Party, State and Nation,” 448–51.
15. Quote from KSJ, 1861 (special called session), 20; Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 355; Shortridge, “Kentucky Neutrality in 1861,” 285–87; Simkins, The South, Old and New, 135; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 50–51.
16. Frank Moore and Everett, The Rebellion Record, 29–31, 129; Thomas C. Mackey, “Not a Pariah, but a Keystone,” 25–45; Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South, 206–22; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 35–57; Edward C. Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War, 1–39; WPA, Military History of Kentucky, 147; McQuown and Shannon, Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 36.
17. Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 318n; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 142–44.
18. Klotter and Klotter, A Concise History of Kentucky, 111; Paludan, A People’s Contest, 26.
19. Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 23.
20. Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 88.
21. Using the most updated estimates, a recent Kentucky history estimates that between sixty-six thousand and seventy-six thousand white Kentuckians fought for the Union, while between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand fought for the Confederacy. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 20; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 60 (quote).
22. The abundance of personalized war memoirs written by Kentuckians on both sides speaks to the lack of consensus in the state and the need for participants to define the war individually; it is little wonder that this was the state where so much of a political conflict (war) was spoken of as an interpersonal dispute (feud). See Dallam, A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky; William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate; Chapman, Ten Months in the “Orphan Brigade”; Diary of Brigadier-General Marcus J. Wright; Young, Reminiscences of a Soldier of the Orphan Brigade; Jackman, Diary of a Confederate Soldier; Mosgrove, Kentucky Cavaliers in Dixie. It should be noted that many, if not most, wartime memoirs written by Kentuckians dealt with experiences outside Kentucky. Even though the accounts are personalized, they tend to stress their participation in the larger war effort rather than the discord within the state.
23. The “War between the States” motif, a condition in which delineations of “segmented authority” are purportedly clearly drawn, makes the American Civil War seemingly unique among civil wars of the last three centuries since secession created what were virtual definitive boundaries between the war’s oppositional forces. However, in the Three Forks region, and communities throughout the South whose wartime stories have only begun to be told, the war was fought “intimately” within communities, suggesting that this civil war was perhaps more similar to others than may have been previously suspected. Ash, When the Yankees Came, 125. For “fragmented authorities” and “segmented authorities,” see Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 83, 88–89, 330–63.
24. Simon, “Lincoln, Grant, and Kentucky in 1861,” 6; Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 119.
25. KSJ, 1861 (special called session), 24 (quote); Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 696–98; Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 37–38; Shortridge, “Kentucky Neutrality in 1861,” 299; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 6; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 87–91; Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 100, 309n.
26. Rhyne, “Rehearsal for Redemption,” 44; Mathias, Incidents and Experiences, 74–75; Laver, Citizens More Than Soldiers, 66–97.
27. Perrin, Battle, and Kniffin, Kentucky, 357; Kirwan, Johnny Green of the Orphan Brigade, 8–10; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 147; WPA, Military History of Kentucky, 166.
28. The means by which a militia becomes “a political rather than a military institution” is explained in Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 107–9.
29. WPA, Military History of Kentucky, 240.
30. Lexington Observer and Reporter, December 9, 1865.
31. Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 697.
32. William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate, 245, 252. For the linguistic distinctions between bushwhackers, guerrillas, and partisans as they were understood in the nineteenth century, see Mackey, The Uncivil War, 6–10.
33. Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 697; WPA, Military History of Kentucky, 240.
34. Blight, Race and Reunion, 53, 212–16, 382–91.
35. Lowell H. Harrison, “The Government of Confederate Kentucky,” 84–89, 93–97; Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 71.
36. Historians have successfully debunked the myth of stolidly Unionist southern Appalachia, revealing a far more complex array of factors that contributed to the formation of divergent allegiances in the mountains. Civil wars create combatants, but they do not dictate that they fight uniformly and for uniform causes. Southern Appalachia’s Civil War experience was more like that of the majority of the modern era’s civil wars in which the larger war actually played host to a “mosaic of discrete miniwars,” many of which had only peripheral connections to the “master cleavage” (in the case of the United States, secession) that initiated a state of war. For these phrases and their significance in describing civil war, see Berkeley, The Graves Are Not Yet Full; Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 151, 9–18, 111–16.
37. Rockenbach, “ ‘The Weeds and the Flowers Are Closely Mixed,’ ” 3.
38. Volz, “Party, State and Nation,” 467.
39. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 57.
40. Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank during Slavery Times, 129.
41. KHJ, 1861, 327.
42. KSJ, 1861, 555; Rockenbach, “ ‘The Weeds and the Flowers Are Closely Mixed,’ ”1–2; Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 24, 29.
43. Quote from Tomes and Smith, The War with the South, 54; Congressional Globe, vol. 54, part 2 (February 21, 1863): 1161–62.
44. Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 171–72.
45. Owen, Fourth Report of the Kentucky Geological Survey in Kentucky, 351.
46. Brian McKnight’s history of the Civil War in the “central Appalachian divide” suggests that mountaineers were capricious in their loyalties and unwilling to provide firm support for either side. Having produced an unambiguous military history, McKnight does not take strong account of the role of local government or violent political agency outside the para
meters of official military units or units of peripheral officiality. I contend that under the direction of local elites, eastern Kentucky’s male population, white and black, exhibited a distinct interest in the war’s outcome (or at least its local outcome) and thus participated actively, although not always within the confines of regular military forces. McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, 3–5, 109–13.
47. Wisconsin Daily Patriot, November 19, 1860; Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South, 206; Scalf, Kentucky’s Last Frontier, 500; Volz, “Party, State and Nation,” 449–51, 500.
48. Hartford Herald, April 30, 1879; McAfee, Kentucky Politicians, 74–75; Doolan, “The Court of Appeals of Kentucky,” 463.
49. Brockman, History of the Hume, Kennedy and Brockman Families, 43; Hume, “The Hume Genealogy,” 110; Walden, Remembering Kentucky’s Confederates, 29; Kleber, Clark, and Harrison, The Kentucky Encyclopedia, 541.
50. Ed Porter Thompson, History of the Orphan Brigade, 700–704.
51. “Campaign Sketches No. 3,” 179; Scalf, Kentucky’s Last Frontier, 281 (quote); Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 23, 30–31.
52. Perry, Jack May’s War, 1–5, 13–14; Ed Porter Thompson, History of the First Kentucky Brigade, 753, 755–56; Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 65.
53. Ed Porter Thompson, History of the Orphan Brigade, 701; Walden, Remembering Kentucky’s Confederates, 29; Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 106–7.
54. War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 32 (1892), 433, 687; Clements, History of the First Regiment of Infantry, 147; KAGR, 210–13.
55. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 8.
56. Cincinnati Press, November 8, 1861.
57. New York Herald, November 24, 1861.
58. Although nationalism does not fully explain Confederate loyalty in a Union state, Noble’s testimonial suggests its contribution in conditions in which it was not previously part of the political or cultural atmosphere. “Nationalism is contingent; its creation is a process. It is not a substance available to a people in a certain premeasured amount; it is rather a dynamic of ideas and social realities that can, under the proper circumstances, unite and legitimate a people in what they regard as reasoned public action. Such a view of nationalism, moreover, underlines the political nature of the undertaking, directing attention to the social groups seeking to establish their own corporate ideals and purposes as the essence of group self-definition.” Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 1–21 (quote 6); Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War, 121–24.
59. Christopher Phillips has said that the Civil War–era “border experience,” in contrast to the attempts at Confederate nationalism farther south, “fits best within the political . . . rather than the cultural realm.” “ ‘The Chrysalis State,’ ” 160.
60. Degler, The Other South, 122 (quote); McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, 17. For similar views, see McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels, 6; Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 20, 26; Groce, Mountain Rebels, 70; Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War, 132; Waller, Feud, 31.
61. Breathitt, Floyd, and Morgan counties were peculiar in being “Confederate in sympathy” compared to most counties in eastern Kentucky. Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 7; John Britton Wells, 10th Kentucky Cavalry, 4–6. Floyd County was the home of one of Kentucky’s Confederate senators, John Milton Elliott. “Campaign Sketches No. 3,” 179; KAGR, 1:210–13.
62. The typical Kentucky slave owner, like the majority of slave owners throughout the South, owned fewer than ten slaves. In 1860 only seventy Kentuckians owned more than fifty slaves. Sprague, “The Kentucky Pocket Plantation,” 69; Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.
63. Herbert W. Spencer, “Captain Bill’s January Raid”; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 9–10. In 1850 these contiguous counties were Floyd, Morgan, Owsley, and Perry. Goodrich, A Pictorial Geography of the World, 233–43; Ernest Collins, “Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties,” 9, 13; Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.
64. Tallant, Evil Necessity, 91–100; Barnett, “Virginians Moving West,” 244; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 6–8.
65. Ernest Collins, “Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties,” 41 (quote).
66. For the patron-client relationships and martial violence, see Schmidt et al., Friends, Followers and Factions, xxxii–xxxiii. White southern mountaineers, within and outside the seceded states, agreed with their lowland fellows that the alleged northern threat to slavery was an equal threat to all property and autonomy. Aside from this, even in a place like Breathitt County where black and white mingled freely, the white fear of a free black population was probably also a factor as it always was in the South (especially the Upper South). See Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 9–10, 123–30.
67. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:50–52; Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.
68. Dunaway, African-American Family, 10.
69. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:5.
70. Waldrep, “Rank and File Voters and the Coming of the Civil War,” 70–71; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 440–47; Volz “Party, State and Nation,” 1–8, 469–81.
71. This suggests that southeastern Kentucky was consistent with the rest of the state, since cursory analysis of Kentucky’s sectional divides on the 1861 neutrality vote reveals a consistent correlation between Democracy and antineutrality. The same areas that had supported Henry Clay and his Whigs during the party’s salad days tended to favor neutrality in 1861 and contributed the greater amount of Union support after Kentucky’s official participation in the war. Counties that had continued Democratic leanings since the 1820s opposed neutrality and accordingly provided the larger numbers of Confederate volunteers over the next four years after the state’s early attempt at neutrality was revealed as a clear failure. Fox, “The Southern Mountaineer,” 389; Rossiter, Parties and Politics in America, 85–86; Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 20–23. For similar data from other slave states (with relatively similar conclusions), see Trelease, “Who Were the Scalawags?” 445–68.
72. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, p. 216; Coulter, “Some Reasons for Kentucky’s Position in the Civil War,” 50–52; Volz, “Party, State and Nation,” 500.
73. Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 47–48, 71, 74–75, 117–18; Shannon and McQuown, Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 32–38.
74. Relatively few histories of the U.S. Civil War have used white southern class concerns to explain wartime Unionism in the southern states (in fact, only recently has the subject of southern Unionism been broadly explored). For four exceptions, see Degler, The Other South; Escott, Many Excellent People; Durrill, War of Another Kind; and Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists. For a complex examination of the changing relationships of “aristocrats,” yeomen, and poor whites in the occupied South, see Ash, When the Yankees Came, 170–94.
75. Most Breathitt County surnames were found exclusively on either Union or Confederate recruitment rolls, showing that kinship played a significant role in picking sides—brothers and cousins often stuck together. But the small number of surnames found on both sides, when compared to 1861 tax records, suggests that economic considerations often trumped familial ones. Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS; War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 32 (1892), 433, 687; KAGR, 1:210–13; Charles C. Wells, 1890 Special Veterans’ Census for Eastern Kentucky.
76. Forty-fourth Annual Report of the American Bible Society, 67.
77. In E. P. Thompson’s understanding, class is not so much a thing as it is an event, a historical phenomenon that occurs when people “as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually op
posed to) theirs.” Viewed as a continentwide conflict, the American Civil War hardly appears as a war between classes. However, within one divided community with no definite attachment to either North or South, class formation (at least for a historically finite length of time) is a useful heuristic for understanding what made some men fight for the North and some men fight for the South, and why some attempted (unsuccessfully) to avoid the war altogether. E. P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class, 9.
78. WPA, Military History of Kentucky, 240.
79. This is a bit of an irony considering Governor Thomas Metcalfe’s clash with Andrew Jackson in 1830. National Republican Thomas Metcalfe was elected as Kentucky’s tenth governor in 1828. He was a firm defender of publicly funded internal improvements, a trait that gave him natural distance from President Jackson’s policies disdaining same. Jackson’s veto of a federal bill funding a road between Lexington and the Ohio River during Metcalfe’s term marked the beginning of Jacksonian decline in most (but not all) Kentucky politics. Ramage and Watkins, Kentucky Rising, 26–27, 90–92; Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 256–72.
80. Surprised by the amount of Confederate support he found in eastern Kentucky in early 1862, Colonel James Garfield advocated loyalty oaths for these heads of party, hoping that lead rams would change the flocks’ direction. War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 10, part 2, p. 68; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 13–14.
81. Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 29.
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