Kentucky in the War
Cincinnati Enquirer, 13 April 1884; page 9
Contributed More Men to the Union Army than Many a Northern State
The paper read by Captain William Cassius Goodoe at the meeting, Thursday night, of the Ex-army and Navy Society, was very interesting and may well be supplemented by a discourse delivered by L R Hawthorn at Odd-Fellows Hall, Newport Ky. at a meeting of William Nelson Post No 1 GAR, held on Saturday evening, April 5. The gentleman went on to say that Kentucky furnished during the late war 86,783 men for the service, not counting 11,336 colored troops enlisted within her borders.
She lost in killed and deaths from disease and wounds 8204 officers and men. Kentucky furnished more soldiers than either of the States of Maine, Connecticut, Iowa or New Jersey; nearly as many as New Hampshire, Vermont and Rhode Island together; more than Maryland and Tennessee; nearly as many as California, Kansas, Minnesota and West Virginia together and within a few hundred of the great states of Wisconsin and Michigan. She furnished more men than were enlisted in the regular army during the war, as many as General Sherman had when he began the Atlantic campaign, as many as Mende commanded at Gettysburg, and quite as many as the combined armies of Grant and Buel at Shiloh. Kentucky furnished more regiments and batteries than any state, with the exception of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. She lost more in battle that all the regular regiments and batteries in the service.
The gentleman continued at great length to give acts and statistics that showed that Kentucky had responded nobly to the cry that went up in the North on that eventful day of 1861. When it is remembered that Kentucky sent a large number of her young men to the Confederate armies, making up several regiments accredited to that State and companies attached to other regiments, it will be seen that Kentucky had a large interest in the war of the rebellion.