Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia.

Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia. By Brian D. McKnight. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2006. Pp. xii, 312. $40.00, ISBN 0-8131-2389-5.)

"Goodness, Cumberland Gap!" wrote Confederate Edward O. Guerrant in 1863, "I'd as soon go to the Great Sahara or Wise County Va." (quoted on pp. 134-35). For many soldiers and civilians in the Appalachian region, these images of desolation and loneliness characterized their experience of the Civil War in what Brian D. McKnight describes as the Central Appalachian Divide. McKnight explores the literal and figurative implications of this phrase in his book Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia. In this first major study of the Civil War on the Virginia-Kentucky border, McKnight examines the complex relationship of geography, military aspirations, and local loyalties.

As the Civil War began, the region emerged as an important feature in the strategy of both the Union and Confederate armies. Livestock, timber, coal, iron, and salt were among the many useful and available products in the region needed to sustain wartime economies. Access to serviceable roads and rail lines affected not only the prewar marketing and distribution of these resources but the nature of political loyalties as well. Interestingly, slavery declined throughout the region and, in McKnight's view, was not a decisive factor in determining loyalty to the Union or Confederate causes. Control of the Cumberland Gap and other mountain passes offered important access to supplies and transportation while offering opportunities to harass the enemy.

In the war's early days, battles at such places as Camp Wildcat and Ivy Mountain in eastern Kentucky featured brave but untested troops. Soldiers from Indiana and Alabama traveled in a landscape hitherto beyond their experience. Describing Cumberland Gap, an Alabama soldier observed the area was "'the roughist country I ever saw ... nothing but rocks and mountains'" (p. 74). The terrain itself combined with poor roads, bad weather, and scarce supplies to frustrate the grand military plans and reputations of leaders North and South.

Local loyalties were inherently complex. Devotion to a cause might depend on which side was in control or lead to the temporary flight of dissenters. After the war, many citizens complained of lawlessness and violence with only spotty relief from civil authorities. Even religious ideas had to be reworked. Primitive Baptists, convinced that the Confederate cause lay within God's plan, came to believe after the war that defense of the Federal government had "'received the sanction of the only true God of Heaven and Earth by bringing the so called Southern Confederate Government to nothingness'" (p. 231).

If the region did not see the great armies that fought at Chattanooga and Perryville, the horrors and deprivation of war were no less significant to the mountain people who experienced the destruction wrought by raiding Union and Confederate columns, bushwhackers, and even their own neighbors and kinfolk. McKnight makes good use of eyewitness accounts, newspapers, and previous scholarship in advancing his analysis of the complex social and military aspects of the war on the Virginia-Kentucky border. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will appeal to both general and scholarly readers. This book is essential for all Appalachian regional and Civil War collections.

SHANNON H. WILSON

Berea College