When the war broke out, Kentucky declared itself in a state of armed neutrality and refused to take a side in the conflict and both sides chose to respect that neutrality to avoid pushing the Kentuckians to join the other side. After a Confederate Army under General Leonidas Polk violated Kentucky’s neutrality by invading the state in early September of 1861 and the Union responded with their own invasion led by General Ulysses Grant, the Kentucky General Assembly chose to pledge allegiance to the United States. In spite of that, the population of Kentucky was very divided on loyalties. The Jackson Purchase however was solidly loyal to the Confederacy with the majority of the inhabitants siding with the Confederacy, so much so that the region was called “the South Carolina of Kentucky” [1] and in May of 1861, prominent locals in the region and delegates from Tennessee met at the Mayfield Convention [2] to discuss secession from Kentucky and joining with Tennessee. The sheer percentage of the population in the Purchase that sided with the Confederacy meant that it was exceedingly difficult for the Union to manage an occupation and many residents of the Purchase turned to guerrilla warfare, partisanship, or just simply aiding the Confederate army in whatever ways possible [3] such as food, clothing, animals like horses or draft animals, or providing intelligence and acting as guides during raids. After the Confederate armies were pushed out of Kentucky following the Battle of Perryville, the violence escalated as many felt that the Union was oppressing them and more than ever they had to resist.

The first commander who tried to rein in the region was Ulysses Grant who was put in charge of a military department that included western Kentucky and parts of Tennessee and Mississippi that were occupied by Federal troops. One of the major issues in the region was smuggling as people took advantage of the war to try and make a profit for themselves. There was a cotton smuggling ring centered in the Purchase and Grant was determined to stamp it out because merchants were paying Confederates for illegal Confederate produced cotton with gold which then filled Confederate coffers. He attempted to separate the illegal cotton trade from the legitimate cotton trade by trying to issue an army trading permit along with the one issued by the Treasury department. Suspected smugglers would be denied that permit and not allowed to trade cotton. The Treasury Department struck down the army permits and refused to let them be issued because they considered them an undue burden. Grant then resorted to a more drastic measure. Army investigators had connected several Jewish merchants to the smuggling of illegal cotton so Grant issued General Order No. 11 [4], which ordered the expulsion of all Jewish traders and the revocation of their trading permits. The order, however, was very vague and his officers read it as expelling all Jewish people and that’s what they began to do with Jewish residents being given 24 hours to pack up and leave but a raid on Holly Springs by Earl Van Dorn delayed implementation in most places except Paducah. The local Jewish population led by a man from Paducah named Cesar Kaskel sent a telegram [5] to Lincoln calling the order unconstitutional and insisting that the Jews were loyal citizens that were being treated unfairly. After increasing backlash from the Jewish community in Kentucky and in the North and a visit to Washington DC by Kaskel and several other prominent Jews, Lincoln ordered General Order No. 11 revoked [6].

By 1863-4 there was increasing violence in Kentucky and the Purchase which led to the Union resorting to harsh measures in order to maintain control. General Stephen Gano Burbridge was made military governor of the state in June 1864 and he used harsh tactics to quash partisan activity like one he called “Atonement” in which for every unarmed Union civilian murdered by partisans, they would bring four random partisans out of the jails and publicly execute them at the location that the crime took place regardless of whether they were actually involved in any way in that crime. [7] Specific to the Purchase, Eleazer Arthur Paine, also called General Pain [8] by the locals, was put in charge of the military district of West Kentucky. Both men were given a mandate by the Government to do whatever was needed to maintain order and curb the chaos and violence in the state. Both took that mandate seriously and executions of suspected spies or guerrillas, imprisonments on charges of treason or no charges at all happened frequently. There was also an attempt to quash any criticism of their methods and any anti-Union speech was suppressed. Burbridge even resorted to the attempted quashing of the Democratic Party in Kentucky and what amounted to voter fraud to try and swing the state for Lincoln in the 1864 Presidential Elections which was ultimately unsuccessful as McClellan still carried the state. Both men would eventually find themselves reassigned elsewhere after word of their actions spread. The results of the use of these harsh measures were mainly good if not politically damaging for the people who used them, the tactics did work and partisan violence did decrease as the Confederate locals decided it wasn’t worth the risk to themselves or others.

There were also the partisan groups themselves being funded and armed by both sides. Starting in 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the Partisan Ranger Act. Under the Act, all partisan, guerrilla, and raider groups would become part of the Confederate Army and would be funded, armed, and to some extent trained by the Army [9]. Groups that were affected by this that operated in Kentucky at one point or throughout the war were Quantrill’s Raiders, Mosby’s Rangers, and McNeil’s Rangers. The Union responded by fighting fire with fire, and began funding and arming their own groups to harass the Confederates and their supporters, the most famous of the Kentucky Guerrilla hunters was Edwin Terrell who led a group of irregulars that had the job of hunting down guerrillas across the state. Edwin’s group was responsible for mortally wounding William Quantrill and crushing the Quantrill's Raiders after an ambush in Spencer County on May 10, 1865 [10]. There were also reports of Union soldiers “moonlighting”[11] as guerrillas. Soldiers would dress up as Confederate partisans or soldiers and go around looting or pillaging from local farms. Commanders sometimes let behavior like that slide because they saw it as beneficial, because it would cast blame on the Confederate and at least theoretically weaken their level of support. The problem with the partisan groups was that they were wild, unruly and undisciplined and there were many reports of partisan groups laying waste to a town or city or indiscriminate killings. This eventually led to Regular Army generals such as Robert E. Lee to push the Congress to do something and the Confederate Congress voted to revoke the Partisan Ranger Act in 1864. The good in this case was that the Union army used their allied partisans as a hammer to strike at the Confederate groups and to put them down or limit their effectiveness and prevent them from attacking civilians, the rail lines, or garrisons which helped to rein in the chaos that was happening as Confederate allies partisan groups in the Purchase had previously operated with near impunity.

A good more in depth look into what the war was like was the effect it had on the Hinson Family and how they responded to it. Jack Hinson was a farmer and his family lived in the Between the Rivers region (Now Land Between the Lakes) in the border area between Kentucky and Tennessee. Hinson was a well respected member of the community. When the war broke out, he had initially considered himself neutral but opposed to secession. He was friendly towards and welcomed the Union and got on well with the soldiers and met the local commanders a few times including General Grant. Things began to change in the area after the battles of Forts Henry and Donelson and the Union taking full control of the region, and things started to get bad for his family. The Union army became increasingly heavy handed trying to crack down the growing issue of partisan fighting and “bushwhackers”. One of Hinson’s sons enlisted in the Confederate army and went to Virginia to fight the Union which cast suspicion on the family in the eyes of their Unionist neighbors and the occupying forces. Everything changed for the family in the fall of 1862 when two of his sons, George and John went on a squirrel hunt one morning. While they were sitting in the woods with their guns looking for squirrels, they were spotted by a Union patrol and arrested as bushwhackers because they were caught “hiding” in the woods with guns. The officer in charge of the patrol decided to make an example out of them and get revenge for Union soldiers killed by partisans and ordered that the men be executed as guerrillas and they were executed by firing squad and their heads were severed and their bodies paraded in public display in Dover as a warning to would-be guerrillas [12]. As a result of the executions, the Hinson family was then accused of sedition. A few weeks later, after a neighbor that they had previously been on bad terms with for years before the war reported them to the Union commander saying they were helping the Confederates, the Union responded to the accusation by burning down their farm. These acts against his family turned Hinson against the Union and he responded with violence. He murdered the neighbor who had accused his family of aiding the enemy, the case was investigated by the Provost Marshal but no verdict is recorded [13]. Then he ordered a .50 caliber long rifle from a gunsmith to be made for him and joined the growing number of partisans in the region. Hinson would live in a cave in the forest and hang out on the ridges above the rivers and snipe officers and soldiers that were on the gunboats and military transports that were going down the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. Despite repeated attempts to hunt him down, he evaded capture for the entire war. In November of 1864 he served as a guide for Nathan Bedford Forrest when he led a successful cavalry raid against Johnsonville, Tennessee. Hinson’s son Robert was also affected by the deaths of his brothers and like his father he decided to fight, leading a guerrilla band until he was killed by the Union on October 18, 1863. After the war was over, Hinson laid down his gun and reintegrated back into civilian life and was never arrested or hunted down for his wartime activities. The story of Hinson was then quashed by the family because they feared reprisals by the Union during the Reconstruction era and also because they were embarrassed by the violent acts that Jack had committed during the war solely out of a desire for revenge more than any loyalty to the Confederacy. These days, Hinson is commemorated in a roadside marker in Land Between the Lakes near Golden Pond. I felt this was a good case study person to look at because it gives a glimpse into just what the Union army did to people they suspected of being disloyal or enemies. It also shows what kind of activities that the guerrillas of the region were a part of and how they fought.

To compare what was going on in the Jackson Purchase during the war, it may be helpful to look at a different contemporaneous occupation such as the French Occupation of Mexico. The Second French Intervention in Mexico was a military occupation of Mexico by the Second French Empire under Napoleon III from 1861-1867. As the United States was distracted with their Civil War, Mexico defaulted on debts it owed from loans to Britain and France and refused to continue payments. In response, Britain, France and Spain held a conference to decide how to respond and signed the Convention of London that called for a coalition invasion of Mexico in order to get the debt repaid by extracting resources from Mexico [14]. The combined navies began blockading Mexico and troops began landing in December 1861. The United States warned them that they were in violation of the Monroe Doctrine but were unable to do much else. Unlike Britain and Spain, France had colonialism on their minds. France went into Mexico intending to set up a client state and turn Mexico into part of the French Empire. When the British and Spanish governments realized what France’s plans were for Mexico, they wanted no part of it and pulled out their troops and went home in February and March of 1862 leaving the French to fight on their own. Many native Mexicans and wealthy landowners welcomed the French [15] to liberate them from the government of Benito Juarez who was perceived as unfriendly to them and to regain a measure of the power they had lost. After a year of back and forth fighting around the Gulf Coast of Mexico and Veracruz, the French and their collaborators in Mexico took Mexico City on June 7, 1862 and set up the Superior Junta [16] to rule Mexico. The Junta then proclaimed the Second Mexican Empire as a client state of France and offered the Crown to Maximilian von Habsburg who accepted and was crowned on April 10, 1864. The war then shifted towards guerrilla activity as the Juarez Government set up an insurgency to fight the French and Mexican imperials.

The war was exceptionally brutal as the Imperial government and the French committed numerous atrocities to break the spirit of the Mexican republicans. In 1865, Maximilian signed the Black Decree which authorized the execution of any captured republican prisoners without trial. In the end over 11,000 [17] people were executed by the French and collaborators. This and incidents of burning villages and killing republicans was meant as a terror tactic to scare the civilians and republicans into standing down and accepting Imperial rule and break their resolve, but ended up having much the opposite effect as more and more people joined up with the republican cause. It also served to alienate collaborators who had previously aligned themselves with the new government.

The tide of the war began to shift against the French in the middle of 1865. With the Civil War over, the United States began sending money and weapons to the Mexican Republicans as well as ramping up diplomatic pressure on the French Government. Secretary of State William Seward began waving the Monroe Doctrine around threatening American action against the French. In 1867, Seward switched tones and began to outright threaten war with France if they did not pull out of Mexico. Napoleon III decided that relations with the United States were more important than his colonial ambitions in Mexico and ordered his generals to begin pulling out the French troops. Of this diplomatic victory, Seward said “The Monroe Doctrine, which eight years ago was merely a theory, is now an irreversible fact.” [18] Without French military support, the Imperials quickly lost ground to Benito’s Republicans and Mexico City fell to the Republicans on May 15, 1867 and Emperor Maximilian was captured and eventually executed by firing squad on June 19, 1867.

There are differences and similarities between this occupation and the occupation of the Jackson Purchase. The most glaring being that the Union occupation was ultimately successful in maintaining control over the region. The Union was able to effectively control insurgency by declaring martial law and people were more likely to be jailed than executed which did not inflame people as much. The Union also had a mandate to bring the area back into the United States while the French were trying to establish a colonial government. This would have strengthened Union resolve and sapped French as they were fighting on their ‘home turf’ to reunify their country while the French were halfway across the world fighting somewhere completely alien to them. Another big difference is that the French occupation failed because of outside pressure while the only pressure the Union army had was from the Federal government and higher ups within the army. There was also no real outside pressure against the occupation because there was no other nation that wanted to risk a war with the United States by trying to pressure them into giving up while on the other hand the French had to choose between staying in Mexico and risking war with the Americans or pulling troops out and peace with the US.

Chris Edwards is a resident of Marshall County. Many members of his family were involved in the Civil War on both sides which fueled his curiosity on his chosen topic. He is finishing up his Bachelors degree in History, Minor in Political Science at Murray State and will be graduating in May.