Journal of Southern History

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.