Abstract
Through a biography of Kentucky lawyer, soldier, and politician Benjamin F. Buckner (1836–1901), this book reorients the narrative of Civil War–era Kentucky around the experience of conservative proslavery unionists such as Buckner who resisted secession in 1861 because they believed slavery had safer prospects in the United States than in the new Confederacy. After the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, this faith in a proslavery federal government collapsed, and Buckner, who had led Union troops in combat in 1861 and 1862, resigned from the army in April 1863. The book is built around these war years and a revealing body of personal correspondence from Buckner to his rebel fiancée, Helen Martin. Looking both forward and backward in time from Buckner’s war experience, the book uses Buckner’s life and career to reintegrate the fractured historiographies of slavery, secession, politics, war, domesticity, emancipation, Civil War memory, industrialization, and regionalism in Kentucky. The collapse of slavery provided a window of opportunity across the South for significant social change. That window was never truly opened in Kentucky ironically because of its wartime loyalty to the Union. Though they could not save slavery, Buckner and political allies leveraged their loyalty during Reconstruction to delay the advent of civil rights for African Americans, suppress those rights by paramilitary violence, and undermine the Fifteenth Amendment in a pivotal Supreme Court case. Buckner’s life shows how many of the same inequalities, conflicts, and contradictions inherent in antebellum Kentucky were consciously re-created, expanded upon, and reinforced in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
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