By Charles R. Welsko
By the mid-1850s, Kentucky’s once vibrant militia system had declined from its prominence as both a military and social lynchpin in the Commonwealth to a nearly non-existent shell of its former self. Originally, Kentucky’s militia system served to protect Anglo-American settlements from Indigenous populations they forced out of the Ohio River Valley. At the middle of the nineteenth century, that system had transformed into a social organization before fading away in the early 1850s. Sectional tensions around the institution of slavery prompted a revitalization of the militia system in Kentucky. This transformation played a vital role in shaping how Kentuckians experienced the Secession Crisis as well as how it organized soldiers for war when the Commonwealth joined the fray in the fall of 1861 and how Union leaders attempted to thwart guerrilla violence.
During the settlement of Kentucky, militias were a compulsory part of life for men between the ages of 18 and 50. Militiamen served a variety of functions—as local defense organizations, levees for larger military campaigns, security for burgeoning industries (such as salt works and iron furnaces), and transportation routes from the east into Kentucky. They also fought against native populations, both defending white settlements and conducting retaliatory campaigns against Indigenous groups in Kentucky or across the Ohio River in what would become Ohio and Indiana.[1]
After these early conflicts with Indigenous people and wars with Great Britain, Kentucky’s militia increasingly became social fraternities. Following the War of 1812, Kentucky officials shifted legal codes to transition Kentucky’s militias to local, volunteer organizations rather than compulsory defense organizations.[2] As historian Harry S. Laver has noted, Kentucky’s militias helped establish community identity and reinforced social structures, created avenues for political participation, acted as police keeping-auxiliaries, and encouraged economic activity. Their members also helped maintain the institution of slavery, serving as the backbone of slave patrols that recaptured runaway enslaved people or broken up escape attempts before they even began. By the early 1850s, with lax legislation, militia organizations fell into a state of dormancy across the Commonwealth.[3]
John Brown’s raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (later West Virginia), in October 1859, catalyzed change in Kentucky’s stale militia system. Like other Southern states, fear over enslaved resistance and a repeat of Brown’s attack by other Northerners prompted a revision of entire militia system. The Kentucky General Assembly passed new legislation that created the State Guard. This new, state-wide militia system incorporated local civic-oriented companies, such as the Lexington Rifles or the Citizens’ Guard, into a modernized, state-wide system.[4] By the summer of 1860, and with the looming 1860 Presidential Election, Kentucky had 49 militia companies spread across the state with approximately 2,500 men enrolled in its ranks.[5]
After Lincoln’s election, while Deep South States advocated and organized secession, most Kentuckians resisted calls for dissolution of the nation. Instead, they advocated a moderate course that would preserve both slavery and the Union. South Carolina, Georgia, and other Southern states demurred. After the Civil War began, Kentucky declared neutrality in May as a bid for time—either to secure peace or consolidate power between Unionists and Secessionist factions—as the state remained divided. The militia system played a vital role in Kentucky’s divided neutrality.
Some Kentucky leaders viewed the State Guard as a deterrent to invasion from either North or South. Others viewed the organization with suspicion. Skeptical of Governor Beriah Magoffin, many Kentucky Unionists, thought that he and the State Guard’s commander, Simon Bolivar Buckner, plotted to use the militia to force secession. In response, Unionist legislators created a Military Board to oversee the State Guard. The board stripped Magoffin of his power as commanded-in-chief of the militia system, diverted funds to a new body, the Union-leaning Home Guards, and relegated Buckner to the background. Political victories in May state elections and subsequent Unionist victories in August 1861 signaled the death knell of Kentucky’s secessionism.[6] When Confederate troops seized Columbus, Kentucky, in early September, the Unionist legislature responded by officially supporting the Union. Militia units served as the basis for both Unionists and Confederates in Kentucky to form new military units. Members of State Guard companies, like those led by John Hunt Morgan or Simon Bolivar Buckner, often left together to join Confederate units, while Home Guard companies served as the foundations for many Federal Kentucky regiments.
Throughout the war, Kentucky’s militia played a vital role in defending local communities against Confederate raids and guerrilla violence. A mixture of divided sympathies, the presence of Union soldiers in the state, and the erosion of slavery created a recipe for irregular violence, as Kentuckians waged an increasingly bitter fight behind the lines.[7] Union leaders in Frankfort often, and ineffectively, relied on county militia units to defend the state from raiders and guerrillas.
Within CWGK, militias appear frequently and imprecisely. Each county had its own company under the State Guard legislation of 1860. During the war, the threat of invasion and irregular violence prompted Kentuckians to call for weapons, resources, and more men, to defend the state. Furthermore, beyond the distinction between the State Guard and Home Guard (though they both eventually reformed together as the State Guard), there were also different types of militias in the state. Three categories are important to distinguish between:
Enrolled militia: were the white men between the age of 18 and 45 who resided in Kentucky; these men could be mustered into the active militia in case of an emergency;
Active militia: were the men involved in volunteer companies of the State Guard and who would be first called up to respond to an emergency;
Reserve militia: were all white men in Kentucky under the age of 18 or older than 45 that could be called upon to serve in the military, only “on occasions of extreme danger to the State.”[8]
Understanding the various definitions of the militia system provides context to CWGK documents. It also helps frame tensions between individuals or state officials with Federal authorities. Faced with violence at home, either through raids or guerrilla activity, Kentuckians often tried to turn to the militia system, long seen as an institution to protect their homes, as a solution to these local problems. As the war dragged on, and many white Kentuckians grew embittered at the course of the war, they wanted to serve in militia units that would stay locally to protect their homes. These requests clashed with the Union's need for soldiers in Federal units and with military leaders in the state.
[1] Harry S. Laver, “Rethinking the Social Role of the Militia: Community-Building in Antebellum Kentucky,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Nov. 2002), 807-8; Richard G. Stone, Jr., A Brittle Sword: The Kentucky Militia, 1776-1912 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977) 12, 18, 21-39.
[2] Stone, A Brittle Sword, 37,
Laver, “Rethinking the Social Role of the Militia,” 787.
[3] John A. Boyd, “Intimidation & Conspiracy, Provocation & Intrigue: The Militias of Kentucky, 1859–1861,” Army History No. 69 (Fall 2008), 8; Laver, “Rethinking the Social Role of the Militia,” 777-816.
[4] Boyd, “Intimidation & Conspiracy, Provocation & Intrigue,” 8-9.
[5] Boyd, “Intimidation & Conspiracy, Provocation & Intrigue,” 9.
[6] Boyd, “Intimidation & Conspiracy, Provocation & Intrigue,” 11-3; Stephen I. Rockenbach, War Upon Our Border: Two Ohio Valley Communities Navigate the Civil War, (Charlotteville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 39-43
[7] Christopher Phillips, “The Hard-Line War: The Ideological Basis of Irregular Warfare in the Western Border States,” in The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth, eds. Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 13-42.
[8] An Act for the Better Organization of the Kentucky Militia, approved 5 March 1860, in Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky Passed at the Session Which Was Begun and Held in the City of Frankfort on Monday, the Fifth Day of December, 1859 and Ended on Monday, the Fifth Day of March, 1860 (Frankfort, Ky., 1860), pp. 142–71.