Sunday · September 27, 2026
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18611776 Club

Polk breaks Kentucky's neutrality; Confederate troops occupy Columbus

Residents wave rebel flags at the landing, but the bishop-general has just handed the state to the Union.

Kentucky had tried to sit the war out, declaring neutrality between Washington and Richmond. On September 3, 1861, Confederate General Leonidas Polk ended that fiction, sending troops under Gideon Johnson Pillow to occupy Hickman and then Columbus, to beat a feared Union move on the same ground. Crowds at Columbus greeted the soldiers waving Confederate flags the next day. Within days the Kentucky legislature asked the United States for help expelling the invaders, a request that helped keep the state under Union control for the rest of the war…

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More from September 3
1783

Peace is signed at the Hôtel d'York; the United States is free and independent

Eight years of war end with four signatures in a rented Paris hotel room.
1976

Viking 2 sets down on Mars, tilted on a rock at Utopia Planitia

A stray radar echo fires the thrusters early, cracking the ground beneath the lander's feet.
1777

Musket fire greets Hessian dragoons at Cooch's Bridge; some say the Stars and Stripes flew over the fight

Some who were there later said this was the first time the Stars and Stripes flew over American troops in a fight.
18381776 Club
Borrowed papers and a uniform from Anna Murray carry him through Wilmington and Philadelphia to New York in under a day.
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Read the full September 3 edition →Everything that happened on September 3 →
More from Civil War & Reconstruction
1862

Lincoln warns the South: free the slaves by New Year's or the Union will do it for you

The order comes five days after Antietam, tying freedom to a battlefield victory.
1868

Logan names May 30 a national day to decorate soldiers' graves; the order goes to every post in the Union

General Order No. 11 puts the commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic behind a practice Southern women began two years ago.
1862

Seward and Lyons sign a treaty giving both navies the right to search and seize slave ships

The Senate ratifies unanimously the same day, ending half a century of U.S. resistance to British calls for mutual search rights on African and Cuban waters.
1861

Tennessee votes to leave the Union; the eleventh state is also the last

Middle Tennessee swings from 51 percent against secession in February to 88 percent in favor today, providing the decisive margin, though East Tennessee refuses to accept the result.
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