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A “Secret Inquisition” in Kentucky: General Stephen Burbridge, Abraham Lincoln, and Union War Policy

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by Matthew C. Hulbert

At 4 p.m. on November 9, 1864, Governor Thomas E. Bramlette received an urgent letter from prominent Lexington political general and attorney John B. Huston. The message alarmed Kentucky’s chief executive, to say the very least. According to Huston, Union soldiers had arrived at his home shortly after midnight, arrested him in front of his wife and daughter, and had further plans to expel him “into the Rebel lines.” Huston freely admitted to Bramlette that he’d been campaigning for George McClellan in the upcoming presidential contest of 1864—but also noted that he had every right to do so as a “free man” and as a supporter of the Union “without conditions.” His detention and impending excommunication from Union territory, Huston concluded, had come on the orders of General Stephen Burbridge, commander of the District of Kentucky, in an effort to squelch pro-McClellan voices on the eve of the hotly-contested election.

Lacking the authority to free Huston from the custody of a federal commander, Bramlette immediately telegraphed President Lincoln. “General John B. Huston, a loyal man and prominent citizen” the wire read, “was arrested and yesterday started off by General Burbridge to be sent beyond our lines by way of Catlettsburg, for no other offense than opposition to your re-election … you are doubtless re-elected, but surely cannot sanction this ostracism of loyal men who honestly oppose you.” Lincoln responded almost immediately, signature sarcasm included: “I can scarcely believe that General John B. Huston has been arrested for no other offense than opposition to my re-election, if that had been deemed sufficient cause of arrest, should have heard of more than one arrest in Kentucky on election day.”

bramlette to lincolnLincoln sent an order to Burbridge ordering Huston’s release and assured Bramlette that the general had not yet been—and would not be—shipped south. As it turned out, Burbridge had also arrested Colonel Frank Wolford and Bramlette’s own Lieutenant Governor, Richard T. Jacob. “Lieutenant Governor Jacob is at Catlettsburg, and Colonel Wolford at Covington, both under arrest, and, by order of the Secret Inquisition, ordered into the rebel lines,” Bramlette fumed to Lincoln. “Will you either order their release at once, or a suspension of the order until you receive my communication of this date?” Lincoln’s response to this second request lacked the force of the first:

Yours of to-day is received. It seems that Lieutenant Governor Jacob and Colonel Wolford are stationary at present. General Suddarth and Mr. Hodges are here, and the Secretary of War and myself are trying to devise means of pacification and harmony for Kentucky, which we hope to effect soon, now that the passion induced by the exciting subject of the election is passing off. A. Lincoln

This wasn’t enough for the governor; the public outrage Burbridge had fomented with his crackdown on civil liberties was bad for Kentucky and bad for the war effort. Bramlette wired Lincoln again. “If the Headquarters of the Commandant in Kentucky were at Frankfort, where a free interchange of views could be had, it would avoid the evils which have resulted from Burbridge’s weakness.” “But,” he continued, “he [Burbridge] and I cannot hold personal converse after his bad conduct within the last few weeks. Our intercourse must be restricted to official correspondence in writing. It would therefore much facilitate matters to have some commandant with whom I could act on terms of social courtesy and equality.” In other words, Bramlette wanted Lincoln to replace Burbridge—and he wanted it done immediately.

Lincoln refused. Not because the president was loath to playing musical chairs with his top military commanders. McDowell, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, and McClellan (twice) were collective proof enough of that. Rather, Lincoln denied the removal request because at the end of the day, he was a wartime president, and he needed commanders in place who were willing to take bold action—even if those actions occasionally fell between the cracks of civil liberty or even flirted with illegality. Bramlette was no doubt disappointed to learn this hard lesson about Lincoln’s wartime priorities.

Months later, following the spectacular failure of a strategy for stamping out guerrilla violence (that involved executing POWs believed to be irregular combatants and ended up creating new bushwhackers faster than it could hang them), Major General Stephen Burbridge was stripped of his authority and never again reinstated to command. In this, he learned a hard lesson of his own: Lincoln was only willing to look past “secret inquisitions” or to bend the rules for the generals who orchestrated them if it brought the Union closer to ultimate victory. Burbridge failed—and thus took his place among the McDowells and Popes of the Union high command.

Matthew C. Hulbert is an Assistant Editor of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.

SOURCES: Thomas E. Bramlette, 1864, “Message to the General Assembly of Kentucky,” Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives (KDLA).

Between the Rock and the Hard Place: Sources on Guerrilla Violence in CWG-K

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Click here to view this Subject Guide in the new Civil War Governors interface.

On June 14, 1864, John T. Smith penned a letter to Kentucky governor Thomas E. Bramlette. According to Smith, the County Court of Logan County had selected him to serve as a special messenger. His task: hashing out a solution for Logan County’s guerrilla infestation. “Our object,” Smith wrote, “is to fall upon some plan so as to have a company to act against Guerillas … the condition of most of us is such that we can not be spared long at a time from our families and therefore can not with propriety volunteer regularly and devote our whole time to the Service but we can raise a sufficient number to keep off guerillas and robbers by taking turn about with each others.”

Stationing troops in the area—an oft-used solution for localized outbreaks of irregular violence in Kentucky—wouldn’t do in this case; outside soldiers, the Logan County contingent argued, “are unacquainted with the country and its citizens and can do but little in catching guerillas who are well acquainted with both people and country.” Put another way, guerrillas had home field advantage against regular troops and it would take an insider to catch an insider. Smith and his comrades were willing to use their own intimate knowledge of Logan County to hunt pro-Confederate bushwhackers (on a part-time basis), so long as Governor Bramlette would provide them with supplies, firearms, and the state’s permission to wield them with lethal force.

Perhaps most interesting, though, is the postscript of Smith’s letter. It reads as follows:

P.S. We are troubled by all sorts of Guerillas. Since writing the above, I learn that a squad of federal guerillas or negro Soldiers from Clarksville Tenn. came into the neighborhood of Voleny last night (the place visited by rebel guerillas two nights before) and stripped the citizens of their negroes and horses. It is a perfect outrage upon our country. The Federal Soldiers at Clarksville are so busy recruiting negroes that they pay no more attention to guerillas and robbers than if they belonged to the same class of individuals. If we are permitted to raise our company give us instruction what is to be done with negro guerillas. I think we can raise from 150 to 200 men a portion of whom can always be in motion and when necessary all can act.

Aside from Smith’s views on black enlistment, this addendum reveals the extent to which Logan County residents were caught between a gray rock and a blue hard place: pro-Confederate guerrillas would raid a neighborhood and take what food and horseflesh they needed to operate in the bush. Then a group of Unionist guerrillas—sometimes even black Unionist guerrillas—would come through the same neighborhood, accusing the residents of having willingly supplied the Confederates. This cycle could repeat itself ad infinitum (and often in the reverse order), with local citizens trapped in the middle. And it was anything but limited to Logan County — this was a state-wide problem.

So if you’re interested in finding out how Governor Bramlette, private citizens like John Smith, and/or Kentucky’s military forces waged war against irregular combatants, check out this subject guide on Guerrilla Warfare — but be advised that it only represents the tip of the iceberg.

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SUBJECT GUIDE: Guerrilla Warfare

KYR-0001-001-0008 – Thomas E. Bramlette, Proclamation by the Governor, Jan. 4, 1864

It is in the power of persons whose sympathies are with the rebellion to prevent guerrilla raids, almost invariably, by furnishing to Military Officers of the United States or State of Kentucky, the information which experience has proved them to be, as a general thing, possessed of.

If all would unite, as is their duty, in putting down guerrillas, we should soon cease to be troubled with their raids. A neglect to afford all assistance and information which may aid in defeating the designs of marauding parties, can but be construed as a culpable and active assistance to our enemies.

I, therefore, request that the various Military Commandants in the State of Kentucky will, in every instance where a loyal citizen is taken off by bands of guerrillas, immediately arrest at least five of the most prominent and active rebel sympathizers in the vicinity of such outrage for every loyal man taken by guerrillas. These sympathizers should be held as hostages for the safe and speedy return of the loyal citizens. Where there are disloyal relatives of guerrillas, they should be the chief sufferers. Let them learn that if they refuse to exert themselves actively for the assistance and protection of the loyal, they must expect to reap the just fruits of their complicity with the enemies of our State and people.

KYR-0001-002-0018 – Berry S. Young et al. to Thomas E. Bramlette, Feb. 16, 1864

The Undersigned citizens of Crittenden having been informed that by Legislative enactment and by the authority vested in you as Governor of said State that forces are to be Raised for the defense of the state against Guerrilla invasion if such be the fact We would Recommend to your favorable Consideration Lieut F S Loyd of Co H 20th Ky Regt as Col and J N Hughey 1st Sergt Co E 48th Ills Regt ^for Lt Col^ both Recruited from this (Crittenden) County both of them accomplished Gentlemen and Soldiers they Refer you to Col Edward of your Staff By promoting those Young Gentlemen you will greatly oblige the Undersigned and Reward merit gained by gallant service in their countrys cause

Berry S Young clk c c c

James M Steele

W C Carnahan

S L. R. Wilson

Robt F Haynes County Atty,,

J H Walker Clerk

Crittenden Circuit Court

D N Stinson Post Master at Marion Crittenden Co Ky

John N Woods

Alfred Armstrong

James W Wilson —

  1. E. Black

J C Henson

  1. L. Leigh

S U Elder

KYR-0001-004-0996 – George Shirley and E. Wilty, Affidavit, Jun. 13, 1864

State that John Branstetter an infirm old man of near 70- years has lived many years in this county (formerly Barren County) a respected & good citizen and up to the commencement of this Rebellion a Sober & discreet man- that the Guerrilas Robbed him of a great deal of his property. From the troubles consequent there to & the additional fact we suppose, that his two sons Joined an independent company called the “Metcalfe Tigers” for the purpose of hunting down guerrillas & were exposed to many dangers the Old man took to drink- While in one of his drinking sprees he was induced by some bad men to go into the woods & play a game of cards. The game was played on his land & money was bet & won as appears by the evidence Testimony of a credible witness- who chanced to come upon them & saw the game He has been indicted therefore tried & fined $200- which is the least the law provides in such cases This old man is often delirious & wild wherein these drinking sprees & has to be guarded sometimes We his neighbors & friends are candid in representing that we think this is one of the few cases which demand the interposition of the Governor and ask that his fine be remitted.

KYR-0001-004-1941 – Z. Wheats to Thomas E. Bramlette, Jun. 19, 1865

I called at your office to-day & left for your consideration, the Petition of Capt. Edwin Terrell of the Independent Ky Scouts. I hope you will grant the prayer of his petition. He is one of the bravest men I ever saw, & has done more to rid Kentucky of Guerrillas than any man I have heard of. The fact is, his little band have been more effective in this service, than some Brigades of Cavalry. His head quarters were in Shelbyville & they gave our town & county protection which we could not have obtained from any other source.

KYR-0001-004-1380 – Hill and Knott to Thomas E. Bramlette, Dec. 16, 1864

Sir: As you are doubtless aware this portion of our State has long been infested by a gang of Guerrillas whose depredations have been committed almost with impunity, in Spite of the utmost vigilence of the Military, whose efforts to capture or destroy them, they have constantly managed to elude. So frequent and successful have been their forays—characterized by murder robbery and plunder—that their presence has become a cause of extreme terror to the citizens of whatever portion of our community they may mark as their prey. Some three weeks ago they made a raid through a portion of this County murdering some, robbing others, and maltreating in some manner, nearly all with whom they met.

KYR-0002-225-0083 – M. E. Poynter to Thomas E. Bramlette, Feb. 15, 1865

I trouble you with a line in regard to the recruiting officer for the State Service at this place who professes to have authority— from you to raise a company &c. I refer to W. W. Harper— and as a citizen and a Union man in behalf of the cause—the community, your own good name and of common decency I protest against such an appointment—As badly as this service demands men and as much as we have suffered from guerrillas we as a community had rather Quantrell, would pay an occasional visit than be annoyed by this man in “brief authority”— all the time.

KYR-0001-003-0086 – E. H. Hobson to Thomas E. Bramlette, Mar. 5, 1864

The 37th Ky Mounted Inft has greatly improved, Since Col C J Hann took command this Regt has recd its Horse equipments and enfield rifles but to make them more efficient would most respectfully Suggest that you arm two or four compns of the regt with Ballard Carbines or muskatoons I am anxious to have the Regt mounted and send them to the Cumberland to protect the Border Counties. the notorious Gurilla Capt Richardson and nine of his men will arrive here to day as Prisoners, they Justly merit and I hope will be punished with death give Col Hansons wishes your favourable consideration.

KYR-0002-022-0062 – W. M. Allen to Thomas E. Bramlette, Dec. 23, 1864

The last raid resulted in the death of two of our best citizens, and the killing of three of the band, and the wounding of three others of them. It was at first supposed that two of them killed at Jeffersontown were Federal soldiers, taken prisoners by the gurillas but we are all satisfied that they were deserters & gurillas. Our people are now pretty thoroughly aroused, and are anxious to have them pursued and exterminated. When pursued, these cut throats flee to the Salt River hills and scatter about among their friends and cant be found. We know who many of their aiders and abettors are but have no power to punish. The Military Authorities give us but little protection. We want something of our own that will be more efficient. It is proposed by some to raise 100 men in our county at our own expense!

KYR-0002-225-0079 – John F. Lay to Thomas E. Bramlette, Mar. 11, 1865

I have the Honor to make aplication to you for authority to recruit a Company of State troops to Serve in the State of Ky for the period of twelve months I have Served over three years in the Fedral army and know Cannot remain at Home on account of Gurillas if you will favor me with authority please Send me Some Blank Enlistment papers

KYR-0002-225-0037 – W. H. H. Faris to Thomas E. Bramlette, Apr. 24, 1864

I have presumed to address your excellency on a matter of some importance. It is the method we should adopt as the most proper for the defence of our state. The two already provided, the state troops and militia, have not proved sufficiently available. It is as much as the state troops can do, to guard the frontier, so, as to prevent the greater inroads of bodies of five hundred men. And sometimes a thousand. While parties of from thirty to forty can slip in between the posts that establishes the military chain along the southern border, effect every species of robbery, and commit any depredations they wish, and pass out again with perfect impunity. This predatory warfare is to be made on Kentucky during the three seasons when the woods are thicker, so they (the guerrillas) can practice it with greater security. This mode of warfare is characterized by the guerilla chieftains as the scouting systems. All this the militia are intended to prevent, but in which they will most signally fail; as they have done as they have done already.
Because there is ^no^ method, no arrangement no anything about them that is calculated to intercept, or overtake one of those flying bands of guerillas that pass through one county, and into another (committing all the mischief they wish) before the one has been, or the other is aware of its approach.

KYR-0001-019-0156 – Bennett Spearger to D. E. Downing, Aug. 14, 1862

The guerrilla warfare is working its ruin as a cause produces its effect a few yesterday about 2. oclock. P.M. there were 2 Union Men Killed on the Road leading from my house to Thompson Arterberry’s Hamilton and a bout 30 other men came into Tompkinsville yesterday morning a bout 8. oclk a.m. and had Nathaniel Austin and ^a^ young Hefflin Prisenors they shot Austin through the head and lefthis Brains was scatered in the road and they shot Heflin in several places, you are acquaintd ^with^ Austin and Heflin Both neither of them you Know never belong to any army the man who stealthily takes deliborate aim at the husband and Father of a helpless family ^and^ because he is freind to his Country, sends the mesenger of death to drink his life blood and compells the heart stricken widow and helpless Orphans to seek protection and support at the hands of a cold unfeeling world. Could the hands of a cold grave’s dread monster enter claim to such a fiend in any form too horrid to mete out to them there just deserts

SOURCE: John T. Smith to Thomas E. Bramlette, 14 June 1864, Kentucky Department of Military Affairs (KDMA).

Visualizing Unionism: Congressional Redistricting in 1861

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Modern political observers will not be surprised to hear that the redrawing of Congressional districts every ten years is an intense political battle within each state. Imagine how fraught that struggle was in Kentucky when the lines of political opposition were not only drawn between parties, but between opposing forces of loyalty and treason.

As CWG-K builds its 10,000-document Early Access interface (with funding from the NHPRC), we created a set of maps for the reference section of the site. Starting with blank NHGIS shape files based on the 1860 Kentucky census — files graciously processed by digital cartographer, GIS expert, and former KHS Research Fellow, Andrew W. Fialka — we tagged each district with a color code to track both geographic shifts (in the size of districts) and their physical placement within the state itself. This allowed us to fully visualize the redistricting process in the wake of the 1860 census and understand just how seriously the state government of Kentucky took the threat that the rebellion posed.

In the prewar map drawn from the 1850 census, Kentucky had ten congressional districts, varying widely in geographic size but (as required by law) roughly equal in population. Congressional Districts, 1859 to 1861, 37th Congress

Lincoln’s Secretary of the Interior, Caleb Smith, informed Governor Magoffin that Kentucky would lose a seat in the Thirty-Eighth Congress on July 9, 1861 (CWG-K document KYR-0001-023-0070), in the midst of one of the most politicized summers in Kentucky history. Elections for members of Congress and a new legislature served as referenda on secession in the state, which was in its period of official, declared neutrality. Union candidates dominated the summer voting, though some Confederate sympathizers soured on voting in the contests and stayed home. Nine of the ten Congressional seats went to Unionists, the exception being Southern Rights firebrand Henry C. Burnett of the far-west First District.

Legislative elections in August were equally lopsided Union victories, which meant that the new maps would be drawn by men determined to counter the rebel political threat. Looking at the 37th and 38th Congressional maps side by side, we can see how Unionist legislators sought to break up known clusters of rebel support and tip the balance in each Congressional district towards Union support.

Congressional Districts, 1863 to 1865, 38th Congress

The First District, rebel virtually to the core, lost Hopkins County, which may not have changed its electoral chemistry significantly. Hopkins was the scene of a protracted local political and paramilitary struggle between Union and Confederate elements in the later years of the war, but so was virtually every county in the region.

The Second District, anchored by Unionist Christian and McLean counties needed all of that loyal influence to brace divided Henderson and Daviess and stem electoral charges from the rebel counties in the eastern half of the district.

Any rebel sentiment in the Third District, the site of Kentucky’s secession convention at Russellville (Logan County) and the capital of the Provisional Confederate Government at Bowling Green (Warren County), was cunningly neutralized by stretching the district eastward to grab the hilly Union bastions of Cumberland, Clinton, and Russell counties.

What had been the Fifth District in the old system became the new Fourth and grew dramatically south and east in much the same manner as the Third. Notice how the soon-to-be guerrilla infested counties of Meade, Bullitt, Spencer, and Marion were neutralized with staunchly loyal Green, Adair (home of 1863-67 Governor Thomas E. Bramlette), and Casey.

The old Seventh, new Fifth, remained dominated by Louisville, a city that sent a fair number of citizens into the rebel ranks but was politically dominated by Unionists of the severest (sometimes even abolitionist/anti-slavery) stripe. Watch, though, as the new Fifth District swings east to break up the northern Kentucky rebel hive that was Owen and Grant counties. The rebels of Sweet Owen get drowned out by the Louisville vote.

Owen County’s old home, the Tenth District, became the new Sixth. And with the Owen-Grant connection broken up, the legislators thought it safe to reach down and include evenly divided Harrison County in the Northern Kentucky district, to be outweighed by the loyal voters in Covington and Newport.

Henry Clay’s old Ashland District, the heart of the Bluegrass, had fallen suspect in the eyes of the loyal legislators. The scions of the thoroughbred families were lured by the promise of John Hunt Morgan even as their old-Whig fathers drew maps in Frankfort. To brace the new Seventh District, the legislators dipped way down south into the Presbyterian-Unionist domain of Danville to prop up the district which John C. Breckinridge had represented more recently than Clay.

The two great mountain districts were largely safe from rebeldom. The new Eighth District, its political  center at London (Laurel County), remained loyal throughout the war and would become the rural base of the postwar Republican Party in the state into the twentieth century.

The new Ninth gained the rebel votes in Pike and Johnson counties, to be balanced by the unconditional unionists in Boyd and Greenup.

Reading the maps side by side gives us great insight into the ways that Kentucky leaders perceived the geography of rebellion — perceptions which have largely been borne out by historical scholarship since. What else do you see happening in these maps?

Patrick A. Lewis is Project Director of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.

The Caroline Chronicles: Curriculum Development Update

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On Friday, April 8, instructors and students from the History Club at Hopkinsville Community College visited the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History. As part of their experience on the KHS campus, club members became the first group to play out the classroom simulation of The Caroline Chronicles. And we’re thrilled to report that they—and the simulation itself—outperformed even our wildest expectations.

The simulation involves two sides—a defense counsel and a prosecution team—arguing for and against Caroline’s pardon using evidence drawn directly from the primary, secondary, and legal documents used to pen the blog series. The decision-makers in the case are a panel of Pardon Commissioners, who listen to verbal arguments from both the prosecution and the defense, are allowed to question the lead counsels of each side, and then issue a recommendation to the governor. (To ensure fair proceedings, all participants were given access to all of the documents prior to the simulation and then divided into roles randomly before the trial began.) After deliberating privately, Pardon Commissioners must report their recommendation to the rest of the group and offer three justifications based only on the arguments and evidence presented by counsels.

The prosecution at work.

With Jack McCoy-like gusto, the prosecution offered its arguments first, making a strong case for upholding Caroline’s conviction (listed below):

  1. Caroline believed she should have become a free citizen after arriving in Louisville as contraband with Buell’s army. Her service in the Willis Levy house constituted re-enslavement and gave her a strong motive to lash out at her new master’s family.
  1. On a personal level, Willis and Anne Levy had been abusive of Caroline, treating her cruelly, scolding her frequently, and even threatening physical punishment. Aside from her enslavement, this hostility also gave Caroline ample motive to punish Willis and Anne by hurting their only child.
  1. Not only did Caroline have the means to commit the crime—she had easy access to the poison that killed Blanch Levy—she was also seen smiling at the toddler’s corpse on more than one occasion and asked several times when the corpse would be buried. According to the prosecution, this indicated that Caroline was happy to see Blanch dead but also wanted the evidence of her crime buried before an autopsy could expose her guilt.

Following the prosecution’s oral arguments, the Pardon Commissioners threw a potential curve ball; they asked if it was possible that Anne Levy had actually tried to poison her daughter and herself as part of a murder-suicide plot (potentially rooted in lingering post-partum depression). The prosecution quickly replied that no evidence whatsoever existed to support such a conclusion.

The defense organizing its case.

Caroline’s defense counsel then took the floor and gave three core arguments in favor of reasonable doubt existing:

  1. Just as much of the evidence collected points to Willis Levy having accidentally poisoned Blanch as it does Caroline as the killer—and while this doesn’t totally negate any possibility of Caroline’s guilt, it does raise a reasonable doubt.
  1. Next the defense focused on the victim. Blanch Levy was a toddler; toddlers put things—everything—in their mouths. It’s very possible that Caroline was watching Blanch in the yard and that Blanch picked up poison put out by Willis Levy, and ingested the poison accidentally. In other words, the defense added a layer of complexity to the accidental death scenario in which Caroline was not criminally at fault.
  1. Lastly, the defense pointed to the consistency of Caroline’s story in the case record. Throughout the entire process, even following her conviction, Caroline never changed her narrative of Blanch Levy’s death—and in keeping with her purported affection for the child, the defense underscored that Caroline’s smiling at the corpse and her questions about the autopsy could have just as easily stemmed from genuine concern and her traditional role as a female slave on the plantation (tasked with the “work of death”).

The Pardon Commissioners did not have any questions for the defense and subsequently left the courtroom to confer in private chambers.

The panel of Pardon Commissioners listening to verbal arguments.

The panel of Pardon Commissioners returned to the courtroom and recommended that Caroline be issued a full pardon by the governor. Their reasoning included that (1) Willis Levy had a track record of carelessly using poison in the general vicinity in which Blanch was killed; (2) the prosecution had failed to properly establish a motive for Caroline to kill Blanch; and, (3) the Pardon Commissioners believed that Caroline did have genuine affection for Blanch and, as a result, that she would have lashed out at Willis and Anne Levy to protest her treatment while not harming the child.

The Pardon Commissioners’ recommendation aligned with the historical results of Caroline’s case; in turn, she was awarded a full pardon. So now the question is: how do you think your class would decide?

If you’re interested in finding out, drop us a line about adopting The Caroline Chronicles curriculum in your classroom. Included are primary and secondary reading assignments, low and high stakes writing assignments with instructor guidelines, and the script for the capstone in-class trial simulation.

“A Very Catiline”?: Finding Richard Henry Stanton

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A few weeks ago, CWG-K was approached by Feliks Banel, a Seattle historian and radio broadcaster, seeking information about the man who named Washington state. A Kentucky Congressman in 1853, it seems, had suggested that Columbia—the name under which the territorial bill had been submitted—might be confused with the District of Columbia. So, Richard H. Stanton suggested the compromise name of Washington—which, he apparently thought, wouldn’t get confused with any other important center of political power in that District.

So, Feliks asked, did anyone in Kentucky remember this Richard Stanton? Turns out, the answer is generally no. Not in Maysville, where Stanton lived and is buried. Not in Powell County, where the county seat is named after him. But he was well known to CWG-K.

Listen to Feliks’s radio piece on KIRO, which features CWG-K project director Patrick Lewis summarizing Stanton and his place in Civil War Kentucky.

What do CWG-K documents tell us about Richard Stanton? He and his law partner (and brother-in-law) Thomas Throop were two of the most important attorneys in the state when the Civil War came to Kentucky. Stanton had undertaken the gargantuan task of compiling a revised and annotated edition of the Kentucky Revised Statutes in 1860, making Stanton a household name to whom attorneys and judges across the state turned for the latest interpretation of state laws. On a regional level, Stanton was Commonwealth’s Attorney (akin to a district attorney in most other states) for the Tenth Judicial District serving Mason, Lewis, Greenup, Rowan, Fleming, and Nicholas Counties.

S&T

But in CWG-K documents, Stanton conducts very little business as a Commonwealth’s Attorney. He appears most frequently in private practice requesting pardons for their clients, and they seem particularly close to the Democratic administration of Beriah Magoffin.

Why was such an influential attorney like Stanton unable to hold his position as Commonwealth Attorney after 1861? The first clue came from a letter of his partner Tom Throop to Magoffin in November 1860:

Your positions are undoubtedly correct, and if our union as states is preserved the movement must come from the north. They must abolish all these nullifying laws, carry out the provisions of the constitution, as to the comity between the states, carry out the provisions of the fugitive slave act, respect their so called personal liberty bills, allow the free transit of persons from the south with their families & property through their territories; acknowledge by their acts, not words only, that we as states have an equality of rights, with them: unless this is done, our union is a farce, it is effete, a humbug & a cheat.

Throop certainly seems a John C. Breckinridge Southern Democrat, but did he speak for his friend Stanton? Union General “Bull” Nelson certainly seemed to think so. He arrested Stanton and six other Maysville men on October 2, 1861. According to Nelson (a native Maysville man, himself) the group were “traitorous scoundrels who were engaged in fitting out men for the Southern army, subscribing moneys, getting up nightly drills and doing the manner of things usual among the secessionists. …with the Hon. R. H. Stanton at their head.”

In another letter, Nelson asserted that “This man Stanton is the head of secession in Northeast Kentucky” and that “He has harbored in his house an officer of the Confederate Army” and forwarded 259 men from the area to Humphrey Marshall’s rebel forces in Prestonsburg, Kentucky. This was entirely plausible. Stanton’s son returned from a law practice in Memphis at the outbreak of the war to raise a company of troops in Mason County for Confederate service. Henry T. Stanton may have been the very officer harbored by his father.

Whether with evidence or speculation, Nelson concluded that Stanton “is the soul of rebellion in this part of Kentucky.” “[M]orally a very Catiline” whose arrest “has struck secession dumb here.”

First taken to Cincinnati, then to Camp Chase in Columbus, Ohio, and finally to Fort Lafayette in New York City, Stanton proclaimed his innocence the entire time. As did many Kentucky secessionists facing the state and federal government crackdown on wartime dissent, Stanton proclaimed himself a strict neutralist. In a letter to Secretary of State Seward, Stanton argued that “we were in favor of Kentucky maintaining a neutral position in the contest…and advocated that policy, hoping that the State would be in a position to maintain peace within her borders and mediate between the two sections.”

Eventually, the Lincoln administration felt enough political pressure from undoubtedly loyal Kentuckians (including a petition from a majority of state legislators) and released Stanton on December 17, 1861, after taking the loyalty oath (read the whole case file in the OR, Series II, Volume II, pp. 913-33). Stanton & Throop continued to practice—carefully avoiding such overt political statements as Throop had made to Magoffin just after Lincoln’s election—for the rest of the war.

From the politics of Manifest Destiny to the mechanics of Confederate recruiting in Union territory to the ever-important American debate over civil liberties and dissent during wartime, Richard Stanton should not be a name that Kentucky historians forget again. Even at this stage, CWG-K has identified a host of mid-level political players like Richard Stanton, and as the project moves forward into annotation and social networking—identifying each unique individual mentioned in our documents and linking them and their known associates together into a massive research platform—we will find many more. What new life story will CWG-K uncover next?

Patrick A. Lewis is Project Director of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.

To Own Life and Death: The Boundaries of Race and Mastery

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By Matthew C. Hulbert

Early one evening in May 1859, an inebriated Jesse Williams handed one of his slaves—a young man named Wesley—a loaded musket. Williams commanded Wesley to take the weapon, under cover of darkness, and with it to assassinate Edmund Stevens. In other words, Williams instructed his African American slave to take a weapon he wasn’t legally allowed to possess and gun down a white neighbor in cold blood. Williams and Stevens had apparently been feuding for years. Now, sufficiently fortified by liquor and desperation, Jesse aimed to end their dispute once and for all.

This scenario constituted the ultimate “lose-lose” for a slave like Wesley. On one hand, if he obeyed Williams, it would mean committing murder and virtually guaranteeing himself a date with the hangman. On the other, if Wesley refused to heed his obviously deranged master’s word, it would mean, at the very least, a severe beating—and given Williams’s current states of mind and intoxication, possibly much, much worse. So with no good options laid before him, Wesley took the gun and half-heartedly trudged off to the Stevens farm.

Later that same night, Wesley returned home with the gun bearing its original load. Williams, still quite drunk and now irate, demanded an explanation; when he told a slave to do something, he expected results. Murder was no exception. But according to Wesley, it wasn’t his fault. He’d been thwarted by Stevens’s dog—the animal barked whenever Wesley got too close, so it had been impossible to sneak into range. Undeterred, Williams sent his would-be assassin back into the night, this time with a small cache of poison to silence the dog. Minus the barking, Wesley could presumably finish off Stevens. And if Wesley failed again, Williams promised “to cut his back all to pieces.”

Wesley did fail again. And as court documents later revealed, he’d failed many times before: the dog was just one item from a long list of excuses concocted to avoid murdering Stevens. Wesley harbored no animus against Stevens and had even less interest in committing murder on Williams’s behalf. In fact, on more than one occasion, Wesley never even left the Williams farm; he simply hid in the nearby woods and reported back to his master in the morning, as if he’d gone out after Stevens but a clear shot had never materialized.

Even when sober, Williams wasn’t particularly bright. (And as witnesses later told it, he wasn’t sober all that often.) But eventually even he caught on to Wesley’s stalling. So one day, as he prepared to “hunt” Stevens alone, Wesley must have been disheartened to learn that Williams would be tagging along as field supervisor. Together, the pair snuck within range of Stevens and, with an insistent Williams looking over his shoulder, Wesley pulled the trigger. The projectile found its mark. Edmund Stevens fell dead in his tracks.

wesley indictmentGiven his ongoing strife with Stevens, Williams was the prime suspect, but he had a built in scapegoat: he hadn’t technically killed Stevens. Rather, it was his slave, Wesley, who’d pulled the trigger and should be legally held responsible for the deed. Not surprisingly, Williams banked on the fact that investigators would inherently take the word of a white slaveowner over that of a slave, let alone one accused of backshooting a white man. Even less surprising, Williams neglected to mention that he’d commanded Wesley to commit the crime on numerous occasions. Not long after the shooting, Williams died—almost certainly the result of his drinking. So Wesley was forced to stand trial alone, and a jury convicted him of Stevens’s murder.

This is the point in Wesley’s story where things get a little complicated. Williams, as a white, male slaveholder, had literally owned Wesley. As his owner’s human property, Wesley was technically bound to follow orders or suffer terrible—even mortal—consequences. Unity between white slaveholders and white non-slaveholders played a major role in imbuing the institution of slavery with this absolute, race-based authority. In other words, Williams, Stevens, and even the men investigating the crime were all supposed to be complicit in maintaining the color line that justified mastery over commoditized (black) human beings. But Williams broke from that protocol when he exercised the absolute authority granted him by the institution of slavery and wielded it against a member of the very community vital to maintaining the institution in the first place. More simply put, Williams overextended his ownership of the life and death of a black slave by also making a claim on the life and death of a free white man.

wesley forced

“That he done it under the eye of his master and under the fear that he would be killed himself or great Bodily harm would be done him, if he failed or refused to obey the command of his master.”

Following his conviction, Wesley was condemned to death. A petition offered on his behalf to Governor Beriah Magoffin argued that Wesley should be spared the gallows because Williams had both owned him and ordered him to assassinate Stevens. Even Williams’s supporters, few as they might have been, couldn’t discount the fact that two, distinct sets of footprints were found at the scene of the crime. Interestingly, though, the petitioners did not seek a full pardon for Wesley—merely that he might escape execution to spend the rest of his life in prison. The request, which Magoffin granted, illustrates how irrevocably interwoven the legal system of Kentucky had become with ideas of race, slavery, and social power. The petitioners (and Magoffin, for that matter), likely still believed that, as a rule, Wesley was duty bound to do as his master commanded. At the same time, though, they were compelled to prevent future instances of white masters using black slaves to assault other white Kentuckians. Not to close this loophole was akin to allowing the color line on which so much of slavery’s power depended to erode from within.

This means that Magoffin had to concede that what Wesley was ordered to do was wrong. By implying that the command had been wrong, the implication was also made that Wesley should have known better, morally speaking, than to obey it—a line of thought that unavoidably called into question Williams’s absolute mastery over his slave property. But even as Magoffin seemed to understand that Wesley—again, as a rule—had no choice but to obey Williams and that Williams’s order had been morally wrong, the governor, who himself owned slaves, couldn’t take that reasoning to its logical conclusion: complete exoneration for Wesley. I.e., no prison time.

wesley commutedWhy not? Because to have consented to the ability of a slave like Wesley to only obey orders he found morally acceptable wouldn’t just have conceded a level of humanity among chattel that many slaveholders found discomforting, it would have utterly undermined a vital defense of the institution of slavery itself. (That is, the idea that slavery was a positive good for African Americans, a people otherwise incapable of thinking for themselves.) And to undermine the institution of slavery would have ultimately threatened the chief enforcement mechanism of a racial hierarchy that elevated white over black in matters social, political, economic, and cultural. With this in mind, to some extent, Wesley didn’t actually go to prison because he was a slave—Wesley went to prison to the preserve the very means of his enslavement.

 

Matthew C. Hulbert is an Assistant Editor of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.

SOURCES: W. H. Calvert et al. to Beriah Magoffin, 16 July 1861, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives (hereafter KDLA); Edward P. Campbell et al. to Beriah Magoffin, 16 June 1861, KDLA; Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Wesley (a slave), Judgment, 15 June 1861, KDLA.

“Acquainted with the Value of Slaves”: The Commonwealth Invests in an Institution

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By Tony Curtis

On April 8, 1863, the Hickman Circuit Court empanelled a grand jury to review an arson case against three enslaved, runaway men—John, Elijah, and James. The jury indicted the three men for, “maliciously willfully and feloniously, set fire to and burn the dwelling house of Wm Poore, the Said Slaves having conspired to-gether. . .with one [gap] Wheeler (a white man).” All pled not guilty to the charges with court appointed attorneys by their side, but the jury found all three “guilty as charged and Say by reason thereof they shall Suffer death, but we recommend that the Governor modify the Same to punishment in the penitentiary for life.”

Not all Hickman County citizens agreed. In a letter to Governor James F. Robinson, twenty-five citizens of the county maintained that “the crime of these negroes was committed with every circumstance of atrocity possible, and simple justice demands their execution under the law.” The petitioners claimed that the three defendants had been seen with the 21st Regiment of Missouri Volunteers while at Clinton (whose commanding officer appeared on their behalf at the trial) and that they are “a scourge and terror to the whole County. They obtain arms—United States muskets—whenever they choose and make nightly excursions into the country, bursting open the houses of citizens, robbing them, putting upon them and their wives & families every kind of indignity and insult short of actual murder and violation.”

Voicing the frustration of Kentucky slave owners in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, they stated that the military had taken no action to stop the alleged robberies and that the “citizens of this county have no hope except in the civil laws. If these afford them no protection and that immediately society here will be broken up and the negro become supreme.” They wanted a “stern but just” sentence to intimidate their “fellow marauders,” where “imprisonment would strike little terror to the negro.” Governor Robinson agreed, and the Court ordered all three men to be hanged on May 15, 1863.

As interesting as the politics of the case, historians should also pay attention to the procedures demanded by law when slaves were to be executed. The Revised Statutes of Kentucky (1852) specified that slaveowners be compensated for the execution of their slaves convicted of crimes. From Chapter 93, Article 7, Section 24:

§ 24. When the court shall sentence to death a slave, the value of such slave shall be fixed by the court, and entered on record. If the slave be executed, or die in jail, after conviction, before the day of execution, the value, so fixed, shall be paid out of the public treasury to the master or owner, upon a presentation of a copy of the record, and certificate of the sheriff of the fact of the death or execution of such slave. If a slave, imported into this state contrary to law, or passing through this state, by land or water, to any other state, territory, or country, be executed for crime, or die before execution, he shall not be paid for as above.

To obtain a value on each of the slaves, the Hickman Circuit Court reached out to individuals “acquainted with the Value of Slaves”—in this case two physicians (H. O. Earle & C. T. Seay) and a farmer (George B. Moss). Seay and Moss owned slaves, though the record is unclear as to whether Earle owned any slaves. However, it is interesting to note that they consulted two physicians and a farmer—assessing value in terms of both physical ability and skill sets. Was this a standard makeup of court appointed valuators of slaves? Was there a particular set of qualifications to fulfill this requirement? Was there a standard form used to evaluate each enslaved person? Whatever the answers are to these questions, they valued each man as follows, “John (the slave of C S Parrott) at One thousand & Sixty Dollars. James (the Slave of Quirus Beckwith) at One thousand one hundred & forty Dollars and Elijah (the slave of Quirus Beckwith) at Eight hundred dollars.”

The Annual Report of the Auditor of Public Accounts…for fiscal year ending October 10, 1863, confirms the payment of the aforementioned amounts to Beckwith and Parrott:

Excerpt from the Annual Report of the Auditor of Public Accounts…for fiscal year ending October 10, 1863

As the Caroline Chronicles reminds us, money flowed out of the state coffers and in some cases into the state coffers as a direct result of slaves being caught up in the Kentucky legal system. In this case, public funds were used to compensate slaveowners for their loss of human property.

Another twist on the state’s criminal laws and slavery documented in CWG-K collections occurred in 1862, when two enslaved men—Jordan of Scott County, Kentucky, and Abner of Graves County, Kentucky—were convicted of Manslaughter and sentenced to life in the Kentucky State Penitentiary. In these cases legislative action was sought to remove these men from the penitentiary and sell them back into slavery. The men agreed to this pardon and to the stipulation to be returned to slavery—with no say as to who and where they would be sold at public auction. Chapter 93, Article 7, Section 25 of the Kentucky Revised Statutes needed amended in order to give the Governor the power to sell Abner and Jordan back into slavery. This section already granted the governor the power to commute the sentence of a slave, but it did not give him the power to sell said enslaved men into slavery to the financial benefit of the state. The act only stipulated that the slaveowner “shall be paid for him as though he were executed, or take the proceeds of his labor in the penitentiary.” An act passed on March 17, 1862, entitled “An ACT to amend section 25, chapter 93, if Revised Statutes”, amended this section:

An ACT to amend section 25, chapter 93, of Revised Statutes

An advertisement for the sale was placed in the Frankfort newspapers , and Jordan and Abner were returned “to their original condition of servitude” by the governor and the state treasurer by public auction held at the Franklin County Courthouse doors on July 21, 1862. The proceeds were “paid into the public treasury, and the slaves delivered to their purchasers.”

These two documents offer insight into another way in which Kentucky was complicit in the perpetuation of the institution of slavery—by codifying and enforcing slave laws, collecting taxes on enslaved property, just to name a few ways—and in the instance of these two documents, by compensating slaveowners when the enslaved were executed and by collecting payment for enslaved persons sold at public auction from the Kentucky State Penitentiary. This is yet another example of how the entire white population of Kentucky—slaveowner or non-slaveowner, rich and poor—participated in and benefited from the fully integrated slave economy.

Tony Curtis is an Assistant Editor with the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.

SOURCES: Commonwealth of Kentucky vs. John a Slave of C. S. Parrott Elijah & James Slaves of Q Beckwith, Indictment, April 11, 1863, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives (hereafter KDLA); Thomas G. Poore et al. to James F. Robinson, Correspondence, April 11, 1863, KDLA; For more on the policy of the military and runaway slaves, see Diane Mutti Burke On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 (2010), 284-287; Revised Statutes of Kentucky, 627-648; 1860 Federal Slave Schedule, Ancestry.com; Annual Report of the Auditor of Public Accounts…for fiscal year ending October 10, 1863, 18; Tri-Weekly Commonwealth (Frankfort, Ky.), July 4, 1862; Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 243; See also Tim Talbott, “Negroes for Sale,” Random Thoughts on History (blog), June 19, 2013, http://randomthoughtsonhistory.blogspot.com/2013/06/negroes-for-sale.html; and Abner and Jordan, Affidavit, July 21, 1862, KDLA.

“Shall I order from Cuba”?: Kentucky’s Transnational Neutrality

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Last week, Matt Hulbert explored the contradictions between the Jeffersonian, states’ rights rhetoric of the provisional Confederate government of Kentucky and its actual record of heavy-handed governance and suppression of civil liberties in the counties under its control in the winter of 1861-62. In his piece, we learned that provisional Confederate Governor George W. Johnson accused the Union party in Kentucky of polluting Kentucky’s declared neutrality (which lasted from May through September, 1861) from the outset, always intending to use neutrality to save the state from secession and deliver it to the Union cause. And they did. The problem was, Matt tells us, that the Confederates had precisely the same game plan going into the summer of 1861, but were politically outmaneuvered and, later, outvoted. The rebels lost the neutrality cold war and convened their rump secession convention when they lost their bid for the legitimate government in Frankfort.

I want to jump back to that cold war, to show just how the rebels used the cover of neutrality to prepare the state for secession and civil war. In the weeks after Fort Sumter, Magoffin rejected Lincoln’s request for troops and called a special session of the legislature to consider considering secession. As Magoffin’s famous exchange with Alabama Secession Commissioner Stephen F. Hale reveals, the governor was a conditional unionist, not an outright secessionist. Lincoln’s call for troops, though, proved the limit of Magoffin’s conditionalism, and like many Upper South politicians after Sumter, he seems to have been in favor of secession. To his credit, though, Magoffin genuinely respected the will of the electorate and knew that if Kentucky were not to devolve into a miniature civil war, it must secede legitimately – through a convention called by the legislature or direct legislative action. The closest he (and all the Kentucky secessionists) could get in the May 1861 special session was neutrality and the hope that the political winds would blow the majority of Kentuckians to their side as the year wore on.

With the special session yet to convene in Frankfort, Magoffin began to set the state’s military house in order for whatever decision – secession, Union, or neutrality – might result. As chief executive and commander in chief, Magofffin could take out loans and expend state funds for arms and ammunition that (theoretically) would be put to any purpose the people of Kentucky demanded. By working through fellow secessionists at home and across the Gulf South, though, Magoffin could covertly ensure that if the cold war between unionists and secessionists turned hot, his party would have the upper hand.

Magoffin tapped Luke Blackburn to coordinate buying the weapons. Blackburn, a postwar governor of Kentucky, is most famous for his unsuccessful 1864 plot to blight northern cities with yellow fever with infected blankets from Bermuda routed through Canada. Yet secret missions involving Britain, the Caribbean, and the Gulf South had been Blackburn’s forte since the very outset of the war.

Things began promisingly. On April 26, Blackburn wired that he had “purchased two pieces heavy Ordnance two thousand muskets six hundred Kegs powder” and asked for $30,000 to be transferred from a Kentucky bank to his credit. Blackburn’s preferred shipping company, commission merchants Hewitt, Norton, & Co., whose antebellum business had brokered southern cotton between New Orleans and Liverpool, put 1,500 guns costing approximately $14,000 on rail cars bound for Louisville on May 1, but warned that the frenzied buying from agents of other southern states meant that other supplies were drying up quickly. The firm had only secured $15 worth of percussion caps and could find no more powder. “Shall I order from Cuba”? asked Louisiana Secession Convention member M. O. H. Norton. “Blackburn cant be found.”

MOHN

KYR-0001-019-0023

No one knew where Luke Blackburn had gone, and no one could act on Magoffin’s behalf as the available supplies in the Gulf South dwindled. When Norton requested new instructions on May 2, Magoffin was more than happy to turn the operation over from Blackburn to Norton, with additional funding secured by Louisville pork merchant Benjamin J. Adams. Fellow Kentuckian and cotton broker in the Louisville-New Orleans firm of William T. Bartley & Co. Robert A. Johnson had notified Magoffin the day before in a private cable that “Luke Blackburn [was] intoxicated Since Saturday” and urged the Governor to “Withdraw powers authorize another Agent”.

LPB

KYR-0001-019-0029

Luke Blackburn was certainly neither the first nor the last Kentuckian to let the French Quarter get the better of him. But why had Magoffin trusted him for the mission?

Though a Kentucky native, Blackburn was living and practicing medicine in New Orleans in 1861. In fact, he had lived his adult life in the cotton kingdom along the banks of the Mississippi River. Blackburn had lived in Natchez, Mississippi, as a young man and had family ties to Helena, Arkansas, where his interests and kin overlapped with “The Family,” an early Arkansas Democratic political dynasty built on Kentucky connections to  provisional Confederate Governor George W. Johnson. Taken alongside Blackburn’s later experiments in biological warfare, the New Orleans arms deal raises important questions about how elite antebellum Kentuckians participated in a complex – yet surprisingly intimate and personal – international economy of slaves, cotton, liquid capital, and thoroughbred horses and how those economic connections encouraged them to address the question of secession. These kinship-political-business relationships are precisely the sorts of interconnections that the future social networking capability of  CWG-K is designed to document.

Little wonder, then, that when Magoffin needed arms for Kentucky, he tapped into the networks that funneled cotton, slaves, and capital up and down the river from Kentucky to New Orleans and out to the world. Magoffin’s fallback agents at Hewitt, Norton, & Co. fit precisely the same profile. Kentucky’s 1861 neutrality was not an inward facing, isolationist political posture. The way Magoffin managed arms procurement demonstrates that he understood the Civil War as a conflict over global agricultural and industrial markets, a war fought for the interests of the southern states in and on an international stage.

Patrick A. Lewis is project director of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.

Grabbing Guns and Breaking Banks: The Short, Ambitious “Reign” of Kentucky’s Provisional Confederate Government

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by Matthew C. Hulbert

On November 18, 1861, a three-day convention kicked off in Russellville, Kentucky. Attended by a few dozen of lawmakers, court officers, religious figures, and community leaders, the gathering was essentially an “emergency meeting” of pro-southern ideologues. To say they had much to talk about would be an understatement. Kentucky’s policy of armed neutrality and diplomatic mediation had recently crumbled. Following elections in August 1861—that virtually everyone in the state understood as a referendum on secession—the government in Frankfort veered toward Conservative Unionism and officially backed the Union war effort in September.

The Commonwealth’s governor and chief proponent of neutrality, Beriah Magoffin, wasn’t trusted to head up the recruitment of troops, so a military board was installed to serve as de facto commander(s) in chief. With these developments in mind, and claiming to speak on behalf of “the people of Kentucky,” convention leaders decried the “unfortunate condition of the state.” Moreover, they promised to devise “some means of preserving the independence of the Commonwealth.”

It is worth pausing now, for just a moment, to decode their terminology. By “unfortunate condition,” pro-Confederates at the convention referred specifically to a conspiracy theory in which two-faced politicians in Frankfort had deceived their constituents with false pledges to perpetual, armed neutrality. By way of Machiavellian deception, Unionist double operatives had managed to deliver Kentucky—against the collective will of its populace—directly into the hands of a tyrannical president and his cabinet of fanatical abolitionists. In turn, the aforementioned “independence of the Commonwealth” no longer referred to armed neutrality or a role as negotiator between warring nation-states. The will of the convention was to break away from the Union, one way or another.

For what it’s worth, the conspiracy theory outlined above was half correct when examined in the right light. On one hand, Conservative Unionists had come to a tentative neutrality agreement with Confederate sympathizers believing all the while that they could keep Kentucky in the Union proper. On the other hand, pro-Confederates had also entered into the neutrality pact with ulterior motives—their plan had always been to land Kentucky for the Confederacy. But the people of Kentucky handed the Conservative Unionist position a healthy majority in the 1861 elections and squashed any genuine possibility of a secession ordinance emanating from Frankfort. The idea that Lincoln had forced Kentucky to remain in the Union by brute force in 1861 is largely the stuff of post-war mythmaking; Kentuckians, many of whom supported the institution of slavery, simply believed their chattel safer when backed by Union authority than Confederate.

Regardless of these facts, the convention-goers declared Kentucky’s independence.

Therefore be it Ordained That we do hereby forever sever our connection with the Government of the United States, and in the name of the people we do hereby declare Kentucky to be a free and independent State, clothed with all power to fix her own destiny and to secure her own rights and liberties.

blog_provisionalAnd while the initial declaration said nothing of it, it’s safe to presume that everyone in the hall knew precisely which destiny would be fixed: Kentucky would only remain an “independent State” for as long as it took to officially join the Confederacy.

The newly-formed provisional government set up shop in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It consisted of a Provisional Governor (George W. Johnson), a twelve-man “Council” (that essentially functioned as an unelected general assembly in miniature), and a Secretary of State (who basically served as a gopher, delivering notes for Johnson to the Council and vice versa). Very early on in the business of the provisional government—which met nearly every day from convention’s end in November 1861 until January 1, 1862—Johnson released a message meant to justify the actions of the new government and outline his plan for Kentucky’s future. Below are excerpts from some of the more significant passages:

A profound and happy domestic peace, pervaded the whole country and rewarded their vigilance, until the abolition parties, growing with the growth of the North, determined to interfere with the domestic institutions of fifteen slave-holding States … Their avowed purposes were at war with the words of the Constitution, the decisions of the Supreme Court and the whole usage and history of the government; and when so infamous a party gained possession of the Federal Government, a profound dread of the consequences seized upon the whole nation.

Kentucky desired to mediate and remain neutral between the contending parties. It would have been more wise if she had foreseen the utter ruin which would and always must follow the destruction of Constitutional government, and if she also had drawn the sword with the Southern States for its preservation.

They [ambitious demagogues and fanatics who had seized the Government and outraged the Constitution] had deliberately plotted for years for power to destroy the Constitution with protected Southern institutions; and in the first intoxication of victory, it was species of madness in Kentucky to expect abolitionists to dash the cup untasted from their lips.

The North refused to grant Constitutional amendments for the protection of slave property; and thus the peace conference inaugurated by Virginia and Kentucky, closed its labors an utter failure.

The first and most important duty which is before us is to bring to the Confederate States all our resources for the successful prosecution of this war; and to do all we can to turn the minds of all parties to terms of honorable peace — To the first of these duties you have already turned your attention; and I trust the world will soon see the result of your labors in your organized battalions of brave and dauntless Kentuckians.

According to Johnson, the northern states, led by Lincoln and hordes of abolitionists, had intentionally undermined the Constitution in an effort to trigger bloodshed and the final destruction of southern slavery. Kentucky, for its part, had honorably tried to stop the conflict, but was deceived from outside (by northerners) and from within (by Unionist turncoats). Now, the only option for the preservation of true Republican ideals and individuals freedoms was to join the Confederacy and restore freedom to the Commonwealth by military force—the last resort of “brave and dauntless Kentuckians.”

Ironically, as the ledger book of the provisional government recently added to the CWG-K digital archive reveals, Kentucky’s pro-Confederate state government fell into the same trap that plagued its national counterpart: in order to preserve the individual freedoms and rights allegedly trampled by the federal government, George Johnson and company resorted, out of logistical necessity, to tactics that can at best be described as hypocritical and at worst as bald authoritarianism. This was especially true when it came to procuring money and firearms—essential commodities of any rebellion.

On the former subject, the Council resolved to seek a loan of $25,000 from the Southern Bank of Kentucky at Russellville—one of the few lending institutions not cut off by Union lines. E. M. Bruce of Nicholas County added an amendment to the resolution: “And if said Banks refuse to loan the twenty five Thousand dollars, then said Committee be and they are hereby authorize to co-operate with the authorities of the Confederate States and use such means as will secure the Twenty five thousand dollars desired.” Following a back-and-forth with J. W. Moore of Montgomery County, Bruce suggested another amendment and the resolution eventually read as follows:

Towit: Resolved by the Council of the Provisional Government of the State of Kentucky. That the Governor be and he is hereby authorized and requested to appoint Two or more Commissioners to negotiate a loan from the Southern Bank of Kentucky for the sum of Twenty Five Thousand Dollars for the use of this Government, and if said Bank refuse to loan the Twenty Five thousand Dollars then the Governor is further authorized to use such means as in his judgment may be necessary to obtain said Twenty five Thousand dollars of the said Southern Bank.

In short, the Council granted Governor Johnson the authority to take funds by whatever means necessary—force included, and strongly implied, actually—if the bank refused to loan money on the terms requested by the provisional government. The substitution was adopted and T. L. Burnett and Burch Musselman were dispatched to procure the loan. Later, the appointed commissioners returned with disappointing news. The Southern Bank had refused to loan the provisional government $25,000, largely because even though its directors harbored their own pro-southern sympathies, they fully understood the consequences of funding a rump government’s plot to commit armed treason. In place of the requested $25,000, the bank would only agree to $5,000 to the commissioners themselves, on the condition that the funds be viewed as personal loans—not official Council business. Not seeing any other option, Burnett and Musselman took the deal.

Outraged by the bank’s lack of confidence and the commissioners’ failure to follow directions, the Council refused to accept responsibility for the $5,000 loan and instructed Burnett and Musselman to return the funds. The Council further decreed that Governor Johnson must now step in and “obtain the $25.000 of the said Bank in accordance with the resolution appointing the Commissioners.” This put Johnson in a very uncomfortable spot because on one side, he needed money to fund his government. But on the other, he really didn’t have the ability to make real the authority granted to him on paper by the Council—that is, he had no real means of compelling the Southern Bank to hand over $25,000 in exchange for IOUs.

Part of the reason Johnson couldn’t strong-arm the bank is because the provisional government didn’t command an army; a major reason the provisional government didn’t command an army is because they had no recruits; and, they had very few recruits because they had no weapons. This led directly to the previously mentioned effort to procure firearms. Late in December, the Council passed a bill that called for all free, white, able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 45 who would not volunteer for active service in the Confederate military to produce any and all guns in their possession for inspection by an appointed official. Each county would have an inspector, the inspector would decide which guns were worthy of confiscation, and provide the then disarmed citizen of Confederate Kentucky a receipt to be repaid after the successful waging of the war.

Another stipulation of the inspection program was that anyone who failed to deliver a gun for inspection or who tried to “secrete his arms” would be arrested. The local constable or sheriff would take the offender into custody, but the bill also granted the gun inspector himself with the power to detain citizens. Anyone caught violating these rules would be fined $50 or jailed and, more startling, would be “disarmed as an enemy and his arms delivered to the Inspector.” Any able-bodied men who legitimately did not own a gun, but was worth at least $500 in taxable property had the option to take an oath before the inspector (attesting to his lack of firearm) but then had to pay the inspector $20, for which the citizen would receive a receipt. This $20 payment would be considered a debt against the Confederate government to be repaid at the (successful) conclusion of the war. In other words, more involuntary payments made under the guise of patriotic loans.

Johnson and his Council frequently lambasted Lincoln as a tyrant; they accused the federal government of holding the Union together at the expense—and against the will—of its actual inhabitants. Secessionists pointed to the results of the presidential election of 1860 as evidence: Lincoln had not won a single southern state, or even a single border western state. Nor had he managed to capture more than 40% of the popular vote. So how would he now claim to have a mandate from the people to preserve the Union at any cost?

In reality, this was probably the biggest case of the pot calling the kettle black in the history of Kentucky. Johnson was not elected by anything resembling a plurality of the people and neither were the councilmen who then presumed to govern them. The ascendance to power of Kentucky’s provisional Confederate government—in as much as the group ever actually ruled over anything—came in direct opposition to the collective will of the Commonwealth. The state-wide elections of 1861 make that perfectly and unavoidably clear.

More illuminating, though, is how the plans hatched by the provisional government to grab guns and break banks reflected the broader problems—and fundamental intentions—of the national Confederate government in microcosm. For years historians have pointed out that to run the rebellion effectively from Richmond, Jefferson Davis had to take near-dictatorial control of its management; or, put another way, that he had to sacrifice the supposed core cause for which the Confederacy fought for sake of actually winning the fight. The situation in Kentucky was the same in principle—because just like the case of Davis and the national Confederate government, it ultimately exposes yet again the extent to which states’ rights was never really the main catalyst or prize of the conflict.

Matthew C. Hulbert is an Assistant Editor of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.

SOURCES: Provisional Government of the State of Kentucky, Journal (specifically documents KYR-0004-033-0027, KYR-0004-033-0036, KYR-0004-033-0001, KYR-0004-033-0029).

The Caroline Chronicles: A Story of Race, Urban Slavery, and Infanticide in the Border South – PART VI

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The Caroline Chronicles:
A Story of Race, Urban Slavery, and Infanticide in the Border South

Part VI – “Poison, Infanticide, and Female Slave Resistance”

Matthew C. Hulbert

We’ve left it to you to determine—based on what documentation survives—whether or not Caroline’s case warranted a pardon from Governor Thomas E. Bramlette. (In case you missed, she did receive one. Bramlette’s decision not only stayed her execution, but exonerated her completely.) This week, we’ll look more closely at the death of Blanch Levi itself, both victim and manner, to understand where it fit within an older American tradition of gendered assumptions about female slaves and resistance. Doing so will help explain some of the cultural baggage that white prosecutors, jurors, and observers brought with them into an urban, Border South courtroom in 1862–1863.

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Despite the chronic fear of nineteenth century slaveholders that the morrow’s sunrise might bring with it a rebellion, large-scale slave uprisings didn’t happen often in the antebellum South. Logistically speaking, they were just too hard to pull off. And slaves—especially moving into the 1840s and 1850s—generally knew it.

After weeks or even months of planning, it took just one doubting, would-be rebel—looking to safeguard his or her own individual future by sabotaging those of the group—to inform and bring the conspiracy to a screeching halt. Even when slaves managed to kill their white owners or overseers and escape from immediate bondage, a sustained self-liberation movement (a la Haiti) simply wasn’t a viable option in the United States. Rebellious slaves needed somewhere permanent (and safe) to go. More important still, they had to reach that place, presumably on foot, poorly provisioned, and without the benefit of a well-traveled guide, before being hunted down by well-mounted, well-armed, and ill-intentioned white posses. The Stono Rebellion (South Carolina, 1739) and Nat Turner’s Revolt (Virginia, 1831) are illustrative of this fundamental difficulty. In both instances, insurgents initially managed to spill much blood, but in the end, were corralled and executed en masse.

Of course, this isn’t to say that slaves did not oppose their captivity with violence, only that such violence more frequently took the form of individual, localized acts of resistance. And, if we still subscribe the tenets of “resistance and accommodation” blueprinted by the late Eugene Genovese (and I think we do for the most part, regardless of how fashionable or not it might be to admit it), these acts of resistance were carried out with the basic understanding that they would not ultimately result in freedom. Instead, they would make life in the immediate more bearable. For enslaved women tasked with domestic responsibilities (in other words, for female house slaves as opposed to female field slaves) the nature of their work—as cooks, wet nurses, and nannies—put them in immediate proximity to the food consumed by their white masters and to the offspring of their white masters. As it related to resistance, this literal dual-proximity to matters of white subsistence and reproduction spawned a double-edged arrangement for enslaved women. Poisoning and infanticide gave some women the ability to resist by hitting white masters where it hurt most. On the other side of the coin, however, this relatively untapped potential also affixed to slave women a much broader stigma, or better still, an inherent “tradition of suspicion,” that had a very real ability to influence—or even poison, if you’ll pardon the pun—white perceptions of an individual like Caroline at trial.

For a detailed example of a slaveholder’s poison-related paranoia, we have to look no further than the prolific diarist Mary Chesnut, who recounted the gruesome story of a Dr. Keitt—brother to Lawrence Massillon Keitt, of Brooks-Sumner infamy.

Kate told a wonderful tale which I must set down. Laurence M. Keitt’s brother—a Dr. K that I knew full well was poisoned by his negroes—he was very indulgent. Spoiled them utterly—but was passionate & impulsive. Mr. Taylor, who married an acquaintance of ours, Miss Baker of Sumter, said to him, “Keitt, these negroes are poisoning you. Do not let them know you suspect them unless you take them up instantly, but I advise you to go away at once, say to say–& see if this extraordinary disease will not stop.” He promised. Just after Mr. Taylor left the house a woman brought him a cup of coffee & as he stirred it—it was so evident some white powder was at the bottom of the cup—that in a passion he dashed the cup in her face without drinking it. That night his throat was cut. Afterwards, by their confession it [was] provided they had been giving him calomel for months every morning in his coffee. Thre[e] were hung—but two suspected men escaped because a bother of his believed them honest and guiltless.

Other instances aren’t hard to find. According to historian Deborah Gray White, “as early as 1755 a Charleston slave woman was burned at the stake for poisoning her master.” In 1850, a family of Missourians headed by Wade Moseby was poisoned when a female slave laced their coffee with arsenic. And, two female slaves kept at Fort Riley were accused of poisoning an ordnance sergeant—though interrogation (that bordered on torture) later convinced authorities of the duo’s innocence. Despite their eventual exoneration, the idea was fixed: when unknown or unfamiliar ailments suddenly struck white slave-owners, enslaved cooks would be suspected from the outset.

Cases of infanticide are also fairly common, though the discussion is complicated by the fact that the best-known of them typically involved female slaves killing their own children as a way to not only rob white owners of future labor, but also to spare the children themselves a lifetime of emotional trauma, physical abuse, and involuntary servitude. The plot of Toni Morrison’s Beloved immediately comes to mind. The book is based on the real-life plight of Margaret Garner, a Kentucky slave who fled across the Ohio River in 1856 with several small children in tow. Garner was eventually tracked down by marshals and slave-catchers, but managed to kill one of her youngest daughters with a butcher’s knife before being subdued.

Even so, the record does contain numerous instances of female slaves killing or being accused of killing their adolescent charges. In 1769, White notes that “a special issue of the South Carolina Gazette carried the story of a slave woman who had poisoned her master’s infant daughter.” In 1848, a female slave cook belonging to Joseph Parks was “sent away at once” after being accused of intentionally poisoning a white child. In Tales from the Haunted South, Tiya Miles unpacks the story of Chloe, a female slave at the famed Myrtles Plantation in Louisiana. According to popular lore, Chloe baked oleander into a birthday cake—only meaning to make her master’s children sick—but used too much of the poison and killed multiple members of the family.

Chloe’s story is interesting because it fuses fears of poisoning and of infanticide into a single narrative—the worst case or “double-whammy” scenario for white slaveholders who had created a counter-intuitive system in which their own survival and that of their children frequently depended on the obedience of slaves who despised them. Further still, as Miles eventually sleuths, Chloe was a complete fabrication; an apocryphal ghost created by site owners for the purpose of drumming up commercial notoriety and attracting tourism. (The book, not coincidentally, analyzes the rise of ghost tourism in the South.) For our purposes, however, Chloe’s ahistorical roots are particularly enlightening because they allow us to read backward into the extent to which the aforementioned stigma or “tradition of suspicion” was entrenched in southern culture prior to emancipation: easily deep enough to have been passed down into the present without a hint of doubt from virtually anyone, save for Miles.

None of this is to say that Caroline did not intentionally poison Blanche Levi—nor is it to say that Caroline did not also attempt to poison Anne Levi and simply failed. Murder isn’t an exact science, after all. Unfortunately, given the [lack of] surviving documentation and real evidence, we will probably never know what actually happened on the front lawn of Willis Levi’s home that September morning. But we should at least now have a better understanding of what cultural baggage strode into that Louisville courtroom with Caroline, a female slave charged with infanticide by way of poison. Guilty or not, to say the proverbial deck was stacked against her would constitute a gross understatement.

Matthew C. Hulbert is an Assistant Editor of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.

SOURCES: Special thanks to Kristen Epps, Joshua Rothman, and Carole Emberton for suggesting examples of poisoning/infanticide. Woodward & Muhlenberg, The Privary Mary Chesnut, 181-182; Miles, Tales from the Haunted South; White, Ain’t I a Woman?, 79; W. H. Mackey to George, March 26, 1902, in Slaves and Slavery Collection, KHS; Christopher, “Captain Joseph Parks,” 16; “Daring Attempt to Murder,” Liberty Weekly Tribune, April 5, 1850; “Family Poisoned,” Liberty Weekly Tribune, May 3, 1850.