Description
Benjamin Forsythe Buckner (1836–1901) faced a dire choice as the flames of Civil War threatened his native Kentucky. As an ambitious Bluegrass aristocrat, he used to be sympathetic to fellow slave owners, but used to be also convinced that the Abnormal Institution could not live to tell the tale a war for Southern independence. Defying the wishes of his Rebel fiancée and her powerful circle of relatives―yet still hoping to impress them with his get to the bottom of, independence, and courage―Buckner joined the Twentieth Kentucky Volunteer Infantry in 1861 as a Union soldier. President Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 in the end destroyed Buckner’s faith in his cause, on the other hand, and he resigned his commission.
In For Slavery and Union, Patrick A. Lewis uses Benjamin Buckner’s story to illuminate the origins and perspectives of Kentucky’s conservative proslavery Unionists, and provide an explanation for why this group eventually became a key force in repressing social and political change all over the Reconstruction era and beyond. Free from the constraints and restrictions imposed on the former Confederate states, men like Buckner joined with other proslavery forces to work in the interest of the New South’s brand of economic growth and racial keep an eye on.
Other studies have explored how Kentucky cultivated a Confederate identity after the Civil War, but For Slavery and Union is the first major work to personify this transformation. Lewis’s important book transcends biography to provide a deeply nuanced look at the history of the commonwealth in the nineteenth century and the development of the New South.