By Todd Hatton
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Murray, KY – Every week, we remember the Commonwealth's role in the U.S. Civil War with the Kentucky Civil War Dispatch. Today, we focus on one of the Commonwealth's most prominent citizens: U-S Vice President, U.S. Senator, and Confederate General, John Cabell Breckinridge.
On this date in 1861, the 37th Congress was heading for adjournment and Kentucky's U.S. Senator John C. Breckinridge of Lexington was edging closer to open support for the Confederacy.
In his book Breckinridge: Statesman Soldier Symbol, historian William C. Davis writes that earlier in March, the former vice president gave a speech in the senate in which he declared his love and devotion for the Union, though guardedly
Davis quotes the senator: "For myself, neither in public nor in private life, will I ever consent to sacrifice the principles of constitutional freedom, of municipal liberty, and of State equality, to the naked idea of Federal unity." Breckinridge ran for president in 1860 as a pro-slavery Southern Democrat, finishing second to Abraham Lincoln.
Even after the Confederacy was formed, Breckinridge clung to the Crittenden Compromise. According to Davis, Breckinridge said the plan could still save the Union "if the Republicans would set aside sectional prejudices and grant the southern states equal rights in and to the territories."
In his address, he also predicted that Kentucky would do its best to reunite the states. But if reunion proved impossible, the Commonwealth would turn to the southern states, and unite with them to found a noble Republic, and invite beneath its stainless banner such other States as know how to keep the faith of compacts, and to respect constitutional obligations and the comity of a confederacy.'
Davis says Republicans and Northern Democrats viewed his remarks as "near-treason." They saw them as confirmation of all the motives their various prejudices had ascribed to him in the campaign the year before.
Davis quotes Breckinridge's fellow Kentuckian Joseph Holt of Louisville. Both were Democrats who had served under President James Buchanan, Breckinridge as vice president and Holt as postmaster general and secretary of war. Holt was, however, an unwavering Unionist.
In the presidential election of 1860, Breckinridge lost Kentucky to Constitutional Unionist John Bell of Tennessee. Davis observes that the Commonwealth voted against Breckinridge on the suspicion merely that he was a disunionist. His Senate speech would cause his home state's condemnation of him to be far more decided.
On the other hand, Confederate-sympathizing lawmakers like Texas Senator Lewis T. Wigfall welcomed Breckinridge's remarks. Texas seceded in February 1861; nonetheless Wigfall stayed in the senate, doing so apparently, just to bedevil Lincoln and the Republicans.
After the remarks, Wigfall wrote to Confederate President Jefferson Davis saying, "Breckinridge has made a magnificent speech, bold, open, definite, wholly right, and unmistakably with us."
Wigfall resigned his senate seat on March 23, five days before Congress adjourned. He became a Confederate general and would later serve in the Rebel Senate.
Breckinridge, too, would become a general in the southern army and the Confederacy's last secretary of war. In December, 1861, the U.S. Senate expelled him for treason.
WKMS produces Kentucky Civil War Dispatches from West Kentucky Community and Technical College history professor Berry Craig. The Murray State alumnus is the author of Hidden History of Kentucky in the Civil War and True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon, and Burgoo.