[1] Hawes began his political career as an ardent Whig and was a close friend of the party's founder, Henry Clay.

When the Commonwealth's neutrality was breached in September 1861, Hawes fled to Virginia and enlisted as a brigade commissary under Confederate general Humphrey Marshall.

The ceremony was interrupted, however, by forces under Union general Don Carlos Buell, and the Confederates were driven from the Commonwealth following the Battle of Perryville.

Hawes relocated to Virginia, where he conducted a Confederate government in exile for Kentucky and continued to lobby President Jefferson Davis to attempt another invasion of the state.

[3] As a member of the state militia, Hawes saw limited service in the Black Hawk War in 1832, and returned to his position in the Kentucky House in 1834.

[9] When the Whig Party dissolved in the 1850s, Hawes became a Democrat, supporting presidential candidates James Buchanan in 1856 and John C. Breckinridge in 1860.

[4] A July 1861 address to the people of Bourbon County, authored by Hawes and other like-minded Democrats, blamed Republicans for starting the Civil War, denounced the coercion of states to remain in the Union, and warned that the Lincoln administration would fight to end slavery.

Following the resolutions of the Russellville Convention, the provisional Confederate government's ten legislative councillors selected Hawes to succeed Johnson as governor.

)[8] He joined the leaderless and nomadic shadow government, which had been traveling with the Army of Tennessee, in Corinth, Mississippi, and took the oath of office on May 31.

[8] Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith proceeded with the invasion nonetheless, while the leaders of Kentucky's Confederate government remained in Chattanooga, Tennessee, awaiting Hawes's return.

[8][9] Bragg, desiring to enforce the Confederate Conscription Act in the Commonwealth, decided to install the provisional government in the recently captured state capital of Frankfort.

[3][4] Displaced from their home state, the legislative council dispersed to places where they could make a living or be supported by relatives until Governor Hawes called them into session.

Scant records show that, on December 30, 1862, Hawes summoned the council, auditor, and treasurer to his location at Athens, Tennessee, for a meeting on January 15, 1863.

[14] Another major blow was Davis's decision not to allow Hawes to spend $1 million that had been secretly appropriated in August 1861 to help Kentucky maintain its neutrality.

[14] This location was only 100 miles (160 km) from Richmond, allowing Hawes to travel easily to the Confederate capital for audiences with President Davis.

[14] In the summer of 1864, Colonel R. A. Alston of the Ninth Tennessee Cavalry requested Governor Hawes's assistance in investigating crimes allegedly committed by General John Hunt Morgan during his unauthorized raid into Kentucky.

[10] Finally satisfied that it was safe to return to Kentucky, Hawes arrived in Paris to find his home had been burned by Union troops.