Reviewed by:

• General Hylan B. Lyon: A Kentucky Confederate and the War in the West by Dan Lee
• William R. Black

It is surprising that this is the first biography of Hylan B. Lyon. Raised in Eddyville, Kentucky, Lyon managed to get into West Point and embark on a military career. He fought in the Coeur d’Alene War of 1858, where he was horrified by the U.S. Army’s illegal execution of Yakima chieftain Qualchan. Lyon then worked on the Mullan Road, the first wagon trail to traverse the Rockies. When the Civil War broke out, Lyon resigned his army commission and organized a Confederate battery company in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He was quickly promoted to lieutenant colonel of the Eighth Kentucky Infantry and eventually became a brigadier general in Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry corps. In December 1864, Lyon led eight hundred cavalrymen in a raid of western and south-central Kentucky, burning down seven courthouses in the process.

After the war, Lyon fled to Mexico with former Tennessee governor Isham G. Harris and worked as chief surveyor for a railroad connecting the Confederate colonies Carlota and Cordova. He soon tired of exile, however, and in May 1866 returned to Eddyville, where he spent another half-century. In the 1880s he served on a state penitentiary commission that toured prisons in six states and recommended that Kentucky adopt Ireland’s system of graduated levels of confinement. It was because of Lyon that the new state penitentiary was built in Eddyville, and he oversaw its construction. Lyon became active in the United Confederate Veterans and Forrest’s Cavalry Veterans, attending several reunions in the 1890s and 1900s. He also served a term as a state representative; in fact, he sat on the joint special committee that decided the 1899 gubernatorial election, declaring William Goebel the winner hours after he had been fatally shot by an assassin.

Biographer Dan Lee may wish Lyon had written more. Lyon left behind a short, unfinished manuscript memoir and a few dozen letters, and he wrote little during the last two-thirds of the war. The result is that he disappears for long stretches of Lee’s Civil War chapters, which make up 70 percent of the book and are often indistinguishable from a solid regimental history.

The strongest chapter is on Lyon’s December 1864 raid, which Lee assesses frankly. Lyon’s orders were to destroy the railroads and telegraph lines connecting Nashville, Clarksville, and Bowling Green and get the local gristmills back in working order, all to cut off William T. Sherman’s supply lines and pave the way for John Bell Hood’s army. Though Hood was defeated at Nashville, if his army had made it to Kentucky, he would have been sorely disappointed. Lyon did little that he was ordered to do and focused instead on burning courthouses, which he justified on the basis that they had been, in his words, “‘occupied as barracks and used as fortifications by the Negroes’” (p. 167).

Historians should look deeper into the motivations behind Lyon’s actions during the raid, including his public explanation that the Black Union soldiers had smallpox and burning the courthouses was necessary to prevent the disease’s spread. There is also much about Lyon’s antebellum and postbellum life that could be illuminated by deeper engagement with secondary literature and [End Page 129] asking different questions of the sources. Historians have been understandably interested in how white Kentuckians abandoned or erased their Unionist past, but Kentucky’s Confederate veterans have received less attention, in part because the heavily Confederate western part of the state is less represented in the Louisville, Frankfort, and Lexington archives (Lyon’s papers are at Murray State University and Western Kentucky University). Hylan Lyon, who served three nations during his lifetime and chose to honor only one, the Confederacy, on his tombstone, merits further study.

审核人：

• Hylan B. Lyon将军：肯塔基同盟与西方战争，丹·李（Dan Lee）
• 威廉·布莱克

令人惊讶的是，这是Hylan B. Lyon的第一本传记。里昂在肯塔基州埃迪维尔（Eddyville）抚养长大，成功进入西点军校并从事军事事业。他参加了1858年的“科达伦战争”，在那场比赛中，他因美军非法处决亚基马酋长Qualchan而感到震惊。然后，里昂在穆兰路（Mullan Road）上工作，这是穿越洛矶山脉的第一条货车小径。南北战争爆发后，里昂辞职，在肯塔基州鲍灵格林市成立了一个联合炮台公司。他很快被提升为肯塔基第八步兵团的中校，并最终成为内森·贝德福德·福雷斯特的骑兵军团的准将。1864年12月，里昂在对肯塔基州中西部和南部的一次突袭中率领八百名骑兵，在此过程中烧毁了七座法院大楼。

战后，里昂与田纳西州前州长伊萨姆·哈里斯（Isham G. Harris）逃往墨西哥，并担任铁路总检察长，该铁路连接同盟殖民地卡洛塔（Carota）和科尔多瓦（Cordova）。然而，他很快就对流放感到厌倦，并于1866年5月回到埃迪维尔，在那里度过了另一个半个世纪。在1880年代，他在州监狱委员会任职，该委员会巡视了六个州的监狱，并建议肯塔基州采用爱尔兰的分等级监禁制度。正是由于里昂，新的州立监狱才在埃迪维尔（Eddyville）建立，他监督了它的建设。里昂开始活跃于同盟退伍军人和福雷斯特的骑兵退伍军人，在1890年代和1900年代参加了几次聚会。他还曾担任州代表。实际上，

传记作者丹·李（Dan Lee）希望里昂写更多。里昂留下了一段简短的未完成的手稿回忆录和几十封信，在战争的后三分之二期间，他几乎没有写任何东西。结果是他在李的内战篇章中消失了很长一段时光，这些篇章占本书的70％，而且常常与可靠的军团历史无法区分开。

最强的一章是关于里昂1864年12月的突袭，李对此进行了坦率的评估。里昂的命令是销毁连接纳什维尔，克拉克斯维尔和鲍灵格林的铁路和电报线，并使当地的磨坊恢复运转，所有这些都切断了威廉·T·谢尔曼的补给线，为约翰·贝尔·胡德的军队铺平了道路。尽管胡德在纳什维尔被击败，但如果他的军队到达肯塔基，他会感到非常失望。里昂几乎没有下令执行他的命令，而是集中精力于烧毁法院大楼，他以此为由进行了辩护，用他的话说，是“'被黑人所占领，用作防御工事'”（第167页） 。

历史学家应该深入研究里昂在突袭行动中的动机，包括他公开解释黑联盟士兵有天花，焚烧法院是防止这种疾病传播的必要手段。里昂的战前生活和战后生活还有很多，可以通过更深入地接触中学文献和[End Page 129]来阐明。询问来源的不同问题。可以理解的是，历史学家对白人肯塔基人如何抛弃或抹去联盟主义者的过去很感兴趣，但肯塔基州的同盟退伍军人受到的关注较少，部分原因是该州南部的同盟国西部地区在路易斯维尔，法兰克福和列克星敦的档案中所占的比例较低（里昂论文在默里州立大学和西肯塔基大学）。希兰·里昂（Hylan Lyon）在其一生中曾为三个国家/地区服务，并选择在其墓碑上仅纪念一个邦联（Confederacy），值得进一步研究。