Sherry Chandler

Camp Nelson

One of the horrors I discovered in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2007) was that the African-American soldiers fighting in the Union Army could be as badly treated by Northern forces as by Southern.

Here, from Helen Deiss Irvin, is a harrowing incident from Kentucky’s Civil War:

In the devastating war it took to free the slaves, many black men were impressed into or enlisted in the Union army, and black women were bystanders who often suffered. . . . black women journeyed in droves to Camp Nelson, where their husbands or sons were trianing as Union soldiers. The Union commander, Speed S. Fry, called this situation the “Nigger Woman Question.” He expelled the women and had those who returned whipped. But the strength of family ties led more black woman and children to Camp Nelson, where they settled in samll huts they themselves put up near the camp. Living conditions were miserable, and most were penniless. One old woman with several sons in the Union army washed and sewed to pay her way.

Without giving these people time to collect their meager belongings, the Union commander evicted 400 of them in late November, 1864. Gutman tells that they were “dumped” from wagons on roadsides “in extreme cold weather.” They suffered intensely. Having no other place to turn, about 250 made their way back to the camp. Of these, 102 died.

Still they came, often turned out by their former owners when slave husbands joined the Union army. By January, 1865, Camp Nelson was the residence of 3,060 slaves, mostly women and children. [pp. 60-61]

From the Camp Nelson website, there is a kinder side to this incident, which states that 10,000 African-Americans enrolled in the Union army there:

The families of the African-American Soldiers attracted the attention of the American Missionary Association, an abolitionist society founded prior to the Civil War. Reverend John Fee, the founder of Berea College, came to Camp Nelson in 1864 to teach and minister to the refugees at Camp Nelson. His efforts eventually led to the founding of Ariel College and church and finally the settlement of Hall. Fee believed passionately in the equality of the races and he sought to educate the freedmen to become independent, self-reliant members of an integrated American society The refugee camp for the families of the African-American soldiers was located near the present day community of Hall west of US 27. This was also the site of Ariel College.

And here:

Fry was severely criticized by the northern press, the U.S. Sanitary Commission and by the missionary to the refugees, Rev. John G. Fee. Fry’s actions also enraged the African-American recruits and undermined the recruitment of African-Americans in Kentucky. Because of the complaints and reactions, Washington directed Fry to establish a camp for the refugees within Camp Nelson

A direct result of Fry’s actions at Camp Nelson and the uproar which followed was the passage into law, in February 1865, of the act which freed the wives and the children of the ex-slave enlistees. This act resulted in an increase in the enlistment of enslaved African-Americans in Kentucky and other border states.

Here is a photo that I stole from the site of the refugee camp. I highly recommend that you go spend some time at the Camp Nelson webpage.

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.

The strong need for companionship

From Ellen Eslinger, “The Shape of Slavery on the Kentucky Frontier, 1775-1800,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 1994;92:1-23:

The dangerous conditions of life in eighteenth-century Kentucky also hindered black socializing and family formation. Because the majority of slaves lived in holdings of five or fewer, most western blacks had to look beyond thier master’s household for a spouse. In some parts of Kentucky slaves were extremely dispersed. In Madison County where Boonesborough was located, for example, 42 (or 44 percent) of slaveowners owned only one slave in 1787; 83 percent owned five or fewer. Throughout the eighteenth century, the average slaveholding unit remained small, measuring only 4.39 statewide in 1800. Moreover, approximately one-fifth of western slaveowners had only a single slave. By this time the emergence of staple crop production, particularly hemp and tobacco, was beginning to have an effect in some areas, but most slave masters still owned only a single slave, or perhaps two. The dispersed pattern of slaveowning meant that many western slaves lived in relative social isolation from other blacks. Those residing in outlying settlements still vulnerable to Indian attack were particularly isolated.

How western blacks coped with this situation remains largely a mystery, but the journal of a young Kentucky settler named James Taylor, the son of a prominent Virginia planter, provides a rare glimpse of its importance for western slaves. After a brief stay with his brother, Hubbard Taylor, who had settled in Clark County three years earlier, James Taylor retraced part of his route to reach lands given to him by his father on the Kentucky shore of the Ohio River near modern Newport. With him were his seventeen-year-old body servant, Adam, and two adult male slaves, Moses and Humphrey. That first year, 1793, Taylor and his slaves cleared roughly fifteen acres and planted it in corn, an achievement slightly exceeding the western norm. One day, Moses approached his master and said that he and his fellow servants could not remain in Newport because “there are no colored people here, we have no women to wash for us, on Sundays we stalk about without being able to talk to any one.” Moses urged Taylor to sell his land and move to the densely settled area where Hubbard Taylor lived. Taylor replied, “Moses, I am a stranger as well as you and my servants, I have good land here on a fine river. I have no land there and you will in time have many black people here for neighbors.” Moses found it hard to believe that such an isolated place would ever be better. Taylor urged patience. “Depend on it we will reap the advantages in due time,” he told Moses. “We can raise four times as much corn and every kind of produce as we could in Virginia, on those poor worn out lands we have left.” Taylor’s future may have looked promising, but Moses and his fellow bondsmen had less to look forward to. They ran away a short time later when Taylor went to spend a weekend with neighbors. While Taylor’s land lay on the southern banks of the Ohio River, his slaves ran toward slavery rather than away from it, retracing their way to Hubbard Taylor’s large plantation. Their destination being readily surmised, they were soon caught. No women joined Taylor’s men for at least another four years.

I’m astounded by Taylor’s appeal to “we” in his argument. Such “reasoning” seems obviously absurd from Moses’ perspective but perhaps that is the solipsism of white Europeans.

One other thing may have kept Moses and his companions from running away across the Ohio River. The Battle of Fallen Timbers took place in August 1794. Before that, Ohio was Shawnee territory, so the men may have considered that going north was running into danger as well as further away from others of their own people. Anyway, I’m not sure the Ohio River had yet been established as a sharp demarcation between slave and free states, though the first fugitive slave law was passed in 1793, the same year in which this incident seems to have taken place. The Underground Railroad began operating about 1810.