Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (Civil War America) [Hardcover]

Anne Elizabeth Marshall (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 29, 2010 | Series: Civil War America

Historian E. Merton Coulter famously said that Kentucky "waited until after the war was over to secede from the Union." In this fresh study, Anne E. Marshall traces the development of a Confederate identity in Kentucky between 1865 and 1925 that belied the fact that Kentucky never left the Union and that more Kentuckians fought for the North than for the South. Following the Civil War, the people of Kentucky appeared to forget their Union loyalties, embracing the Democratic politics, racial violence, and Jim Crow laws associated with formerly Confederate states. Although, on the surface, white Confederate memory appeared to dominate the historical landscape of postwar Kentucky, Marshall's closer look reveals an active political and cultural dialogue that included white Unionists, Confederate Kentuckians, and the state's African Americans, who, from the last days of the war, drew on Union victory and their part in winning it to lay claim to the fruits of freedom and citizenship.

Rather than focusing exclusively on postwar political and economic factors, Lost Cause, Gained Identity looks at Kentuckians' activities--public memorial ceremonies, dedications of monuments, and veterans organizations' events--over the longer term, by which they commemorated the Civil War and fixed the state's remembrance of it for sixty years following the conflict.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ideal for a range of scholars.... A pleasure to read."
-Journal of Historical Geography

"Marshall's book is beautifully written and truly a pleasure to read."--
-Journal Of Southern History

"Creating a Confederate Kentucky is a welcome addition to the study of post-Civil War Kentucky.... Those who teach the history of Kentucky and of the Civil War and Reconstruction will find this book a valuable addition to their reading lists."
-Journal of the Civil War Era

"Marshall's book is a good read, and it will be of much interest to those seeking a better understanding not only of Kentucky's key role in the 1860s, but also of how all of us have remembered the war ever since."
-Blue & Gray Magazine

"Rather than focusing exclusively on postwar political and economic factors, Creating a Confederate Kentucky looks over the longer term at Kentuckians' activities . . . by which they commemorated the Civil War and fixed the state's remembrance of it for sixty years following the conflict. . . . Will be a nice addition to your Confederate/Kentucky library shelf. . . . Excellent."
-Lone Star Book Review

"An interesting, informative book. It helps clarify the experiences of many of us who grew up in Kentucky. . . . The book has set a new standard."
-The Kentucky Civil War Bugle

"Anne Marshall's Creating a Confederate Kentucky alters the entire field of Civil War memory study….[It] is a masterful work of scholarship. Its prose is lucid; its research is thorough; and its interpretative power is truly ground-breaking."
-Civil War Book Review

"Marshall has crafted an easily read, easily comprehensible scholarly volume. Recommended. All levels/libraries."
-Choice

"Marshall has illuminated an important and understudied aspect of how a border region simultaneously departed from and reflected broader patterns of memory. Marshall's excellent study will refine our understanding of how contested and unpredictable memory was and continues to be."
-The American Historical Review

"By enriching our understanding of the ways Confederate Kentuckians, white Unionists, and African Americans interpreted the state's participation in the Civil War, Marshall also sheds significant light on the processes through which competing interests claim ownership of history."
-The Journal of American History

"An intelligent narrative. . . . The author writes well and is easy to read. . . . A valuable and serious history of the development of Confederate memory in Kentucky and in America. . . . An excellent book for any student of Reconstruction, the process of reconciliation or the years after the Civil War."
-TOCWOC: A Civil War Blog

"An excellent book: tightly argued, richly detailed, and elegantly written. It is a model of what a state study can do, showing the importance of not just race, but also place, to the story of the Lost Cause."
-Civil War Monitor

"Examines all sides of Kentucky's Union-Confederate postwar dialogue. . . . [A] thoughtful, carefully researched and plausibly presented historical study, illustrated with a handful of vintage black-and-white photographs. Highly recommended."
-Midwest Book Review

From the Inside Flap

Marshall traces the development of a Confederate identity in Kentucky between 1865 and 1925 that belied the fact that Kentucky never left the Union and that more Kentuckians fought for the North than for the South. Following the Civil War, the people of Kentucky appeared to forget their Union loyalties, embracing the Democratic politics, racial violence, and Jim Crow laws associated with formerly Confederate states.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (November 29, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080783436X
• ISBN-13: 978-0807834367
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.9 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #372,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Becoming Confederate November 30, 2010

By James W. Durney TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

E. Merton Coulter said Kentucky "waited until after the war was over to secede from the Union." In Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War Garry W. Gallagher looks at secession 150 years after the war. This book documents the process and reasons for Kentucky becoming a Confederate state in popular memory. In the process, the reader gains an understanding of how the South lost the war but won the peace.
Kentucky is a badly divided Border State in 1861. With strong ties to both sides, politically the state makes no choice. Kentuckians follow their heart in choosing sides, even as events force Kentucky into the Union ranks. This is never a comfortable fit for the state or the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation is not applicable in Kentucky. After the war, slavery is still legal and people are slaves. Reconstruction is not necessary in a state that never seceded. An army of occupation does not protect people working for the Freeman's Bureau. Black men, who enlisted in the USCT and their families, are free but the law offers little protection. Many Whites that supported the Union did not do so to destroy slavery and feel betrayed. Many ex-Confederates are welcomed home and have their civil rights restored as if nothing happened. With so many tensions, Kentucky is a powder keg.
The author documents the explosion in Kentucky and the resulting development of a Confederate memory. In the process, we see post war America and the development of reconciliation. This is not an easy process filled with high-minded people acting with the best of motivates. This is a bloody, violent era where factions struggle for advantage and in some cases survival. Age, selective memory, practical considerations and race play major roles during this time. All of these threads and many more are woven into an intelligent narrative that takes the reader from the end of the war to the 20th Century. The author writes well and is easy to read. This well illustrated book has a complete set of endnotes, Bibliography and index. It is a valuable and serious history of the development of Confederate memory in Kentucky and in America. This is an excellent book for any student of Reconstruction, the process of reconciliation or the years after the Civil War.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "A Strange Conclusion to a Triumphant war" August 6, 2011

By Alan F. Sewell TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Kentucky was arguably THE pivotal state in the Civil War. It was the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Henry Clay, the "Great Compromiser." At the outset of the war Kentucky elected a pro-Union legislature that prevented the secessionist governor from taking the state out of the Union and thereby encouraging Maryland and Missouri to follow suit. During the war prominent Kentuckians filled President Lincoln's cabinet, reassuring Border State residents that Lincoln was not their enemy. Kentuckians refused to rally to the Confederate cause when Braxton Bragg's Confederate Army occupied most of the state.

Thus it may be fairly said that the Confederacy's back was broken in Kentucky.

Yet as soon as the war ended influential Kentuckians embraced the Southern causes of States Rights (i.e. "keep the Negroes in their place") to such an extent that most Kentuckians came to see their state as having been a keystone of the Confederacy instead of the other way around. A few years after the war a Kentucky Unionist lamented: "A consistently loyal man in Kentucky, is of all men most miserable,--persecuted, trodden under foot, hooted at by rampant rebels--And disowned & Cast off--by the government, he hazarded all to Support--he finds no security, no ray of hope Anywhere--It is a political mystery if not iniquity, that a triumphant government, should exalt its enemies--and abase its friends--This is a Strange Conclusion to a Triumphant war."

So why DID Kentucky repudiate the Confederacy during the war only to embrace it after it had been defeated? Dr. Marshall answers that question as succinctly as I have ever seen it stated:

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"For many Kentucky whites, who had traded their loyalty to the Union in return for protection of slave property, black enlistment (in the Federal Army) was the ultimate blow, the final realization that the Union cause had evolved and was no longer their own."
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In other words Emancipation caused a majority of White Kentuckians to switch their sympathies from the Union to the Confederacy but only AFTER it was too late to have a material impact on the course of the war. Kentuckians were also annoyed by the heavy-handed administrations of its Union Military Governors, but Emancipation is clearly the fundamental factor that alienated them.

The most important conclusion I drew from this book is that President Lincoln was exactly right in his timing of the Emancipation Proclamation. If he had issued it during early 1862 Kentucky would most likely have entered the Confederacy during Bragg's invasion in September 1862 and the Union cause may have unraveled. This book makes it clear that maintaining White hegemony over Blacks was the primary political interest of Kentuckians during and after the war. As soon as their hegemony was broken White Kentuckians began to identify with the Confederacy.

This book also hints at the importance of African-Americans in Kentucky. The book states that 40,000 Black Kentuckians enlisted in the Federal armies and many more labored as civilians in the railroads and ports. Thus, African-Americans accounted for much of Kentucky's Union war effort.

Those were the important points that expanded my education about Kentucky during and after the Civil War. Here are some other things I liked:

* The writing is lucid and the length of the book is right. The breath of material is wide but there is no useless filler. Every paragraph is interesting.

* There are no hidden agendas. It is a deeply researched factual account that doesn't have any ideological or revisionist axes to grind. It is always a comfort to read this kind of book when so many these days are written by people aligned with outrageously bogus revisionist agendas that make a mockery of the Civil War era and the people who lived through it. This book lets the facts speak for themselves.

* It captures the feeling of postwar melancholy. After the war Kentucky became the step-child of the Union --- a loyal state that somehow wasn't loyal enough. Coincident with the war the political and economic center of the United States shifted toward the emerging Northeastern and Midwestern industrial centers, leaving Kentucky as a backwater. This was a severe demotion for a state that had played such a prominent role in national politics until 1860.

* It tells how the images of controversial Confederate Kentucky partisans like John Hunt Morgan were rehabilitated by postwar Kentuckians from being "horse thieves and highway robbers" to heroes.

* It tells the entertaining stories of how prominent Kentuckians like colorful newspaper editor Henry Watterson dedicated their lives to creating a mythology of Kentucky as a Southern state with Northern values. Some of the yarns they spun were hilariously exaggerated mischaracterizations of Kentuckians. Maybe they were trying a bit too hard to "spin" an image that really didn't need to be spun. Just let Kentucky be what it is.

This book is an excellent complement to SISTER STATES, ENEMY STATES another well-written book that vividly describes Kentucky's Civil War years. By reading both books you will come away with a thorough understanding of how the Civil War shaped Kentucky both in fact and in mythology right on down to our own time. The human interest story in CREATING A CONFEDERATE KENTUCKY is about how during the past 150 years Kentuckians have spent so much effort inventing stories of what they THINK their ancestors did during the Civil War.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended, especially for Kentucky state history shelves February 13, 2011

By Midwest Book Review

Format:Hardcover

Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State tells of how the state of Kentucky retained strong ties to the Confederacy, even though Kentucky never seceded from the Union and more Kentucky citizens ostensibly fought for the North than for the South. After the Civil War, the people of Kentucky rallied to Democratic politics, and the racial violence and Jim Crow laws strongly associated with former Confederate states took root in Kentucky soil. Creating a Confederate Kentucky examines all sides of Kentucky's Union-Confederate postwar dialogue, from political and economic motivations to what the Kentucky people's activities (public memorial ceremonies, dedications of monuments, veterans organizations' events, and more) revealed about their motivations and drives. Chapters tell of Kentucky sentiments from 1792 up through 1935 in this thoughtful, carefully researched and plausibly presented historical study, illustrated with a handful of vintage black-and-white photographs. Highly recommended, especially for Kentucky state history shelves.