Robert J. Breckinridge

(1800-1871)

During the Civil War, Kentucky Presbyterian minister Robert J. Breckinridge was an important advisor to President Abraham Lincoln.

Born near Lexington in 1800, Breckinridge was the son of a U. S. senator who was also in President Thomas Jefferson’s cabinet. Well educated, Robert hoped to follow his father’s footsteps into politics. Elected to the Kentucky legislature, he nearly died of an illness, had a religious conversion, and instead entered the ministry. He preached, taught, wrote prolifically, was a college president, and expanded public education while serving as Kentucky’s superintendent of public instruction.         

A slave owner who believed in gradual emancipation, Breckinridge was a staunch Unionist during the Civil War. His own family, however, was divided, with two sons in the Union army and two others in Confederate service. In addition, his nephew, John C. Breckinridge, was a Confederate general and the Confederate secretary of war.

Editor of the Danville Quarterly Review, Breckinridge’s writing and speeches promoted Kentucky Unionism. He was influential with Lincoln and Kentucky’s Union military commanders, and he wanted secessionists to be harshly handled. He did, however, intervene to have his captured Confederate son sent to a penitentiary instead of a prisoner-of-war camp and used his connections to save his son-in-law, captured and accused of being a guerrilla, from the gallows. Breckinridge worked for Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, and his wartime opinions alienated him from several family members for years after the Civil War.

Robert J. Breckinridge

Kentucky Historical Society Collections