Description

Although I was born in Michigan, my present was shaped by a past in Morgan County, Kentucky, where my parents were born, and where their ancestors had lived from before the Civil War. This was an ordeal from which Morgan County, its county seat, West Liberty, and my ancestors emerged changed in ways unpredictable before the war. Engagements fought in Morgan County were small and may seem inglorious to those who've focused on the war's major battles -- Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga, among others -- but were as deadly to participants in them as the great battles were to those they subsumed into their inferno. Great names -- William "Bull" Nelson for the Union and John Hunt Morgan for the Confederacy -- did pass through Morgan County en route to fame and ignominy elsewhere, but most of those who fought in Kentucky's hills were locals who had their own ideas on what the war meant and on how to fight it. Infantry skirmishes and cavalry raids did occur in and around West Liberty, but most of what took place there was irregular actions of partisans, guerillas, and simple brigands -- "bushwhacking," it might best be called in a term of the time. We should not forget these actions, experiences of persons whose lives were as valuable to them ours are to us. If we forget the lives who suffered through years of warfare, we may just relive them.