Rethinking the Social Role of the Militia: Community-Building in Antebellum Kentucky

Abstract

IN REQUIEM FOR A NUN (1951) WILLIAM FAULKNER PERFORMS SOME literary backtracking when he introduces the earliest inhabitants of his fictional Jefferson, Mississippi, and explains the origin of the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse. His story, set in the 1830s, opens with the capture of a gang of ruffians: [A] gang--three or four--of Natchez Trace bandits ... [was] captured by chance by an incidental band of civilian militia and brought in to the Jefferson jail because it was the nearest one, the militia band being part of a general muster at Jefferson two days before for a Fourth-of-July barbecue, which by the second day had been refined by hardy elimination into one drunken brawling which rendered even the hardiest survivors vulnerable enough to be ejected from the settlement by the civilian residents[.] The story continues as Jefferson's residents struggle to find a suitable place to secure the miscreants, but of greater import for this study is the brief appearance of the local militia company. Faulkner's portrayal of the volunteer soldiers conforms to popular perceptions of the early national militia. Incompetent at best, dangerous at worst, militiamen usually appear in the historical narrative as buffoons who drank too much, poked each other with cornstalk weapons, and inevitably shot their commander in the backside with a rusty, antiquated musket. Caricatures of the overaccoutred captain and his clownish part-time charges are familiar to even casual scholars of the new republic. (1) Yet even in Faulkner's amusingly inept company of Yoknapatawpha more-or-less citizen-soldiers, there are hints of something more at work. The militia had mustered in preparation for the upcoming July Fourth celebration, an occasion that throughout the nation traditionally attracted in uniform. Militiamen frequently organized the day's activities, made patriotic speeches at the afternoon barbecue, and concluded the evening among their neighbors and friends with a long series of toasts. The Jefferson company also deemed it their duty to forego further entertainment and capture the wandering felons, upholding another responsibility generally ascribed to citizen-soldiers--the maintenance of civil order. The militiamen's appearance in Faulkner's tale bears one additional similarity to the traditional understanding of the militia's place in the early nineteenth century: it is peripheral and fleeting. Beyond stereotypes, little is known of the ways the militia affected American communities in the early republic. In his study of the trans-Appalachian frontier, Malcolm J. Rohrbough hints at the social influence of the militia, noting that musters were the largest gathering of people communities witnessed, where men would gather in small groups to play at politics, swap horses, engage in rough and tumble, debate the leading questions of the day (the price of land and crops), or simply exchange news. The actual breadth and diversity of militia activity suggest that a reassessment of its role in the early nineteenth century is in order. (2) The following pages attempt to demonstrate the social significance of citizen-soldiers to the evolution of Kentucky society from 1790 to 1850. Kentucky provides a number of conducive ingredients for this type of study. Most important is the timing of the state' s settlement and growth. Explored and settled in the 1770s and 1780s, the former Virginia county became a state in 1792 and entered the nineteenth century as one of the union's newest members. In the span of one generation, outposts like Fort Boonesborough and Bryant's Station gave way to burgeoning cities: Louisville pulled river trade off the Ohio, and Lexington became known as the Athens of the West, a center of social, political, and economic activity. This pattern of progress permits the examination of Kentucky's development from a scattering of frontier settlements to a mature network of thriving communities just sixty years later. …