During the US Civil War, Kentucky was a ‘border state’— divided in its loyalties between the Union and the Confederacy. (The Bluegrass State gave both sides a President; Abraham Lincoln was born in Hodgenville, and Jefferson Davis was born in Fairview.) One might argue that no two persons embodied Kentucky’s divided loyalties more visibly than did John C. Breckenridge and John Hunt Morgan, and both are memorialized in central Lexington...for now.
Today’s editorial in the Lexington Herald-Leader makes a strong case that, while Breckenridge’s career is a painful, but accurate, reminder of Kentucky’s “border state” divsions during the Civil War, it is long past time to retire Morgan’s statue from its current location. As the editorial board said:
Morgan’s transformation into a romantic hero arose when a national movement to sanitize the Confederacy and slavery dovetailed with an effort to rebrand the Bluegrass from a fairly lawless western outpost into a bastion of southern gentility.The “Lost Cause” bemoaned the defeat of the South and the loss of a mythologized culture of genteel manners, happy slaves and honor-bound soldiers. Lexington’s motive was a little more prosaic.
People in the Bluegrass seized on reinventing it as the fictionalized Old South, with its alleged charms and codes, to attract wealthy northerners to invest in horses and land here. Both ignored the horrible reality of human enslavement by glorifying those who fought to preserve it.
There was a time when civic leaders thought wrongly that we needed a fictionalized, heroic Morgan to define Lexington’s culture and character. That time is long past. It is important to acknowledge and study the real, terrible history of slavery and the Civil War, as well as the currents that led to the Lost Cause movement.
Morgan’s family home is nearby and open to the public; he will not be forgotten.
The more modest statue of Breckinridge, in civilian attire, could be used to interpret this state’s mixed loyalties during the Civil War. But Morgan arrayed on a huge pedestal will drown out more nuanced and complete accounts of our history and attempts to articulate a more inclusive future.