By Todd Hatton
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkms/local-wkms-976855.mp3
Murray, KY – On this week's Kentucky Civil War Dispatch, we find out what a 1861 Louisville court case and an order of Army mules can tell us about Commonwealth sentiments in the first months of the American Civil War.
On this date in 1861, Southern-sympathizing Louisville merchants Michael Brady and David Davis were hoping a local judge would permit them to trade with the Confederates via the Louisville & Nashville Railroad.
According to The Encyclopedia of Louisville, "On June 24, 1861, the surveyor of the port of Louisville ordered that permits must be granted by his office for anyone wishing to do business with the South."
Brady and Davis were denied permits.
Before the war, much of Louisville's interstate trade went south via the L&N. Its president, James Guthrie, was a staunch Unionist who once said, "I hate the word secession' because it is a cheat."
Because Brady and Davis didn't have permits,the L&N refused to ship their freight. So they sued the railroad.
On July 10, Judge George P. Muir upheld the surveyor's order and found for the L&N. In Brady and Davis v. Louisville & Nashville Railroad, Muir "ruled that the federal government had a right to stop any traffic not deemed appropriate."
Louisville's secessionist minority condemned Muir's ruling, claiming it was yet another example of federal "tyranny."
The ruling must have felt like insult to injury to the secessionist minority in the Falls City. The Southern sympathizers were still smarting over the congressional elections in which the Union Party won big everywhere but deep western Kentucky. Louisville voted overwhelmingly Unionist.
The Louisville Courier, the state's leading secessionist paper, wasn't giving up on a Confederate Kentucky. On July 4, the day Congress convened, the Courier ran a editorial that favorably compared the Confederates to America's Revolutionary War heroes: "The Declaration [of Independence], which was written by a Southern man and a slave holder, enunciates the great principles of free government on which our Government was founded, and that lie at the very bottom of that adopted by the Confederate States."
The irony of using "slave holder" and "free government" in the same sentence evidently escaped Editor Walter N. Haldeman.
In any event, the next day, the Courier followed up with an editorial denouncing Northern "sectionalism" as the cause of the war. The paper said President George Washington spoke against sectionalism in his famous Farewell Address. The Courier was convinced that Washington "would have contributed the best energies of his great mind to check the progress of the sectionalism that resulted in placing Mr. Lincoln in power."
The Courier was equally convinced that if Washington returned from the dead he would "applaud the heroic men who have been driven to take up arms against the assertion of a principle [sectionalism] that is fatal to Constitutional liberty." Of course, it was the Confederates who had asserted the "principle" of sectionalism and seceded from the Union because they feared Lincoln and the Republicans would end slavery. Too, Washington was an ardent nationalist and unionist who, in his will, ordered the emancipation of his slaves upon the death of his widow, Martha Washington.
Meanwhile, Muir's stop order was another victory for the Union cause in Kentucky. Lewis and Richard Collins, in their History of Kentucky wrote that on the same day he issued his ruling, there were "large purchases" of Kentucky mules for the U.S. army.
Soon, many Kentucky men would be following those Kentucky mules into Union service.
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.