If Thomas Massie had lived in Lewis County during the Civil War and hoisted a Confederate battle flag, locals likely would have run him out of town, maybe on a rail and in a suit of tar and feathers, to boot.
Few, if any, Kentucky counties were more pro-Union and anti-Confederate than Lewis County, where the libertarian-leaning, far-right-wing Republican grew up. He lives in Garrison.
Most of Kentucky tilted toward the Union to one degree or another during America’s most lethal war. But Lewis is the only county in the commonwealth where a Union monument funded by public donations sprouts on a courthouse lawn.
Garrison is about 10 miles from Vanceburg, the county seat, where the stone Union soldier, musket-at-the-ready, has stood guard on a tall pedestal since 1884.
Old military records credit Lewis County with 917 Union enlistments, including four African Americans. Confederate records are sketchy, but few local men donned rebel gray.
The base of the monument makes no bones about where the county stood in 1861-1865. “The war for the Union was right, everlastingly right, and the war against the Union was wrong, forever wrong.”
The battle of the bigots
Massie, who represents the deeply Republican Red-hued Fourth District, had been chastising his primary opponent, uber-conservative Covington lawyer Todd McMurtry, for posting racist tweets last year.
McMurtry shot back that Massie put up the rebel banner — and a modern Stars and Stripes — almost 14 years ago when his house was being built, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.
The GOP primary looks like a battle of the bigots. In February, Massie was one of only four House members who voted against the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, a measure that would establish lynching as a federal hate crime. In addition, Massie (and Kentucky’s four other GOP congressmen) got an “F” on the latest NAACP legislative report card. (Democrat John Yarmuth of Louisville got an “A.”)
McMurtry, who claims he’s the true Trumpian in the primary, allegedly tweeted in October, “I am in Austin this weekend. Glad to be in this group. #redneck #racist #f—wit Just had the best BBQ of my life.”
It will be interesting to see which of these candidates the Republicans living around the only Union statue on a courthouse lawn will choose.
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