Political climate of Perryville, KY 1862

[NebraskaFed]

Gents,

A comrade and myself are curious about what the political outlook was amongst the civilian population in and around the Perryville, Ky area during 1862. Was it Pro-Union or Pro-Slavery? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks for your help!

Sincerely,
Cody G. Williams

[ewtaylor]

Re: Political climate of Perryville, KY 1862

Gents,

A comrade and myself are curious about what the political outlook was amongst the civilian population in and around the Perryville, Ky area during 1862. Was it Pro-Union or Pro-Slavery? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks for your help!

Sincerely,
Cody G. Williams

Mr. Williams,
I first need to correct you on one thing. "Was it pro-union or pro-slavery?" Kentucky had a very large slave population and slaveholder population at the outbreak of the War. A great deal of Pro-Union men in Ky were slaveholders. In the future I would refer to citizens being either Pro-Union or Pro-Confederate. With that technicality out of the way the areas in Northern Ky(near the Ohio river) and Southeastern Ky (mountains) were mostly pro-union. The Bluegrass region and western Ky were mostly pro-Confederate. The Perryville/Danville are would most likely fall under the Pro-cs group. However, Ky was as divided as the nation during this War and I'm sure there were some pro-unionists lurking about the Bluegrass area.
Kentucky supplied over 100,000 men to the US army and about 40,000 to the Cs army, however her modern day allegiance would lead you to believe otherwise.
Here is a tidbit of info I found:
Morgan and his raiders so fired the public’s imagination that schoolchildren on both sides recited poems about them. The Yankee rhyme was: "I’m sent to warn the neighbors, he’s only a mile behind/He’s sweeping up the horses, every horse that he can find./Morgan, Morgan the Raider and Morgan’s terrible men/With bowie knives and pistols, are galloping up the glen."
Southern children had a different perspective: "I want to be a cavalryman, and with John Hunt Morgan ride/A Colt revolver in my belt, a saber by my side./I want a pair of epaulets to match my suit of gray,/The uniform my mother made and lettered C.S.A."
hope this didnt confuse more,
ewtaylor
bluegrass rifles

[The Pigman]

Re: Political climate of Perryville, KY 1862

Sir:

Perryville is not far from Whitehall the home of that great Kentucky unionist Cassius Clay.

It is true that Kentucky joined the confederacy after the war.

Thanks,
Mark C. Foster

Gents,

A comrade and myself are curious about what the political outlook was amongst the civilian population in and around the Perryville, Ky area during 1862. Was it Pro-Union or Pro-Slavery? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks for your help!

Sincerely,
Cody G. Williams

[Clark Badgett]

Re: Political climate of Perryville, KY 1862

Mr. Taylor, the area you talk about may very well have been pro CS, but for some unexplained reason, there were thousands of local men that joined Union regiments. I don't really think that outside of eastern Kentucky we can make any true generalizations about any other area being predominately one way or another. But as a whole we can make a general statement that there were 2 Union soldiers for every Confederate one.

I had lots of family members from that very area that all seemed to end up in Federal blue. One of them died in Libby Prison.

[markj]

Re: Political climate of Perryville, KY 1862

Greetings,

I believe a widely held feeling at this time, even among ostensibly pro-Confederate slaveholding Kentuckians, was of considerable wariness toward Bragg's invasion. As I recall, Kentuckians were not particularly enthusiastic about their "liberation"--the number of Kentuckians who actually volunteered to join Bragg was far lower than expected.

This was only prudent given that many Kentuckians stood to personally lose, no matter who "won": To Bragg they likely would have said, "Yes, it's nice you're here but what will the Federal Army and Home Guards do to us once you're gone? And by the way, when and how are you going to pay me for the hogs your men slaughtered and for the hams they stole out of my smokehouse?"

The same attitude was displayed by pro-Southern Democrats in Indiana during the Morgan Raid. Although Morgan does seem to have received some aid from sympathetic locals, the general attitude was of, to say the least, considerable annoyance with his raid since it resulted in pro-Southern Democrats being put into a very precarious situation with the state government--it really put a lot of heat on them.

Regards,

Mark Jaeger