Interpretive Essays


Introduction to CWGK's Interpretive Essays

The Civil War and Reconstruction eras were messy in Kentucky. From Lincoln’s election in 1860 through Reconstruction and Redemption, Kentuckians fought in a bloody civil conflict, faced hardships at home, and a quarter of a million enslaved individuals participated in the destruction of a slave system that had existed in one form or another for more than two centuries on the North American continent. White and Black Kentuckians lived through a period of profound change in the Civil War Era. After the conflict ended, white Unionists, embittered by what they saw as betrayal by the Federal administration rallied to work with former Confederates limiting the rights of newly freed African Americans.

CWGK offers a lens into that uneven, bloody, and bitterly resisted change. The governor’s office sat at the intersection of the state’s wider transformations. Situated at the intersection of social, political, and military events, Kentucky’s chief executives intervened in all the war’s transformative elements. That office presents a way to capture individual Kentuckians at moments of need: when they asked Frankfort to intervene in their lives, either out of necessity, desperation, or annoyance. Out of those documents, Kentucky’s wartime governors interacted with ordinary Kentuckians in the remission of fines or imprisonment, navigated the mobilization of military forces for national armies and tried to thwart guerrilla violence at home, confronted the social upheaval and destruction of war, and responded to the erosion of slavery in the state.

No historian has attempted a synthetic treatment of Kentucky’s Civil War and Reconstruction experience since E. Merton Coulter’s The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (1926) in large part because of the state’s messiness during the war and its complexity after 1865. These interpretive essays cannot fill that void completely, but they can provide CWGK the ability to work towards two broader objectives. On one hand, it allows staff to unpack different elements of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras in Kentucky, leveraging expertise and research experience to dig into a specific topic, offering readers more opportunities to understand this seminal era in Kentucky and United States history. On the other hand, these essays also work to explore the edition itself, offering staff the ability to clarify their intent within the edition along with a way to signpost how researchers and educators can best use CWGK.

New essays will appear over the months and years to come. They will be linked below as well as through a dropdown menu at the bar on the top of this page.

Interpretative Essays: