By Berry Craig
NKyTribune columnist
No son of Kentucky is more famous or more revered than Abraham Lincoln, and rightly so.
His 1809 birthplace near Hodgenville, the LaRue County seat, is a national shrine. Lincoln’s statue stands tall in the Capitol rotunda in Frankfort.
Yet no president was more unpopular in Kentucky than the Great Emancipator, who got less than one percent of the Bluegrass State’s vote when he won the White House in 1860. He managed only 30.2 percent when he was reelected in 1864.
No president lost an election in Kentucky by a wider margin than Lincoln did in 1860 (Photo Provided)
Lincoln, whose birthday is Feb. 12, went down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents. But no president lost an election in Kentucky by a wider margin than Lincoln did in 1860. Lincoln was an anti-slavery Republican; Kentucky was a slave state. Almost every white Kentuckian supported the South’s peculiar institution.
Tennessean John Bell, candidate of the conservative Constitutional Union Party, collected Kentucky’s dozen electoral votes with 66,051 ballots to 53,143 for pro-slavery Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge of Lexington, according to Presidential Politics in Kentucky 1824-1948 by Jasper B. Shannon and Ruth McQuown. Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois received 25,638 votes; Lincoln’s total was 1,364, the authors added.
The pro-Breckinridge Lexington Statesman editorialized that “No intelligent man of the South will fail to deprecate the election of Lincoln and therein the success of the Republican party as the most serious and lamentable calamity which could have befallen our Republic,” according to Lincoln and the Bluegrass: Slavery and Civil War in Kentucky by William H. Townsend.
He also cited a letter from a young Lexingtonian who dubbed the president-elect “…an infernal old Jackass. I should relish his groans and agonies if I could see him put to torture in hell or anywhere else. He has chosen to become the representative of the Republican Party and as such I should like to hang him.”
Predictably, the Statesman gave Lincoln’s March 4, 1861, inaugural address a less than rave review, Townsend wrote. The paper claimed Kentuckians disdained the president’s remarks as “radical, sectional and abhorrent …. Lincoln’s silly speeches, his ill-timed jocularity, and his pusillanimous evasion of responsibility and vulgar pettifoggery have no parallel in history, save the crazy capers of [Roman Emperor] Caligula, or in the effeminate buffoonery of Henry of Valois [King Henry III of France].”
Soon afterwards, the Louisville Courier, which also endorsed Breckinridge, published a letter – omitting the signature – purportedly from “a prominent member of Congress,” Townsend wrote. He quoted from the letter: “Lincoln is a cross between a sand-hill crane and an Andalusian Jackass. He is, by all odds, the weakest man who has ever been elected…I was sent for by him. I speak what I know.
“He is vain, weak, puerile, hypocritical, without manners, without social grace, and as he talks to you, punches his fists under your ribs. He swears equal to Uncle Toby [a character in Tristram Shandy], and in every particular, morally and mentally, I have lost all respect for him … He is surrounded by a set of toad-eaters and bottle-throwers.”
The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, at Charleston, South Carolina. The Statesman, which, like the Courier, favored secession, charged that Lincoln, “the miserable imbecile” who “now disgraces the Presidential chair,” started the war, Townsend wrote.
After a brief period of neutrality in the spring and summer of 1861, Kentucky forthrightly declared for the Union. Perhaps three times more Kentuckians donned Yankee blue than put on Rebel gray.
But in Kentucky, loyalty to the Union usually did not mean loyalty to Lincoln. Almost all unionists were pro-slavery. Confederate Kentuckians argued that only secession would save slavery.
In 1864, when Lincoln ran for a second term against Democrat George B. McClellan, it was obvious he would lose Kentucky again.
“I am opposed to your election, and regard a change of policy as essential to the salvation of Kentucky,” Lowell H. Harrison quoted conservative Union Democratic Gov. Thomas Bramlette in The Civil War in Kentucky. Most Kentuckians agreed with their chief executive.
The Louisville Journal, the state’s premier Union paper, denounced the commander-in-chief.
“Undoubtedly President Lincoln, on account of his position, is the chief tyrant of the country…,” Robert Emmett McDowell quoted the newspaper in City of Conflict: Louisville in the Civil War 1861-1865.
A Union general, McClellan was endorsed by every important paper in Kentucky except the Frankfort Commonwealth, which backed Lincoln.
Lincoln won reelection in a landslide. McClellan carried the Bluegrass State in a blowout.
Kentucky gave Lincoln “the lowest vote [he]…received in any of the 25 states which participated in the balloting in 1864,” according to Presidential Politics in Kentucky. The authors added, “Notwithstanding their opposition to secession, the voters of the state indicated violent antagonism to the Republican leader, for he received less than one third of the total vote cast.”
The president improved his score from 1860, when “he carried not a single county,” Shannon and McQuown wrote. In 1864, running on the Union ticket, not as a Republican, he carried 25 of 101 counties that posted returns. Nonetheless, McClellan outpolled Lincoln 64,301 to 27,787, according to Presidential Politics.
Lincoln became popular in Kentucky only after he was assassinated. “…A great transformation seems almost mysteriously to have swept over the people when the word came that Lincoln was dead,” wrote E. Merton Coulter in The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky.
“From their customary attitude of condemnation and vilification, they now turned to honoring and praising. They speedily forgot their past four years’ opposition to the President, who now lay dead, and they have never sought to recall it.”
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
