Compromise!

Bit of finals week fun from the University of Kentucky that shows some ideological continuity between 1861 and 2009 in the Commonwealth. My intro to U.S. students had a short essay question as follows:

Who’s to blame for the Civil War, and how did we get there, between 1840 and 1861?

Now, this should prompt the students to air the grievances of both North and South, taking into account the litany of events that drove us toward conflict for twenty years. Historiographically speaking, I'm looking for a "blundering generation" sort of answer, which is perhaps debatable, but seems to cover the material well enough for non-majors. However, I was pleased to see this from a student still, it would seem, steeped in the anger and frustration that proslavery Unionists in Kentucky felt during the secession crisis.

The Confederates are to blame for starting the Civil War. Just because you’re not getting what [you] want doesn’t mean you need to succeed [sic] from the Union and start a war with them. They should’ve just kept calling congress into session until they reached compromise and if they didn’t get their states rights, then they could have succeeded [sic] from the Union.

Legacy of H. Clay much?

Interpreting Wiley's Material Culture.

During the Bell Wiley Panel last Saturday afternoon at the Southern, Pete Carmichael posed the interesting question of interpreting the evidence that Wiley had used descriptively. That is, how can historians use the material culture of the soldier - what he ate, what he wore, etc. - to better understand (and in the case of both the park service and the academy, to better teach) the dynamics of wartime life. Earl Hess raised the valuable point of the "battlefield detective" type work that has been done on some Civil War battlefields, but that is, of course, straying from Wiley's methods and sources, therefore being rather out of the spirit. Carmichael was on to something using sources like Wiley's letters and diaries.

I think that material culture has two important interpretative uses. 1) Strategic. As anyone who has been on one of Jim Ogden's staff rides at Chick-Chatt can attest, the materiel of the Confederate soldier is a window into the political economy of the Confederacy, Chattanooga being the gateway into the industrial heartland of the Confederacy. A Johnny writing home about the abundance of goods - and, yes, that happens despite mythology - reveals the extent of the (to quote The Ogden) "Confederate military-industrial complex."

2) Social. What do clothes say about the man? What prewar associations did soldiers make between cloth and status? Is the fact that the Confederacy resorts to the cotton-wool blended jean cloth vice the all-wool uniforms of regulation (and their U.S. counterparts) significant? I think it is, particularly with this army emerging from a southern slave society. How do Confederate soldiers, particularly those from elite backgrounds, react when they are issued uniforms of jean cloth? Is it degrading to wear the material often associated with "jeans wearers," a term antedating "redneck" and "hillbilly"? Is it more degrading when, after hauling off large quantities of jeans from the 1862 Kentucky Campaign, slaveowning Confederates are issued suits of the same goods marketed as "negro cloth" before the war?

This is, also, something I've been playing around with recently. I mentioned a while back poking around on a project on the relationship of the 5th Ky. Inf. to the rest of the Orphan Brigade. That issue of interpreting material culture, using it for more than its purely descriptive, "wonder what it was like..." value. In a paper I'm prepping for the Appalachain Studies Association's meeting in the Spring in Dahlonega, I bring out Kentucky Confederates' association of cloth and class. One brief illustrative point from my paper, my take on an account of the 5th Ky. joining the rest of the Brigade, which by that time was uniformly uniformed in what is now known as the "Columbus Depot" jacket.

"'Say, there backwoods, bawled one [Orphan], 'any more butternut jeans where you
came from?' And such attacks came quick and fast." Such attacks, of
course, associated both class - jeans coats - and space - the backwoods - with
the men of the Fifth Kentucky and as a consequence with the mountains as a whole
without regard to material evidence of the Fifth's actual range of sartorial
class presentations.

Lee, if I remember correctly, has found some similar evidence of disdain for rough jeans from his South Carolinians. Any more we're aware of?

"Take These Pistols to My Father"

As the semster ends, my intro to U.S. history students are quickly approaching the Civil War. Last week we looked at two Mexican War-era lithographs depicting the death of Lt. Col. Henry Clay, jr. of the 2nd Kentucky Infantry at the battle of Buena Vista. I asked my students to think about these two images in light of 1) the potential political implications of each and 2) how warfare is depicted. They drew out some fantastic points, including:

- The most common reaction was to the American flag flying above the scene. It seems "extremely patriotic," one wrote.
- Continuing on this nationalist theme, some noticed that "American troops are in straight line & seem more organized, [with] more intricate uniforms." They linked these lines advancing under the flag to themes of the constant and "always advancing" progress of Manifest Destiny.
- Like many of the young men in uniform in Mexico, the students saw this image as a depiction of the heroism and glory of military service. "It shows the great leader dying an honorable death on the battlefield giving an inspiring quote to his officers, handing over his pistols." The inspiring quote, for those who can't make it out: "Leave me, save yourselves. Take these pistols to my father and tell him I have done all I can with them and now return them to him."
- Many linked Clay's drive to acquit himself well on the battlefield to the expectations of manhood and honor, some even to Clay jr's attempt to "fill the shoes" of Clay sr. by "dying fighting for" the family reputation.

Discussion of the second image focused on the "otherization" (my word, not theirs) of the Mexican enemies. The enemy is "hostilely [sic] killing the man with little emotion/remorse." It tries to depict "defeat not by a noble enemy but by [a] barbaric people." They concluded that this encouraged Americans to fight against Mexican "barbarity," justified by God's providential designs for the U.S. carrying its civilization to the entire continent. ...or so Jimmy Polk might say.
- Discussions about the depiction of war in the second image versus the first were insightful, too. In contrast to the first lithograph where "the battle continues in the background...while the figures in front look peaceful," and Clay's grapeshot wound in the thigh is "unreal" "sanitized violence," the second image shows "disarray," and "chaos." Most concluded that the second image was more "blunt," even more "realistic," and shows warfare with "very little honor" indeed. In our class discussion we talked about how movies today serve many of the same purposes as these images did in the 1840s.
- Looking toward exam time, I was quite pleased to see the students pick up on some irony in the very fact of Clay jr's death. One noted that the Col. died "because of a border dispute [of which] Henry Clay [sr] didn't want to be a part...he felt it was unnecessary." Another found it "ironic b/c [ah, the age of text-speak!] Clay is always being defeated (1844 by Polk) & his son is portrayed being defeated." (That one's for you, Chris!)

All in all, a useful little assignment that the students got into. I asked them to relate these themes -- both the political implications of the debate over the spread of free soil/slavery into the West and the impact of images of war on young men of military age -- in relation to why men would enlist to fight in the Civil War. And we'll be there in just a couple weeks!

Rainy Post-Shiloh Days

As I sit in cooped up in my office on this dreary April day, I am reminded that 147 years ago tens of thousands of men were doing precisely the same. After the excitement of battle had faded, the survivors were given ample time to reflect on their experiences as movement ground to a halt. Maj. Ben Buckner of the 20th KY (U.S.) felt much the same as he wrote home to Helen.

Although I have written you two letters in the last days, I dont know how I can better spend an hour or so this gloomy rainy miserable evening than by writing to you again, feeling assured that you will receive any thing I may write with pleasure, however uninteresting it might be to others; and as you are so very good about writing as indeed you are about every thing else, I would have no excuse for not having written should by time during the next week be so occupied as to make it impossible to do so. But dearest though I may write you never so long a letter you must not expect any thing of interest. The battle with all its horror as well as points of interest you have learned all about long since, and we have no incident in camp worth relating. We are stuck fast in the mud, and as it rains here every day I dont know when we will move, as it would now be utterly impossible to drag our artillery over these horrid roads. The rebels are somewhere, I dont know where, though if they were only five miles distant I would not know it as the movements of the rebels and indeed of our own army are kept profound secrets from both officers and men. ...

You dont know how very much I want to see you. Do you know that the day of the battle, I thought of you again and again , that during the terrible scene that I thought not of mother & father or self only you. God bless you darling you are so good, true, and noble. ... Write me a long letter dear Helen, tell me every thing about you. ...

As ever yours

B.

The Simple Fifth Kentucky and Appalachian Otherness

In 1914, veteran of the 4th Ky. Infantry (CS) Lewis C. Garrigus wrote a series of articles in his (then) local paper, the Portland Morning Oregander. In one of these, Garrigus recalled nicknames that each regiment was given within the brigade.

Lieutenant-Colonel Phil Lee, of the Second Kentucky, was quite a wit and something of a wag as well, and after the Fifth came to use, he characterized the five regiments as follows: The "honest ninth," the "theiving fourth," the "supple sixth," the "invincible second" and the "simple fifth." The fifth had been recruited in the mountain counties of Kentucky, and we called them "seng diggers" when they first came to us, but we soon learned to respect them for their prowess, their indomitable courage notwithstanding their want of culture.

And in so doing, Garrigus joined what was, by then, a cultural phenomenon that considered the American mountain South another America, a retarded frontier, the contemporary ancestors of the country permanently locked in their Elizabethan past. This is not surprising for 1914 as many scholars who study the evolution of the idea of Appalachia will point out. But what is most interesting is that Garrigus' claims are backed up by wartime accounts that disparage the soldiers of the Fifth as jeans wearing, uncultured, ginseng digging, persons outside the mainstream Kentucky. The development of an Appalachian other has been linked to mountain unionism during the war, but I can't help but wonder if there are also roots of an Appalachia-as-other in intra-Confederate criticism of the mountaineer as well. I have decided to start poking around this idea this semester in a seminar with Dwight Billings to see if it has legs.

My exploratory steps thus far has been to see if the 5th was really a "mountain" regiment. Using E.Porter Thompson's 1868 annotated rosters, here's where the Orphans hailed from. Update: New maps! Red counties sent a company-sized contingent, Orange counties sent a significant (~15+) group, and Yellow counties sent a small number of soldiers into the unit:

The "Simple Fifth." While there are the large groupings from Morgan and Breathitt (2 companies in that case), there are certainly large contributions from non-stigmatized Northern Ky. Certainly, though, the 5th is the most tightly grouped of any of the units.

For comparison:

The "Invincible Second"

The "Thieving Fourth"

The "Supple Sixth" (not as South-Central as I had previously assumed)

The "Honest Ninth"

Happy New Year: From the New South

A bit of a New Years celebration here at AoT. This is a poem I came across during my thesis research that I've always loved. It's from the Lexington Observer & Reporter, owned and edited by W.C.P. Breckinridge, Colonel of the 9th Ky. Cav (CS), and lately (by the time of this poem) passed off to Confederate sympathizer George S. Ranck. The paper was a leading spokesman for the Kentucky Democracy, a New South booster, eventually a New Departure paper following Henry Watterson's lead, and one of the best sources I have for news and (favorable) opinion about anti-black militia and Kuklux activity.

Notice the "cut down in the prime of life" and "whipped but defiant" South imagery. And, of course, the section towards the end about guarding the "annals and altars of state" from the "wolf" is, going into 1869, a commentary on Kentucky's position on the upcoming 15th Amendment debate.

ADDRESS OF THE CARRIERS OF THE
Lexington Observer & Reporter,
TO THEIR PATRONS,
The 1st of January, 1869.

PROLOGUE
Looking backward for the glory,
Of a gilded summer dawn,
Down a weary waste of whiteness,
Down a dreary winter lawn.

Looking backward, down the shadow
Of an iron beaten way,
Whence the armoured TIME came silent,
On the animate to-day.

Oh, it startles human reason;
Oh, it withers human pride,
Looking backward, ever backward,
On the living things that died.
...
ADDRESS
Tread lightly – tread softly – oh, merciful Time,
O’er the land of the sun, and the lemon and lime,

For leaves of the flowers so faded and strewn,
Were fair in the morning and fallen at noon.

Go back to the plane of your ice-hidden lakes –
Go back with your breath of the frost and the flakes,

Go northward, oh, season of winter and gloom,
From the emerald South and its odorous bloom.
...
Oh, better to die and be hidden away,
Than to live in the circle and sight of decay.

Our metals of life in their crucibles run,
When the pulses are red in the glow of the sun.

But come to the South with the ice of your heel,
And the channels are still and the currents congeal.

Go backward, oh, winter, go back to the lakes,
With your withering frost and your wandering flakes.
...
The bush is borne down, and the blossom is shed
And we gather to-day at the grave of the dead.

The course that is stark, and the body that’s cold,
Is a lick of the past to be lost in the mold;

And armies may go the sepulcher plain,
To laurel the bier of the body that’s slain,

But never again at the death of the years,
Will the heart of the Southron be lavish of tears,

Go seek in the far-reaching fields of his land,
For the shade of his column and capital grand;

Go look for the mosque of his worship and pride;
Go look for his brother go look for his bride;

Go look for all things he has cherished and loved,
The garden be haunted – the valley be roved,

And the desolate track, and the ravens that fly.
Will tell that the fount of the Southron is dry.

Time was, when a sentinel stood at the gate,
And guarded the annals and altars of state;

When the gleam of his eye and the glare of his blade
Kept the wolf in the covet afar and afraid;

When the good and the pure, and the noble and true,
Were all in the land that the sentinel knew –

Time was when the tyrant would blanch in the sight,
Of the column and arch of our temple of right,

When the marbles of state in their purity stood –
That our fathers had builded and hallowed in blood;

But time is long gone with the sands of the glass,
When honor was watchword, and virtue the pass.

Go banish the dust from your lexicons old
Ye people that glitter and seek to be gold;

Go back to the schools of your earlier days,
For their lessons of truth, and their patriot lays;

Go study the greatness, that tried in the fires,
Shone bright in the glory that covered your sires;

Go feel in the spell that encircles their graves
That tyrants and cowards are meaner than slaves.

Oh, men of the nation – oh, rulers and kings,
Do ye know that your riches and powers have wings?

Do ye know that the ashes ye scatter and spurn,
Must quicken in time, and arise from the urn?

Do you know that the gates where ye gather your tolls,
Are peopled with things that have pulses and souls?

Do ye dare from your source in the dust and the clods
To covet the robe and the thrones of the Gods?

Ye may look at the waves that go out on the sea,
And learn from the past, what your future will be;
...
But evening must come from the shadow at last
With a garment of gloom and a gathering blast.

Happy New Year from a still-defiant South!

"All Men of Decency Ought to Quit the Army"

In honor of finishing up my essay, "'All Men of Decency Ought to Quit the Army': Benjamin F. Buckner, Manhood, and Pro-Slavery Unionism in Kentucky," for The Register last night, I decided to post Ben's letter to Helen, his fiancee, from which I took my title. It also happens to be one of his most concise (but certainly not only) articulations of his opinions about the propriety of African Americans as soldiers and the actions of the Lincoln administration.

Bowling Green, Ky.
Feby. 1, 1863

My Dear Helen,

I received a very long and interesting letter from you yesterday evening, and as the mails have at last commenced coming with some regularity, I shall doubtless have the pleasure of hearing frequently and of writing to you as often. I cant tell you when I am coming home as that depends on Col Hansons stay. When he comes I am going home on leave for a while, and just as soon as we are paid off I am going to try General Wright with a resignation.
The papers come quite regularly and we are very much edified by reading the proceedings of the Congress upon the Negro Soldier bill. All men of decency ought to quit the army if that bill becomes a law.
What is to become of Kentucky it is impossible to tell. All is dark in her future. I am sick at heart with the prospect before us. We who are in the army feel that we have been grossly deceived by the President and the party in power and what to do is the question that disturbs us all. We are all opposed to secession, and believe that it is no remedy for any of the evils that beset us. At the same time, we are uncompromising in our opposition to the infamous and disgraceful measures originated by the President & his party. The fact [is] that the Army and the Country are brought into disrepute both at home and abroad by the adoption of measures totally unfit for the accomplishment of any useful purpose. ...
Col Hanson’s time is up in the 5 or 6 of this month. You must be sure and keep me posted up as to your whereabouts for I dont want to have to go all over the Country hunting you up like I did before. I am going to send this letter by Capt Williams of Mt. Sterling[.] He is on duty in the Provost Marshall’s office, and is going home to see his wife. I hope to get my resignation through Genl Wrights head quarters. We are in disputed jurisdiction Rosecrans and Wright both claim us and having tried Genl Rosecrans I intend to try the other.
I hope soon to see you at any rate and we can then arrange for the future.
Goodbye the train is whistling & I have no time to write further [at] this time.

Ever yours
BFB

Though he had first stated his intention to resign back in June of '62 because of preliminary anti-slavery measures, the threat of social contamination-by-association with blacks in the military was too much for him to bear. Standing in integrated ranks was no way to preserve the "decency," honor, community esteem, or whatever else you might call it that a young lawyer needed to successfully build a practice and win a sweetheart. Of course, even had he stayed in the army he would have likely never seen, associated with, or formed alongside African American soldiers. But the pollution to the institution of the army and the country were too great to risk personal miasma.

Interestingly, just like Gorgas in the (apparently firebrand of a) post from the other day, he seems to suggest that despite the radical step taken by the Republicans, the USCTs would still be "unfit for the accomplishment of any useful purpose" as soldiers. But numbers might disagree with Ben. 23,000 black Kentuckians did things like relieve white troops from garrison duty, allowing the Ben Buckner-less 20th KY to return to active service the field in the Summer of '63 and again in '64.

More 1870s Election Commentary: Voter Misinformation

From this article: "Some local Democrats spoke out Tuesday after a fake flier was circulated this week that looked like a notice from the state Board of Elections telling people 'emergency regulations' require Republicans to vote on Tuesday and Democrats to vote Wednesday."

From another one: "It's too hard to vote in Kentucky." "Kentuckians must vow today that before the presidential election in 2012, we'll make it easier to vote. With polls open in Kentucky only 12 hours on Election Day — 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. — too many voters get shut out.
For some historical perspective...

TO THE COLORED VOTERS

On Monday next, for the fourth time, you will have an opportunity to exercise a right under the highest privilege which a citizen has. Your right to vote as a man and citizen is guaranteed to you by the supreme law of the land. Your right to vote is protected by this law, and all who attempt to prevent, delay, or hinder you in the exercise of your right, can be punished UNDER THIS LAW, with very severe penalties. ... Your right to vote is as good as any one's. Your duty to vote is as imperative as any one's. Therefore, you should go to the polls and vote, letting no threats of any kind keep you from exercising your right. ... Go to the polls one and all of you, and STAY UNTIL YOU HAVE VOTED, then leave the polls that others may get to them. When you are at the polls no one has a right to drive or push you from them until you have voted. When you have voted it is your duty to give way that others may vote.
Follow our advice, and should any difficulty disturb the peace, no one, even your most bitter opponent, could not attach the least blame to you. We repeat: it is your duty to vote. ... It is your duty to do nothing that will interfere with the rights of others, nor to allow others to do anything that will in any compromise your rights. As good citizens you should do every thing in the interest of quiet and good order.

Lexington Kentucky Statesman, August 4, 1871.

Effigy 1870 & 2008

Yesterday morning an effigy of Barack Obama was found hanging by a noose from a tree on the University of Kentucky campus -- the campus where I study the history of racial violence and racism in Kentucky, the campus where I teach that same history to students. (link here) I presume that if/when the perpetrators of this are caught, they'll cry crocodile tears about being ignorant of the implications of their action, being ignorant of the history of racial inequality, violence, and lynching that has plagued this state since before emancipation. And I will be the first person to stand up and call "bullshit." Even for 18 year old freshmen, the weight that these images carry in American -- particularly Southern -- society is too great not to be noticed. Sure, there was the effigy of Sarah Palin hung recently, and we should too decry that as inappropriate. But the two acts ARE NOT equal. There is too much cultural baggage attached to the hanging of black men to not consider this an act of racial intimidation.

Strangely, though, I am not outraged; I am not livid. Perhaps I should be. Instead, I am disappointed; I am saddened. I am, frankly, embarassed. On Saturday I am going to Austin Peay University in Clarksville, Tenn. to deliver a paper on the state-sanctioned racial violence of the Kentucky National Legion during Reconstruction. I am honestly nervous about having to hold my head up in front of my audience and deliver this paper. Does this undermine my credibility as a historian representing the University of Kentucky? How does the horiffic act of a member (presumably) of my institution cast me? Was it one of my students? One of my classmates? My paper's title is drawn from a Republican newspaper editor's sighing acceptance of his inability to stem the tide of the state's campaign of violence and lynching, every bit the equal of states in the former Confederacy. "So Goes Democratic Law in a Democratic State." I can begin to understand that Republican editor, a voice crying out in the wilderness, pointing to the racism in American society, despite our best attempts to hide it, to call it something else, to justify it in some way.

I think I will give a short preface to my paper, acknowledging the effigy and asking the audience to think about what Kentucky's history of racial inequality and violence -- or of inequality and violence toward any group -- may have to bear on this incident, on this election. I claim that insecurity brought on by the social chaos of slavery's end motivated this response. That economically unstable, socially precarious, and politically threatened young white Kentuckians lashed out against African Americans attempting to claim political equality. They claimed that a "Black Peril" was upon them, threatening to overtake everything they held dear. I claim -- and they claimed at the time -- that a political contest was about more than the office at stake. It was a contest for the soul of the state. Hopefully, then, the audience at this panel might start a conversation through the lens of history that bears meaning for today. This is what history does. This is why historians matter. They clarify the murky memories of the past, and provide examples of when society achieved great things and when it didn't.

I'll close with a quote from an item in Frederick Douglass's New Era from Aug. 18, 1870 commenting on the first election in Kentucky when blacks could vote. In the face of racism, the Democratic Party machine, and the bayonets of the militia, Douglass remains hopeful for a brighter, more equal, future. Hopefully Kentckians, Americans, can do the same today.

[White Kentucky] built their shanty on the sand bank of slavery, but the rising tide of freedom and equality has flooded back into the wretched hovel, and the whole organization has set to work with a "White Man's Party" mop, to sweep back the wave of human progress. They are doing their best. There is a splash and a spattering, but the tide ever rolls inward, and the great ocean of liberty outside shows the utter feebleness and futility of the effort. While they are vigorously mopping, the sand bank is melting away, and the whole structure will speedily cave in, or be carried out to sea, and engulphed beyond the hope of recovery. That tide is resistless.

The Weary Life of a Soldier

Another letter from the collection I am working with currently. Major Benjamin F. Buckner of the 20th KY Inf. (US) writes to his fiancee Helen from Mississippi in the midst of the campaign in 1862. In this letter, he describes his appearance in the field -- no doubt greatly changed from the last time she had seen him off to war. Given Lee's posts this summer about Generals' appearance in the field, I figured this compliments (despite Buckner wearing Blue).

Camp Near Corinth Miss

May 24 1862

My Dear Helen,

Your idea of my personal appearance under the ___ circumstances is far
from correct. I wear a black wool hat, and my face is nearly of the same
color, my hair short, my mustache trimmed close, my whiskers cut off – beard of
about a weeks growth, (I have no time to shave oftener than once a week as you
may imagine, when I tell you that we have been in such a state of watchfulness
that I have not pulled off my sword for nearly two weeks)[.] My uniform
consists of a stiff pair of soldiers’ shoes minus the strings, a pair of coarse
army pants and a blouse without shoulder straps.
Actual service in the field dispels all the romance of soldiering. It is a
laborious drudging life for anyone of lower rank than Colonel, and I would
rather be a negro under Harrison Thompson (for the same length of time) than a
private soldier.

I think the last paragraph is fantastic. Because while Buckner serves in the Union army, he was still from a slaveowning family in Central Kentucky. So his comparisons, his worldview, his understanding of the essential meaning of drudgery is all drawn from that experience of growing up in a slave society. Harrison Thompson, as you may have guessed, was a large planter in Clark Co. Ky., Buckner's home county. These compairsons, this shared worldview, raise the question: how different are some of these Border State Unionists from their Confederate counterparts? The a later section of the same letter may shed some light on ideological differences. Buckner writes regarding a comment Helen's friend (and big-time Secessionist) Sally Moore had made. The comment was not recorded in Buckner's letter, but I gather it was something about hoping all the US troops would catch yellow fever from the Mississippi swamps.

I did not attribute it to any thing except that mania Secession which despite
her good sense, has taken possession of her mental faculties, perverting them
from the nobler purposes for which they were intended and which they [are] wont
to fulfill. I therefore dont hold her responsible for it, but hope on her account that she may be speedily convinced of the error of her ways. … Dont tell Sally any thing except that her remark was not offensives, as I really did not care a straw fact and like her too much to get angry with her about it.

Though Buckner believes secession is equivalent to madness, in the end he never questions Sally's (or any other secesh's) motives. Preserving slavery is, as his other letters reveal, his goal as well. He just understands the Constitution and the Union as the more secure, more conservative means of its preservation. And as wild and inappropriate a step as he believes secession to be, because he personally knows many of its proponents (including Helen and her family) and because, fundamentally, they fight for the same thing he can never bring himself to be angered at them. Love the sinner, hate the sin.

More to come from Ben later.

Slow February In Bowling Green

As much as we normally focus on the exciting, fast-paced world of battles and heroics in the Civil War, we also have to remember that there were far more tedious and boring duties that kept both officers and men occupied during the war. Excerpt from the papers of Benjamin F. Buckner, a Kentucky lawyer turned Major of the 20th Ky Infantry. Expect to hear more about Ben in the coming months as I am writing a seminar paper on his politics and military service. More on that to follow, now we off to his report of February 1863 in Bowling Green, KY.

Bowling Green Ky Feby 7/63

My Dear Helen
I have been so busy for the last five or six day's that I have had not time to write Genl Mc--- has appointed me Provost Marshall of the town forces at this post and I have been engaged in the pleasant occupation of swearing secesh women to support the government, ferreting out thefts of government property, and convicting the fourth Kentucky Cavalry by the wholesale for drunkenness. It is quite laborious, but will soon be more pleasant. ...

I just enjoyed the idea of an entire regiment of cavalry getting tight "wholesale" on a pilfered stock of Kentucky's finest. Sometimes it takes fun bits like that to make a day grubbing in the archives a bit brighter.

Causes from The Vidette

The Vidette was a camp newspaper for John Hunt Morgan's brigade. In one of their November of 1862 issues, the following appeared;

"It is a hard matter to get a Union man to acknowledge that this is an abolition war. He will say to you; 'If I thought this was a war for the abolition of slavery, I would not only lay down my arms which I have taken up for the defense of the Union, but I would go into the Southern army...many in the western states speak the same way. Now, any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks, and that the whole course of the Yankee government has not only been directed to the abolition of slavery, but even to a stirring up of servile insurrections, is either a fool or a liar. "

The cause for fighting is pretty clear here for the men of Morgan's Cavalry.

Morgan's "Ever Faithful" Mammy

One of my last official acts before leaving Kentucky for the summer was to take a stroll through the Lexington Cemetery, a mecca for those interested in the Commonwealth's Confederate contingent. The Hunt and Morgan family plot is, unsurprisingly, noteworthy for its high concentration of names familiar to students of the Western theater. The graves are arranged in semi-circles, all surrounding big daddy and golden-age Lexington millionaire John Wesley Hunt.

Among these resting places of one of Kentucky's first families, I noticed one marker standing out of place, in the middle of two rows (arcs?) of graves. You can see hers in the bottom right corner of the picture, behind the first arc of Hunt and Morgan graves. The small stone was marked "Bouviette James (Col.) Ever Faithful." Intrigued by this odd placement of a loyal family servant in the family plot, and hoping to find some evidence of postwar paternalistic benevolence, I did some digging.

Aunt Betty, as the Morgans called her, was the mammy of the house, caring for the children including young John Hunt Morgan. During the war, it is said that she was so loyal to the children that she became an ardent supporter of the Confederate cause, and likely mourned the family's losses along with the household's whites. When she died in 1870, the family buried her in their own plot with some of the surviving Morgans and Basil Duke as her pallbearers. So devoted to the family, was Ms. James, that her ghost is still said to haunt the house in Lexington, and was often seen with children when the residence was still occupied. Neat story, and one not unlike many of the "loyal slave" stories throughout the wartime and postwar South. It may even be seen as rather touching that the family would consider a former slave such an integral part of their household.

Undoubtedly, the relationship between family servant and white folks was close, even affectionate at times, but the relationship was always understood to be unequal. Black was always and unquestionably subservient to white, and the knowledge of this distinction was present in every daily interaction. In the case of Bouviette, her status within the household carried over into death as well. The Hunts and Morgans could not even write her name on her tombstone without reference to her skin color lest some future visitor mistake this (colored) woman for one of the "real" family. Further separating her is her placement within the plot. While Aunt Betty was buried with the family, hers was the only grave not arranged in one of the semi-circles around John Wesley Hunt. She was inside the household, to speak, but was never nor never would be part of the (quite literal) family circle. Her marker, smaller than the rest of the family, also highlights her inequality. Though she was of advanced age when she died in 1870, James received the same sized headstone as the Morgan children who died in infancy or pre-adulthood. Implicitly, then, Aunt Betty was in life and was to be in death a perpetual child, a racial other, and an inside-outsider in the Morgan family.

I find it most amazing that the Morgans perpetuated this master-servant domestic relationship beyond the grave. The permanence of Bouviette's outsider, unequal, childlike status is reinforced even though the post-Emancipation world had destroyed the legal framework of that relationship. Bouviette's unequal situation is particularly interesting in light of the political situation in 1870, the year she died. The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869 meant that blacks in Kentucky would vote for the first time in that year. When black men were beginning challenging Kentucky's antebellum political and social racial caste system through political participation, when black and white seemed closer to equality than they had ever been, when the slaveowning Hunts and Morgans feared their world was turning upside down, they buried their loyal old Mammy inside but ever outside the family circle. They showed their credentials as caring, paternalistic masters while at the same time demonstrated their idea of the proper station of African Americans in the Commonwealth.

A few feet from Bouviette, in one of the Morgan semi-circles, lies Francis K. Morgan, little brother of John H. Frank enlisted and served as a Private in Co. I of Morgan's and later Duke's 2nd KY Cav. during the war, and in 1870 joined the Citizens' Guards, a Lexington militia company raised amid white claims that the advent of black suffrage would lead blacks to claim full social equality with whites. Old antebellum fears of insurrection, race war, and miscegenation were trotted out to scare Kentucky whites into action against the state's newly-energized Republican party. Instead of "defending" the "threatened" white citizenry, though, the militiamen of the Guards and four other companies led by former Union and Confederate officers in the city would beat, shoot, intimidate, and harass blacks trying to vote or hold political rallies during elections from 1870-1873 (those companies and their violent reassertion of white supremacy, incidentally, were the subject of my recently completed MA thesis).

In the context of Frank Morgan's and other white Lexingtonians' struggle against black political and social equality in the early 1870s, Bouviette's "Ever Faithful" epitaph is a lesson for Bluegrass African Americans in their "proper" status: loyal, submissive, and unequal. Far from doing her honor by burying her "with" the family, Bouviette's peculiar interment in the Lexington Cemetery is a head on a pike, a hanged pirate in the harbor, a lesson, warning, and threat to African Americans no longer bound by slavery but still bound by the Commonwealth's antebellum racism and violence.