By Todd Hatton
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkms/local-wkms-971859.mp3
Murray, KY – Each week, we chart the Commonwealth's course as it navigated the opening days of the Civil War. On today's Kentucky Civil War Dispatch, the Bluegrass tries to lead a divided nation back to unity as the nascent conflict, largely political since Fort Sumter, threatens to become a shooting war.
On this date in 1861, the Border Slave State Convention ended in Frankfort, having attracted only 17 delegates - a dozen from Kentucky, four from Missouri and one from largely pro-Union east Tennessee.
Undaunted by the poor turnout, the delegates got organized, electing Sen. John J. Crittenden president of the gathering. They also wrote addresses "To the People of the United States" and "To the Citizens of Kentucky."
The address to the American people contained two proposals:
"1. That Congress shall at once propose such constitutional amendments, as will secure to slaveholders their legal rights, and allay their apprehensions in regard to possible encroachments in the future.
"2. If this should fail to bring about the results so desirable to us and so essential to the best hopes of our country, then let a voluntary convention be called, composed of delegates from the people of all the States, in which measures of peaceable adjustment may be devised and adopted, and the nation rescued from the continued horrors and calamities of civil war."
The delegates urged Northerners and Southerners to reunite "that we may be, in the future, as we have been in the past, one great, powerful and prosperous nation."
In their address to Kentuckians, the delegates, all of them Unionists, declared that the Bluegrass State "is as loyal as ever to the Constitutional administration of the Government. She will follow the Stars and Stripes to the utmost regions of the earth, and defend it from foreign insult. She refuses alliance with any who would destroy the Union."
All Kentucky wanted, the address explained, was to stay "out of this unnatural strife" and to keep her soil from becoming " the theatre of military operations by any belligerent."
The legislature had adjourned by the time the convention met, but the capital city was festooned with flags when the delegates came to town, according to the Frankfort Commonwealth, a pro-Union paper.
By "flags," the Commonwealth meant "the stars and stripes not pelicans or rattlesnakes. Numbers of our citizens have given the old banner to the breeze, and the fingers of fair ones are busy plying the needle, stitching together the red, white and blue. It is truly refreshing that as the cloud hangs heavier, and the storm gathers thicker, to see the patriotism and loyalty of Kentucky grow the stronger, and witness the firm determination of her gallant sons to carry the flag, and keep step to the music of the Union.
The paper declared, "Frankfort is all right" and urged "Go on, ye lovers of your country, deck your house tops and your trees with the ensign of your fathers, and unite in the rallying song
"American freemen! Hand to hand,
A bulwark to guard it well shall stand
God save the flag of our native land."
Nothing came of the border slave state convention. The war would go on; Tennessee would soon exit the Union. Kentucky neutrality would remain, but for how long?
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.