By Todd Hatton
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkms/local-wkms-968017.mp3
Murray, KY – This week in our Kentucky Civil War Dispatch, the outbreak of conflict in April 1861 ratcheted up already high tensions in the Commonwealth. Those tensions focused at two points: in Frankfort, where work continued to keep Kentucky in the Union, and here in far western Kentucky, where concerns are quickly became more military.
On this date in 1861, Kentucky's General Assembly reconvened.
The great majority of Kentuckians did not want civil war. But what would their lawmakers do now that war had come?
Unionists had dominated the critical winter session of the legislature. They had thwarted every attempt by the Southern Rights Party to put Kentucky in the Confederacy.
After the war started, the Unionists called for neutrality, but neutrality within the Union.
The secessionists denounced the idea. A Louisville Courier editorial stated, "The free states are collecting their legions to overrun and subjugate' the South. The Unionists ...still insult the intelligence of the people by crying peace, peace."
The May 4 special election for delegates to the Border Slave State Convention suggested that most Kentuckians didn't agree with the Courier.
Voters elected only Unionists to the gathering, which was to meet in Frankfort on May 27.
True, the Southern Rights Party withdrew its candidates and urged secessionists to boycott the election. But the dozen victorious Unionist candidates received more than 1 hundred and seven thousand votes statewide. That was almost 16 thousand more ballots than the combined vote of John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 presidential election. Most Kentuckians considered Bell and Douglas the candidates most likely to hold the Union together.
The Collins History of Kentucky says that despite the election results, Gov. Magoffin renewed his call "for the passage of a law providing for the submission to the people of the question of a convention, and the election of delegates."
Southern Rights supporters hoped such a conclave would put Kentucky in the Confederacy.
Magoffin added, "the very homes and firesides of our people are unprotected from invasion from without or servile insurrection within." He recommended "the necessary measures to place the commonwealth in a position of military defense," the historians Collins also wrote.
Military offense was on the minds of Jackson Purchase secessionists, according to the Union commander at Cairo, Illinois, Colonel Benjamin Prentiss.
When Southern-sympathizing General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the Kentucky State Guard; and Paducah state Senator John M. Johnson, a Southern Rights man; called on Prentiss in late April, the colonel told them he would not allow arms destined for Columbus to pass Cairo because Columbus citizens and persons from other states co-operating with them" threatened his post.
But Prentiss also promised his visitors he didn't intend to invade Kentucky.
Also on May 6, 1861, the Guard's Colonel Lloyd Tilghman of Paducah and Charles Wickliffe, a Ballard County secessionist, huddled with Prentiss at Cairo. Tilghman promised the Union officer that Cairo was not in danger from Columbus, Paducah or Tennessee.
The skeptical Prentiss wouldn't budge; the arms blockade stood.
Meanwhile, in Frankfort, the Unionist majority would again spurn a secession convention. The Union Party would make neutrality official state policy -- and the Stars and Stripes would still fly over the capitol.
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, Hidden History of Kentucky Soldiers and True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon, and Burgoo.