Kentucky Rebel Town

Author(s):  
William A. Penn

This is a detailed Civil War study of a Kentucky Blue Grass town and county. This extensive research of Cynthiana and Harrison County reveals the area’s divisive sectional animosities and personalities. As the title suggests, Cynthiana was widely perceived to be a Rebel stronghold when the secession crisis erupted. The county’s state representatives, Lucius Desha and W. W. Cleary, were among Kentucky’s pro-secession supporters during neutrality, and Desha was arrested for treason when accused of recruiting for the Confederate army. Belief that the town was a den of Southern sympathizers was further supported when Union soldiers arrested and imprisoned for disloyal activities about sixty citizens, including several county officials and newspaper editor. Countering these secession activities were Home Guards and Union supporters, such as attorney W. W. Trimble. John Hunt Morgan’s raids in Kentucky resulted in the First and Second Battles of Cynthiana, which the author carefully researched and enhanced by new battlefield maps. Readers will learn of the central role of the county in the Union military defenses of the Kentucky Central Railroad corridor. The book also describes from both the soldiers’ and citizens’ viewpoints the Confederate army march through the county on the way to threaten Cincinnati in 1862. It also describes the recruiting activities of Union and Confederate supporters, and the controversial African American enrollments.

Author(s):  
William A. Penn

When a Confederate officer scribbled in his journal after the Second Battle of Cynthiana that Morgan’s men were “plundering & pillaging … the best rebel town of our native state,” he was expressing a widely held perception that, in the Bluegrass, Cynthiana was a “Rebel town.” This reputation was earned in the early years of the war after a series of implicating events: the county judge, county clerk, sheriff, and newspaper editor were arrested for being southern sympathizers; one of the very first Kentucky Rebel volunteer companies was from Harrison County, marching off to war as a Confederate flag was displayed on the courthouse flagpole; and the majority of Harrison County recruits joined the Confederate army. At this divisive time, a citizen admitted: “It is not safe for a man to talk about or in favor of the Union.” The state representatives from Harrison County were known to be prosouthern by their speeches during the neutrality period. Rep. Lucius Desha fled behind Confederate lines to avoid being arrested, only to be indicted for treason on returning to the state. Cincinnati newspapers and a US representative from Bourbon County pointed to the arrest of about sixty citizens to support their contention that Cynthiana was full of “lurking Rebels” and described the town as a “pestiferous Secession hole.” A militia officer, writing state officials in October 1861, referred to “Cynthiana, that infernal hole of rebellion.” And in correspondence with President Lincoln about shipping guns through Harrison County, the clerk of the Kentucky state court of appeals warned, “Cynthiana is a dark hole of traitors.” Even after the war ended, complaints surfaced that some candidates for office in Harrison County were former “stay-at-home rebels.”...


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-187
Author(s):  
Robert B. Slocum

AbstractThe noted Episcopal theologian William Porcher DuBose was a seminarian when the American Civil War began. He was torn between continuing his studies for ordination and joining the Confederate Army. He felt duty bound to defend his homeland, and he served heroically, wounded in combat, and taken as a prisoner of war. Troubled by the senselessness and inhumanity of war, he was eventually ordained and served as a military chaplain. He devoted himself to faith and ministry when he realized his country and culture were lost. DuBose vividly presents his views on war and faith in his wartime correspondence with his fiancée and later wife Anne Barnwell Perroneau, and other writings. His experiences of loss and poverty were the basis for his theology of the cross and his understanding of the role of suffering in the Christian life, and he subsequently dedicated himself to faith, peace, and reconciliation.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 99-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Blackburn

AbstractKarl Marx and Abraham Lincoln held very different views on the ‘social question’. This essay explores the way in which they converged in their estimation of slavery during the course of the Civil War; Marx was an ardent abolitionist, and Lincoln came to see this position as necessary. It is argued that the rôle of runaway slaves – called ‘contraband’ – and German-revolutionary ’48ers played a significant rôle in the radicalisation of Lincoln and the direction of the War.


Author(s):  
Brooks Blevins

A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 2: The Conflicted Ozarks focuses on the long era of Civil War and Reconstruction, stretching roughly from the 1850s through the 1880s. The book begins with an analysis of slavery (the most thorough examination of the institution in the region to date) and the secession crisis. Almost half the book deals with the four years of civil warfare, including a summary of the formal, battlefield war in the Ozarks and an examination of various facets of the home front, from guerrilla fighters to the role of women. It also features the most comprehensive portrait of the long Reconstruction era in the Ozarks, including a comparison of political Reconstruction in Arkansas and Missouri as well as an extended treatment of social and economic reconstruction that chronicles railroad building, manufacturing, extractive industry, and the development of educational institutions in the postwar years. In addition to the continuation of volume 1’s argument that the story of the Ozarks is mostly an unexceptional, regional variation of the American story, volume 2 is built on the thematic concept of multiple layers of conflict in the region--divisions over slavery, wartime violence and its stubborn continuation in the Reconstruction era, and the continuing conflicted identity of the Ozarks as part southern and part midwestern, part Union and part Confederate, part modern and part backwoods.


Author(s):  
Allison Dorothy Fredette

Not quite the Cotton Kingdom or the free labor North, the mid-nineteenth-century border South was a land in between. There, the clashing ideologies of this era—slavery and freedom, urban and rural, industrial and agrarian—met, merged, and melded. As they did, they formed something new—a fluid, flexible identity that somehow grew from these tensions while rising above them. This border identity would play a critical role in these states’ experiences during the secession crisis, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Yet, this story—one of political division, internal warfare, and economic struggles—is only one part of the border South’s larger saga. Focusing on the heart of this complicated region, Marriage on the Border reveals how this border environment shaped the lives and loves of Kentuckians, West Virginians, and Appalachian Virginians. Inundated with conflicting messages about marriage, divorce, and gender, these border southerners set their own path. In an era when advice manuals urged all Americans to adopt new ideals of companionate marriage and loving mutuality, border southerners proved especially receptive to these notions. Additionally, when these marriages crumbled, border southerners found ways to divorce more easily than other southerners of this era. Marriage on the Border follows border southerners through their courtships and into their homes, through blissful marriages and turbulent divorce dramas, through secession, war, and reconstruction. Along the way, Marriage on the Border captures the turmoil and confusion of this era, not in its legislative halls or on the battlefield, but in the households of those who lived at the heart of the country.


Islamovedenie ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-39
Author(s):  
Yarkov Alexander Pavlovich ◽  

The history of the Muslims of Siberia and far East during the civil war is not thoroughly investigated. Meanwhile, the processes are interesting, and trend-defining. They are important for understanding what happened in the subsequent Soviet decades. Religion during the war of-ten performed the criterion of ethnic and linguistic identity. This was reflected in naming units (for example – Muslim company, Muslim council, Muslim orphanage). There were few Muslim units of RCP (b) and RKCY where the formation of Soviet personnel managers was on the way. Thus, the ‘Muslims’ marker not only played the role of konfessionism. One could observe a preserved ‘floating’ ethnicity: some siberians defined themselves according to tukhum names, and only then as the Tatars (Bukharians, Bashkirs, Kazakhs), but, in the view of the believers and others – as ‘Muslims’ always.


Author(s):  
Josh Parshall

The regiment was the essential “building block” of Civil War armies. Assigned by states, most volunteer regiments were organized based on soldiers’ home residence and reflective of those local communities. Each branch of the army—infantry, artillery, and cavalry—formed into regiments with varying numbers of companies and overall strength. There were regular army regiments and units specially designated for African American troops. As the war dragged on, regimental strengths diminished dramatically. The Confederate Army tried to refill older units with conscripts and new recruits, while the Union created new regiments to replace depleted ones and later consolidated smaller ones. Neither side was entirely successful in restoring regiments to full authorized strength. Nonetheless, the regiment was more than a mode of organization—it was the prime source of identity and pride for volunteers and later veterans. While armies, divisions, and brigades were crucial to winning battles, and companies forged tight bonds of loyalty, it was the regiment to which most soldiers claimed a personal allegiance. Famed regiments like the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment, the 1st Texas Infantry Regiment, and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment cited their battle honors and high casualty numbers as proof of their fighting prowess. After the war ended, veterans produced hundreds of regimental histories, recounting their battle service and seeking to claim a place in history. Although many historians dismiss these accounts as worthless for serious scholarly research, regimental histories offer rich firsthand accounts of the conflict. They also offer a vehicle for narrating the war in a form well familiar to the soldiers who experienced it.


Author(s):  
James P. Byrd

This chapter narrates the role of the Bible in the secession crisis that erupted after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860. While Benjamin Morgan Palmer and other southerners saw slavery as “a divine trust,” many northerners agreed with Lincoln’s quotation of scripture—“A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand,” meaning the nation could not endure if it remained divided over slavery. In response, southerners scoured the scriptures for arguments to support white supremacy, fearing that many non-slaveholding whites in the South would refuse to support secession. In all, the Bible contributed to the righteous indignation on both sides, helping to pave the way for war.


Men Is Cheap ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 11-43
Author(s):  
Brian P. Luskey

During the economic crisis of the 1850s and early 1860s that made northerners’ individual and household independence seem more precarious, men like Thomas Webster gave voice to their ideology and tried to protect their interest. In doing so, they embraced both caution and speculation not only to end slaveholders’ grip on the nation’s political economy but also to benefit from slave emancipation. Their cautious hedges proved risky, and led to profound soul-searching in political and cultural debates among northern devotees of free labor. By 1860, the financial uncertainty borne of the Panic of 1857 and the secession crisis forced Webster to look for patronage from Republican allies to access a new capital stream. It was through the work of middlemen like Webster—as much as through the efforts of abolitionists, Republican politicians, Union soldiers, and enslaved people—that slavery ended and free labor’s promise for workers was unmade during the Civil War Era. Webster represented the speculative—many said the fraudulent—impulses and activities in an economy founded on the fact that having capital meant having power. That capital would make these northerners more independent in a competitive market, and their speculations would shape the contours of war and emancipation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-59
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Niezgoda ◽  
Izabela Wyszowska

The purpose of the study was to analyze the role of the Renaissance in Poland and the way it is reflected in tourists’ reviews. The authors focused in particular on tourists’ awareness concerning the importance of three major Renaissance landmarks located in three Polish cities, namely the Wawel Royal Castle in Cracow, the Town Hall in Poznań and the Old Town in Zamość. Methods used in the empirical part include an analysis of reviews posted on the TripAdvisor website by Polish tourists who have visited these sites, taking into account the historical conditions underlying the development of the Renaissance in Poland and its characteristic features. The authors used the desk research method. The pilot study described in the article is an introduction to further, in-depth qualitative research. The results indicate that only 10% of all tourists’ reviews referred to the Renaissance character of the sites. The reviews indicate that most tourists lack a solid knowledge of history and architecture, and were most likely not inspired to visit the analyzed sites because of their links to the Renaissance. No reviews were found demonstrating any personal background in history or suggesting that the Renaissance was the reason for visiting these particular sites. So far, references to the Renaissance in tourists’ reviews of Polish landmarks have not been discussed in the literature. The article can, therefore, be regarded as a first contribution to the study of this issue.


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