More below:
<<< Soviet missles placed in Cuba is not the same as firing them at Miami.
One raindrop is not the same as a downpour.
Establishing Camp Dick Robinson is not the same as occupying Hickman and Columbus with a small army.>>>>>
And the bank robber car driver is the same as the guy with the gun in the teller's face. You cannot escape the fact that having 6-7 regiments, two of which were Tennesseans, at Camp Dick Robinson which was about the size of Polk's army that he took to Hickman and Columbus and over twice the size what Grant took to Paducah, was a clear cut violation of Kentucky's neutrality, so much so that the state governor complained to the president about it. The period newspapers of the area are loaded with the reports of this time frame and what was going on all over about Kentucky. I have seen every issue of Tennessee newspapers at our state archives as well as some of the Illinois papers. The political ramifications over Dick Robinson were very apparent to the Confederates who had stuck to their pledge to stay out of KY far better than the Federals ever did. That is also inescapable.
The degree of violation does not matter here at all - it is a violation, as I once said, if even ONE armed Federal sets foot into KY. So 6-7 regiments of them is not supposed to be a problem?????
>>>>Surely, Polk was aware of Union and Confederate violations of Kentucky neutrality, but he took Hickman and Columbus when he did because Fremont was about to. Polk was in Memphis in early July, Robinson was started in early August, Polk took Columbus in early September. If he had reasons other than imminent Federal seizure, he would have acted earlier. And tit for tat doesn't make any strategic or practical sense. It's like acting on idealistic principle rather than cold hard reality. The small possible gain is not worth the huge potential downside.>>>>
Then please explain the Soviet tit for tat when they put missiles into Cuba after the US put some in Turkey? After Archduke Ferdinand was shot by the Serbian assassin in 1914 one side started to mobilize for war, Then, in a clear cut tit for tat move, so did the other side. Polk was very aware, as I have shown, of Union violations of KY. Hence his detailed letter to the KY senate.
>>>I have two Polk bios, one Pillow bio, the Davis book I cited, access to the OR, the first three volumes of Simon's "Papers of USG" and access to all the others, and far too many other Civil War-related books to list. I haven't been to the places you mentioned. People have been researching and writing about the Civil War for 150 years, but new information, articles and books continue to appear, so I suppose there might be undiscovered gems in the collections you cited. >>>>
I have all of those as well as the OR (missing USG papers Vol. 2) but I have been doing serious CW research for nearly 20 years at places all over the country. The one great wish I have is that there would be one place where all of this stuff would be so it would be easier on all of us. So there's lots of places I would still like to go and, I have found, that there's loads of stuff that historians have yet to use and loads of new stuff keeps getting turned up. I used to see Mark Ragan at the NA a lot some years ago. He wrote the book on CW submarines (yes - plural - there was more than the few that folks know of) and he told me that book was based largely on five boxes of previously undocumented NA materials on CW submarines that the NA did not know they had!!!!
So stuff does turn up all the time.
I am flipping through my Volume 1 of Jeff Davis' "Rise And Fall," and note that he states, on Page 341, "General Polk showed in his answer that the United States government paid no respect to the neutral position which Kentucky wished to maintain..." and he was right. It started when Prentiss ran Cairo in the Spring, the taking of the steamboat in Paducah, then when Lincoln told Magoffin that he had , "no present purposes," to come into KY and then, emboldened by the two elections and the disbandment of the KY State Guard that was to enforce the state's neutrality by force of arms if need be (and this was probably the best equipped and drilled state militia in the USA at the time) with many of its men leaving the state to Tennessee to form the 2nd, 3rd and 4th KY of the famous Orphan Brigade (note the big difference in that they left the state whereas the KY regiments at Dick Robinson did not) came Dick Robinson. All of these cases are crystal clear violations of the neutrality. And I fully believe that the Union forces never intended to stay out of KY at all and just violated it when the political winds were blowing their way, hence the response to Polk from the KY Senate on Page 338 which condemns Polk's move but stays quiet about Dick Robinson. Why? Because they wanted it that way and wanted Dick Robinson there doing what it was doing despite that fact that this, too, violated KY's neutrality as he was accusing Polk of doing. Of course they were totally silent about the two TN regiments being there and just tired to make it out like it was just some Unionist Kentuckians. What a charlatan this guy was; what charlatans these Unionists were! They were not even men enough to admit their complicity in this.
Polk blew stated CS policy but after a time Davis backed him. So, ultimately, the buck stops with Jeff Davis as he had full power to order Polk out and chose not to. Of course by this time Grant was in Paducah - tit for tat.
As Von Clausewitz wrote, war is an extension of politics by another means (paraphrasing), and politics is the world's second oldest profession and just as slimy as the oldest. Their complaints about the Confederates entering their state ring amazingly hollow to me.
Greg Biggs