Tag Archives: Civil War

Harper’s Weekly depicted the scene after departing Confederates destroyed bridges across the Barren River at Bowling Green, February 1862. (Kentucky Library & Museum)

As a large force of Union troops prepared to drive the Confederates from Bowling Green in February 1862, one of the town’s residents confided her anguish to her diary.  Virginia native Mary Elizabeth Van Meter (1828-1893), the daughter-in-law of Jacob and Martha Van Meter, was a Southern loyalist who decided that she and her family had to seek safety by evacuating along with the soldiers.  A typescript of Mary’s diary at WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections vividly documents her flight from Bowling Green, her travels through Kentucky and Tennessee, and her eventual return home.

Gathering a few belongings, Mary and her family left Bowling Green amid the boom of cannon, “our troops . . . having waited long enough to burn both bridges, some mills, the railroad depot, and other houses containing military stores.”  Near Columbia, they find refuge with a friend who had once invited them to stay “if ever we were driven from our home by the vile Yankees.”  She rails at “would-be King Lincoln” when she hears that a relative has died in a Federal prison.  Throughout her odyssey, Mary anxiously follows news of every battle, her spirits rising and falling with the fortunes of the South.  A year after departing, she finally returns to Bowling Green, but not before enduring a boat trip with some soldiers wearing the “hateful blue coats.”  Although her home has survived, Mary finds the rest of the town, and her world, changed forever.  “I now sit by my window all day,” she wrote, “and scarcely recognize a familiar face.”

Click here to download a finding aid for Mary’s diary, which is part of the Hobson Family Papers at the Department of Library Special Collections.  For more on the Van Meter and Hobson families, and Bowling Green during the Civil War, search TopScholar and KenCat.

William J. Green’s Union letterhead

In January 1862, Private William J. Green, encamped with an Illinois regiment near Paducah, Kentucky, wrote letters to his brothers, 16-year-old Samuel and 10-year-old John.  He and the “boys in my Mess” had enjoyed the “Turkeys Pies and Bread” and the “Butter and Cake” his family had sent and were pleasantly settled, notwithstanding the rain and mud, in plank-floored tents with stoves.

Although none of the local civilians “claimed to be Secesh,” William knew there were many secessionists in the area.  As a farmer’s son, he even had some favorable comments about their crops and orchards.  William told Samuel of his 11-day march through McCracken, Graves and Calloway Counties, and of the Confederate sympathizers he encountered near the town of Murray.  The people there were stubbornly convinced, he wrote, that “we will never Conquer the South” and, lacking newspapers to tell them otherwise, “say that the Rebels have thrashed us every battle.”

Although William and his brother Samuel, who also served, made it through the war, they would both die within two months of each other in 1867.

Private William J. Green’s letters are part of the collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to download a finding aid.  For more Civil War collections, search TopScholar and KenCat.

Union support on an envelope (Kentucky Library & Museum)

Letters between two brothers, part of the Furman A. Smith Collection at WKU’s Special Collections Library, demonstrate the intensity of feeling that fractured families during the Civil War.  Writing from central Illinois in 1863 to his brother Furman in Trigg County, Kentucky, William Riley Smith reported that “blood still gets hotter here for the cause of the Union.”  William himself was a believer: “I say crush the rebellion to bug dust.”  He focused most of his anger, however, on the slaves emancipated by President Lincoln’s executive order of September 22, 1862, which had taken effect on January 1, 1863.   Using a racial epithet associated more with the South, William declared bitterly that “all our troubles have grown out of the n—-r.”  He recalled his father’s prophesy that slaves “would prove a curse to our nation” because God would not allow their suffering to continue forever.  As a result, William had lost one of his best friends to rebels who, in his opinion, preferred shedding blood over the fate of slaves to preserving “our glorious government.”

Three years after the war, William was still smoldering. Writing to Furman about another brother from whom he had not heard in six months, he complained, “I suppose he thinks that if the South could not dissolve this great Union that he will dissolve friendship between himself and those that love the Union.”

For more Civil War resources, click here or search TopScholar and KenCat.

Frank Phelps letter, 1862

The Civil War came to Bowling Green in mid-September, 1861, with the arrival of General Simon Bolivar Buckner and about 1,300 Confederate soldiers.  They were soon joined by more than 20,000 troops who set up camp in and around the town.  From their fortified positions on surrounding hilltops, the Confederates looked forward to giving, in one soldier’s words, a “genteel whipping” to any Union forces foolish enough to confront them.  As winter set in, however, rainy conditions, poor food and shelter, inadequate clothing and rampant disease wore down the troops.

In mid-February 1862, facing the advance of a large Union force into the area, the Confederates decided to abandon Bowling Green.  Frank M. Phelps of the 10th Wisconsin Infantry was one of the soldiers who helped reclaim the area for the Federals.  Writing a long letter to his uncle back home, he reported crossing the Green River and camping at Munfordville before heading for Bowling Green.  During the brisk march, a “long cheer” erupted from the troops when word came that advance units were shelling the little town.  Phelps and his comrades encountered ponds that the Confederates had fouled with the carcasses of dead horses in order to deny fresh water to the enemy.  Once in Bowling Green, Phelps remarked on the extent of the fortifications, the destruction of the railroad depot, and the general disarray caused by the Confederates’ unceremonious departure.  The secessionists had “called their troops & run as fast as they could,” he wrote, “after setting fire to about 100 tins of salt pork.  [T]he streets are full of sugar salt beef & pork flour & every thing else.”  In a postscript, Phelps reported the capture of a “sesesh Captain” who had lingered behind and wore a disguise in hopes of evading detection.

This fascinating letter is now a part of WKU’s Special Collections Library manuscripts collections.  A finding aid and typescript can be downloaded here.

For more on our extensive Civil War resources, click here.