|
|
|
Reviews
Contested Borderland
The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia
|
By Brian D. McKnight
|
| (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pp. ix, 312. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00.) |
| Historians have virtually ignored the Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia. Although a few recent works have appeared on the subject, no one has attempted to present a comprehensive examination of the era in those mountain highlands. The Civil War in Appalachia does not evoke images of dashing military leaders, great tactical confrontations between huge armies, or logistically complex campaigns. No historical "what ifs" arose from the fighting that took place in those mountains. Instead, it remains a blur, nothing more than a backwater of the larger Civil War. |
1
|
|
Brian D. McKnight has made a valiant and mostly successful attempt to rescue the story of the Civil War in the Kentucky and Virginia highlands. Based upon a wealth of new and rarely used manuscript material, Contested Borderland explores the social, political, and military complexities of the Civil War in a region of the country that was—and in some respects, remains—remote, subject to neither political nor social definition. |
2
|
|
The presence, in the early years of the Civil War, of two armies only added to the complex chemistry of the Appalachian highlands. As McKnight amply illustrates, highlanders were "trapped between two armies, both of which insisted on their loyalty." One of those armies would, McKnight points out, "drive the other out of the region," resulting in "retribution on those who had guessed incorrectly." The mountaineers of the region—whose loyalties to any organization or institution were questionable even without a civil war—thus struggled to survive the conflict as it grew more and more bitter. |
3
|
|
As McKnight illustrates, while the Confederate generals who commanded troops in the Kentucky and Virginia mountains—Humphrey Marshall, William Preston, John C. Breckinridge, and John Hunt Morgan —were all Kentuckians, they had little knowledge of the mountains or mountaineers and were never able to win the support of the indigenous people. McKnight highlights the great Confederate strategic operations that affected the mountains: General Felix Zollicoffer's early campaign; General Edmund Kirby Smith's August 1862 invasion from Knoxville, Tennessee, through the southeastern mountains to Richmond and Lexington, Kentucky; John Hunt Morgan's brief incursion in the summer of 1864 through the mountains and into central Kentucky. He also explores the operations of Union Generals William "Bull" Nelson, James G. Garfield, Stephen G. Burbridge, and George W. Morgan into the Kentucky and Virginia highlands. McKnight's discussion of the latter's often overlooked occupation and abrupt evacuation of Cumberland Gap is particularly welcome. |
4
|
|
In the end, McKnight illustrates that time and numbers were on the Union side. Pro-Union sentiment grew with every foothold Northern forces gained in the region. Inexorably, they occupied more and more "contested borderland," including east Tennessee, and that made the critical difference. Confederate attempts to prove that they could control the region repeatedly came to grief. Yet as the region became more pro-Union, Confederate efforts only grew more desperate and the fighting more bitter. |
5
|
|
As the only modern, comprehensive examination of the Civil War era in the mountain highlands of Kentucky and Virginia, McKnight's book makes a wonderful contribution to Civil War history. It is a well-researched work, designed to introduce the reader to that geographic area and the impact of the war on it. The only missing element is a discussion of the region's geographical features, including some examination of the differences between southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia (such as road and railroad improvements, or lack thereof, in the two areas). Coupled with some discussion of how and by whom the region was settled, this might have added to a greater understanding of the political positions taken by the people of the region during the Civil War. With that said, I heartily recommend the book. Contested Borderland is a fine narrative history of a complex subject in a very complex region, and I hope it spawns more scholarship on the highland region during the Civil War. |
6
|
|
Kent Masterson Brown is an attorney practicing in Lexington, Kentucky, and Washington, D. C., who has published numerous books on Civil War history, including Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics and the Pennsylvania Campaign (2005). He has also written scholarly articles and written and produced documentary films on Civil War history for public television.
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|