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Old Time Kentucky: Hickman Courier’s support of secession reflected South’s influence in the Purchase


By Berry Craig
NKyTribune columnist

One of Kentucky’s oldest newspapers has rebel roots.

“The South,” the Hickman Courier editorialized in January, 1861, “is bound, in order to have her rights, in order to maintain her honor, and the honor of her citizens, to secede.”

The Courier was one of the first, if not the first, Kentucky papers to advocate secession.

Few Bluegrass State newspapers were more rabidly Confederate than the Courier. Brothers Edward K. and George Warren and Tim Willis founded the paper in the Fulton County seat in 1859.

The Fulton County Courhouse today. Hickman was the center of Confederate support during the Civil War (Photo Provided)

The weekly Courier might be the oldest Kentucky paper still publishing under its original name. The daily Louisville Courier-Journal dates to 1868.

The Courier’s owners only claim that they possess the most senior paper in western Kentucky. Fulton County is as far west as Kentucky goes.

Anyway, most readers of the Civil War Courier shared the paper’s Southern sympathy. Fulton County occupies the southwest corner of the Jackson Purchase, dubbed “the South Carolina of Kentucky” for its strong Confederate views.

The Courier’s proprietors believed the rest of Kentucky would become rebel, too. Also in January, 1861, the Courier warned pro-Union Kentuckians, who were the majority in every region but the Purchase, that “all who attempt to impede or retard the triumphant march of the people—determined to assert and maintain their own honor, will be crushed and trampled to death beneath their feet.”

Fulton County Courthouse in 1909

The Courier was chagrined when the unionist Kentucky legislature, having spurned disunion, adopted neutrality in May, 1861. He claimed the Purchase “feels humiliated at the present proceedings” and threatened, “if the State does not afford some redress, and that too quickly, Southern Kentucky will per force link her destiny with that of chivalrous Tennessee.

Confederate troops invaded western Kentucky from the Volunteer State in September, 1861, occupying Hickman and Columbus. Union troops from Cairo, Ill., led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, seized Paducah and Smithland.

The Courier expected Kentuckians to rise against the Yankees. “Thousands are now ready with their muskets to atone for, and redeem the State,” claimed the little four-page paper.

The Courier was wrong. The legislature ordered only the rebels to leave and openly sided with the North against the South.

Except for the Purchase and a few other counties, most of them also in western Kentucky, many more Kentuckians suited up in Yankee blue than donned rebel gray in 1861-65.

The editors Warren practiced what they preached. In late 1861, they stopped publishing their paper and volunteered for the 7th Kentucky Infantry.

The regiment received its baptism of fire in the bloody battle of Shiloh, Tenn., in 1862. The 7th Kentucky fought in several other battles in the war’s Western Theater.

George Warren returned to the Courier in 1865 after the war ended in Confederate defeat. His sibling edited a paper in Mayfield for a while.

George made the Courier “an independent Democratic sheet” with “a very large circulation,” according to the 1885 Purchase edition of Kentucky: A History of the State by J.H. Battle, W.H. Perrin and G.C. Kniffen.

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Berry Craig of Mayfield is a professor emeritus of history from West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the author of six books on Kentucky history, including True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo, Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase, and, with Dieter Ullrich, Unconditional Unionist: The Hazardous Life of Lucian Anderson, Kentucky Congressman. Reach him at bcraig8960@gmail.com


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