Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition

The bureaucratic name of this digital project belies the rich diversity of its contents. Within the voluminous gubernatorial correspondence appear, as the Web site claims, “generals and politicians, prostitutes and plantation mistresses, free African American professionals and ‘contraband refugees,’” whose correspondence, court cases, and petitions came across the desks of five Kentucky governors in office during the conflict. More interesting still, only three of the five men designated “governor” by the project (Beriah Magoffin, James Fisher Robinson, and Thomas E. Bramlette) served as official heads of state between 1861 and 1865, while the other two (George W. Johnson and Richard Hawes) served as provisional governors of Kentucky's breakaway Confederate government, which existed in exile during most of the war. When completed, the Civil War Governors of Kentucky (CWGK) project will have digitized a projected forty thousand documents, which are housed at the Kentucky Historical Society and the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives. Currently, the site features over twenty-two thousand scanned and thirteen thousand transcribed documents. Around ten thousand of these are accessible through “early access.” One major strength of the project is that it employs a nationwide team of history graduate assistants to annotate the contents

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