 There's a famous, though apocryphal quote by Abraham Lincoln. Speaking about Kentucky at the outset of the Civil War, the president said, I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky. This quote has never been verified, and historians at this point pretty much agree that Lincoln never actually said this, but it remains a popular quote because even if it's not true that he said it, it does seem to accurately illustrate the importance that President Lincoln placed on his native state. As we've moved through 1861 in this series so far, I think the most important theme that I want to stress is the value that Lincoln placed on keeping the last remaining slave states from joining the Union. We've looked at Maryland and Missouri, which were arguably the two most important. Maryland in particular was vital in keeping Washington, D.C. from being completely surrounded in Missouri for its access to the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and its industrialized city of St. Louis. We've also talked about the formation of West Virginia, which was a movement that Lincoln did not lead, but he did support, thus successfully dividing the Confederacy's most important state. I won't be talking about Tennessee. Eastern Tennessee was undergoing a similar Unionist movement to that of Western Virginia, but it would not result in the disunion of that state. And sharing a border with both Tennessee and Western Virginia was the state of Kentucky, the state that President Abraham Lincoln was born in. Also the state that the Southern Democrat candidate for president in 1860, John Breckenridge, was from, and he ultimately would defect to the Confederacy even as his state remained in the Union. If there is any state that exemplified the often exaggerated brother versus brother aspect of the Civil War, it would be Kentucky. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In this episode, we will be talking about the Union effort to secure Kentucky. Although Missouri was important for its own reasons, the president knew that the fate of Missouri would have an effect on Kentucky as I illustrated in Lincoln's decision to overturn John Fremont's Missouri Emancipation Proclamation. Kentucky was geographically important, sharing a border with Ohio, and without it the Union would have waged a very different war in the Western Theater, as Kentucky served as the launch pad for Ulysses S. Grant's campaign to capture Fort's Donaldson and Henry, which we will be talking about in later episodes, but would be important starts to the rise of Ulysses S. Grant. We can only speculate about what the war would have looked like if Kentucky had joined the Confederacy, but it is impossible to deny that Kentucky proved to be extremely important for the Union war effort. For that reason, it is worth devoting an episode to the Union operations to control Kentucky, which will finish our look at Lincoln's quest to secure the last remaining border states and bring us closer to the end of the important events that took place in 1861, though we do still have a couple of more things we're going to look at before we get to 1862. After Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops following the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Kentucky, like the other border states, was divided between unconditional Unionists and secessionists. The problem in Kentucky was that the secessionists had virtually complete control over the state militia, as well as the state's supply of arms and ammunition. This concerned one citizen of Kentucky named William Nelson, a Lieutenant in the United States Navy, so he arranged a meeting with President Lincoln. At the meeting, he proposed a plan. Lieutenant Nelson told the President that he wanted the federal government to ship him muskets to be put in the hands of the Union Home Guard in Kentucky. If he got enough guns in the hands of the Unionists, they could prevent the secessionists from taking the state over for the Confederacy. Lincoln did not hesitate to approve the plan, which was already in line with ideas he'd been toying with himself. Before the end of the day, the President issued an order to have 5,000 muskets sent directly to Nelson. Lincoln suggested that Nelson meet with another Kentuckian, Joshua Speed, who could help see that the guns got distributed to loyal Kentuckians. Nelson arranged the meeting and met with Speed and Louisville and gave him the plan. The two booked passage on a train to Frankfurt that day, and Nelson made it clear that he wanted his plan to be kept secret. I do not wish you to speak to me on the cars this afternoon as we go to Frankfurt. He told Speed, if you do, I'll insult you. During the train ride, the pair pretended not to know each other, but they arrived in Frankfurt and held a meeting that night. They were moving quickly. There were a handful of prominent Kentucky Unionists at the meeting, but the most prominent was probably John Crittenden, who had proposed to the compromise plan to try to stave off secession by guaranteeing the right to slavery, including a constitutional amendment that eventually became the Corwin amendment, which I talked about in an episode at the very beginning of the season. The minute the meeting, each had a list of names that they could provide of loyal Kentuckians who could be trusted with the Lincoln guns as they became called. Again, Nelson stressed the importance of keeping the plan secret until all the guns were distributed. As the meeting adjourned, one of the attendees suggested that this might have been the most important meeting to have ever been held in the state of Kentucky. This plan was executed with startling speed. The guns arrived quickly and were rapidly distributed, with focus being on northern and central Kentucky, where there was the strongest Unionist presence. Within a week of Nelson's meeting with Lincoln, the Union Home Guard was running drills in various places throughout the state, but the side of the Union men drilling with firearms was hard to miss. And as quickly as the guns were distributed, news of the Lincoln guns spread throughout the rest of Kentucky. The secessionist militia were still much better equipped than the Home Guard, having almost three times as many firearms, some of which were rifles, but the presence of 5,000 guns in the hands of the Unionists changed things quite a bit. As the rumor spread, as these things usually play out, the number of guns in the hands of the Union men became grossly inflated. The Lincoln guns became a matter of controversy in the state and by the middle of May, the legislature had to address it. The issue was that these guns had been put into the hands of people who are not part of the state militia. Legally, this should not have taken place, so a five-man committee was formed to investigate the matter. But the Unionists in the legislature added an amendment to the bill forming the committee that said that they should also investigate the Knights of the Golden Circle. If you remember from my episodes on filibustering, the Knights of the Golden Circle formed as part of the movement to annex territories in the Caribbean, Latin America, and South America, and it was largely motivated by a desire to expand slave holding territories for the United States. But they formed right before secession, so the Knights ended up largely acting to encourage secession and conduct guerrilla raids in contested areas. They had a significant presence in Kentucky. The guns were still being distributed as word of them made it to the secessionists in the state. When Captain Speed Fry of the Danville Home Guards was returning home with two wagons of Lincoln guns, he approached a town called May's Lick. As he entered the town, a man stepped out from his home and waved for Captain Fry to come speak to him. Fry obliged, and the man said, and barely a whisper, quote, do not go into the town with those guns. With no further explanation, he left, leaving it to Fry to figure out if this was a warning or a threat. Fry and the other men with him decided to ignore the warning, and they went into the town and stopped at a hotel for breakfast, and Fry stood as the lone sentry over the wagons while the other men ate. A crowd formed around the wagons, and one man stepped forward and asked Fry if he should take the guns. He was saying this is a veiled threat. Fry stood his ground saying, quote, there they are, take them. Basically he was saying, I dare you. The man backed down, and the men resumed their travel. In the afternoon, they came to another town, Millersburg, which was known to be a hot bed for secessionists. They anticipated trouble, but the only thing they got was an old woman who shook her fist at them and yelled, if I was a man, I would not let them guns pass without taking some of them. Ultimately, the guns reached their destination without incident, and they were distributed to the Union Home Guard. Most likely, the secessionist element in the state was never as strong as people like Lincoln and Nelson feared. The secessionists may have controlled the militia in the state's arms, but they were still a minority element in Kentucky overall. Out of the four slave states that remained in the Union, Missouri was probably the most likely to secede. But the Lincoln guns made the Union men in Kentucky feel more secure from threats of a secessionist overtaking the state, and both sides decided to adopt the position of armed neutrality in the war. They didn't want to secede, but they didn't want to take part in the war, and armed neutrality was the official stance of Kentucky for five full months after Fort Sumter, while Lincoln concerned himself with the more volatile areas like Missouri. But armed neutrality would not be the stance that Kentucky would maintain throughout the war. The president would not allow neutrality. So now we can fast-forward past some of the events we've already talked about, such as Bull Run and Wilson's Creek, which took place after the Lincoln guns, but while Kentucky was still maintaining its neutrality. After Bull Run, things in Kentucky heated up. Many of the secessionists moved down to Tennessee where they could abandon their neutrality. In the June elections for Kentucky, the Unionists won the day by putting Unionists in the National Congress. But August 5th was the date for the state legislature, and the election there would likely decide whether Kentucky was going to stand with the North or join the South. Ultimately, the Unionists won the day by an overwhelming margin. The state's neutrality was peeling away as Kentucky Unionists solidified, and many of the state's secessionists moved down to Tennessee. The day after the August elections, the Unionists set up a camp on the farm of Dick Robinson in the center of the state. To arm the camp, Union leaders took some of the Lincoln guns and loaded them on a train to arm the camp. But the train had to pass through some secessionist areas, including the town of Cynthia, which already had an entire company join the Confederate army. When the conductor saw the crowd that had formed at the Cynthia station, waiting the arrival of the guns, he ordered the train to return to Covington, and the guns were instead shipped by boat to Louisville, where they arrived in the middle of the night and were secretly moved from the boat to Wagons, where they could be shipped to Lexington, a city that had Unionist and secessionist forces. The Union men in the city were under the command of a local physician, Ethelbert Dudley. The secessionists were under Captain John Morgan, who would eventually serve as a general for the Confederacy. Dudley knew that Morgan might try to seize the guns, so he sent word to camp Dick Robinson for reinforcements. Just before dawn on the day the guns arrived in Lexington, a bugle sounded from the roof of an armory. This was Morgan's signal for his men to prepare for an attack. Then the courthouse bell rang, which was Dudley's signal for his men to prepare their defense of the guns. As the bugle sounded and the bell clanged, Dudley received his reinforcements as 200 Union cavalry rode in from Camp Dick Robinson. For a moment it seemed like the war was starting in Kentucky, but John Breckenridge, who had not yet defected to the Confederacy and was still a United States Senator, a seat he would hold until December, convinced Morgan to stand down. Once more, the tense situation with the Lincoln guns ended anti-climatically, as they were transported to Camp Dick Robinson without bloodshed. On September 2nd, the newly elected Union legislature met in Frankfurt. The governor of the state, Bariah McGoffin, was more inclined to sympathize with the south, but the legislature was now so thoroughly unionist that they had the votes to override the governor's veto. But Governor McGoffin tried his best to keep the legislature from abandoning neutrality. Like other border state politicians, he brought up the crimes of the federal government. He also said that both Camp Dick Robinson and the Lincoln guns were illegal and the legislature should correct this. And following the reasoning of other conditional unionists, he referred to the war as, quote, an unconstitutional war of coercion against the south. And that, quote, I protest against all and every one of the president's usurpations and unconstitutional and illegal acts, end quote. But McGoffin's speech was of little relevance at this point. Kentucky may have still been officially neutral, but the Union army had already incorporated it in its plan to wage a three-pronged war against the south. General Leonidas Polk was occupying two towns in western Kentucky by September 3rd. Ulysses S. Grant was just on the other side of the Kentucky border in Cairo, Illinois, and he had already sent a request to John from Montt, still commander of the Department of the West at this point, for permission to move into Kentucky and occupy Paducah. Neutrality was becoming more and more of a facade as the Unionist legislature tolerated the U.S. army's use of its state as a gateway to the Confederacy. Finally, on September 17th, the veil of neutrality was abandoned completely. Confederate General Buckner moved into Kentucky from Tennessee and was moving toward Louisville. One of his scouting parties burned a bridge that ran across the Salt River, and the city of Louisville, only 30 or so miles away, was feeling threatened. On September 18th, it was clear that Buckner was advancing toward the city, and as the information spread, the numbers of Buckner's forces became exaggerated. 7,000 men, the rumors said, were marching directly toward Louisville. General Robert Anderson, the same man who defended Fort Sumter, was the commanding officer in Louisville, but he had almost no men at his disposal to counter an invasion from Buckner. Anderson called his subordinate officers to a meeting at 9 p.m., and he asked to them how long it would take to call up the militia. They told him two hours, and by 11 o'clock, 1,800 Union men showed up to defend the city. They came under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman. More requests were sent to other areas to try to get as many soldiers as possible, and Anderson wasn't disappointed. Over the next couple of days, troops from Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana had all arrived in Louisville to protect the city. During this time, Sherman came to the burned bridge and concluded that Buckner had not been planning in advance at all, and he set some of his men up to fortify the area around Muldraw's Hill. There had been confederate activity in the city, but the rumors exaggerated it greatly enough that the Union forces were able to concentrate non-Kentucky troops in the state without looking like an invading force itself, which was how the Missourians, by contrast, had seen the Union troops there. Kentucky's stance of armed neutrality was at an end. While Louisville was preparing for an invasion, political arrests were taking place, just as they were in even more solidly Union states throughout the North. The most significant arrest to take place during the Louisville panic was former Kentucky Governor Charles S. Moorhead. Moorhead was not a secessionist. He was elected governor as part of the Know Nothing Party, and in 1860, he supported John Bell, the constitutional Unionist candidate. As he campaigned for Bell, he even traveled to some of the deep south states to give Unionist speeches, but he was a slave owner, and more threateningly, he believed that the best way to bring about the reunification of the country was to recognize the Confederacy and maintain peace. After the Lincoln administration started to carry out political arrests and suspend habeas corpus, Moorhead vocally criticized these policies. He was a Unionist, but he was not falling in line with the pro-war administration, and for that reason, he was to be arrested. His arrest came the day after General Buckner's advance into Kentucky. The U.S. Marshall in Kentucky, A.H. Snead, went before the justice of the peace in Louisville and asked for an arrest warrant to be made out for Moorhead on charges of treason. The justice complied and Snead made the arrest just after midnight at Moorhead's home. The next day, a circuit court judge in Louisville issued a red of habeas corpus. Snead responded by immediately sending a wire to President Lincoln, asking him how to handle the situation and informing him of the Confederates that were supposed to be advancing to Louisville. Simon Cameron, Lincoln's Secretary of War, sent the response. Send Moorhead to Fort Lafayette, along with the other political prisoners that had been taken, such as the editor of Louisville's anti-war newspaper, The Louisville Courier, which had called federal authority over Kentucky a usurpation and revolutionary act that, quote, no citizen of Kentucky is bound to obey, end quote. The editor of the paper, Reuben Durrett, was arrested the same night as Moorhead, along with several telegraph operators who were arrested for wiring articles to New Orleans to be reprinted in southern papers. The people in Louisville were taken aback by the political arrests when they found out about them. The stories of these arrests in Maryland and Missouri had been brought to Kentucky, but the Kentuckians believed that they were above such repressive actions. As with the other states in which such arrests took place, there was an instant backlash. The first person to come to the defense of Moorhead was the editor of the Louisville Journal. His paper was staunchly pro-union, and he was appalled by Moorhead's arrest, and he wrote to Lincoln advising the president to have the former governor released. Lincoln handed the letter to a secretary of state, William Seward, who was the man most responsible for the political arrests taking place throughout the country, and the president asked Seward for more information on the matter. But this letter came at the end of September, when the North was full of fear about a southern invasion, and the administration was engineering the Maryland elections. But Seward refused to release Moorhead unless he took a loyalty oath, and Moorhead refused because he held property in Mississippi, and if he took the loyalty oath, the Confederate government would seize it. Moorhead remained in prison for three months, when he needed a life-saving surgery, and he was only released after John Crintenden stepped up to defend him. Crintenden pointed out to Seward the issue about Moorhead's properties in Mississippi, and warned the secretary of the political consequences of allowing such a highly esteemed figure in Kentucky to die as a political prisoner. Two other men who had been arrested with Moorhead were released after some time as well. The editor I mentioned earlier, Reuben Durrett, convinced Seward to release him by personally writing him a letter telling him the story about his wife's failing health, which apparently moved Seward enough to set him free. Another prisoner, a teleographer named Martin Barr, refused to take a loyalty oath and stayed in prison for six months before finally being released on parole in March of 1862. Eventually the United States Senate would ask the president to provide all the information he had on the arrests of these figures, and Lincoln refused, writing back that it was quote, not deemed compatible with the public interest, to furnish the information desired, end quote. The Senate never received the information they requested. Hundreds of arrests took place in Kentucky after these first few in Louisville. This policy drove Kentuckians to Tennessee to join the Confederacy in large numbers. The policy was very much a guilty until proven innocent situation. If anybody was away from home, the running assumption was that they must be traitors who've joined the Confederacy, and if anybody was seen traveling southward, it was assumed that their destination was Tennessee. The Home Guard was ordered to stop any man they saw traveling in a southward direction. One of the men arrested for the crime of traveling in a southward direction was none other than James Clay, the son of Henry Clay. Like Moorhead, a writ of habeas corpus was issued by the same judge, in fact, and Robert Anderson in Louisville wrote to President Lincoln to receive orders. Seward answered on Lincoln's behalf, saying that Anderson should ignore the writ unless either of two loyal Kentuckians, James Guthrie or James Speed, vouched for him. After Anderson consulted with them, they released Clay on a whopping $10,000 bail, and scheduled his treason trial for January. The trial never ended up taking place. Three members of the Kentucky legislature were also arrested for moving southward from Frankfurt. These were delegates from secessionist areas, but after they were arrested, the legislature sent a delegation to secure their release. Many of the people arrested were essentially nobodies. They were poor. They had no knowledge of the union operations, and they could offer a little service to the Confederacy if they even joined. But for some suspicion or another, they would be arrested and sent to Fort Lafayette, and released upon taking a loyalty oath. When they were released, transportation back to their home state was not provided, and some of them were so poor that they had trouble even making their way back home. Eventually, a commissioner appointed to look into the cases of the poor Kentucky prisoners intervened, telling Seward, quote, I think we can fill all our forts with much better men who are much more dangerous than they, end quote. Basically, Seward was having arrests carried out against anybody who had the slightest bit of suspicion, with no regard to the value of the arrests. A more significant arrest was carried out for Richard Stanton, a former congressman who was arrested by William Nelson, who now held the rank of general. Stanton and six others who were arrested with him were sent to Fort Lafayette. He didn't even know why he'd been arrested, but his crime was that he wanted to stay neutral in the war, but he had opposed the introduction of the Lincoln guns that Nelson had carried out. He was released on the day after Christmas, after James Speed, the man Lincoln connected with Nelson to distribute the gun, and William Sherman, among other people, wrote letters to the president to defend Stanton's loyalty. Just as I detailed in previous episodes for other states, newspapers were the primary targets for political arrests. Obviously, secessionist papers were targeted, but any paper who was anti-war, pro-neutrality, or critical of the administration was suspected of treason. If you did not fully support the war and everything done in the name of the war, you were a secessionist. There was no room for a middle ground. Numerous papers were shut down. The Henderson reporter, the Lexington statesman, the Synthianna News, the Frankfurt yeoman, but the most famous paper to be shut down was still the Louisville Courier. In mid-September, a copy of the Courier was sent to William Seward, who passed it along to Montgomery Blair. Seward suggested that Blair halted the circulation of the paper. Blair was happy to comply, and on September 18th, he sent an order that, quote, the Louisville Courier found to be an advocate of treason. Be excluded from the mails and post offices of the United States, end quote. Marshall Snead received the order and took the initiative of going further, shutting the paper down entirely. He also tried to arrest the owners of the paper, but one of them was away at the time, and word of the paper shut down reached him before he returned home. Knowing that he was in danger, he went straight to Bowling Green, where he could be protected by General Buckner, and he relaunched the Courier. The Louisville Courier was an anti-war newspaper that took opposition to the oppressive policies of the Lincoln administration. The Bowling Green Courier, after all of this, was an adamantly pro-Confederacy paper. In November, a group of Kentucky secessionists met in Russellville, Kentucky, where they held a secret convention. Similar to the Unionist movement in western Virginia, Kentucky's secessionist towns sent delegates to the convention to decide how to respond to Kentucky's place in the union. The delegates there passed a resolution saying that the president and Congress, quote, have substituted for national liberty, a centralized despotism, found upon the ignorant prejudices of the masses of northern society. They have turned loose the unrestrained and raging passions of the mobs fanatics, end quote. They then declared Kentucky to be an independent state. But these delegates couldn't speak for the entire state. In my view, for what little that may be worth, I do believe this is the one thing that the western Virginia folks did right. Not in the sense that you have to agree with it, but in the sense that it was more effective than what everybody else did. They were the only people who were dedicated enough to their cause to actually secede from their own state. The Kentucky secessionists, as far as I know, made no attempt to establish themselves as a new and separate state. Instead, like the Missouri secessionists, they maintained the facade that they were speaking for the entire state, which was obviously ridiculous. Kentucky was far more unionist than Missouri was, without a doubt. Ultimately, Kentucky was secure for the union, and this was a gigantic boon for Lincoln. By forcing the state to abandon its neutrality, the union was able to use Kentucky as a launch pad for some of the most important operations in the entire war for the northern cause, though they wouldn't know it for quite some time, as all eyes were on the eastern theater, which is where everybody believed the most crucial battles would be focused. And it is this eastern theater that we will return to in the next episode as we begin to look at a battle that was of very little strategic or military significance, but would have tremendous political ramifications. The Battle of Balls Bluff, also known as the Battle of Leesburg. Historical Controversies is a production of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. If you would like to support the show, please subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher and leave a positive review. You can also support the show financially by donating at Mises.org slash supportHC. If you would like to explore the rest of our content, please visit Mises.org. 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