Appalachian Figures
On a cold December evening in 1863, a young woman in Wayne County opened a package from Frankfort. Inside was a new photograph album and, tucked among the cartes de visite, a promise from her brother-in-law, Ephraim L. Van Winkle. When he could get to Louisville, he wrote, he would have his own portrait taken and place it “in front” for her. He apologized for the delay, blamed the local photographer, and then casually mentioned that he had just survived three Christmas dinner parties in a row, including one at the governor’s mansion where he had been pressed into service as assistant host.
The writer of that letter was no ordinary relative. He was a Wayne County native who had risen from a log-school education and Monticello Academy to graduate at the top of his law class in Louisville, a mountain-border lawyer who became Kentucky’s Secretary of State in the middle of the Civil War. From his office in Frankfort, Ephraim L. Van Winkle spent his last years signing proclamations, fielding petitions, and wrestling with what he called the “great question” of slavery in a border state pulled in every direction at once.
This is his story, traced from the headwaters of the Cumberland to the corridors of the Old State Capitol.
Dutch roots, Wayne County ground
The Van Winkle name did not begin in Kentucky. Nineteenth-century county histories and family sketches remembered the clan as Dutch, tracing their line back to a Van Winkle who came from Holland to New Netherland with Governor Peter Stuyvesant in the seventeenth century. Later generations moved south and west, eventually putting down roots in the upper Cumberland country.
By the early nineteenth century, Abraham Van Winkle was in Kentucky and his son Micajah had settled in Wayne County. Micajah combined farming with public service. Local reminiscences and a Kansas biography of Ephraim’s older brother, Ransom A. Van Winkle, remembered Micajah as a “first-class Kentucky farmer” who spent decades as a justice of the peace and at one point served as sheriff of the county.
Micajah married Mary Phillips, the daughter of Cornelius Phillips, another Wayne County officeholder who farmed, owned enslaved people, and held posts as magistrate and sheriff. Together Micajah and Mary raised a large family on their Wayne County farm. Among their children were Ransom, who would help found the Free State town of Arrington in Kansas, and two sons whose legal careers would carry the family name to Frankfort: Ephraim L. and John S. Van Winkle.
Ephraim was born in Wayne County on July 20, 1827. The long obituary reprinted from the Frankfort Yeoman in Augusta Phillips Johnson’s A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky paints the classic portrait of a bright boy in a small Appalachian county. He was brought up in the mercantile business but “early manifested a thirst for knowledge,” attended Monticello Academy, and left the hills for Louisville to study law.
Monticello Academy and the Louisville law school
In Louisville, Van Winkle enrolled in the law department of the University of Louisville. Both the Yeoman obituary and modern reference works agree that he graduated in 1850, and Johnson adds that he took top honors in his class.
He returned home to open a practice in Wayne County. By 1850 he appears in local records as an attorney and quickly developed a reputation that later writers called “distinguished” for logic, eloquence, and boldness in debate.
Wayne County sent him to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1855. One term in Frankfort as a state representative for a small Appalachian county was enough to convince the legal and political establishment that the young mountain lawyer was going places. The following year voters chose him as commonwealth’s attorney for the Sixth Judicial District, a demanding job that caused him to relocate to Somerset in neighboring Pulaski County.
By 1860, when the nation staggered toward secession, Van Winkle stood at the intersection of local and national politics. He served as a presidential elector at large on the Constitutional Union (Bell–Everett) ticket in Kentucky, aligning himself with a party that tried to hold the Union together through compromise and constitutional guarantees.
The same year, census and draft-registration records show him in Pulaski County, an established attorney who employed a white day laborer named James Cowan and owned one enslaved person. That combination of wage labor and slavery under one roof captures the contradictions of an Appalachian border county caught between older slaveholding patterns and emerging free labor.
Wayne County meetings and an early Union man
If his ballot in 1860 backed compromise, the secession crisis of 1861 pushed Van Winkle into open Unionism. Johnson’s Century of Wayne County preserves the diary of a local man who traveled with a group of neighbors to Parmleysville on June 17, 1861, for a political speaking.
Under a United States flag that “floated on the breeze,” the diarist listened as “Hon. S. Williams, Secessionist, and Hon. E. L. Van Winkle, Unionist” took the stump. He confessed that he could not shake the feeling that those who disagreed with him on “the great question” were either fools or traitors, a raw glimpse of the way national politics had split even small mountain communities into rival camps.
In Wayne County, some prominent men, like Congressman James S. Chrisman, leaned toward secession. Others favored the Union while still owning enslaved people. The diary entry places Van Winkle squarely in the latter camp: a Wayne County slaveholder who identified with the Union cause early in the war and was willing to defend it in front of his neighbors.
An emancipationist learns to write it down
By the end of 1863, Van Winkle’s views had moved beyond a simple commitment to the Union. In Johnson’s transcription of his long Christmas-season letter from Frankfort to “Juan,” a young relative in Monticello, we hear a man thinking his way toward emancipation and trying to persuade kin back home to see slavery through his eyes.
He jokes about sending photographs of Union major generals and worries that his correspondent will not like them, “not because they are military men,” but because of their association with “Abrahamic sins,” a sly pun on Abraham Lincoln and on the accusation that Republicans were committing a sin against slavery. From there he launches into a long meditation on the institution itself.
In the letter he describes how defenders of slavery respond to criticism with cries of “rascal,” “hypocrite,” and “abolition dog,” and asks whether slavery’s moral status is so weak that it cannot survive honest debate. He imagines a future in which, if the pro-slavery line prevails, the American navy becomes a slave-trading fleet and the beaches of West Africa are ringed with “bloody altars.” Then he turns the argument inward. If he ever became an accomplice in extending human bondage, he wrote, he hoped that God would strike him as a “cumberer of the earth.”
Later writers seized on that letter and similar statements to describe Van Winkle as a “staunch emancipationist” who believed slavery was “a blot on the nation.” The phrasing comes from Johnson’s Wayne County history and has been echoed by whiskey historians and genealogists who have retraced the family’s path from the upper Cumberland to Danville and Louisville.
The letter to Juan is also a snapshot of his new life. He tells her about the busy social season in Frankfort, the three Christmas dinners, and his duties as assistant host at the governor’s house. He promises to “take notes” on the unmarried ladies of the capital for her and jokes about helping launch her into society once the war ends. Beneath the wit is a simple fact. By Christmas 1863, this Wayne County lawyer had become a central figure in the wartime state government.
Secretary of State in a war capital
On September 1, 1863, Governor Thomas E. Bramlette formally tendered Ephraim L. Van Winkle the office of Secretary of State. Civil War Governors of Kentucky indexes the appointment letter in its collection, and modern lists of Kentucky secretaries of state place Van Winkle in office from 1863 until his death in 1866.
The news traveled far beyond Frankfort. In late September 1863, the Marysville Appeal in California carried a brief notice of Kentucky state appointments, mentioning Van Winkle among Bramlette’s new officials, evidence that even a political reshuffle in a mid-South border state could ripple through the Union’s national newspaper network.
As Secretary of State, Van Winkle’s name began appearing at the bottom of official proclamations printed in papers like the Louisville Daily Journal and the Frankfort Commonwealth. Under acts of the legislature authorizing rewards or railroad charters, the familiar formula ran: “By the Governor, E. L. Van Winkle, Secretary of State.” His signature certified appointments of notaries and commissioners of deeds, authenticated copies of legislation, and attested to executive communications sent to Washington.
One particularly revealing document is an executive communication from Bramlette to Congress, printed in the U.S. Congressional Serial Set under the heading “The Legislature of Kentucky.” In it, Bramlette presses the federal government to compensate loyal Kentuckians whose property had been taken or destroyed, describing citizens “reduced to absolute want” by the war. It closes with a familiar line: “By the Governor: E. L. Van Winkle, Secretary of State.” The signature places Van Winkle at the bureaucratic hinge between Washington and a battered Kentucky countryside.
What the mail to his office looked like
The Civil War Governors of Kentucky project has identified seventy-six surviving documents that reference Van Winkle. Taken together, they open a window onto his daily work in wartime Frankfort.
County officers, lawyers, and private citizens wrote to him for appointments and commissions. In December 1864, Trimble County magistrate William M. Webb wrote “Hon. Secretary of State of Kentucky” to ask for a notary commission. On the same sheet, the local circuit clerk certified that Webb was sober, capable, and “a good loyal citizen.” Their joint letter is exactly the sort of courthouse networking that linked the Old State Capitol to distant county seats.
Early in 1865, B. Marks of Louisville sent a recommendation for his friend, Captain W. R. Hunter, late of the 10th Kentucky Infantry, who wanted to be notary public for Nelson County. Marks vouched for Hunter’s character and loyalty and reminded Van Winkle that the applicant could also cite Attorney General John M. Harlan as a reference. Marks tucked in the fee and asked that the commission be mailed back “care of Marks & Co., Bankers.”
Another Louisville letter came from C. T. Taylor, who had already sat for his examination and now needed the formal commission that would allow him to qualify before the Jefferson County Court. He asked Van Winkle to “procure it for me,” enclosed two dollars for the fee, and signed off as “Your obedient servant,” confident that the Secretary of State could make or break his new career in a single stroke of the pen. A note at the bottom of the document records that Taylor was appointed notary on March 29, 1865.
Bush & Shivell, a Louisville law firm, wrote from the city in March 1865 to recommend a young attorney named T. G. Parsons for a notaryship. They praised his moral character and competence and enclosed one dollar for the commission, addressing their letter to “E. L. VanWinkle, Sec. of State, Frankfort, Kentucky.” The tone is deferential but businesslike, the kind of correspondence that kept the machinery of contracts and court filings turning even as armies marched.
Not all of the mail came from courthouses and law offices. One December 1863 letter arrived from the headquarters of the 49th Kentucky Mounted Infantry at Somerset. Lieutenant Colonel John G. Eve thanked Van Winkle for his “kind and prompt attention” to a military matter, reported that all was “tranquil on the Cumberland,” and asked what the legislature was doing and who might become the next United States senator. He closed by asking the Secretary of State to write again soon. A mountain regiment, the statehouse, and the U.S. Senate are all woven together in that short note.
Petitions and recommendations also show Van Winkle himself signing alongside other Frankfort elites. In February 1865, he appears as one name among many on a petition recommending John D. Pollard as police judge of Frankfort, listed shoulder-to-shoulder with figures like John M. Harlan. The Secretary of State was not only an administrator. He was part of the city’s political web.
War work, grief, and a short life
Other sources hint at the emotional weight that work carried. Historian D. M. Sommerville’s study of Civil War governors’ correspondence in Kentucky cites a letter from Van Winkle to Bramlette in May 1865 as evidence of the strain that petitions, pardons, and wartime decisions put on state officials. Even as the shooting stopped, paper and pain kept flowing across the Secretary of State’s desk.
Johnson’s Wayne County history preserves one of the most intimate glimpses of Van Winkle during those final war months. In April 1865, Captain John W. Tuttle, a Wayne Countian serving with the 30th Kentucky, recorded in his diary that he spent Sunday the 16th examining regimental papers “except an hour or two spent with Mr. E. L. Van Winkle” in Frankfort. The two men walked up to the cemetery together while the news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination spread and public buildings in the capital were draped in mourning. Tuttle wrote that the deepest feeling was “everywhere manifested.”
A little more than a year later, Van Winkle was dead. On May 23, 1866, at just thirty-eight years old, he died in office at Frankfort. The Louisville Daily Courier noted the passing of “Hon. E. L. Van Winkle.” The Frankfort Yeoman ran a lengthy tribute that was later copied into A Century of Wayne County. That obituary sketched his life from Wayne County birth and Monticello schooling through Louisville law, legislative service, and his appointment as Secretary of State, praising his “distinguished ability” and social worth.
Wayne County took official notice. On May 28, 1866, the county court at Monticello held a special session. Judge G. K. Marcum presided, and a committee of local attorneys that included John W. Tuttle, James L. Hardin, and M. C. Saufley was appointed to draft resolutions on the death of their native son. A roll of county officers and lawyers signed the memorial entry beside the statement that E. L. Van Winkle was gone.
His younger brother, John S. Van Winkle, already an attorney and legislator in his own right, was appointed to fill out the remainder of the term as Secretary of State. Like Ephraim, John had studied law at the University of Louisville after reading law under his brother in Monticello. Together they form a rare pairing in Kentucky history, brothers from a Wayne County farm who held the same statewide office back-to-back.
From the Old State Capitol to bourbon legend
If the Van Winkle name is familiar today, it is usually because of Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle and the cult that has grown up around his wheated bourbons. Yet even the whiskey lore, when it looks backward, has to pass through the upper Cumberland and the legal careers of Ephraim and John.
A late twentieth-century bourbon history blog, “Who the Heck Was Pappy Van Winkle,” leans heavily on Augusta Phillips Johnson and Civil War Governors to tell that story. It notes that the future whiskey magnate’s father was John S. Van Winkle of Danville and that his uncle Ephraim had risen from Wayne County lawyer to Secretary of State during the Civil War, while holding emancipationist views about slavery’s place in the nation.
In that retelling, the family’s westward arc runs from Dutch New York to Wayne County, from Wayne to Danville, and from Danville to Louisville, where the Van Winkle name becomes attached to bourbon brands instead of bar dockets. The whiskey is what sells bottles. The brothers’ story is what ties that brand back to an Appalachian courthouse square and to a small county that produced two secretaries of state.
A complicated Appalachian life
Ephraim L. Van Winkle’s life sits at the crossroads of several themes in Appalachian and Kentucky history.
He was the son of a Dutch-descended family that had drifted south and west until it reached the Kentucky mountains, where offices like magistrate and sheriff were still stepping stones for ambitious farm families. He used local academies and a regional law school to vault from Wayne County to a statewide legal and political career.
He practiced in Wayne and Pulaski, counties along the headwaters of the Cumberland where slavery existed but did not dominate as it did in the Bluegrass. Census and draft records show him as both an employer of free labor and an owner of an enslaved person, a man who lived inside the contradictions of a slave border state.
He stood under a United States flag in Parmleysville and argued the Union side in 1861, then spent the rest of the war in Frankfort, signing papers and carrying out the directives of Governor Bramlette’s Union administration. In his private correspondence he moved past simple Unionism toward a clear moral critique of slavery, even as he navigated the practical politics of a state that delayed full emancipation and harbored deep racial tensions.
He died young, at thirty-eight, leaving behind a widow, children, and a grieving home county whose bar paused its work long enough to draft resolutions in his honor. His brother carried on the family’s political ascent, and later generations turned the Van Winkle surname into a mark of bourbon prestige. Yet the core of the story remains Appalachian: a boy from Wayne County’s hills who climbed from a log-school education to the very center of Kentucky’s government in one of the darkest periods of its history.
For those of us who study the mountains, Ephraim L. Van Winkle is a reminder that the Civil War in Appalachia was not only fought on ridges and in river gaps. It was also carried in letters, petitions, and proclamations, in arguments over slavery and loyalty, and in the daily work of men from small counties who suddenly found themselves keeping the books for a state at war.
Sources & further reading
Civil War Governors of Kentucky, “Ephraim L. Van Winkle (Pulaski Co, KY, attorney & Sec. State)” and associated correspondence pages, Kentucky Historical Society. These include letters to and from Van Winkle as Secretary of State, along with a biographical sketch based on state records, census data, draft lists, and vital statistics. From The Page+1
Augusta Phillips Johnson, A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky, 1800–1900 (1939), especially Chapter 5 (“A Century of Wayne County”) and Chapter 7 (“War Between the States”), which reproduce the Frankfort Yeoman obituary, the Parmleysville diary, and the 1863 Christmas letter from Van Winkle in Frankfort. Genealogy Trails+1
United States Congressional Serial Set, “The Legislature of Kentucky,” executive communication of January 25, 1864, transmitting Governor Thomas E. Bramlette’s letter on compensating loyal Kentuckians, signed “By the Governor: E. L. Van Winkle, Secretary of State.” Civil War Governors of Kentucky+2GovInfo+2
Louisville and Frankfort newspapers, including the Louisville Daily Journal, Louisville Daily Courier, and Frankfort Commonwealth, which printed gubernatorial proclamations, state officer rosters, and death notices that list “E. L. Van Winkle, Secretary of State” in the early and mid-1860s. Civil War Governors of Kentucky+3Internet Archive+3Internet Archive+3
Federal census and draft-registration records, summarized in Civil War Governors bibliographies, which identify Van Winkle as an attorney in Pulaski County, employer of day laborer James Cowan, and owner of one enslaved person, and which document the births of his children with Ellen Eliza Phillips. From the Page+2From The Page+2
“Ephraim L. Van Winkle,” Wikipedia, and “Secretary of State of Kentucky,” Wikipedia, which provide concise biographical summaries and consolidated lists of Kentucky Secretaries of State used here in conjunction with primary sources. Wikipedia+1
“A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky” and related genealogical transcriptions at GenealogyTrails and Seeking My Roots, which give broader context on the Van Winkle and Phillips families, Wayne County politics, and local memories of the Civil War era. Genealogy Trails+2Seeking My Roots+2
Jack Sullivan, “Who the Heck Was Pappy Van Winkle?” on the Those Pre-Pro Whiskey Men blog, which reconstructs the Van Winkle family’s legal and political background and links Ephraim and John S. Van Winkle to later bourbon history. Pre-Pro Whiskey Men+1
Biographical sketches of Ransom A. Van Winkle in late nineteenth-century Kansas county histories, which shed light on the family’s Dutch origins, Micajah Van Winkle’s service as justice of the peace and sheriff in Wayne County, and the broader Van Winkle migration from Kentucky to Kansas. PA-Roots+1
D. M. Sommerville, “Civil War and Emotional Trauma in Kentucky Governors’ Correspondence,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (2019), which uses Van Winkle’s correspondence with Governor Bramlette as part of a wider study of the psychological burdens of wartime governance. JSTOR+1