A Lost Cause and a Forgotten Cause: An Examination of the Disparity in Memorialization of Kentucky Soldiers from the Civil War and First World War

Civil War monuments are a common sight in the state of Kentucky, with over sixty-one noteworthy monuments as far west as Fulton and as far east as Vanceburg. Most of these monuments tended to favor the perspective of the Confederate States, of which Kentucky was not one, though many Kentuckians did fight for them. These monuments often commemorate Confederate war dead, or the dead of both sides. Comparatively, very few monuments exist in the state of Kentucky to what was, at the time it ended, the world’s deadliest and most terrible war: World War I. Though some monuments exist to the 84,000 Kentucky soldiers of this war, 2,000 of whom gave their lives during it, the 100,000 Kentucky Civil War soldiers tend to be far more commemorated and memorialized. Some monuments to Kentucky war dead, like that of the Confederate Monument in Mayfield, memorialize both wars, but clearly prioritize the Civil War aspect. The reasons for this are varied. Kentucky was a battleground of the Civil War, and though nearly as many Kentuckians enlisted to fight in World War I, far more died in service to either the Union or the Confederacy than died for America during the First World War. Far more prescient, however, is the political, ideological, and cultural significance of Civil War monuments to the “Lost Cause” movement, a historical reframing of the Civil War from the Confederate perspective intended to rationalize the South’s actions as noble and right. This disparity, then, says much about the cultural history of Kentucky and the South more broadly. This paper intends to explore the question of why this was the more influential reason that so few World War I monuments exist in Kentucky when compared to those of the Civil War.