By Todd Hatton
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkms/local-wkms-963558.mp3
Murray, KY – Each week of the U.S. Civil War sesquicentennial year, we've been looking back at the events in the Commonwealth as the conflict loomed. On today's Kentucky Civil War Dispatch, the Bluegrass reacts to the war's first shots at Fort Sumter.
On this date in 1861, Kentucky Gov. Beriah Magoffin responded to Secretary of War Simon Cameron's call for Bluegrass State soldiers to help put down the Southern rebellion. And the governor didn't mince words:
"In answer, I say, emphatically, Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern states."
Three days before, the Confederates had opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, triggering the civil war Kentuckians had so dreaded. On April 14, the fort's commander, Kentucky-native Maj. Robert Anderson, and his little band departed the brick-walled bastion for the North.
When the news of war reached the Commonwealth, the state's pro-Confederate press renewed its call for Kentuckians to stop dallying and side with the South. As a group, the secessionist editors seemed to believe that the people, devoted to the Union as they were, would never fight alongside Northerners against Southerners.
The Louisville Courier, Kentucky's leading Confederate paper, predicted Fort Sumter was "the beginning of the end" of Bluegrass State unionism. The Courier challenged Kentuckians: "for whom will you fight - an Abolition Administration or for your brethren of the South who stand by the Constitution as our fathers made it?"
The Cynthiana News claimed that Kentucky-born President Abraham Lincoln had "driven us into the war, and Union men must choose whether they will fight the Northern abolitionists or their home folks."
The Georgetown Journal had "no room to comment upon the villainous policy pursued by Lincoln and his administration." The Lexington Statesman, on the other hand, had plenty to say: "It is manifest that we have to meet the North as a solid section."
The Frankfort Yeoman agreed. The paper predicted if Lincoln insisted on fighting the slave states, "the hardy sons of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri and Maryland, if fight they must, will be found in the vanguard of the army of the united South."
Meanwhile, Kentucky Unionists pleaded for calm. In a Lexington speech on April 17, Sen. John J. Crittenden begged the people to stay out of the "fratricidal war." Instead he argued Kentucky should be "a peaceful mediator" between the warring sections.
The next day in Louisville, the Union State Central Committee, in an "Address to the People of the Commonwealth of Kentucky," urged much the same thing. The same day,committee member William F. Bullock and a trio of other Unionists -- James Guthrie, Archibald Dixon and John Young Brown, spoke to a large gathering in Louisville. They declared Kentucky would fight for neither the North nor the South and warned both sides to stay out of the state.
Fort Sumter would propel Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas into the Confederacy. The Unionists' pleas hinted at what Kentucky was about to do: declare itself neutral. But it would be neutrality under the Stars and Stripes and within the Union.
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.