Keith Cloer

Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State

Anne E. Marshall. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 256 pp. $29.95).

Many recent historical works examine the history of collective memory. The collective memory and memorialization of the Civil War are currently being debated throughout the nation. Anne Marshall examined how Kentucky, a Union state during the Civil War, developed a Confederate identity in the post-war years. Marshall argued that Kentucky embraced the Lost Cause of the Confederacy in the wake of changing Union war objectives and the postbellum abolition of slavery and that the Confederate minority came to dominate the historical narrative due to the fragmentation of Union sentiment along largely racial lines. Marshall studied Kentucky identity from its inception at statehood in 1792 through 1935 as the Civil War faded from living memory. Her examination was a statewide study of Civil War memory in Kentucky through race and gender. She also looked at the differences between Union and Confederate memory and examined how the Confederate narrative won the hearts and minds of white Kentuckians. Marshall used numerous newspaper articles, personal documents, popular literature, and society journals as her sources. Her analysis focused on the construction of a Confederate war memory and analyzed its creation from a bottom-up perspective.

Marshall analyzed the importance of race in the construction of memory. Marshall initially enumerated the participation of slaves and freedmen in the war. Slavery persisted in Kentucky after the end of the war until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Marshall characterized Kentucky as the “last outpost” of slavery in the United States (34). Marshall cited several Kentuckians who wrote about remaining loyal to the Union due to earlier defense of their property (slaveholding) rights. Marshall also examined how white Kentuckians rejected a compromise solution to outright emancipation through monetary compensation (187). The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment fundamentally changed the social order of Kentucky.

Marshall showed that many Kentuckians who were loyal to the Union changed their position after emancipation (63).

Throughout her analysis, Marshall focused on the importance of women in the construction of Confederate identity in Kentucky. The United Daughters of the Confederacy spearheaded construction of monuments throughout Kentucky in the postbellum years. Women took on public roles in building historical memory that were still denied in other areas of public life. According to Marshall, the white majority used perceived threats of violence against white womanhood by freed slaves to justify their opposition to civil rights legislation and to view the antebellum past as a better time in Kentucky history (164). Other authors, such as Glenda Gilmore, have examined the perceived threat of freed African-Americans towards white women and the use of that threat to justify redemption and segregation. However, Marshall tied the perceived threat of African-Americans as a justification for creating a new memory of a Confederate Kentucky due to Union betrayal of Kentucky’s slaveholding history.

The creation of a Confederate Kentucky memory was not predetermined. Marshall showed that Kentucky’s wartime loyalty split in favor of the Union (12). Union sentiment in Kentucky was hampered by outside imposition of a new racial calculus. Pro-Union Kentuckians resisted Confederate redemption at the ballot box and through violence when necessary (62). The presence of the Freedman’s Bureau in Kentucky caused a great deal of discomfort that poisoned Kentucky opinion of the North. “New South” Kentuckians joined with pro-Union elements to promote industrial development in Kentucky along northern lines (51). The goal of this group of Kentuckians was to reshape Kentucky in the image of the north. Due to the failure of the Unionist state government to curtail post-war violence, many Kentuckians embraced the Lost Cause vision of Kentucky, despite most Kentuckians supporting the Union during the Civil War.

These analyses demonstrated that Confederate identity was not built in a vacuum in Kentucky and that Unionism remained important.

Marshall’s analysis of how Kentucky embraced the Lost Cause made a compelling argument on the importance of race and gender in identity construction. Marshall’s work examined Kentucky, which by her own admission was a unique case (3). Due to the uniqueness of Kentucky, Marshall’s examination cannot be generalized to identity construction elsewhere, including the rest of the South. When Marshall discussed northern perception of Kentucky in her text, she relied heavily on the New York Times. While many consider the New York Times to be the paper of record for the nation, additional sources that examined northern opinion would have bolstered Marshall’s argument. Marshall’s work is very important today given the national discussion on Civil War memorialization and it can help inform the public on how many Confederate monuments were built to support the mythology of the Lost Cause and the ahistorical creation of memory.

Keith Cloer
Western Carolina University