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Kentuckians in Gray: Confederate Generals and Field Officers of the Bluegrass State ed. by Bruce S. Allardice, Lawrence Lee Hewitt (review)

SUMMER 2009 97 “I think that to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” President Abraham Lincoln confessed to a friend in the Senate in the opening months of the Civil War. To Lincoln and other observers, Kentucky represented a space of such vast political, economic, and strategic magnitude that its loyalty could potentially tip the balance of the war. As a geo-cultural borderland riven by dissension, guerrilla warfare, and divided political and economic allegiances, Kentucky was, in many ways, the American Civil War writ small. Despite the state’s formal Union loyalty, Kentucky families—including such notable ones as the Crittendens, Clays, Bufords, Breckinridges, and Todds—were torn asunder by the conflict. The clichéd “brother against brother” scenario was too often reality in the Bluegrass State. Fully one-third of all Kentucky’s wartime volunteers— over one hundred thousand men— donned Confederate gray. Similarly, the state provided the Confederacy with twenty-four infantry and cavalry regiments, several artillery battalions, and an unknown number of irregular or partisan units. Although Kentucky secessionists were a decided minority after the summer of 1861 elections, the state’s manpower contributions to the Confederacy and the early war exodus of many of its military and political elite stand as testaments to the deep divisions that held sway over the Bluegrass State after 1861. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008. 344 pp. ISBN: 9780813124759 (cloth), $40.00. Kentuckians in Gray: Confederate Generals and Field Officers of the Bluegrass State.