12

The Politics of Slavery

 

Opponents of slavery outside Kentucky noticed that the commonwealth had the strongest antislavery movement of any of the slave states, and many hoped that Kentucky would set an example and be the first slave state to abolish slavery. Most Kentuckians agreed with Henry Clay that slavery was evil, but they also agreed with him that it was necessary for public safety—it was an evil necessity. The watershed in the consideration of emancipation as a political issue came with the state constitutional convention in 1849, when antislavery advocates hoped the slaves might be freed. Henry Clay encouraged this when he published a public letter meant to influence the convention. He wrote that Kentucky enjoyed “high respect and honorable consideration” throughout the nation and the world but that none of Kentucky's past glory would equal the achievement of being “the Pioneer State” in abolishing slavery. But the voters elected a proslavery convention, and the members wrote one of the most proslavery state constitutions in the nation. The constitution used strong language to protect the rights of slave owners; it made the right to own slaves “inviolable,” declared that a majority in the General Assembly had no right to infringe on the “lives, liberty, and property of freemen,” and proclaimed that the right to own slaves was “higher than any constitutional sanction.” Debate continued, but, after the new constitution was ratified in 1850, Kentuckians seemed more committed to slavery than ever—nearly every candidate campaigning for election portrayed himself as a friend of slavery.¹

One of the strongest early opponents of slavery in Kentucky was Presbyterian minister David Rice, a man of courage and dignity who came to Kentucky from Virginia in 1783 with his wife and eleven children in response to a request by about three hundred Presbyterian settlers that he organize churches in their frontier communities. He was an effective organizer and a brave man, well ahead of his time on the slavery issue. He preached that slavery was evil and in 1792 published the important pamphlet Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy.² That year, he was elected as a delegate to the Danville convention that wrote the first state constitution, and on the floor he said: “We now have it in our power to adopt [slavery] as our national crime; or to bear a national testimony against it. I hope the latter will be our choice; that we shall wash our hands of this guilt; and not leave it in the power of a future legislature, ever more to stain our reputation or our conscience with it.”³

Kentucky appeared not well-suited geographically to the types of agriculture that required slaves, but slave owners came and established mostly small farms; by 1790, Kentucky had 11,830 slaves, 16.2 percent of the population of 73,077. In 1792, 22.8 percent of the white families owned slaves, and the average number per household was 4.32. At the 1792 constitutional convention, David Rice advocated the inclusion of emancipation and a prohibition on slave importation and argued that “a slave is a standing monument of the tyranny and inconsistency of human governments.” But Rice's words failed to sway his audience. Ninety percent of the convention delegates were slave owners, and the issue forced the only roll-call vote of the entire meeting. Rice's measure was defeated by a close twenty-six to sixteen vote.⁴ This initial debate over slavery is illustrative of the course the issue would take in Kentucky through the coming years. While a vocal minority would express opposition to African American slavery, the majority of Kentuckians would hold fast to an institution that benefited the minority of slave owners.

Necessary-evil theorists recognized the inherent contradictions between the promotion by the United States of the natural rights of life, liberty, and property for all citizens and the holding of a significant portion of that population in bondage. They agreed that slavery was evil, but they warned that immediate emancipation would lead to anarchy, threaten the lives and property of both blacks and whites, and result in the destruction of liberty for whites. As historian Harold Tallant wrote: “Accordingly, the Negro's right to liberty must be temporarily sacrificed in order to safeguard the Caucasian's right to self-preservation.”⁵ Slavery would have to die a slow death, and economic forces would lead to its end, not the pronouncements of either federal or state government.

By the 1820s and 1830s, in the South the necessary-evil argument was replaced by the theory best articulated by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Calhoun wrote that slavery was, not evil, but an institution that produced a positive good. It benefited, not only the slave owner, but also the slave, who was lifted out of savagery, made industrious, and introduced to Christianity. However, as Harold Tallant has effectively shown, Kentuckians held on to the necessary-evil argument throughout the antebellum period. This position “allowed Kentuckians to construct a bridge between conflicting sets of values: they could simultaneously embrace both freedom and slavery without experiencing the psychological discomfort of holding obviously contradictory values.”⁶ The problem with maintaining a view that both defended and attacked the institution was that it prevented a change in attitude regarding slavery that led to definitive action. Antislavery forces used an argument that proslavery forces could wield to their own benefit. While people wrestled with the morality of slavery, “they could not transcend their own beliefs on racial inferiority, their concern for the property rights of slave owners, their fear of offending their neighbors, and their loyalty both to the South and to the peace and harmony of the Union.”⁷ Instead, the status quo was upheld.

Despite Kentuckians' views on slavery, there were individuals and groups at work on the elimination of slavery from the state. The Kentucky Abolition Society was founded in 1808 and remained the most important antislavery organization in the state to the 1820s. The goals of this group included the constitutional abolition of slavery, education of free blacks, humane treatment of those currently in bondage, freedom for persons illegally enslaved, and termination of the slave trade. The society drew a large portion of its membership from among Baptists, but it never achieved a total membership of over two hundred. The local chapters held meetings, and there was a state meeting held annually. Through publications that espoused the immorality of slavery, the group hoped to convince slaveholders to change their views and force an end to the institution. The society was behind the publication of a monthly newspaper titled Abolition Intelligencer and Missionary Magazine. Published in Shelbyville beginning in May 1822, it was edited by John Finley Crowe. The paper was one of only two antislavery publications in the nation at that time. Crowe managed to produce twelve issues of the paper before threats and lack of subscriptions forced its closing.⁸

Fear of a growing free-black population kept many white Kentuckians from supporting antislavery causes. While the first Kentucky state constitution in 1792 allowed free blacks the right to vote, restrictions on black rights were imposed in the 1799 constitution. Free blacks were prohibited from bearing arms and voting. In 1808, the legislature passed a measure that prohibited them from coming to Kentucky. Those already in the state had to carry papers that certified their status^, as well as maintain employment and follow curfews enacted for the slave population.⁹ This fear of an insolent, idle, and threatening population led to the popularization of colonization as an answer to ending slavery. The American Colonization Society for the Free People of Color (ACS) was founded in Washington, DC, at Davis's Hotel on December 21, 1816. Henry Clay was instrumental in its establishment and counseled the national group not to take a specific stand on the issue of slavery. Clay believed slavery to be an evil and a hindrance to economic progress, but he was also a pragmatist. Kentucky, and even his own farm, could not function with the immediate abolition of slavery, and he believed that any attempts to make the freeing of slaves a key issue would lead to division and, ultimately, civil war. Instead, he was hopeful that his own state would turn to gradual emancipation through a change in the constitution.¹⁰

Members of the ACS attempted to allay the fears of slaveholders by asserting that the society intended, not to interfere with slave property, but to provide a means to remove free blacks from the United States to distant colonies. Slaveholders who joined the group viewed the organization as a means to protect the ideals of classical republicanism. Slaves, dependents by virtue of their status, did not pose the threat to republican equality that legally free blacks did. Because they viewed freedmen as “unfit for freedom,” many white Americans on both sides of the slavery issue saw colonization as a means to uphold social and racial standards. However, by the late 1820s, abolitionists of both races had rejected the idea of pairing freedom and colonization; yet African Americans who advocated colonization believed that it was the only means of guaranteeing freedom and community autonomy free of white influence, and whites saw colonization as the only way to convince slaveholders to free their slaves.¹¹

The ACS moved quickly after its founding to enlist federal support. In 1819, Charles Fenton Mercer, a representative from Virginia, introduced the Slave Trade Act, designed to allow the federal government to transport captured slaves who were illegally imported from Africa after the 1808 ban on the international slave trade. The society worked to convince the Monroe administration that the act permitted the president to purchase land in Africa for the deported slaves. Lieutenant Robert Stockton of the U.S. Navy, in conjunction with Dr. Eli Ayres of the ACS, went to West Africa, where, using a pistol to the head as a powerful negotiation tool, he brokered the purchase of a private colony for the ACS from the African king Peter on December 11, 1821. President Monroe channeled funds to the society to prepare the colony of Liberia for returning the Africans.¹²

An affiliate of the ACS, the Kentucky Colonization Society (KCS), was formed on January 14, 1829. Kentucky had thirty-one chapters by 1832, behind only Virginia with thirty-four and Ohio with thirty-three. Society membership fell into three general groups: those in favor of slavery, those strongly opposed to slavery, and those who remained neutral on the subject. Because of the society's early neutral stance on the issue, slaveholders like Robert Wickliffe of Lexington joined the society. Cassius M. Clay compared Wickliffe to George McDuffie of South Carolina because both expressed extreme proslavery opinions. Wickliffe supported the efforts of the society to collect funds to purchase land in Liberia and remove free blacks from Kentucky. Encouraged by Henry Clay, the General Assembly expressed approval of colonization in 1827, 1828, and 1832. The idea was very popular in Kentucky in the 1830s and 1840s; however, the movement itself never became a highly organized, unified political machine. The problem lay in the broad appeal of the movement. By avoiding any direct platform on the issue of slavery, the group allowed individual members to decide what the goals of the organization should be. In Kentucky, colonization supporters agreed that African Americans had to be controlled by slavery or removed from the state—colonization supporters shared a hatred and fear of free blacks. Those who defended slavery sought to colonize free blacks in Africa because it would remove them from Kentucky as examples of freedom, prevent them from aiding fugitive slaves in escaping, and prohibit them from encouraging insurrections. Opponents of slavery, on the other hand, sought to rid Kentucky of free blacks because removing them would dispel the fear that emancipation would lead to race war and open the door for emancipation. Separationists supported any means of separating all African Americans from Kentucky, and colonization worked toward that goal. But the amorphous nature of the society necessitated the avoidance of taking a stand on the issue of slavery because one or more of the groups involved would be alienated.¹³

Robert Wickliffe experienced such alienation in the early 1830s. Wickliffe, who had amassed a large fortune in land and slaves through his law practice, served as the first president of the KCS. His involvement stemmed from the idea that the organization did not intend to interfere with the slaveholders' right to own property in slaves. But there were other members who held a different opinion. Chief among them was Robert J. Breckinridge. Breckinridge, a slave-owning lawyer who had also served in the Kentucky General Assembly from 1825 to 1830, was opposed to slavery and believed that colonization was a means to bring its end in Kentucky. Antislavery members of the KCS began to fill positions of power within the organization in 1830 and began to influence the position of the society.¹⁴ Wickliffe, in an address to the Lexington female auxiliary of the KCS in 1830, told those assembled that the society sought only to remove free blacks from the state and had no intentions of interfering with the slave owners' right to property. After Wickliffe concluded, Robert Breckinridge stood and said that he did not agree with Wickliffe's assessment of the focus of the society. As Wickliffe later wrote, Breckinridge said that, if the society did not work for emancipation, he would, “not only wash his hands of it, but denounce it.”¹⁵ Sensing that the majority of the members supported Breckinridge's stated goals, Wickliffe left the KCS and never returned.

The KCS collected enough funds to finance the removal of a group of one hundred freedmen in 1833. The group, which included seven slaves manumitted by Robert Wickliffe's wife Mary, left Louisville on March 22 to travel to New Orleans, where the group boarded the ship Ajax for Liberia on April 20. After a difficult voyage and several on-board deaths from cholera, the group arrived and sent several early positive reports on farming and living conditions. Despite the success of the first group, the KCS had little money left to fund any more trips to Liberia and was unable to send any immigrants from 1834 to 1839, and it sent only twelve in 1840. By 1845, the organization made an effort to raise five thousand dollars to purchase land in Liberia specifically for Kentucky settlers. The sum was gathered in less than a year and used to purchase forty square miles on the north bank of the St. Paul River fifteen miles from Monrovia. The area was given the name Kentucky in Liberia and the capital Clay Ashland in honor of Henry Clay. That same year, a ship was chartered to carry roughly two hundred emigrants to Africa, but only thirty-five from Kentucky were on board when it left in January 1846, and two men refused to disembark once the ship landed in Liberia.¹⁶

The expense of the charter and negative reports from Liberia of cholera and other diseases and of economic difficulties hindered the operations of the KCS in the following years. Actions taken by the Kentucky legislature attempted to bolster the work of the KCS, starting with the March 24, 1851, act that required all freed slaves to leave the state and prohibited freedmen from moving into Kentucky from other states. The primary motive of the law was to prevent any increase in the number of free blacks who lived in Kentucky. In 1856, the legislature authorized a yearly sum of five thousand dollars in aid for the group, but the only other large group of manumitted slaves to leave the state consisted of forty-two who left in May 1857. After sending an estimated total of 661 men, women, and children to Africa, the group went out of existence in 1859.¹⁷ However, even as late as 1864, Kentuckians continued to express an interest in the concept. Marcellus Mundy, a colonel in the Twenty-third Kentucky Infantry, wrote from a hotel in Louisville to Abraham Lincoln: “Will the Government undertake to Colonize the negroes of Kentucky out of the state, if the people of Kentucky will emancipate them?…I can safely say that the only drawback to successful emancipation, is a disinclination to have the negro population freed and kept among us.”¹⁸ But colonization never gained the necessary momentum to prove a viable force in ending slavery in the state. While the idea of removing the “threat” of a free black population appealed to many segments of the population, slaveholding and nonslaveholding, the organization was unable to acquire the funds to finance more than a few trips or attract African American volunteers to move to distant lands.

The greatest success for antislavery forces in Kentucky came in 1833 with the enactment of the Nonimportation Act, officially entitled “An Act to Amend the Law Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves into this State.” This law offered something for both sides of the slavery issue, and similar laws were in effect in eleven of the fifteen slave states. Persons with slaves who immigrated to the state had to swear, within sixty days of their arrival, that they intended to become citizens of the state and that they did not intend to sell any slaves. The law prohibited the importation of slaves for sale within the state. The law strengthened an earlier nonimportation act passed in 1815 that had few enforcement measures and numerous loopholes. The 1833 measure increased the penalties for buying and selling imported slaves and also clarified the duties of officials in enforcement of the law. The provision of the law that generated opposition following its passage was the prohibition on hiring out-of-state slaves for periods longer than one year and the restrictions placed on citizens of Kentucky purchasing slaves in another state and transporting them to Kentucky for their own use.¹⁹ The passage and retention of this state law was the focus of antislavery forces in the state throughout the 1820s and into the late 1840s.

Antislavery men argued that nonimportation provided hope that slave numbers would decrease and the institution would waste away. This stance on the slavery issue was a hallmark of the conservative nature of the antislavery forces in Kentucky. The policies pursued by antislavery conservatives had the goal of gradual change, not the radical overnight upsetting of the status quo that other antislavery forces supported. Harold Tallant attributes this to the belief that blacks were “a permanently hostile race that had to be controlled” and the idea that “true progress came only through a gradual and orderly process, in which small changes over a period of years led to a fundamental transformation in society.”²⁰ By supporting nonimportation in conjunction with colonization and gradual emancipation, antislavery advocates envisioned a controlled, orderly end to slavery through the proportionate increase of the white population. And the antislavery men found little opposition prior to 1840 to their position on nonimportation.²¹

The slave trade was one of the cruelest aspects of slavery. Kentucky served as a thoroughfare for slaves sold from the upper South to the growing cotton and sugar plantations of the Southwest in the nineteenth century. Exports of slaves to Mississippi occurred as early as 1800, but numbers increased following the War of 1812. There were reports of slave coffles traveling through Kentucky beginning in 1816. Reverend James H. Dickey described one group he met on the road near Paris in Bourbon County in 1822. Forty men were joined by a

chain perhaps forty feet long, the size of a fifth-horse chain,…stretched between the two ranks, to which short chains were joined which connected with the handcuffs. Behind them were, I suppose, about thirty women, in double rank, the couples tied hand to hand. A solemn sadness sat on every countenance, and the dismal silence of this march of despair was interrupted only by the sound of two violins; yes, as if to add insult to injury, the foremost couple were furnished with a violin a piece; the second couple were ornamented with cockades; while near the center waved the republican flag, carried by a hand literally in chains.²²

As the cotton fields of the Southwest opened, industries in the Bluegrass region slumped. Slaves became a more valuable commodity to the South, and, during the summer months, interstate slave traders traveled throughout the upper South purchasing slaves at courthouse auctions, at private farms, or from other traders. Traders housed the purchased slaves in slave pens or jails until they were shipped in large groups further south. Lewis C. Robards was the best-known slave trader in Kentucky prior to 1850. Robards purchased a theater in Lexington that he then leased as a slave jail. The upstairs of the building had furnished rooms that housed mulatto women to be sold for prostitution in New Orleans. Slaves to be quickly sold found basic accommodations on the first floor. Robards followed the common practice among slave traders to improve their profits—he hid the illnesses and disabilities of the men and women he was selling. The result was that many slave owners found themselves with “property” that could not work or died soon after the sale.²³

Public sales in Lexington were held on Cheapside adjacent to the courthouse and were displays of degradation of buyer and slave. Sales drew crowds, not just buyers. The 1843 sale of the slave Eliza attracted approximately two thousand people. Eliza was the daughter of a white master and his slave woman, who had served the family as a house servant. Eliza was beautiful, and she had manners and culture. The family placed Eliza for sale to pay debts, and she had waited in the Lexington slave jail for a week before appearing on the auction block. At the auction, two men emerged as the main bidders. One was described as a “Frenchman” from New Orleans looking to purchase slave women for prostitution; the other was Calvin Fairbank, a Methodist minister born in 1816 in New York. He graduated from Oberlin College and held that slavery was a sin that should be abolished. He had discovered Eliza in the Lexington jail and had gone to Cincinnati to collect funds to prevent her sale to New Orleans. He returned to Lexington with $2,275 in his pocket and authorization to draw up to $25,000 from the account of three white men. The auctioneer, sensing the opportunity to raise the purchase price, ripped Eliza's dress open to expose her neck and bare breast and lifted her skirt to show her legs. A wave of disgust and shame swept over the crowd, but bidding continued. Fairbank's winning bid was $1,485. When asked by a member of the crowd what he intended to do with her, Fairbank announced: “Free her, sir.” The crowd, led by slavery advocate Robert Wickliffe, roared its approval. Wickliffe had a strong sense of southern honor, and he was paternalistic as a slave owner. He attempted to avoid separating the families of his slaves, and he considered the export of Kentucky slaves into the Deep South “abominable.” He drove Eliza and Fairbank to a friend's house in his carriage, and there Eliza's free papers were signed.²⁴

The happy ending of Eliza's sale was not, however, the norm. In a similar situation, William Pratt, a Baptist minister, was asked by a slave woman named Nancy Lee to save her two daughters from the auction block in 1860. The girls' father had purchased their freedom, but Lee claimed that “Negro traders” had destroyed the papers and placed the girls for sale on Cheapside to pay their father's debts. Pratt attended the sale and began bidding on the nineteen-year-old. As the price went higher, he attempted to explain to the crowd the girl's situation. But the crowd was unmoved. She was sold to a slave-trading firm in Lexington for the sum of $1,700. Her seventeen-year-old sister was sold to a Covington dealer for $1,600.²⁵ Some Kentuckians expressed opposition to public slave auctions, as shown in an article in the Western Luminary in 1831: “Our streets have lately exhibited scenes which we consider disgraceful, and altogether inconsistent with our character as a civilized and christian community. We allude to the barbarities connected with the merciless traffic in human flesh, which is continually carried on, by beings in human shape, in our midst.”²⁶ However, most Kentuckians accepted the domestic slave trade as commonplace in a slave-labor society. Marion B. Lucas has estimated that approximately seventy-seven thousand slaves were exported from Kentucky to the Lower South from 1830 to 1860.²⁷

Advocates of the Nonimportation Act of 1833 hoped to put an end to some of these darker episodes, and the law appealed to slaveholders as well as antislavery proponents. Slaveholders found the law agreeable to the extent that many knew that slaves sold to the traders were often incorrigible or difficult to manage and the law prohibited their being “dumped” in Kentucky. In addition, the value of those slaves already in the state would increase, which provided an economic appeal to slaveholders who could rent slaves at higher rates and, when they decided to sell slaves within the state, sell at higher prices. Slaveholders in the established regions of the state benefited, but those living in the growing Green River region were forced to pay higher prices for slaves within Kentucky when those for sale in neighboring Tennessee were cheaper. Finally, proslavery supporters hoped that the Nonimportation Act would be a stopgap against further antislavery measures. As the antislavery movement grew in the North and within the state, slaveholders believed that nonimportation was “a measure that might placate antislavery forces and defuse the slavery issue.” Those opposed to slavery fought to avoid the repeal of the 1833 law, which faced such a threat in each legislative session in the 1830s and 1840s. Antislavery conservatives lobbied for colonization and gradual emancipation, and they believed that the gradual increase in the white population versus the black population in conjunction with colonization would lead the majority of Kentuckians to eventually support stronger action directed against slavery. But their orderly, restrained approach to change weakened their overall cause because it kept them from directly challenging the standards of slaveholder society.²⁸

In the 1840s, antislavery sentiment in the state grew, and the champion of the cause was Cassius Marcellus Clay. Clay, born in Madison County in 1810, was the son of the wealthy slaveholder and Kentucky politician Green Clay. His development of antislavery views came from a combination of reflecting on the crueler aspects of slavery he witnessed growing up and the influence of his time at Yale, where he heard abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison speak. Clay recounted that as a boy he and his sister Eliza had grown fond of a mulatto slave, Mary. Green Clay sent Mary to work at one of the overseers' homes, where she was threatened with assault by the drunken man. Mary took up a butcher knife and killed the overseer in self-defense. She appeared on the grounds of White Hall, the Clay residence, screaming, covered in blood, and still holding the knife. Although she was acquitted at trial, the general practice was to send such a slave to the Deep South. Clay vividly remembered:

Never shall I forget—and through all these years it rests upon the memory as the stamp upon a bright coin—the scene, when Mary was tied by the wrists and sent from home and friends, and the loved features of her native land—the home of her infancy and girlish days—into Southern banishment forever; and yet held guiltless by a jury of, not her “peers,” but her oppressors! Never shall I forget those two faces—of my brother and Mary—the oppressor and the oppressed, rigid with equal agony! She cast an imploring look at me, as if in appeal; but meekly went, without a word, as “a sheep to the slaughter.”²⁹

This anecdote demonstrates the moral repugnance that Clay felt, but his initial interest in antislavery stemmed from the economics of slavery and not from moral or religious concerns. Clay was elected state representative in 1835, and he served three terms in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Whig sympathies led to his alignment with his cousin Henry Clay's plan for national economic growth and state support of commercial development within Kentucky. Cassius Clay asserted that Kentucky had the best of the South, valuable farmland, and the North, minerals in the mountains and waterpower. He proposed the development of eastern Kentucky as a world-class manufacturing center, a transformation that would make the region an “American Switzerland.” Clay, therefore, viewed slavery as a hindrance to economic growth—slaves took money from white workers looking for jobs and opportunity. The opposition to commercial growth that Clay witnessed in the state legislature further strengthened his views as those most opposed were also the strongest advocates for slavery. His emphasis on economics set him apart from other antislavery conservatives, who feared that extreme antislavery measures would upset the social hierarchy and racial harmony. Clay's more proactive stance set aside worries about order, and he also parted ways with other conservatives on the issue of colonization. While he believed that the races would be better off separated, he argued that colonization was not feasible in the early 1840s. If the state adopted gradual emancipation, then slaveholders would have adequate time to remove their slave property to other areas where slavery remained legal, or owners could sell their property without fear of losing their monetary investment. As this took place, the black population of the state would be removed without the need of a state-enforced removal.³⁰

Clay approved voluntary colonization, but what made him unique was that he accepted the presence of a free black population in Kentucky, which, he believed, should not pose a hindrance to the prospect of gradual emancipation. And Clay argued that African Americans living in the state deserved the same political and natural rights as white citizens. These views and Clay's defense of northern abolitionists led proslavery Kentuckians to view him as a threat. Yet his desire to build an antislavery coalition meant that he would exclude no group that had the same goal. He worked in the 1840s to unite the southern emancipationists and northern abolitionists. The drawback to his approach was that, in order to maintain such a coalition, he avoided specific policies on how to accomplish emancipation in the state. He encountered the same trap as that of the early members of the colonization movement—in order to maintain a diverse membership in hopes of acquiring a stated goal, whether colonization or emancipation, men like Clay had to avoid specific policy positions.³¹

Clay added to his “dangerous” reputation when he began publication of his antislavery newspaper, True American, in Lexington, the heart of the Kentucky slave aristocracy. Even before the publication of the first issue in June 1845, he received death threats. Throughout the summer months as he battled typhoid fever, he continued to write editorials that enraged much of the local proslavery population, and in August one particularly provocative editorial moved local officials to call for meetings on the situation. He warned the slaveholders of Kentucky that a vengeful slave revolt awaited them if they continued their ways. Lexington leaders held meetings that drew old enemies of Clay's, citizens fearful of civil unrest in the city, and those who feared Clay's influence on white nonslaveholders. There was also a fear that Clay's work would incite the slaves of Kentucky. On August 18, a committee went to the newspaper office, dismantled the press, and shipped the pieces to Cincinnati. In October, Clay resumed publishing the True American with Lexington given as the editorial headquarters and dateline for the paper, but the actual printing took place in Cincinnati. In-state subscriptions numbered around three hundred, with seventeen hundred out-of-state subscribers. Clay was never able to get the citizens of Kentucky to rally behind his right to freedom of the press, but his actions won him accolades in the North among abolitionists. He continued the publication of True American until May 1846, but the paper and Clay himself only hindered the cause of emancipation within Kentucky as he became a symbol of the evils of the antislavery movement.³²

Other antislavery advocates were at work within the state throughout the period. One of the more famous incidents involved Delia Webster and Calvin Fairbank. Delia Webster was born in Vergennes, Vermont, on December 17, 1817. She was trained as a teacher and came to Lexington in 1843 with several friends and soon opened the Lexington Female Academy. She boarded in a home on West Second Street in Lexington where Calvin Fairbank also resided. During meals, they discussed emancipation and made plans to help a slave family escape. On September 28, 1844, Fair-bank rented a hack and horses with driver and proceeded to pick up Webster at 7:00 P.M. under the ruse that the two were eloping. After dark, the couple gathered the slave Lewis Hayden, his wife, Harriet, and their ten-year-old son and planned to take them from Lexington to Ohio. The group arrived in Washington, Kentucky, at 4:00 A.M. and waited until after sunset to cross the Ohio River to Ripley, where the family was handed over to John Rankin. Fairbank and Webster headed back to Lexington and were arrested late September 30 at Millersburg, northeast of Lexington. The pair was put in the Megowan's slave jail, where Fairbank made an attempt to escape. He was captured and placed in irons in the basement of the jail. An incriminating letter found in his possession helped lead to an indictment in the Fayette County Court. Delia Webster's trial began on December 17, 1844, and lasted five days. She proclaimed her innocence, but a proslavery jury found her guilty and sentenced her to two years in the state penitentiary. Fairbank, who was tried separately, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years for each slave he helped escape. Webster was taken to the penitentiary and served six months before receiving a pardon from Governor William Owsley despite objections from many Kentucky citizens. The Hayden family made it safely to Canada, where Lewis became a prominent black abolitionist. The family later moved to Massachusetts and joined the Boston Vigilance Committee. Fairbank served twelve years of his fifteen-year sentence and was pardoned in 1864.³³

The late 1840s were what Harold Tallant has called a “crossroads for the slavery controversy in Kentucky.” In August 1848, Kentuckians approved the calling of a constitutional convention. Issues such as the rising state debt and unrestrained spending by the legislature, as well as the gerrymandering of districts and the perceived undemocratic awarding of public offices, were key to the popularity of calling for a convention, but very quickly slavery became the most important issue. Political activists in some areas aligned themselves in proslavery and antislavery factions despite party affiliations. As groups vied for votes as delegates to the convention, the emancipationists in the state received an endorsement from a key figure. Henry Clay released a public letter in February 1849 that supported the idea of Kentucky adopting a gradual form of emancipation in conjunction with colonization. His view was not anything new to Kentucky emancipationists, but his very public pronouncement carried a great deal of weight. Louisville, where the only state antislavery newspaper, the Louisville Examiner, was published, became the center of antislavery political organization in late spring 1849, and the repeal of the Nonimportation Act of 1833 by the General Assembly in February of that year seemed to add momentum to the antislavery cause. Many Kentuckians were outraged at the repeal of the law and began to look at emancipationist candidates for the constitutional convention as a means to ensure that the policy of nonimportation was protected by the new constitution. However, antislavery supporters found it difficult to unite despite their common goal. They convened a meeting in April 1849 in Frankfort that became known as the Frankfort Convention. Their goal was to organize a statewide political organization, but the internal divisions of the group soon became evident. Some supporters wanted to enter the constitutional convention with a definite plan of emancipation drawn up and placed in the constitution, while others wanted to include specifically only nonimportation but to leave open the means of enacting emancipation in the new constitution.³⁴

Advocates of maintaining slavery acted quickly to form their own political organization. The Friends of Constitution Reform met in February 1849 with a platform that emphasized a new constitution that would make government more responsive to citizens and fiscally responsible. The abandonment of slavery or change of it within the state, however, was not something that citizens wanted, according to proslavery men. Although the group wanted to put an emphasis on issues other than slavery, the continuance of the institution was its most important goal.

As candidates for the convention began to canvass their districts for votes, the debate over the issue of slavery became intense. Antislavery men faced difficulty in many areas as anxieties over slave rebellions mounted in the months after the mass escape of approximately seventy-five slaves from the heart of the Bluegrass in August 1848. Supporters of slavery argued that talk of emancipation only served to ignite the flames of rebellion in the hearts of Kentucky's slave population. Evidence of such tensions erupted at campaign debates in different areas of the state. Although not a candidate for the convention, Cassius Clay was a popular speaker on the issue of emancipation. He debated the proslavery candidate Squire Turner at Foxtown on the Lexington-Richmond turnpike in Madison County on June 15, 1849. His remarks about Turner offended Turner's son Cyrus, who met Clay at the speaker's stand and called him a liar. Clay pulled out his bowie knife but was quickly surrounded. The knife was knocked from his hand, and he was hit in the head with a club and stabbed in the right lung. True to his reputation, Clay kept fighting and managed to wrest control of the knife, cutting several fingers to the bone. He then took the knife and stabbed Cyrus Turner in the abdomen up to the hilt before losing consciousness. Thomas Turner, Cyrus's brother, fired a pistol at Clay's head, but it misfired. The two seriously wounded men were moved to a nearby house, where Cyrus Turner died a few hours later; Clay survived, to the surprise of everyone.³⁵

Campaigning continued throughout the summer months despite a return of cholera to the region that emptied many urban areas and clearly reduced the eventual voter turnout. The records of the election are not complete, which makes it difficult to establish an exact count, but the estimate is that the emancipationists garnered 9.7 percent of the total vote. While only two emancipationist candidates were elected to the convention, the tally of 14,801 votes for emancipationists indicates an increase in emancipationist sentiment. However, antislavery supporters viewed their efforts as a failure because they could not control the constitutional convention and put in place the policy of emancipation. Many contemporaries believed that the inability of antislavery forces to agree on a practical plan for emancipating Kentucky slaves led to their defeat. When the convention opened on October 1, 1849, about one-third of the delegates were firmly proslavery, and, except for the two emancipationists, the remaining delegates seemed to be in favor of strengthening the institution because of the gains made by antislavery advocates over the past years.³⁶

The issue of slavery dominated throughout the twelve-week convention, and disagreements over how to deal with it continued despite the number of proslavery delegates. The debate centered on how to strengthen slavery in the new constitution without alienating citizens of the state. Many asserted that, in order to protect slavery from future emancipation schemes, radical steps must be taken to protect owners' slave property. But others reminded the assembly that the prior constitution had sufficiently protected slavery and that the voters had elected them to maintain the status quo, not to change it. By early December, the convention agreed to keep most of the slave clause from the 1799 constitution but added that the General Assembly must pay for the removal of any slaves freed through a legislative compensated-emancipation program. This action, in effect, ended any hopes of emancipation by making the process an expense too great for the state to bear.³⁷

The third constitution of Kentucky was approved in a May 1850 referendum vote with a majority of 51,351 votes among the 91,955 cast. The new constitution prohibited the immigration of free blacks into Kentucky in addition to maintaining support for slavery. The recognition of the rights of owners to their property in slaves, including their increase, made clear to most Kentuckians that the institution of slavery was firmly entrenched within the state. Harold Tallant wrote: “Under these circumstances, slavery—an institution perhaps wrong in the abstract—served the useful function of controlling the Negro race and providing sustenance to blacks and whites alike.”³⁸ The ratification of the new constitution also brought a change in the politics of Kentucky. Prior to 1850, open debate and a general acceptance of the views espoused by emancipationists like Henry Clay existed, but, following the 1849 convention vote, serious discussion of emancipation was all but extinguished. Instead, Democratic and Whig politicians began to use the issue of the protection and maintenance of slavery as a means to gain votes. Nevertheless, outside the mainstream, antislavery reformers continued to advocate constitutional emancipation and nonimportation; Kentucky society remained tolerant of their activity.³⁹

In 1853, Cassius Clay offered land in southern Madison County to the Reverend John G. Fee if he would accept the position of pastor of an anti-slavery congregation that supported Clay. The two had formed an acquaintance in the late 1840s, and they had worked in 1849 to elect antislavery men to the constitutional convention. Fee was born in Bracken County in 1816 to a family of slaveholders. He attended Augusta College near Augusta, Kentucky, and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and then went to Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati in 1842. It was during his time at Lane that Fee adopted his abolitionist views. In 1846, he began working for the American Missionary Association (AMA), headquartered in New York. The group had several noted abolitionists, and much of its work focused on antislavery activities. Fee pastored a congregation in Bracken County and organized the AMA work in Kentucky. He hired men to travel throughout Kentucky handing out antislavery and religious tracts, and the response in eastern Kentucky was positive. These operations laid the groundwork for future AMA schools and churches, but Cassius Clay viewed them as an opportunity to build a political antislavery base. When the pastor of the congregation in Madison County was removed for misconduct, Fee agreed to take the post. Clay gave Fee ten acres that Fee named Berea for the biblical community of believers who were commended in Acts 17:10-11 for studying the scriptures daily. Fee hoped that Berea would become an outpost for the antislavery movement, and the group encouraged northern abolitionists to move to the area.⁴⁰

Fee's beliefs and actions did not sit well with the other residents of Madison and surrounding counties. He had long been not only antislavery but also anticaste. He did not support the colonization of free blacks, and he refused to believe that whites and blacks were two separate races. His strong commitment to God's law over man's led to many clashes with locals. Fee handed out Bibles to slaves, he supported interracial marriages, and the college at Berea was open to whites and blacks alike. As a result, he faced many physical threats to his life. In 1855, a Garrard County mob prevented his participation in a debate on colonization, and, in 1857, he was forcibly removed from a Rockcastle County home when he was preaching and taken beyond the county line. Several schools sponsored by his followers were burned, and on January 16, 1858, in northern Madison County Fee and Robert Jones, a fellow AMA worker, were taken by a group of thirty men to the Kentucky River, where the group threatened to drown the two if they would not promise to leave and never return. At their refusal to comply, the group made Jones strip and whipped him severely before placing the two men on horseback and sending them toward Berea with the warning never to return.⁴¹ Fee's stand against such opposition garnered praise from anti-slavery advocates in the North. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote: “Fee is fighting the battle in Kentucky which we should fight in every slave territory. He is fighting it successfully—necessities, afflictions, distress, only make him stronger.”⁴²

But the forces against the antislavery work in Kentucky grew more violent and more committed. Fee traveled to the North for fund-raising in the fall of 1859. In October, John Brown executed his ill-fated raid at Harpers Ferry that set off a new round of fears throughout the slaveholding South. Emotions were already inflamed when, in the Brooklyn church of Henry Ward Beecher, Fee remarked: “We want more John Browns, not in manner of action, but in spirit of consecration; not to go with carnal weapons, but with spiritual; men who, with Bibles in their hands, and tears in their eyes, will beseech man to be reconciled to God. Give us such men, and we may yet save the South.”⁴³ Newspapers in Kentucky printed reports of Fee's message that announced that he had called for more John Browns in Kentucky. In addition, rumors spread that the Northerners moving to Berea had trunks filled with guns for a slave revolt. Threats poured in to the Berea community, and, on December 23, sixty men approached the Bereans and gave them ten days to leave the state. After a failed appeal for protection from Governor Beriah Magoffin, more than thirty of the group left for either Cincinnati or Bracken County on December 29. Fee did not return to Kentucky until April 1864, and he returned to emphasize education for African Americans.⁴⁴

Opposition to antislavery advocates was not centered in the Bluegrass region. William Shreve Bailey, a trained mechanic turned newspaper editor in Newport, began writing antislavery articles for the Newport News with a particular appeal to the working men of Newport to support the end of slavery for their own benefit. He purchased the paper for $650 and began publishing his own paper, the Free South, in March 1850. The antislavery paper suffered financially as proslavery businesses boycotted advertising. The building was burned in 1851, he faced multiple libel suits, and, when he resisted a caning attempt, the attacker sued him. But Bailey's real problems began in 1859 after John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid. On October 28, a crowd attacked the office of the paper, moved the presses into the street, and threw the type into the Ohio River. The next night more items were stolen, and Bailey was warned to leave the state. He refused, sued the perpetrators for property damage, reopened, and continued printing the paper until 1865. He was later arrested for “incendiary writings,” and northern abolitionists posted his bail and funded a trip to England, where Bailey collected funds for antislavery work. He returned to Kentucky after the Civil War, and all charges were dropped.⁴⁵

In the end, the Civil War decided the issue of slavery for Kentuckians. After the beginning of the war, many slaves abandoned their masters and fled to union encampments, where they worked as cooks and personal servants. Once slaves learned that Federal troops employed runaway slaves and local impressments of black laborers began, the numbers of slaves entering Union camps increased throughout 1862 and 1863. Soon whole families made the escape to freedom. Slaves would disappear overnight while owners were in church services, and they would often leave with valuable items such as livestock. With the rapid disappearance of black labor, Kentucky agriculture suffered. Tobacco and wheat production dropped over 50 percent; barley was down 15 percent, and hemp production had fallen off by 80 percent. The wealth that so many whites had acquired in slave property also dropped as the federal government estimated that 71 percent of the slave population was free by March 1865. Slave property assessed at $107,494,527 in 1860 was worth only $7,224,851 in 1865.⁴⁶

Even those slaves who remained with their masters during the war years expressed new attitudes. In New Castle in the winter of 1861, between forty and sixty slaves who had completed a day of hog killing marched through the streets singing and shouting for Lincoln. The demonstration lasted for almost two hours, and several times the demonstrators stopped in front of the homes of known states' rights supporters. Whites also noted that disobedience of slaves had increased in many cases. Slaveholders acted as though slavery was not affected by the ongoing war. Slaves continued to be bought and sold, and advertisements for runaways ran in local newspapers into 1865. But many owners began to realize that the future of slavery was uncertain. Some gave their slaves land, and others offered wages if slaves would stay and continue to work.⁴⁷

Although the majority never owned a slave, most Kentuckians believed in the necessity of slavery as a means of social and racial control. For many, tradition and the notion of white racial superiority created a barrier to enacting a viable policy of gradual emancipation or envisioning a world with free white and black labor within the state. The antislavery issue was debated openly in Kentucky throughout the antebellum period, but Kentuckians defended the institution of slavery to the bitter end. Instead of being the first slave state to abolish slavery, Kentucky was one of the last. The Kentucky legislature was the only one in the Union that specifically voted against ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, which abolished slavery and guaranteed voting and civil rights to African Americans.⁴⁸