Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (62 page)

26
. E. Merton Coulter,
The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky
(Chapel Hill, 1926), 92, 44;
CG
, 37 Cong., 2 Sess., Appendix, 82–83.

of Confederate ports, he hesitated to impose a land blockade against Kentucky lest he violate her "neutrality." Not until August 16, after state elections had shown that unionists were in firm control of Kentucky, did Lincoln issue a proclamation banning all trade with the Confederacy. Even this did not entirely halt the trade, but at least it made such commerce illegal and drove it underground.
²⁷

Lincoln's forbearance toward Kentucky paid off. Unionists became more outspoken, and fence-sitters jumped down onto the Union side. The legacy of Henry Clay began to assert itself. Unionist "home guard" regiments sprang up to counter the pro-southern "state guard" militia organized by Governor Magoffin. Union agents clandestinely ferried 5,000 muskets across the river from Cincinnati to arm the home guards. Ken-tuckian Robert Anderson, of Fort Sumter fame, established Union recruiting camps for Kentucky volunteers on the Ohio side of the river to match the Confederate camps just across the Tennessee line. At a special election on June 20, unionists won more than 70 percent of the votes and gained control of five of Kentucky's six congressional seats.
²⁸
This balloting understated pro-Confederate sentiment, for many southern-rights voters refused to participate in an election held under the auspices of a government they rejected. Nevertheless, the regular election of the state legislature on August 5 resulted in an even more conclusive Union victory: the next legislature would have a Union majority of 76 to 24 in the House and 27 to 11 in the Senate.

This legislative election marked the beginning of the end of neutrality in Kentucky. Military activities along the state's borders soon forced the new legislature to declare its allegiance. Several northern regiments were stationed in Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. An equally large Confederate force occupied northwest Tennessee, fewer than fifty miles away. Key to the control of the Mississippi

27
. Coulter,
Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky
, 73;
CWL
, IV, 486–87. Lincoln's proclamation was an implementation of legislation enacted July 13, 1861, forbidding trade with the Confederate states.

28
. Most states held their congressional elections in the fall of even-numbered years, as they do today. But because a congressman so elected would not take his seat until thirteen months later, some states, including Maryland and Kentucky, held congressional elections in the odd-numbered year in which that Congress was scheduled to meet. Because Lincoln had called the 37th Congress into special session on July 4, 1861, Maryland and Kentucky had to hold special elections in June, a fortuitous circumstance that gave unionists in both states a chance to demonstrate their majorities and consolidate their control.

between these two forces was the high bluff at the rail terminal of Columbus, Kentucky. Both rival commanders cast covetous eyes on Columbus, and each feared—correctly—that the other intended to seize and fortify the heights there.

The Confederate commander was Leonidas Polk, tall and soldier-like in appearance, member of a distinguished southern family, a West Point graduate near the top of his class who had left the army in 1827 to enter the ministry and rise to a bishopric of the Episcopal church. When war came in 1861, he doffed his clerical robes and donned a major general's uniform. An officer of high reputation, Polk never measured up to his early military promise and did not survive the war. The opposing Union commander was Ulysses S. Grant, slouchy and unsoldier-like in appearance, of undistinguished family, a West Point graduate from the lower half of his class who had resigned from the army in disgrace for drunkenness in 1854 and had failed in several civilian occupations before volunteering his services to the Union in 1861. "I feel myself competent to command a regiment," Grant had diffidently informed the adjutant general in a letter of May 24, 1861—to which he received no reply.
²⁹
Grant's commission as colonel and his promotion to brigadier general came via the congressman of his district and the governor of Illinois, who were scraping the barrel for officers to organize the un-wieldly mass of Illinois volunteers. A man of no reputation and little promise, Grant would rise to the rank of lieutenant general commanding all the Union armies and become president of the United States.

Polk moved first to grasp the prize of Columbus. On September 3, troops from his command entered Kentucky and occupied the town. Grant responded by occupying Paducah and Smithland at the mouths of the strategically crucial Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Both sides had invaded Kentucky, but by moving first the Confederates earned the stigma of aggressor. This converted the legislature from lukewarm to warlike unionism. On September 18 the American flag rose over the capital and legislators resolved by a three to one margin that Kentucky having been "invaded by the forces of the so-called Confederate States . . . the invaders must be expelled."
³⁰
Governor Magoffin and Senator Breckinridge resigned to cast their lot with the Confederacy. Other Kentuckians followed them. On November 18 a convention of two hundred delegates passed an ordinance of secession and formed a provisional government,

29
.
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
, 2 vols. (New York, 1885), I, 239.

30
. Edward Conrad Smith,
The Borderland in the Civil War
(New York, 1927), 301.

which the Congress in Richmond admitted as the thirteenth Confederate state on December 10. By the end of the year 35,000 Confederate troops occupied the southwest quarter of Kentucky, facing more than 50,000 Federals who controlled the rest of the state.

War had finally come to Kentucky. And here more than anywhere else it was literally a brothers' war. Four grandsons of Henry Clay fought for the Confederacy and three others for the Union. One of Senator John J. Crittenden's sons became a general in the Union army and the other a general in the Confederate army. The Kentucky-born wife of the president of the United States had four brothers and three brothers-in-law fighting for the South—one of them a captain killed at Baton Rouge and another a general killed at Chickamauga. Kentucky regiments fought each other on several battlefields; in the battle of Atlanta, a Kentucky Breckinridge fighting for the Yankees captured his rebel brother.

IV

The unionism of the fourth border state, tiny Delaware, was never in doubt. For all practical purposes Delaware was a free state. Less than 2 percent of its people were slaves, and more than 90 percent of its black population was free. In January 1861 the legislature had expressed "unqualified disapproval" of secession, and never again considered the question. The state's few slaveholders and Confederate sympathizers lived mainly in the southern counties, bordering Maryland's eastern shore.
³¹

Each of the four upper South states that seceded contained a large area with little more commitment to slavery and the Confederacy than Delaware—western Virginia, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and northern Arkansas. The economy and society of two of these upland regions were so distinct from the remainder of their states as to produce wartime movements for separate statehood. West Virginia managed to secede from the Confederacy and rejoin the Union. A similar effort in east Tennessee failed, leaving a legacy of bitterness that persisted long after the war.

The thirty-five counties of Virginia west of the Shenandoah Valley and north of the Kanawha River contained a quarter of Virginia's white population in 1860. Slaves and slaveowners were rare among these narrow valleys and steep mountainsides. The region's culture and economy

31
. Harold Hancock, "Civil War Comes to Delaware," CWH, 2 (1956), 29–56.

were oriented to nearby Ohio and Pennsylvania rather than to the faraway lowlands of Virginia. The largest city, Wheeling, was only sixty miles from Pittsburgh but 330 miles from Richmond. For decades the plebeian mountaineers, underrepresented in a legislature dominated by slaveholders, had nursed grievances against the "tidewater aristocrats" who governed the state. Slaves were taxed at less than a third of their market value while other property was taxed at full value. The lion's share of state internal improvements went to the eastern counties, while the northwest cried out in vain for more roads and railroads. "Western Virginia," declared a Clarksburg newspaper during the secession winter of 1860–61, "has suffered more from . . . her eastern brethren than ever the Cotton States all put together have suffered from the North."
³²

The events of 1861 brought to a head the longstanding western sentiment for separate statehood. Only five of the thirty-one delegates from northwest Virginia voted for the secession ordinance on April 17. Voters in this region rejected ratification by a three to one margin. Mass meetings of unionists all over the northwest coalesced into a convention at Wheeling on June 11. The main issue confronting this convention was immediate versus delayed steps toward separate statehood for western Virginia. The stumbling block to immediate action was Article IV, Section 3, of the U. S. Constitution, which requires the consent of the legislature to form a new state from the territory of an existing one. The Confederate legislature of Virginia would not consent to a separate state, of course, so the Wheeling convention formed its own "restored government" of Virginia. Branding the Confederate legislature in Richmond illegal, the convention declared all state offices vacant and on June 20 appointed new state officials, headed by Francis Pierpoint as governor. Lincoln recognized the Pierpoint administration as the de jure government of Virginia. A rump legislature, theoretically representing the whole state but in practice representing only the northwestern counties, thereupon elected two U. S. senators from Virginia, who were seated by the Senate on July 13, 1861. Three congressmen from western Virginia also took their seats in the House.

When the Wheeling convention reconvened, in August 1861, a prolonged debate took place between separatists and conservatives. The latter found it difficult to swallow the idea that a legislature representing only one-fifth of Virginia's counties could act for the whole state. But the convention finally adopted an "ordinance of dismemberment" on

32
. Smith,
Borderland in the Civil War
, 105.

August 20, subject to ratification by a referendum on October 24, 1861, at which the voters would also elect delegates to a constitutional convention for the new state of "Kanawha." All of these proceedings occurred against the backdrop of military operations in which a Union army invaded western Virginia and defeated a smaller Confederate army. This achievement was crucial to the success of the new-state movement; without the presence of victorious northern troops, the state of West Virginia could not have been born.

Union forces moved into western Virginia for strategic as well as political reasons. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Ohio River ran through this region and along its border for two hundred miles. The most direct rail link between Washington and the Midwest, the B & O would play an important role in Civil War logistics. In May 1861 the Confederates at Harper's Ferry had already cut the railroad while rebel militia in northwest Virginia occupied the line at Grafton and burned bridges west of there. Western Virginia unionists pleaded with Washington for troops; preoccupied with defense of the capital, General Scott could offer little help. But across the Ohio River, Governor William Dennison of Ohio came to the rescue. Like many other states, Ohio raised more regiments than called for in Lincoln's April 15 proclamation. Dennison was particularly fortunate to have the assistance of George B. McClellan, William S. Rosecrans, and Jacob D. Cox, all of them destined for prominent Civil War commands. McClellan and Rosecrans had graduated near the top of their West Point classes and had gone on to successful civilian careers in business and engineering after resigning from successful careers in the army. Cox was an Oberlin graduate, an outstanding lawyer, a founder of the Republican party in Ohio, and a brigadier general of Ohio militia. These three men organized the regiments raised by Governor Dennison and his equally energetic neighbor, Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana. Taking command of these troops, McClellan sent a vanguard across the Ohio River on May 26 to link up with two unionist Virginia regiments.

Their initial objective was the B & O junction at Grafton, sixty miles south of Wheeling. The colonel commanding the Confederate detachment at Grafton withdrew his outnumbered forces to Philippi, fifteen miles farther south. Three thousand Union soldiers, in service only five weeks, pursued with forced night marches through the rain over wretched roads at a pace that would have done credit to veteran troops. Although a planned pincers attack on the 1,500 Confederates at Philippi miscarried on June 3, the rebels fled twenty-five miles southward to Beverly with such haste that northern newspapers derisively labeled the affair "The Philippi Races."