Civil War for the day

The New York Times has a continuing series on the War:

“I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky,” President Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said in 1861. Whether or not he actually uttered these words, Lincoln made clear his views of his native state in a letter in the fall of that year: “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”
What was so special about Kentucky? And where did the Bluegrass State figure during the secession crisis and the Civil War that followed?
Kentucky complicates the notion that the Civil War was a fight between the urban and industrial “North” and the cotton plantation “South”. If anything, America was split into thirds in 1861, with a vast middle ground that straddled the line between free and slave states. This central region conjoined people in the lower Midwest with those of the Upper South, especially along the winding Ohio River, which served more as a cultural and economic crossroads than a border.
In the mid-nineteenth century, no state symbolized the cultural, political and geographic heart of the nation more so than Kentucky. Settled mostly by Virginians in the late eighteenth century, the state had in turn become, by 1860, one of the most important population exporters in the expanding West. Thousands of Kentuckians, frustrated by complex and legally tangled land claims, set out across the Ohio River for the Old Northwestern states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Garrett Davis, one of Kentucky’s  state senators, noted: “Kentucky has almost peopled the northwestern states, especially Indiana and Illinois. I have no doubt that one fourth of the people of Indiana are either native-born Kentuckians, or the sons and daughters of native-born Kentuckians. They are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.” The result was to spread the state’s complicated views on slavery and free soil across the western states and territories.
One such migrant was Thomas Lincoln, father of the future president, who moved first to southern Indiana and then to the growing Prairie State of Illinois. Other Kentuckians followed the Ohio and Mississippi river trade in the other direction, however, toward the expanding cotton belt in the Old Southwest. Western Kentucky’s Jefferson Davis found fame and fortune only after he departed for Mississippi, as did many other future Confederates, like Albert Sidney Johnston and John Bell Hood, who set out for Texas. Staying home in the Bluegrass State were iconic defenders of the great American compromise tradition, including Henry Clay, John Crittenden, and, for a period at least, the great Breckinridge dynasty.
But for many politicians, North and South, the state’s real value lay in its land and resources. Both sides coveted the limestone-rich Bluegrass region around Lexington for its famous horse farms, a central part in any nineteenth-century army. The rapidly expanding city of Louisville on the Ohio River would provide critical sources of industry for any nation fortunate enough to access its ports. And then there was the Ohio River itself, a highway of water flowing almost a thousand miles between Pittsburgh and the Mississippi River, with much of it marking the northern border of the Bluegrass State.
No wonder, then, that the Confederate States lobbied hard for Kentucky to secede, and, when it didn’t, repeatedly tried to conquer it. Southern leaders hoped that a Confederate Kentucky could cripple the industrial capacity of Cincinnati and serve as a base of a potential invasion of the north. As late as 1864, Confederate generals dreamed of launching an invasion from northern Kentucky through Ohio and on to Lake Erie, effectively splitting the United States in two.
For Union military strategists, Kentucky figured not only as a key defensive bulwark against a Southern assault into the Midwest, but as the starting gate for an invasion of Tennessee and the heart of the Confederacy. The Louisville and Nashville Railroad and the twin Cumberland and Tennessee rivers would serve as key invasion routes into the Confederate heartland, and both traversed central and western Kentucky. Without Kentucky, the Union army would have found it far more difficult, if not impossible, to execute its famous Anaconda Plan to strangle the South.
But what did Kentuckians themselves think of the rapidly unfolding civil war in April of 1861? Kentuckians had long prided themselves on their political moderation, valorizing Henry Clay as the great national savior behind the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Great Compromise of 1850. This tradition reflected a conservative, pro-slavery Unionism widely shared among whites on both side of the slave-free border. Social, racial, economic and political order– slavery and Union– depended upon a spirit of national comity and mutual respect. The makeup of Kentucky society, with its growing urban centers of Louisville, Lexington, Paducah and the northern towns near Cincinnati, along with mixed labor relationships in the countryside where resident slaves, hired slaves, free laborers, and family farmers often toiled together in the fields, reinforced this sentiment. Slow and natural change was fine for Kentuckians. Political or social revolution, which Civil War would undoubtedly portend, was not.
The cataclysmic events of mid-April– the attack on Fort Sumter, guarded until 12 April by a Kentuckian, Major Robert Anderson, and Lincoln’s subsequent call for 75,000 troops to “suppress the rebellion” on 15 April– yielded a cacophony of voices across the Bluegrass State. Speaking for Kentucky’s pro-secession minority, Governor Beriah Magoffin declared: “I say, emphatically, Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States.”
While most Kentuckians agreed that war against the South was unwise, if not “wicked”, they likewise rejected repeated entreaties from Confederate secession commissioners to join the new republic. A well-respected resident of Bourbon County responded to the secessionist call by insisting that the people of Kentucky “will never submit to it. They love order, peace, and freedom, and these priceless blessings can be secured only by sustaining the Union, the Constitution, and the Laws.” Underscoring the pro-slavery basis of white Kentuckians’ sense of “order, peace, and freedom” in the Union, the editor of the Nicholasville Democrat declared shortly after Fort Sumter:

We do boldly assert that the Union party in Kentucky is as sound on the slavery question as the States Rights party can be. We believe that four-fifths of the slaves of the State are owned by Union men. Would it not be strange that the owners of this species of property should decide to deprive themselves of it to their own loss? There is no sort of affiliation whatever between Lincolnites and Unionists.

Indeed, many of the state’s conservative Unionist bemoaned the “twin heresies” of abolitionism to the North and secessionism to the South that squeezed the state in early April of 1861.
This was no mere war of words, however. Competing militias drilling in the streets of Louisville and Lexington suggested a menacing future: a fratricidal guerrilla struggle between and among Kentuckians. One of Lexington’s major militia organizations, the Chasseurs, saw roughly half its members head into each of the rival armies when the war broke out. One militia leader, John Hunt Morgan, delivered his entire corps of Lexington Rifles into the Confederate army, though not until September of 1861, when all hope of peace and neutrality within Kentucky finally collapsed.
Still, to most Kentuckians, the Union was the best protector of the slave-based social order. They trusted their native-born president to protect the peculiar institution, counting on the moral influence of the Lexington-based Todd family and Lincoln’s longstanding ties to eminent Kentuckians like Joseph Holt and Joshua Speed to preserve both slavery and Union. By 20 May, the Kentucky legislature agreed to declare for neutrality, causing one analyst to quip that there were now three distinct republics: the United States of America, the Confederate States of America and the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
But Kentucky’s official neutrality was unsustainable. Both sides repeatedly violated its tenets, with secretive recruiting parties and unofficial trade violations rankling partisans across the state. Then, in September of 1861, Confederate General Leonidas Polk made the fateful decision to invade the far southwestern part of the state in hopes of securing the bluffs over the Mississippi River. Almost immediately, Kentuckians responded with rage to the Confederate invasion, and little-known Brigadier General Ulysses Simpson Grant promptly invaded Paducah in response. The state legislature quickly affirmed its official ties with the Union, thus cementing all of the border states for Lincoln.
Nevertheless, the relationship between Kentucky and the Union would prove to be a deeply troubled one. Beginning in late 1861, a three-part struggle ensued between white conservative Unionists, secessionist rebels against that Union, and slaves in rebellion against the conservative nature of that Union. White Kentuckians bitterly rejected Lincoln’s moves toward emancipation and black soldier enlistment. And nearly all white Kentuckians resented the presence of federal troops on Kentucky soil, especially since the state was nominally loyal to the Union.
Kentucky may have proven a key link in the North’s chain of victory, but it repeatedly proved to be the most “southern” of the Union states, both during and after the war; not for nothing do historians say that Kentucky “waited until after the war to secede”. It refused to free its slaves until ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, eight months after Appomattox; amazingly, it would not add its own official support for, and ratification of, the amendment until 1976.