Lexington society must have made note of the 1843 marriage of two Kentuckians, attorney John C. Breckinridge and Mary Burch of nearby Georgetown. John soon went off to fight in the Mexican War of the late 1840s, playing that card into a political career.
At 36 he became the youngest man ever elected to the U.S. Vice-Presidency running with James Buchanan in 1856. Their campaign poster promised state sovereignty---code for a proslavery policy. By then Mary with six children under the age of 12 (one had died as an infant) was busy enough to leave little mark on Washington society.
After four divisive years of a Buchanan/Breckinridge administration Breckinridge ran for President in the election of 1860.
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“Dividing the National Map” shows 1860’s four Presidential candidates (L-R: Lincoln, Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell.) Breckinridge is tearing off the Southern states, which he did, but Lincoln won the four-way election. South Carolina reacted by leading the Secession movement soon after.
Although Kentucky remained in the Union Breckinridge fought with the Confederacy, becoming Jefferson Davis’s last Secretary of War before surrender in April, 1865.
He was next reunited with the family in Ontario, Canada in the fall. They spent the winter in Toronto greeting other Confederate exiles such as the Jefferson Davis family, James Mason, Jubal Early--- enough, according to Mrs. Breckinridge, "to form quite a pleasant society among ourselves.”
They found a house in the town of Niagara with a view of the United States but soon took the children to France where they remained for two years. John spent his exile traveling in Europe and the Middle East.
Pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in his 1868 general amnesty the Breckenridges were free to return to Kentucky. Johnson was impeached for that Christmas Day pardon but the controversy was not enough to actually motivate Congress to remove him from office.
The family rented a Lexington house on Second Street and John found profitable work in railroad building and the law. He never sought political office again, which would have required him to ask for approval with a 2/3 majority from Congress, a humiliating and perhaps futile move.
Mary took up the post-war cause of elite Southern women, creating the durable myth of the Lost Cause with stone and bronze public statuary.
She was president of Lexington’s Ladies’ Memorial & Monument Association formed in May, 1869 to fund a sculpture of a cross draped with a Confederate flag on a broken staff unveiled in 1875.
About 3,000 Confederate Memorial Associations attracted female volunteers. Above, an outdoor meeting in Macon, Georgia in the late 1870s.
Two years after the cemetery memorial installation a bronze sculpture funded by The John C. Breckinridge Monument Association was placed before the Fayette County Courthouse. John himself had died seven days before the statue’s dedication.
Breckinridge’s Memorial has been moved from its official public site. In 2018, the Mayor and the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council relocated it to the Lexington Cemetery near the family burials.
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