By Todd Hatton
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Murray, KY – Each week, we trace the path the Bluegrass took during the opening days of the Civil War. On today's Kentucky Civil War Dispatch, election returns for a special 1861 session of the U.S. Congress serve only to further dim southern hopes for a Confederate Commonwealth.
On this date in 1861, Kentucky was heading toward elections for a special session of Congress that President Abraham Lincoln had called for July 4.
The Unionists were confident of a big victory. The secessionists were unsure what to make of the balloting which, after all, was for the Yankee Congress.
The Louisville Courier, the state's top Rebel paper, urged pro-Confederate Kentuckians to stay home on election day, June 20.
Nevertheless the Southern Rights party fielded candidates in all 10 congressional districts. Joseph H. Lewis of Glasgow, the third district Southern Rights candidate and a future Confederate colonel, confessed he didn't expect to win. According to the History of the Orphan Brigade by Ed Porter Thompson, his aim "was to arouse the citizens, if possible, to a sense of their duty, and to incite opposition to the designs of the Washington cabal."
As the election turned out, most citizens were indeed aroused, but for the Union ticket. Unionists swept to blowout victories in nine of Kentucky's ten districts.
Statewide, Unionists polled 72 percent of the vote.
The First District went for Henry C. Burnett of Cadiz, the incumbent Democrat who ran as a Southern Rights candidate. He defeated Unionist Lawrence Trimble of Paducah.
Burnett's vote came primarily from the Jackson Purchase, where he collected about 75 percent of the ballots. Outside of the region, he carried only his home county, Trigg, and that by a scant 20 votes.
Delegates to the Mayfield convention, where Burnett was nominated, had called for a referendum for the "North" or the "South" to be put on the ballot in each county. It isn't certain how many counties did. But Fulton County reported 645 votes for the "South," none for the "North" and 3 for "Neutrality."
Several secessionists apparently boycotted the election. The total vote cast was about 26,300 fewer than all of the ballots tallied in the presidential election of 1860.
But the Union vote was only 8,200 less than the vote received by candidates John Bell, Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. The Bell and Douglas supporters formed the core of the Union Party in the Bluegrass State.
The congressional elections suggested that not even war between the North and South could shake Kentucky's bedrock Unionism. The balloting also showed that the Jackson Purchase was the state's only Rebel region.
Indeed, the Purchase - which would be dubbed "the South Carolina of Kentucky" - had become a Confederate enclave in a mostly Unionist state. The region was the opposite of mountainous eastern Tennessee and western Virginia, Unionist sections in Confederate states.
The congressional elections also hinted that the Mayfield convention delegates were wrong about the rest of the state coming around to support secession. The weather was getting hot, but Kentucky was still cool to the Confederates.
The secessionists were down to their last hope: the August elections for the state legislature. If they could capture the House and Senate, they could put Kentucky in the Confederacy.
Yet given the election results for the border slave state convention and for Congress, a Southern Rights triumph seemed as unlikely as a late summer blizzard.
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.