Historian Patrick A. Lewis Pens New Book, FOR SLAVERY AND UNION

Lexington, KY-Governor A. B. "Happy" Chandler is purported to have called Kentucky the only state to join the Confederacy after the Civil War was over. Whether one considers the Commonwealth a Southern state or not is a matter of debate, but today it is more closely associated with the South than the other Civil War border states. How did Kentucky go from a state which refused to secede and sent between 60,000 and 75,000 more men into the Union army than the Confederate one to one whose enduring images are Southern-from the bow-tied colonel to white-columned mansions and mint juleps?

Historian Patrick A. Lewis traces one thread of that transformation in For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War by documenting the life of one prominent Clark County resident. Benjamin Forsythe Buckner was born in 1836 to an old Whig family from Winchester, Kentucky. This ambitious Bluegrass lawyer from a slave-owning family was an ideal candidate to volunteer at the outbreak of the Civil War. Against the protests of his fiancée and her pro-secession family, he volunteered with the Union Army's Twentieth Kentucky Volunteer Infantry Regiment as a major. Buckner was not, however, a slave owner who was also a Unionist; he was a proslavery unionist. For him, slavery was something worth protecting, and he, and others like him, thought that preserving the Union was the best way to ensure it.

To get beyond the facts of Buckner's life, Lewis examined numerous primary documents from him and his contemporaries to reveal his attitudes as well as his actions. He also paints a vivid picture of Buckner's mid-nineteenth century world to move beyond a mere biography, illuminating the complicated views on slavery in the upper South. Lewis shows the institution not only as a lived reality for those enslaved but also as a political issue that shaped Buckner's personal politics. In his world proslavery unionism was not uncommon until President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Upon its announcement in 1863, seventeen officers from Buckner's regiment, including Buckner, resigned their commissions. "I cant fight against my principles and those of my friends in order to satisfy the absurd desire of a faction at the north," he wrote. His resignation did not send him to the Confederate cause, though. He wrote to his fiancée, "They brought all this upon the country and upon them the blame of all this ought to rest." Buckner married and spent the rest of the war quietly in Kentucky. After the war, Buckner reemerged and, in 1870, raised a battalion of militia in and around Lexington that for the next three years would harass, intimidate, and murder black men at the polls.

Buckner is emblematic of many who fought; he was on the wrong side for the wrong cause. In many ways, he demonstrates how the United States has both succeeded as well as failed-often at the same time-in its efforts to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people. Ultimately, proslavery unionists such as Buckner made up a small minority of those young men nationwide who flocked to defend the Union. Despite their modest numbers, these men were primarily from prominent families and became their communities' civic leaders after the war. As such, they had a disproportionate effect on attitudes and loyalties in their home state. Because their principles were more closely allied with those in the former Confederacy, proslavery unionists like Buckner helped push Kentucky closer to the South during Reconstruction and beyond.

Patrick A. Lewis is assistant editor of the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society and the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.