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KENTUCKY
FIGHTING MEN
1861-1945
RICHARD G. STONE, Jr.
Copyright 1982 by The University Press of Kentucky
Paperback edition 2009
The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre
College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,
The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,
Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,
Morehead State University, Murray State University,
Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,
University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,
and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.
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www.kentuckypress.com
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8131-9314-4 (pbk: acid-free paper)
This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
| Member of the Association of
American University Presses |
For Richard G. Stone
and Marye Grove Stone
Contents
Prologue
There stoodJohn Bull in martial pomp,
But here stood old Kentucky!
THE BRITISH would attack at dawn. So ran the familiar folk yarn that improved with age, like Kentucky bourbon. In defense of New Orleans stood only a pitiful rabble of an American army, huddled behind a long, low rampart of mud and cotton bales stretching away from the Mississippi into a mucky cypress swamp. But the invaders took too lightly Old Hickory Jacksonand the hunters of Kentucky. Andrew Jackson felt no dread; he knew what a deadly bead his hardy, freeborn Kentuckians could draw with their graceful long rifles. Why, every Kentuckian there at Chalmette on that eighth of January in 1815 was half-horse and half-alligator! Each man carried a gun, a pack of cards, and a bottle of whiskey. None would waste his precious powdernot until the hated redcoats drew so close that you could see them wink: And twould have done you good, I think, / To see Kentuckians drop em / O Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky.
Like so much popular mythology, Samuel Woodworths hoary ditty The Hunters of Kentucky surrounds a kernel of truth. About eight hundred sons of the Bluegrass did indeed fight behind the storied parapet at Rodriguez Canal on that long-ago chilly January morning. But the Kentucky contingent was only a small part of Jacksons motley army. The real noteworthiness of Woodworths doggerel is its reminder to us of the early American military tradition of the citizen-volunteer soldier, a tradition closely associated with Kentucky. The Bluegrass State evoked an image of log blockhouses, war whoops, long rifles, buckskins, and Bowie knives for decades before it conjured up an equally distorted vision of mint juleps, burgoo, damsels in hoopskirts, thoroughbred horses, and stately antebellum brick mansions.
For almost half a century before the Battle of New Orleans thousands of pioneers had found irresistible the urge to settle west of the Alleghenies. Bust my coonskins, William, says J. I. Corbys fictional version of the scout Simon Kenton. Yore a sight fur sore eyes! Whatever brung you out thisaway? Kentons old friend from Virginia responds, Fauquier Countys gittin too small fur us, too. It took the pioneer founders of Kentucky some twenty years of fighting, from 1774 to 1794, to wrest away the Dark and Bloody Ground from its original redskinned possessors.
To this day we identify the Kentucky fighting man with the preindustrial era: Daniel Boone, the lonely long hunter; Kenton, the intrepid forest scout; George Rogers Clark, the dynamic border captain; Benjamin Logan, the county sheriff and militia colonel; and Isaac Shelby, Richard M. Johnson, and John Adair, militia heroes of the War of 1812 who became prominent political leaders. During the nineteenth century the gentleman duelist and feuding mountaineer clansman sustained the frontier tradition. The Kentucky fighting man of the long rifle era was distinguished by his individualism. He cleared a patch, plowed ground, chopped logs, and hunted game to shelter and feed himself and his family. On occasion he joined with his neighbors, under the loosest of militia organizations, to make fast-moving thrusts against Indians and British. The famous 1813 campaign which culminated in the Battle of the Thames lasted only ninety-four days. On these forays the citizen-soldier of Kentucky was usually led by a captain he and his comrades had commissioned by ballot. Even such leaders as Clark in the 1780s or Shelby in 1813 commanded more by personal example and entreaty than by high rank. Although the frontier Kentuckians Indian opponents were brave, tough, and skillful, their numbers were few, and their weapons and social organizations were comparatively primitive. So the informal war-making methods of pioneer Kentucky sufficed for the planting of white civilization in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys.
