USA > Kentucky > A history of Kentucky and Kentuckians; the leaders and representative men in commerce, industry and modern activities, Volume I > Part 28
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the state legislature composed almost entirely of Union men, declared that negroes claiming freedom under the Proclamation must not remain in the state, but the enactment was of little effect. Those who wished to leave did so; those who did not, remained, finding pro- tection in the Federal camps.
On December 30, 1863, the last sale of slaves ever held in Kentucky, occurred in Louisville, when some person or persons, un- able or unwilling to read the signs of the times, paid for a man of 28 years, $500 ; for a boy of II years, $350; and for two women of 18 and 19 years, $430 and $380 respectively. Money was plentiful in those days, and there have been fools from the very beginning of civilized man. After this sale there was no longer a thought of another, since any slave desiring his freedom had but to walk away from his home and into a camp of Federal soldiers.
If such an anomaly as mild slavery can ex- ist, it had its home in Kentucky as was illus- trated by the fact that many thousands of slaves remained quietly on their master's homes, and went about their daily tasks as though there were no hands beckoning them to freedom-and poverty, and distress. Not until the war had ended, and in many in- stances not even then, did these faithful ser- vants renounce the allegiance to "old Marster" and "old Miss" to which they were born and to which they had loyally lived. It is a mat- ter of painful regret that the faithful colored servitor of the old days, loyal to himself and to the white family he was proud to serve, is passing rapidly away, and that no successor is found among his race today. The most un- bending aristocrat that ever lived in any land was the colored "mammy" of the families of Kentucky who owned broad acres and many slaves. No man was good enough to marry her "young miss" or "honey" as she called her; no young woman whose family owned fewer acres and slaves, was a fit mate
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for the boy she had nursed in infancy, spoiled in his later years, and worshipped always. There was something charming and attrac- tive in those old days and those who are old enough to recall that patriarchial era, regret their passing, while, at the same time, giving thanks that human slavery has passed for- ever from the land.
One of the anomalies of legislation was il- lustrated by the Kentucky legislature in Feb- ruary, 1864, when that body, unanimously in favor of the Union, re-enacted the law pro- hibiting the importation of slaves into Ken- tucky as merchandise. There was no place from which to import them; no one who de- sired to bring them into the state. The ways of the average legislature are past finding out. This same legislature also protested against the enlistment of Kentucky negroes into the army, and requested the president to remove the camps of negro soldiers from the state. This request was, of course, ignored, and ac- tive recruiting of negroes went on. More than 20,000 negro soldiers were recruited in the state and credited-not to Kentucky, but to Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and other eastern states.
In the presidential election of 1864, Mr. Lincoln received 27,786 votes out of a total vote of 92,087. There were many persons in Kentucky in those days, who found it con- ducive to life, liberty and the pursuit of hap- piness, to remain away from the polls. This accounts for the small total of votes cast.
The foregoing, it is believed, is a fair and correct account of the more important events connected with slavery in Kentucky. Some general remarks upon a subject which entered so largely into the greatest of all civil wars may not be inappropriate.
In the decade from 1840 to 1850, the activ- ity of the Abolition party in the north became very great. All along the Ohio river were stations for rescuing slaves and conveying them to places of safety beyond the border.
The number of slaves who escaped in this way was relatively small-perhaps a few hun- dred each year-but the effect upon the minds of the people were out of proportion to the producing cause. The truth is, as has been stated more than once herein, that the slaves in Kentucky were not generally suffering from any bonds that weiglied heavily upon them. There were minor exceptions ; a few masters were not kind to their slaves, but these men suffered a social ostracism which tended to reduce their ranks and to a kinder treatment of their dependent servants. Slavery in Ken- tucky was of the domestic sort ; that is, it was to most of the slaves not a grevious burden to bear. This is well shown by the fact that thousands of them quietly remained with their masters in the counties along the Ohio river when, on any night, they might have escaped across the border. Still, the "underground railway" system, as it was called, although it did not lead many slaves to freedom, pro- foundly irritated the minds, of the owners, and even those who did not own slaves. Accom- panied, as was this work of rescuing slaves, by a violent abuse of slaveholding, it destroyed in good part the desire to be rid of the institu- tion which had grown on the soil, and gave place to a natural though unreasonable deter- mination to cling to the system against all out- side interference. Towards the end, the laws concerning slavery grew more rigid because of this interference by persons actuated by sentiment in some instances; by ignorance in others.
The rights accorded to the slaves from the initial settlement of Kentucky, if lost to them at a later date, were lost because of the fear of servile insurrection, rapine and murder as a resultant of the agitation kept alive by those who regarded slavery as a crime and any means that might be employed for its destruc- tion, as legitimate. While seeking to destroy slavery, they were really adding to the burden of the slave and inducing in the slaveholding
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states the enactment of laws clinching more tightly the bonds borne by the slave. It is fair to assume the honesty of purpose actuat- ing these people, however much their plans and efforts may be decried. The world will never forget that it was New England that in- troduced slavery into the colonies and kept alive the slave trade until it was found that the bleak climate of the North Atlantic coast was unfitted to people born under the scorch- ing sun of the equator. When this fact was borne in upon them, they ceased to exchange New England rum for African slaves and made haste to dispose of those whom they held to the people of the more genial south- ern clime. It was not until they had thus shifted the burden of slavery from their own shoulders that they discovered what a crime against nature was slavery. The agitation against what was known as "the peculiar in- stitution" was continued until nothing could withstand it and the direful effects of war alone destroy it.
There was no legal provision for the mar- riage of slaves. In some instances they were married, without licenses, by preachers of their own race. In other and in most in- stances, they merely "took up" with each other without the formality of a clerical cere- mony. This loosely assumed tie was fre- quently maintained until the death of one of the parties, a deep-seated affection existing between the persons thus irregularly joined in matrimony. Slaves, in the sight of the law, could own no property, but many of them, by "hiring their time" from their masters, did accumulate small properties in the possession of which they were protected by their owners.
Most of the slaves in Kentucky were, by nature, amiable, affectionate and faithful. There were many instances of their fidelity to their masters and their families, which the his- tory of the world could scarcely equal even between friends and equals, much less be- tween masters and slaves. The slaves of the
few "hard masters" would occasionally "run away" but after a few weeks absence would voluntarily return, take their punishment and fall again into the performance of their for- mer tasks.
Generally speaking, slaves were allowed a great deal of liberty. However, when emis- saries from the north became unusually active in the state the privileges of the slaves were necessarily abridged and restricted, as it was the current belief that these emissaries were bent upon stirring up strife among the slaves and inciting them to an insurrection in which the chief feature was to be an indiscriminate slaughter of white men, women and children. In those days a system of mounted patrols was instituted. These patrols rode about the country at night, on the highways and by- ways and through the plantations and woe be- tide the slave who was caught abroad at night without a written "pass" from his master. The negroes had a deadly fear of these night- riders whom they called "patter-rollers" and about whom they had a song which ran some- thing like this :
"Over the fence and through the paster, Run nigger, run, oh run a little faster, Run, nigger run, The patter-roller ketch you."
Like the savage Indians, the negroes had a marvelous system of inter-communication which no white man has ever fathomed. They got information concerning themselves almost as rapidly as the telephone would furnish it today. Almost every night one could hear a colored man in the woods or along a road, when the patrol was not near, mournfully chanting the "hoola" song, which would be taken up by another perhaps a mile distant and again chanted, while another and another would repeat it in every direction until the night became vocal with the mournful sound of that distressing and monotonous refrain :
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"Hoola, hoola, hoo, Hoola, hoola, hola-hoola hoo."
That was all there was of the strange song, if song it may be called, which was repeated over and over again, indefinitely. It may have been a chant brought from Africa by their an- cestors. It was believed by many to be a means of communication between the slaves. Whatever it may have been or meant, it is a fact that no one has heard it chanted since the colored people became free.
The selling values of slaves, though small, comparatively, at the beginning of the state, gradually grew larger until the beginning of the War Between the States and the near prospect of emancipation gradually brought the values down to nothing. In 1785, a slave of Francis Vigo of Louisville, was hanged for stealing and the court fixed his value at $400, which was paid. The common law of England then obtained in the state. under which generous and liberal law a young Eng- lish girl was hanged for the alleged theft of an article valued at less than six shillings. In Collins' "History of Kentucky," a citation is made of the sale in 1855 of seven negro men at prices ranging from $1,070 to $1,555, the average price being $1,243. The usual price for healthy men, neither too old nor too young, was about $1,000 for a number of years before the war. George Brown, who, for many years, was a noted colored caterer of Louisville after the war, and to whom ref- erence has before been made, and who pub- lished his interesting "Reminiscences" of the days of his slavery, states that in 1857 the guardian of his young mistress refused an offer of $2,100 for him, merely because he was not willing to be owned by the man who wanted to buy him. Some years afterwards, when all he had to do to obtain his freedom was to take it. George Brown "bought him- self" for $1,000 because he did not think it honorable for him to "swindle his young mis-
tress out of her slave." And he paid her the $1,000, too, from money which he honorably earned. George Brown was "a gentleman in ebony" and consequently an honest man.
It has been a favorite taunt from certain sources that the south went into the war be- cause she did not want to lose her slaves. This is not true of the south as a whole, and it is particularly not true of Kentucky. The Kentuckians who fought in the Confederate army, and there were many thousands of them, had no thought of the perpetuation of slavery; many of them had never owned a slave and had no expectation of ever owning one. Many of them considered slavery mor- ally wrong, among them the writer of these words, and they would have been glad to see it abolished at any time by any proper means. On the other hand, many of the most promi- nent Union men in the state and all of the prominent men of Kentucky who served in the Union army, were slave-holders. Gen. Cassius M. Clay, the most prominent advo- cate of the abolition of slavery within the state, was a slaveholder and continued to own slaves until the Emancipation Proclamation and the subsequent amendments to the con- stitution set them free.
After nearly fifty years without slavery, it is now a surpassing wonder why anyone in Kentucky ever wished to perpetuate the in- stitution; for, aside from the moral and hu- manitarian side of the question, it was eco- nomically considered, wasteful and profitless as a system of labor. Farms which required thirty slaves for their cultivation are now, with the aid of modern invention, cultivated equally well by four or five men. Under the old system, the program was to use negroes to raise corn to feed to hogs to feed to negroes who raised more corn to feed more hogs, and so on ; the problem continuing in a circle which it fatigues the mind to contemplate.
Donn Piatt, a genius of Ohio birth, said of President Lincoln: "He well knew that the
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north was not fighting to liberate slaves, nor the south to perpetuate slavery." The ques- tion at issue in this great struggle was whether ultimate sovereignty rested in the individual states or in the central Union, slavery being the ostensible incident which had brought the
issue to the test of war. In the mighty con- test which ensued, slavery collapsed as a mat- ter of "military necessity" and disappeared for all time from the face of our fair land.
"Praise God from whom all blessings flow."
CHAPTER XXXIII.
ARMY VETERANS AS OFFICE HOLDERS-PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST OF 1800-ELECTION OF JEFFER- SON AND BURR-KENTUCKY'S PART IN THE CONTEST-REPEAL OF OBNOXIOUS LAWS-PIO- NEER KENTUCKY BANK-SURPLUS OF COURTS-LOUISIANA PURCHASE FREES THE MISSIS- SIPPI-REPUBLICAN BECOMES DEMOCRATIC PARTY-DEATH OF JOHN BRECKINRIDGE.
Kentuckians have an inborn propensity for politics and it has been said by envious critics that this propensity extends to a willingness to hold public office when the proceeds thereof are encouraging. At a reunion of Kentucky Confederate soldiers held some years since, the orator of the day, himself a Confederate vet- eran, congratulated his comrades upon their financial prosperity which they had won through their own efforts since the war had closed. "We draw no pensions," said he; "we need no pensions; we want no pensions," which sentiment was generously applauded. When the orator had concluded, he was warmly congratulated by a friend who had held high rank in the Federal army. "That was a fine speech," said he, "and I enjoyed every word of it, but especially that portion of it where you said that you and your com- rades drew no pensions, needed no pensions, wanted no pensions. Of course none of you needs a pension, as the last blamed one of you has held a public office ever since your disa- bilities were removed." The orator had no response ready, as he was at the time conclud- ing his seventeenth year as an office-holder.
It was true in large part that for many years after the war men who had served in the Con- federate army, filled many public positions, but a shrewd old general of that army explained that this was because those who entered the Confederate service from Kentucky were "the
rose and expectancy of the fair state" and that had there been no war, they would have grown up and filled all the public offices just the same. It would ill become this writer, who was one of them, to comment upon the Gen- eral's compliment. This anecdote, trivial enough in itself, is entitled to recognition, since it illustrates truthfully and in a few words a condition which obtained in Ken- tucky politics for years following the close of the war, but which exists no longer. The vet- erans of the two armies, enemies once but friends now, are tempted no longer by the flesh pots of Egypt, but, calmly and bravely as they met each other upon the field of strife, they await the inevitable hour, smiling mean- while, indulgently, upon the youngsters who have taken their places in the political battle line, wishing them a wisdom which they do not possess and which may come, as the years come, to take the place of platitudes and abus- ive epithets.
The Kentucky boy when arriving at the dig- nity of long trousers, becomes an embryo poli- tician, particularly if he has the good fortune to be a country boy. The boy whose misfor- tune it is to be born and reared in the city, takes up cigarettes with his first pair of long trousers and a few years later the boy from the country arrives and pushes him out of his political or business pathway. The moral of this is that a boy had better stain his fingers
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hulling walnuts in the country than with a cigarette in the city.
These preliminaries having been settled, the principal characters of the presidential contest of 1800 may be introduced. Party lines were as strictly drawn one hundred and ten years ago as they are today. The senseless habit of imputing all the sins in the calendar to politi- cal opponents was as common then as now, and men made fools of themselves about poli- tics precisely as they do today.
There was in 1800 an inflamed public senti- ment caused by the Alien and Sedition laws for which the Federalists were responsible. The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, ringing and manly in tone, had stiffened the courage of the Republican party, and a political battle royal was a certainty. There were no tele- graphic dispatches in those days, no daily newspapers, no telephones, no fast mail trains to quickly and widely distribute political in- formation. Men lived narrow lives, by force of circumstances, but they thought broadly. Every man, according to his intellectual light, was a politician, some for love of country and from a sense of duty; some from love of the loaves and fishes and a sense that it was well to make hay while the sun shone brightly.
John Adams led the Federalists, Thomas Jefferson the Republicans. Adams was the cold, calculating product of the New England coast; honest, austere and every inch a pa- triot : every foot a man. It is too late in the history of the country for the warmer-blooded men of the more generous and genial southern sun to deny to the stern sons of New England the recognition and the honor which is their due. Mistaken they may have been-from a southern point of view they were undoubtedly mistaken-but they were honest from their view-point, and for this they should have credit.
There were no national conventions in the days of 1800. The Federal congressmen fol- lowing the custom of that day, named for
president, John Adams; for vice president, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. The Republi- cans named for president, Thomas Jefferson ; for vice president, Aaron Burr, the stormy petrel of the political world of his day, who lives in the minds of many today as a traitor to his country; in the minds of others as the greatest political genius of his time. He is, at least, entitled to the statement that he was never convicted of any of the charges brought against him. The worst that can be said of Burr today, from a judicial standpoint, is that he had the benefit of a Scotch verdict-"Not proven."
At that time, presidential electors were chosen by the state legislatures and not by a direct vote of the people as now. The contest was not allowed to lag and the state capitals, instead of the entire Union, became the seats of war; the storm centers wherein surged and seetlied the political cauldrons. In May, the state of New York, through its legislature, cast the first votes for Jefferson and Burr, to the surprise of the Federal forces, since it had been expected that the state would cast its vote for Adams as it had done four years be- fore. Adams, chagrined at this unexpected result, dismissed from his cabinet, Mr. Pinck- ney, secretary of state, and his associate on the presidential ticket, and Mr. McHenry, sec- retary of war, believing these gentlemen to lack sympathy with the principles of the party which he represented. He had the usual ill- luck of those politicians who, through lack of judgment, "swap horses while crossing a stream." Alexander Hamilton, the father of the Federalist party and the shrewdest politi- cian the new country had ever known, saw the evil effect of this action of the president, and, in a public letter, censured his public character and conduct. A house divided against itself cannot stand-and from this moment began the downfall of the Federalist party and the ascendancy of the Republican party, which was later to become known as the Democratic
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party and which, through various vicissitudes of good and ill-fortune, has existed to this day.
Hamilton, it has been charged, wrote this letter with a view to defeat both Adams and Jefferson and elect Pinckney, which was then possible under the constitution as originally adopted. The center of his alleged plans was the state of South Carolina, which was ex- pected to support Jefferson for president and its own son, Pinckney, for vice president. This expectation was not realized, as South Carolina cast its electoral vote for the Repub- lican ticket, Jefferson and Burr. This was the straw which broke the Federal camel's back and ended all hopes of the success of Hamilton's schemes, with the electorate. Jef- ferson had received a plurality of seventy- three votes ; Burr, an equal number. Under the cumbrous provision of the constitution as it then existed, there was no election and the contest came before the national house for final decision. Hamilton, with Machiavelian shrewdness, bitterly opposing the Republican principles of Jefferson, threw his strength to Aaron Burr, endeavoring to have chosen as president the man at whose hand he was later to meet his death in a duel.
In the house eight states cast fifty-one votes for Jefferson ; six states cast fifty-three votes for Burr ; two states divided. For thirty-five ballots there was no change, but on the thirty- sixth, several members cast blank ballots which was tantamount to voting for Mr. Jef- ferson. On this ballot ten states voted for Jefferson ; four states-Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Connecticut-for Burr. Mr. Jefferson therefore became presi- dent and Mr. Burr vice president. Thus came into the political arena the Democratic party which held power for a number of years- nearly a quarter of a century-when it sur- rendered it ; and since which time it has gone upward and downward upon the political teeter-board, sometimes winning, sometimes
losing, but always "picking its flint and coming again," even after its most disastrous defeats. It was a gallant party in its earlier, as in some of its later years, until it fell under the control of opportunists and followed strange gods into devious patlıways and met defeat The child is probably yet unborn who will witness its final downfall, but there be many today who mourn for the Democratic party of their fathers.
Kentucky was so intimately a part of the presidential contest, the events of which have just been related, that no excuse is offered for bringing into this history of the state a re- countal of national events. The Alien and Sedition Laws, responsibility for which rested upon Mr. Adams and the Federalist party which he represented as the titular head of the party, were especially offensive to the freedom-loving Kentuckians. Under the bale- ful provision of those laws foreign-born resi- dents of the United States, who had bared their bosoms to the storm of war and shed their blood in the cause of the colonies, could at the mere will of the president of the United States, be banished from our shores and de- nied the enjoyment of the blessings of free government they had aided the United States to obtain. "Kentuckians are an imperial race," said a just judge once in charging a grand jury. Kentuckians are a just and lib- erty-loving race, he might well have said, and being so, they sought the first opportunity to express their stern disapproval of laws which worked wrong and injustice upon those who, in the stress of peril, had come to the aid of the struggling colonies and offered their for- tunes and their lives upon the altar of liberty, freedom and political equality. Kentucky fought for Jefferson and the Right and no- where was his election hailed with more unan- imous accord than in the new state, Virginia's first-born, and the first star of the west to cast its splendor upon the flag of the Union.
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