Thomas E. Bramlette

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas E. Bramlette won the 1863 Kentucky gubernatorial election with a margin of nearly four to one. Union forces helped produce that result by jailing and intimidating supporters of his opponent, Charles A. Wickliffe. Bramlette entered office as a trusted servant of the Lincoln administration. Within a year, that same governor issued a proclamation threatening to "bloodily baptize the state into the Confederacy." How did a committed Union man arrive at that declaration? The answer lies at the intersection of wartime federal policy and Kentucky's particular ideas about sovereignty and race.

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• 2. A Kentucky Lawyer's Rise

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  Thomas Elliott Bramlette was born on the 3rd of January, 1817, at Elliott's Cross Roads in what was then Cumberland County, Kentucky. His parents were Colonel Ambrose S. Bramlette and Sarah Elliott Bramlette. His father served two terms in the Kentucky Senate and a number of terms in the state House of Representatives. Bramlette studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1837 at the age of twenty. That September, he married Sallie Travis; together they had two children, Thomas and Corinne.

  His political career began in 1841, when Clinton County sent him to the General Assembly. Governor John J. Crittenden appointed him Commonwealth's Attorney in 1848. He resigned that post two years later and relocated to Columbia, Kentucky, in 1852. A run for the United States House of Representatives in 1853 ended in defeat: Democrat James Chrisman turned back the Whig nominee.

  In 1856, Bramlette won election as a judge in Kentucky's 6th Judicial District and served that bench for five years. On the 7th of August, 1861, he resigned his judgeship and accepted a colonel's commission in the Union Army.

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• 3. Raising the Third Kentucky

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  In defiance of Kentucky's declared neutrality, Bramlette raised and commanded the 3rd Kentucky Infantry. On the 19th of September, the regiment marched on Lexington with two aims. The first was to break up a peace conference scheduled there for the 21st. The second was to arrest the state's junior senator, John C. Breckinridge, whose Confederate sympathies were an open matter. A delay allowed Breckinridge to escape before the arrest could be made. He enlisted in the Confederate Army shortly afterward.

  Bramlette resigned his military commission on the 13th of July, 1862, at Decherd, Tennessee. He returned to Louisville to take up President Abraham Lincoln's appointment as United States District Attorney for Kentucky. In that role, he pursued Confederates and Confederate sympathizers throughout the state with noted vigor.

  When the Union Democrats needed a gubernatorial candidate in 1863, the party's central committee first chose Joshua Fry Bell. Bell withdrew when he grew skeptical of Kentucky's future within the Union. The committee then turned to Bramlette, who declined a commission as a brigadier general in the Union Army to make the race. During his term, he declined an offered seat in the United States House of Representatives. He also turned down a nomination to become the Democratic candidate for Vice-President in 1864. In December 1863, he addressed the General Assembly to declare that Kentucky had already met its quota of soldiers for the Union Army.

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• 4. Forty Thousand Men

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  A census authorized by President Lincoln in 1863 found 1,650 freemen and 40,000 enslaved males of military age in Kentucky. On the 4th of January, 1864, Bramlette was still firm in his Union loyalty. He proclaimed rebel sympathizers responsible for all guerrilla raids and specified stiff fines and imprisonment for anyone who aided them. General Stephen Burbridge then proposed enlisting Kentucky's Black population into United States Colored Troops. Bramlette objected, insisting that Black enlistment should only begin if the state failed to meet its white quota.

  By March 1864, white enlistment had fallen short of Army requirements. Bramlette reluctantly agreed to Black recruitment under strict conditions: owners must give their consent and each would receive three hundred dollars in compensation. By April, enslaved men were fleeing to enlist despite that requirement, drawn by the prospect of emancipation. Their determination set off a wave of violence against those who sought to join up. By June 1864, the consent requirement had been swept away by an order from Union Army Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas.

  The crisis deepened on the 5th of July, 1864, when President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus for Kentucky citizens. Burbridge went further, interfering with that November's presidential election and banishing Lieutenant Governor Richard T. Jacob from the state. When the General Assembly reconvened in January 1865, Bramlette voiced his opposition from the floor. Yet even at that moment, he urged passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, declaring that slavery was "irrevocably doomed." When news of Lincoln's assassination reached him, Bramlette proclaimed a day of fasting and prayer.

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• 5. Pardons and Refusals

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  Andrew Johnson, the new president, received a petition from the Kentucky General Assembly calling for an end to martial law. Bramlette reinforced the message with a declaration of his own. He announced that every "white male citizen" aged twenty-one who had resided in the Commonwealth for at least two years could vote. Kentucky's response was decisive: Democrats swept to control of both houses of the General Assembly and five of the state's nine congressional seats. President Johnson ended martial law and restored habeas corpus in the state.

  When the General Assembly convened in December 1865, Bramlette issued pardons to most ex-Confederates in Kentucky. He and the legislative majority opposed ratification of both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. Bramlette also protested the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau in the Commonwealth. Even as those political battles continued, he supported the construction of turnpikes financed by government bonds.

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• 6. Beyond the War

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  Bramlette took particular pride in the state's debt reduction during his term. He encouraged immigration to build the labor force Kentucky's rebuilding would require. He also supported the development of the state's natural resources.

  After leaving office, Bramlette ran for a United States Senate seat and lost. He returned to private law practice in Louisville and became a patron of charitable organizations. Sallie Travis, his first wife, had died, and in 1874 he married Mary E. Graham Adams.

  Bramlette died in Louisville on the 12th of January, 1875, following a brief illness. He was fifty-eight years old. He was buried at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, and the institution he had helped found as the Agricultural and Mechanical College grew into what is now the University of Kentucky.

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