Sherry Chandler

Slave state

Some snippets from Helen Deiss Irvin on slavery:

In the Kentucky social hierarchy, most powerless were black women. Subject to all of the abuses of slavery, they were vulnerable to additional ones as women. It was widely known, for example, that the slave trader Lewis Robards of Lexington sold black women into prostitution—a practice in which no one intervened—and other traders operated breeding farms for southern markets. Moreover, the exploitation of black women by their owners was not unusual, as evidenced by numbers of nearly white slave children.

Nice word: exploitation. But to continue:

. . . The sales in Lexington of Eliza, only one sixty-fourth black, and of two sisters who were graduates of Oberlin College—all three the daughters of their white masters—were causes célèbres, as J. Winston Coleman, Jr., relates in Slavery Times in Kentucky. But black women, children, and men were sold every court-day, and no one turned a head. It was whiteness, the obvious kinship with the white ruling class, that distressed onlookers. [pp. 48-49]

Coincidentally, NPR recently ran a story about a study showing that people who approve of Barack Obama perceive his skin tone to be lighter than it is while those who disapprove see it as darker. Obviously we have not got beyond this prejudice for the white.

With African-American slaves as with Native Americans, there was a great fear of miscegenation that did not apply to white men. Here is a key paragraph from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (HarperCollins, 2009):

From the earliest years of settlement, the rising birthrate of mixed-race children induced authorities to attempt to resolve “miscegenations” with a stroke of the pen: In 1662, the Virginia assemply passed legislation declaring that slave offspring inherited the status of the mother (partus sequitur ventrem) This law provided white males with an incentive to prefer slave women as illicit sexual partners—as they could not be charged with bastardy. [p. 23]

Clinton tells the story of Richard M. Johnson, a friend of Mary Lincoln’s father, John Robert Todd, and an exception to the rule of “exploitation,” the one that said these sexual liaisons would be politely ignored. Johnson would serve as vice president under Martin Van Buren but before achieving that high estate, he created a scandal in Lexington not only by acknowledging his two mixed-race daughters, offspring of his long liaison with his “housekeeper,” but also by trying to arrange advantageous marriages for them with white men. He accomplished this in part by settling lands and money on them, thereby adding fuel to the fire (see “bribed” below).

Like the sisters sold at auction, Johnson’s daughters were well educated. When Lafayette stayed with Jonson on his visit to Lexington in 1825, Clinton quotes a neighbor as reporting the event thus:

Evry thing that was necsary for the occasion was prepared in fine order. Johnson’s Two Daughters they Played on the piano fine. They Ware Dressed as fine as money Could Dress them & to one that Did not no they ware as white as anny of the Laydes thare & thare ware a good many. [p. 24]

I daresay the daughters, Imogene and Adaline, could probably spell better than the reporter, too.

Lexington Society might have tolerate such socializing from a wealthy powerful war hero, but with their marriages, Johnson had gone too far. George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal, explained the situation thus in 1835:

The author of the Declaration of Independence had his faults, but he was at least careful never to insult the feelings of the community with an ostentatious exhibition of them. He never lived in open intercourse with an “odoriferous wench”; He never bribed “his white fellow citizens” to “make such beasts of themselves” before the open eyes of the world as to stand up in the church, grasp the sable paws of negresses and pronounce the sacred vows of wedlock. [p. 25]

Prentice was a Unionist, an ardent Henry Clay supporter, and a member of the Know-Nothing Party but his writing style was broadly satiric and the liberal peppering of quotation marks in this passage leads me to wonder just where his barbs were falling.

Clinton reports that Adaline died of a “broken heart” in February 1836 because of all her father suffered on his daughters’ account [p. 25].

Horace and Mary Austin Holley were instrumental in bringing Lafayette to Lexington, by the way. Mary Holley would, no doubt, have been one of those white women present at Johnson’s plantation, Blue Springs in 1825. In 1818, when Mary Holley first came to Lexington with her husband, who was to be president of Transylvania University, she was uneasy about having slaves as servants. She soon adjusted, however, and when the Holleys were preparing to leave Kentucky in 1827, Rebecca Smith Lee records that:

[Horace Holley] reckoned up his own financial condition carefully . . . and wrote to Orville that he was leaving Kentucky worth at least six thousand dollars, counting his books, furniture, land, and two slaves. [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (Univ Texas Press, 1962), p. 172]

Unfortunately, when the Holleys left Lexington, they fell on hard times. They went to Louisiana where events did not work out the way Horace Holley thought they would. Ill and humiliated, he decided he had to flee the cursed south:

“One breath of air,” he cried out as Mary begged him to lie back on the couch by the window and let her fan his brow, “one breath of air from the Northern shore of freedom, though borne upon the eastern gale, were worth all the boasted luxuries of the ever-smiling scented South, alluring but to destroy!” [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography, pp. 181-182]

But in order to book their passage, the Holleys had to have money:

He hastened to book passage for himself and wife and son on the Louisiana two weeks hence, and spent his scanty strength making preparations to leave. Most of his ready cash had gone toward equipment for the house and school, and a few days before sailing he was compelled to sell their excellent colored woman named Susanna for the sum of four hundred and fifty dollars, with Mr. Martin Duralde as witness to the transaction. [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography, p. 182]

Horace Holley never made it to the Northern shore of freedom. He died of yellow fever on the voyage. After his death, Mary Austin Holley returned to Louisiana to serve as governess on the LaBranche plantation.

Considering white southernism

We who were born in the South called this mesh of feeling and memory “loyalty.” We thought of it sometimes as “love.” We identified with the South’s trouble as if we, individually, were responsible for all of it. We defended the sins and the sorrows of three hundred years as if each sin had been committed by us alone and each sorrow had cut across our heart. We were as hurt at criticism of our region as if our own name had been called aloud by the critic. We knew guilt without understanding it, and there is no tie that binds men closer to the past and each other than that.

— from Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (Norton, 1994, first published 1949)

When Lillian Smith wrote these words in 1949, I was 4 years old so that, by definition, I grew up in a world very different than the one she’s describing. In my world, the struggle to end racism was more open, thanks in part to people like her. Socially and geographically, my experience was also very different.

Kentucky was a slave state that did not leave the Union. Instead it split internally so that the old saw about “brother against brother” was often literally true here. Take what may be the most famous example, George D. Prentice,¹ a poet who was editor of The Louisville Journal and an ardent abolitionist Union supporter but whose son died fighting with the southern cavalry under General John Hunt Morgan.

Kentucky saw none of the great slaughtering battles on its soil. Instead the war was fought here as an insurgency by raiders like Morgan and by others not quite so legitimate. In an insurgency, it’s often hard to distinguish friend from enemy. Richard Taylor’s novel Sue Mundy addresses the way betrayal leads to betrayal in such an atmosphere. (Addendum: See By Neddie Jingo! on brother against brother.)

And last, but most significant for my experience, Kentucky was never economically dependent on huge populations of field slaves. Slaves themselves were a cash crop in Kentucky, extra “stock” sold South to feed King Cotton. Read your Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or, for that matter, come to the Kentucky Derby and sing a verse of the now bowdlerized “My Old Kentucky Home,” once also called “Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night.” Here’s some of the verses you won’t sing:

The day goes by like a shadow o’er the heart,
With sorrow, where all was delight,
The time has come when the darkies have to part,
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

The head must bow and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darky may go;
A few more days, and the trouble all will end,
In the field where the sugar-canes grow;

A few more days for to tote the weary load,
No matter, ’twill never be light;
A few more days till we totter on the road,
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

Weep no more my lady
Oh! weep no more today!
We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home,
For the Old Kentucky Home far away.

Not exactly a glorious Southern heritage, a slave pining for the paradise that was slavery in Kentucky, but one that leaves the state with a very small population of African-Americans, especially in rural areas. So that, in the part of Owen County where I grew up, there was not even an Aunt Sally tucked into a little cabin out of the way somewhere. You had to go to the county seat, Owenton, to see a black face.

My father, who was a building contractor, had one black hand in his crew for a while. He didn’t come in the house and eat with us but then neither did any of the white crewmen. “Dillpickle” Whitney was known as a smart-aleck but nobody in my life felt inclined to do more than laugh at his audacity. Scorn enough in that laughter, perhaps, but I didn’t realize it then. (No particular scorn in the nickname, however. Many men had nicknames where I grew up. My own grandfather was called “Hick.”)

When our consolidated county high school was integrated without incident in 1959, Dillpickle’s son Billy was one of three six African-Americans in our freshman class. We, the last of the war babies, graduated a whopping 73 kids in 1963. Billy Whitney became our star basketball player without much comment that I ever heard. Georgia Green Stamper tells the story here. Our basketball team was called The Rebels, by the way, and still is. Our mascot was a Confederate soldier.

So I grew up with lots of tales of Southern sympathy but innocent of the kind of racism Smith describes in her memoir. I did not experience the kind of epiphany described by John Crowe Ransom’s granddaughter, Robb Forman Dew, on Maud Newton’s blog:

Among other things, I wanted to understand the surprising bit of meanness I had seen my grandmother display one summer afternoon when she and I were sitting on the front porch waiting for the horse and wagon that belonged to the black “vegetable man” who made his rounds of Natchez neighborhoods almost every day.

He was late that afternoon, and she had gone inside, but I waited still, because it was thrilling and exotic to me to have our vegetable selection brought to our door by a man driving a horse and cart. When he came into view, there I sat, and I waved and called to him to stop. I ran inside to alert my grandmother, but she had heard the jangle of his wagon and I turned and followed her until all at once she came to a dead stop when she spotted the vegetable man standing on the porch outside the screen of the front door.

It’s an incident that has haunted me all my life, even though I don’t remember exactly what she said, only that she berated him for being there, at her front door. Her voice and the words she said were stunningly harsh. So cruel, in fact, that I was frightened and also imagined that the man, in turn, would fly into a fury on his own behalf. But he backed down the stairs, literally with hat in hand, mumbling apologies, and he brought a selection of string beans and mustard greens and Kale around to the kitchen door where she met him again, still so angry that she said no more to him than to get out of her yard. He left the vegetables in a heap at the back door as a gift, and I don’t know if she ever bought anything else from him.

I experienced what you might call a more normal form of American racism, and so I had a gentler slower more intellectual awakening. I never had to see anyone I loved turn mean in quite this way. But I was warned that any venture forth to the really good schools of the North would see me ostracized for my accent and I did experience incidents like this in the years when I lived in Chicago:

Certainly I felt unappreciated and suffered my share of personal angst growing up within my immediate family. I had no idea, however, that I was universally misunderstood until I moved from Louisiana to Columbia, Missouri, where people actually asked me if in the South we had worn shoes when we went to school. At a dinner party my host turned to me suddenly and asked if it was true that the normal Southern diet was made up mostly of pork fat and greens. I was just married and only twenty-one years old, and so dumbfounded that I didn’t even realize the man meant to be rude.

Such experiences pushed me to identify Southern, to feel a bit of the fraught “loyalty” that Smith describes. To quote from Dew one more time:

To have loved people who were compromised by the nature of their society as well as whatever other demons besieged them is one of the remarkable conditions of being Southern.

Although anybody living in Louisiana or Alabama would no more consider Kentucky Southern than they would John Crowe Ransom’s Tennessee, I am nevertheless more at home in the world of Faulkner and O’Connor and Warren than in that of Hemingway or Updike.

So I have been making a big deal lately about identifying with The Other.² I will even admit to identifying a bit with Randy Newman’s Rednecks, though the vocabulary makes me feel antsy:

Now your northern nigger’s a Negro
You see he’s got his dignity
Down here we’re too ignorant to realize
That the North has set the nigger free

Yes he’s free to be put in a cage
In Harlem in New York City
And he’s free to be put in a cage on the South-Side of Chicago…

You can never take a Newman lyric at face value; he deals in compromised narrators. He gives voice to the voiceless, but it’s a voiceless we’d just as soon not have to hear. We often feel a little soiled just listening. Still, as By Neddy Jingo discovered several years ago, reading The Redneck Manifesto, rednecks see themselves as the last group in America it’s still politically correct to despise. “Class,” says Neddie. The culture wars are all about class. We’ve said it here, too.

Where does that leave me in dealing with my Confederate forebears? Or the members of my family who identify redneck. Stuck in ambivalence I guess.

Pity the human who feels no ambivalence. His name is Bush.

___

¹Prentice was a Northerner who married a Southern woman. He’s a bit like Lincoln in that. I am wondering this morning if a case can’t be made that Lincoln’s marriage is somewhat emblematic of the whole culture war in the United States, a troubled but valuable union. Who knows how much calculation may have gone into Lincoln’s allying himself with the South this way. He did not want to go to war. But, for whatever reason, he was more or less married to the South. Mary Todd, whose family became her husband’s enemy, must have suffered terribly during the Civil War. Yet, it seems to me that history seems downright eager to heap contumely upon her, to fault her for adding to Lincoln’s burden rather than standing stalwartly at his side.

²In How Publishing Likes Its Southerners, Maud Newton has another take on David Payne’s Oxford American article that started me off on this kick, including tales of Richard Ford (a man whose work I’ve not read) that set my teeth on edge. On this same subject, it’s worthwhile reading Robb Forman Dew’s post in its entirety for her explanation of why she doesn’t write about the south.

George D. Prentice and Sue Mundy

I’ve been reading Richard Taylor’s new novel, Sue Mundy. It’s given me a greater appreciation of George Prentice and his importance in Civil-War-era Kentucky.

Marcellus Jerome Clarke, familiarly known as Jarom in Taylor’s novel, was a notorious guerilla operating in Kentucky in 1864-65. He joined forces with William Quantrill for a while when Quantill crossed over into Kentucky to avoid capture. Clarke liked to wear his curly dark hair long, and he affected somewhat gaudy costumes, red velvet with fringe & tinsel and a plumed hat.

Sue Mundy (also spelled Munday), the brazen woman guerilla, was completely the invention of George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal. Clarke was captured and hanged as Sue Mundy in March 1865.

Prentice was a strong Union loyalist and has been given some credit for keeping Kentucky in the Union. But he strongly disapproved of the actions of Major General Stephen Burbridge. It has been said that Kentucky seceded from the Union after the Civil War and much of the fault or credit for that lies with “Butcher” Burbridge, who put Kentucky under martial law, interfered with elections on Lincoln’s behalf, and executed two Confederate “guerillas” for every Union sympathizer killed in Kentucky. If he didn’t have a guerilla prisoner, an ordinary POW would do. Sometimes he selected his victims by lots drawn. He would take them to the location of the latest guerilla raid and have them shot down as publicly as possible.

Prentice invented Mundy as a tool to taunt Burbridge. A great punster, he would write in the Journal thus:

Many think it makes no difference on what day of the week a man dies, but we confess that we shouldn’t like to die of a Mundy.

You have been an awful girl, Sue, we must say. You have killed so many persons, of all colors, that no doubt white, yellow, and black ghosts haunt you continually, the black ones coming by day because black doesn’t show at night.

Our journal may bring you and your fellows to justice and thus be to you and them not only a newspaper but a noosepaper.

The novel is a fascinating look at the horrors of life in a border state with more relevance than you might think to contemporary times, dealing as it does with an insurgency.

Both of Prentice’s sons fought for the South. One died campaigning with John Hunt Morgan, the other, if I remember correctly, was never reconciled with his father. [Addendum: In Sue Mundy, Taylor has portrayed Jarom Clarke as an orphaned boy constantly looking for father figures who fail him: John Hunt Morgan and William Quantrill among others. Prentice also is presented as one of his failed fathers, one who created him in his avatar Sue Mundy. Here is a small passage from the end, when Jarom is waiting to be hanged:

Jarom would never meet or even see George D. Prentice, his failed father, the author in part of his son's destruction. Would he come to visit? No. Had he been at the wharf or somewhere along the route to the prison? Would he be among the throng that gathered for his execution, armed with sharpened quill to get the last word?

Fascinating to think of the Civil War as a failure of fathers, perhaps even a failure of men of letters who "father" our public figures. I am not smart enough to follow that thought up to any kind of conclusion. Takes a novel for that.]

Prentice the polemicist was also Prentice the poet and patron of poets. I have written about him here. The poem below, appropriate to the day, is his most famous.

The Closing Year

‘Tis midnight’s holy hour-and silence now
Is brooding, like a gentle spirit, o’er
The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds
The bell’s deep notes are swelling. ‘Tis the knell
Of the departed year.
No funeral train
Is sweeping past; yet on the stream and wood,
With melancholy light, the moonbeams rest,
Like a pale, spotless shroud; the air is stirred,
As by a mourner’s sigh; and on yon cloud,
That floats so still and placidly through heaven,
The spirits of the seasons seem to stand-
Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn’s solemn form,
And Winter, with his aged locks-and breathe
In mournful cadences, that come abroad
Like the far wind-harp’s wild and touching wail,
A melancholy dirge o’er the dead year,
Gone from the earth forever.
‘Tis a time
For memory and for tears. Within the deep,
Still chambers of the heart, a specter dim,
Whose tones are like the wizard voice of Time,
Heard from the tomb of ages, points its cold

And solemn finger to the beautiful
And holy visions that have passed away
And left no shadow of their loveliness
On the dead waste of life. That specter lifts
The coffin-lid of hope, and joy and love,
And, bending mournfully above the pale,
Sweet forms that slumber there, scatters dead flowers
O’er what has passed to nothingness.
The year
Has gone, and, with it, many a glorious throng
Of happy dreams. Its mark is on each brow,
Its shadow in each heart. In its swift course,
It waved its scepter o’er the beautiful,
And they are not. It laid its pallid hand
Upon the strong man, and the haughty form
Is fallen, and the flashing eye is dim.
It trod the hall of revelry, where thronged
The bright and joyous, and the tearful wail
Of stricken ones is heard, where erst the song
And reckless shout resounded. It passed o’er
The battle-plain, where sword and spear and shield
Flashed in the light of mid-day-and the strength
Of serried hosts is shivered, and the grass,
Green from the soil of carnage, waves above
The crushed and mouldering skeleton. It came
And faded like a wreath of mist at eve;
Yet, ere it melted in the viewless air,
It heralded its millions to their home
In the dim land of dreams.
Remorseless Time!-
Fierce spirit of the glass and scythe!-what power
Can stay him in his silent course, or melt
His iron heart to pity? On, still on,
He presses, and forever. The proud bird,
The condor. of the Andes, that can soar
Through heaven’s unfathomable depths, or brave
The fury of the northern hurricane
And bathe his plumage in the thunder’s home,
Furls his broad wings at nightfall, and sinks down
To rest upon his mountain-crag-but Time
Knows not the weight of sleep or weariness,
And night’s deep darkness has no chain to bind
His rushing pinion. Revolutions sweep
O’er earth, like troubled visions o’er the breast
Of dreaming sorrow; cities rise and sink,
Like bubbles on the water; fiery isles
Spring, blazing, from the ocean, and go back
To their mysterious caverns; mountains rear
To heaven their bald and blackened cliffs, and bow
Their tall heads to the plain; new empires rise,
Gathering the strength of hoary centuries,
And rush down the Alpine avalanche,

Startling the nations; and the very stars,
Yon bright and burning blazonry of God,
Glitter awhile in their eternal depths,
And, like the Pleiad, loveliest of their train,
Shoot from their glorious spheres, and pass away
To darkle in the trackless void; yet Time,
Time, the tomb-builder, holds his fierce career,
Dark, stern, all-pitiless, and pauses not
Amid the mighty wrecks that strew his path,
To sit and muse, like other conquerors,
Upon the fearful ruin he hath wrought.