Kentuckians in Gray by Bruce S. Allardice & Lawrence Lee Hewitt

Author:Bruce S. Allardice & Lawrence Lee Hewitt [S. Allardice Bruce & Lee Hewitt Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813194066
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Brig. Gen. Joseph Horace Lewis

THE RUSSELLVILLE ORDINANCE of Secession aside, Kentucky’s failure to officially secede from the Union, combined with Confederate inability to successfully occupy the Bluegrass State, should not be taken as a dependable measure of national loyalty. Borders, unlike Robert Frost’s famously poetic fences, sometimes make combative neighbors, and the commonwealth remained contested territory during the War of the Rebellion. Kentucky’s Southern sentiments are evidenced by more than just its symbolic presence as the central star in the rebel battle flag but might also be assessed by considering the quality of Kentuckians in gray and complemented by evaluating contemporary local judgments of their services. A brief examination of the antebellum, bellum, and postbellum careers of Joseph Horace Lewis perhaps allows some cautious appraisal of those benchmarks.

Lewis was born on October 29, 1824, near Rocky Hill, midway between Glasgow and Bowling Green, in the southern part of Barren County, itself in the south of the state and relatively close to the Tennessee border. His parents, John and Elizabeth Reed Lewis, were respectable farm folk and well-to-do enough to educate their son locally and to send him to Centre College in Danville.

Graduating in 1843, the nineteen-year-old read law for two years before opening an office in Glasgow, a country town known then as now for its Scottish antecedents. Studiously attentive to minute detail and possessing an analytical mind, Lewis showed promise as an attorney who could logically get to the heart of a legal matter in all its connective subtleties and then ardently hammer his case to a successful conclusion. Ambitious and hopeful, the young lawyer married Sarah Roberts in 1845 and entered politics that same year.

Serving three consecutive terms in the state legislature, Lewis began as a typical Kentucky Whig, though when later stung by Know-Nothing politics and attracted to states’ rights philosophies, he became a Democrat. Self-identified in the 1850 Census as a “farmer,” Lewis presented himself perhaps too solidly as a Southern nationalist and lost both his 1857 and 1861 bids for the U.S. Congress to more localist and unionist opponents.

Widowed in 1858, he possibly had fewer pressing personal concerns about putting his secessionist talk into action. With the outbreak of hostilities following an evolving rebellion in several other Southern states, Lewis used his local prestige to raise a regiment for Confederate service. Eschewing the romantically elite cavalry to raise a pedestrian infantry regiment may reflect more Lewis’s rather phlegmatic nature than his comfortable financial means. He could be sanguine too and was credited with firing the first angry shots in Kentucky when his still-amorphous unit blazed away at Union sympathizers threatening the home of Confederate sympathizers on October 10, 1861.

Neighbors and clients, friends and family (including his fourteen-year-old son and grandfather’s namesake, Jack) formed the Rocky Hill Guards and Barren County Musketmen before merging with other small detachments to become the Sixth Kentucky Infantry, Col. Joseph H. Lewis commanding. Formally organized at Bowling Green on November 19, they made a somewhat awkward showing by being initially

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