West Liberty in the Civil War

By Alfred D. Byrd

Although I was born in Michigan, my present was shaped by a past in Morgan County, Kentucky, where my parents were born, and where their ancestors had lived from before the Civil War. This was an ordeal from which Morgan County, its county seat, West Liberty, and my ancestors emerged changed in ways unpredictable before the war. Engagements fought in Morgan County were small and may seem inglorious to those who've focused on the war's major battles -- Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga, among others -- but were as deadly to participants in them as the great battles were to those they subsumed into their inferno. Great names -- William "Bull" Nelson for the Union and John Hunt Morgan for the Confederacy -- did pass through Morgan County en route to fame and ignominy elsewhere, but most of those who fought in Kentucky's hills were locals who had their own ideas on what the war meant and on how to fight it. Infantry skirmishes and cavalry raids did occur in and around West Liberty, but most of what took place there was irregular actions of partisans, guerillas, and simple brigands -- "bushwhacking," it might best be called in a term of the time. We should not forget these actions, experiences of persons whose lives were as valuable to them ours are to us. If we forget the lives who suffered through years of warfare, we may just relive them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alfred D. Byrd
• Release date: Jul 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005107277

Alfred D. Byrd

I'm a graduate of Hazel Park High School, Hazel Park MI, and I've earned a B. S. in Medical Technology at Michigan State University and an M. S. in Microbiology at the University of Kentucky. My interests are Christian theology and history, Civil War history, science fiction, and fantasy. I've published a number of works, in prose or in epic verse, on these subjects. A number of my works are available from Amazon and other major on-line book distributors. I've also sold four short stories or novellas to science fiction or fantasy anthologies.

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WEST LIBERTY IN THE CIVIL WAR

Alfred D. Byrd

Copyright © 2021 by Alfred D. Byrd

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Each chapter in this book is a revised version of an article that originally appeared in the fanzine The Reluctant Famulus, Thomas D. Sadler, Editor. You can download issues of this fanzine in .pdf format for free at https://efanzines.com/Reluctant/.

Cover image is detail from Landscape Cannon Silhouette, a public domain free download from Needpix.com

Table of Contents

1. Raw Rebels Rudely Routed!

2. Morgan and Morgan in Morgan

3. Burnings, and Shootings, and Hangings — But Why?

4. The War is Over; the War Goes On

1. Raw Rebels Rudely Routed!

ON OCTOBER 23, 1861, three companies of Confederate soldiers, mustered just two days before into the Fifth Kentucky Infantry (CSA), assembled for drill just south of West Liberty, Kentucky, between Morgan County’s courthouse and the Licking River. Among the newly-minted Rebels were two of my great-grandfathers, Samuel Pelfrey Byrd and William Francis Havens. As they shouldered whatever firearms they possessed (in Eastern Kentucky early in the war, such firearms were seldom regulation muskets), my great-grandfathers had no idea battle would soon send them onto radically different paths.

Why were my great-grandfathers in the Confederate Army? That’s a question I, a child of Michigan, have tried to answer ever since I learned of their loyalties. I’ve found no specific answer to that question. I can give you only generalities I’ve learned of Secession and Union in a remote land where these took strange turns indeed.

My great-grandfathers didn’t become Confederates to keep slaves. Two branches of my ancestors, the Wells family on my mother’s side and the Gibbs family on my father’s side, did own slaves; but, as far as I’ve been able to learn, neither family supported the South, and some men from each family entered Union service. The Wellses and the Gibbses likely believed President Lincoln’s early promises the war was about reunion, not about emancipation. According to what my father, Dorsa Wilson Byrd, would tell me of his grandfathers, the Havenses owned no slaves, and Sam Byrd, a recent immigrant from eastern Tennessee, was a tinker and cobbler, too poor to own a slave had he wanted one.

Slaves were rare in Eastern Kentucky, where money to buy them and land to support them were also rare. Slavery, where it did exist in the hills,