Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

History

Committee Chair

Jason Phillips

Committee Member

Brian Luskey

Committee Member

Austin McCoy

Committee Member

Max Flomen

Committee Member

Aaron Astor

Abstract

This dissertation explores how Unionist Kentuckians leveraged their military recruitment to negotiate the scope of federal emancipation during the American Civil War. By 1863, the War Department’s need for troops superseded the racial sensitivities of inhabitants in loyal slave states like Kentucky by promising to free and enlist Black men if white recruits failed to fill the quota. Kentucky’s proslavery Unionists responded and white volunteerism surged by 23 percent, 10 percent more than the national average, to fill the quota and negate military emancipation. Kentucky leaders heralded the recruiting effort but struggled to sustain it alongside an uncredited militia which exhausted their population’s capacity to fill quotas by early 1864. White mobilization plummeted along with the influence proslavery Unionists leveraged from it as Black mobilization began shortly thereafter.

Thousands of enslaved Kentuckians capitalized on the opportunity to self-emancipate by swelling federal quotas. Black Kentuckians recognized the value of their service and leveraged their 56 percent service record to demand broader emancipation policies such as the Thirteenth Amendment. White Kentuckians who had contributed 53 percent of their men into credited federal forces, or 63 percent including their uncredited militia by war’s end, felt the Union betrayed their slaveholding interests once it had a viable alternative to fill quotas. This dissertation joins other scholarly works which emphasize quantitative analysis and contributes to the historiography by interpreting enlistment data as an element of the emancipation narrative. Analyzing recruitment adds a measurable gauge to assess loyalty and lends a dataset scholars can interpret to explore the nuances of wartime manumission in a loyal slave state.

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