Kentucky and the Lost Cause: Misremembering the Civil War

The national memory of the Civil War is confused. The historical rewriting of the states’ rights motivation of the Confederacy, or “Lost Cause,” has long been subscribed to by slavery’s apologists. In fact it has been such an influential piece of propaganda that even the lines between the Union and the Confederacy have blurred as time marches on.

The Lost Cause ideology not only complicates the historical record, but history itself. It is understandable, of course, that the side which fought for such an archaic and brutal institution would in later years try to find a separate but equal reason for fighting. The historical record of the war simply does not back this up.

Lost Cause ideological history has created a false dichotomy in which the motivations of the Confederacy are shrouded in a grey mist that obfuscates the reality of slavery, not state’s rights, as the main reason for the war. As such, it gives the Confederacy a type of honor and nobility that the reality of the war does not afford. For an illustrative example, look no farther than the state of Kentucky.

In the lead up to the Civil War, Kentucky, as a slave-holding state, was in a unique position compared to most of the Union with regard to the struggles of Emancipation, and this position led to a very combative race relationship in the postwar period.

After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the end of the Civil War, slavery was abolished nationwide. This was a source of anger for many Kentuckians. Kentucky had not traditionally been a large slave state, its economy being far more diversified than those of states further south and east, but the institution was nonetheless alive and well. In a state which had had divided loyalties, this governmental reach was seen as an affront to the autonomy of the people.

The situation in Kentucky in the mid-late nineteenth century was horrifically violent and anarchic. There was a sense of federal overreach and a fear of a changing society in which the power dynamics had been subverted. The state government was overrun by former supporters of the Confederacy and uninterested in protecting the rights and persons of people of color. The murder rate skyrocketed, officials neither wished to nor could constrain the people, and the black population was effectively thrust back into servitude. Kentucky may have fought to preserve the Union, but the aftermath was all about maintaining the antebellum status quo.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country found it hard to understand Kentucky in light of the violence, the state’s inaccessibility to outsiders and its rejection of its own history. The western, “bluegrass” area of the state was seen as the more developed, pro-Union half of Kentucky, while the Appalachian, eastern area was the backwards, Confederate supporting half. This narrative helped outsiders to manage the contradictions of a historically Union state assuming the identity of the defeated Confederacy.

The complications of Civil War memory in Kentucky only intensified from the end of the nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Despite the state’s history in the Union, memorials were set up to Confederate heroes and veterans. All events revolving around reconciliation between former rivals in the war skewed to unspoken apologies to the Confederacy. Black Kentuckians’ attempts to memorialize their dead were marginal.

Kentucky became Confederate after the war, feeling more attachment and allegiance to the Lost Cause than to its own true place in the war’s history. It could be said that Kentucky seceded after the fighting was done. And if a former Union state is so confused about its place in history, then the work to undo the false narrative of the Lost Cause in the national historical memory of the United States will take some time.