21. Martin R. Delany, Martin R. Delany: A Document Reader (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 137.
22. Hondon B. Hargrove, Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988), xi; Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men's History and Masculinity, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 46; Marion B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760–1891 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 2003), 153.
23. Quoted in Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 167.
24. See James A. Ramage, John Wesley Hunt: Pioneer Merchant, Manufacturer and Financier (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).
25. Ibid., 41–53; John E. Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 447; Lowell H. Harrison and James C. Klotter, New History of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 100.
26. Basil Duke, History of Morgan's Cavalry (New York: Neale, 1906); James A. Ramage, Rebel Rider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986).
27. Sarah Parker Remond, “The Negro in the United States of America,” in Foner and Branham, Lift Every Voice, 380.
28. The impressment of enslaved African Americans was practiced in both the North and the South to obtain the large labor force required to build fortifications. African Americans also dug trenches, built forts, cleared fields, and performed domestic duties for soldiers during the war.
29. Although President Lincoln authorized the use of “black troops” in December 1862, he exempted Kentucky from that federal mandate. The African American soldiers stationed at Camp Nelson before 1864 were recruited from places such as Ohio and New York. Lucas, History of Blacks in Kentucky, 151–54.
30. Letter from Smith D. Atkins to a friend in Illinois, November 2, 1862, in Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War, ed. Ira Berlin et al. (New York: New Press, 1992), 75.
31. Union general Benjamin A. Butler first used the term “contrabands” to describe enslaved African Americans who had been “confiscated” as property by the Federal government. Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 222; Elizabeth Hyde Botume, First Days amongst the Contrabands (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 10.
32. Douglass Monthly, January 1863, in Foner, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, 524.
33. Lucas, History of Blacks in Kentucky, 154.
34. In a memorandum dated June 12, 1863, Captain Theron E. Hall writes: “Camp near Hickman's Bridge Ky will be called Camp Nelson in honor [of] the memory of the late Maj. Gen. William Nelson” (cited in Richard D. Sears, Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002], 4). At the beginning of the war, Lincoln had tapped Nelson, a former naval officer to recruit loyalists to fight against the Confederacy. Nelson became head of the Army of Kentucky in July 1862. He was a heavy-handed leader and not beloved by his men. On September 29, 1862, the surly Nelson was confronted in the lobby of the Galt House in Louisville by Brigadier General Jefferson Columbus Davis, whom Nelson had removed from field command. After a heated exchange between the two, a humiliated Davis demanded an apology for what he believed to be an attack on his honor. Nelson refused. Davis left the hotel lobby but returned a short time later with a pistol and shot Nelson in the heart. He died less than fifteen minutes later. Despite the murder, Davis was never convicted and continued to serve in the U.S. military. See Collins and Collins, Collins’ Historical Sketches, 113; Kleber, Kentucky Encyclopedia, 676; Donald Clark, The Notorious “Bull” Nelson: Murdered Union General (Carbondale: University of Illinois, 2011).
35. Sears, Camp Nelson, xxxiv.
36. See Richard D. Sears, A Utopian Experiment in Kentucky: Integration and Social Equality at Berea, 1866–1904 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers, 1996).
37. Ira Berlin et al., Freedom: The Destruction of Slavery, series 1, vol. 1, 1861–1867, War Department Official Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 855–56.
38. Brain R. Eades, Slaves to Soldiers: A History of the Black Community at Camp Nelson, Jessamine County, Kentucky (Nicholasville, KY: Camp Nelson Preservation and Restoration Society, 1995), 2.
39. See Peter Bruner, A Slave's Adventures towards Freedom: Not Fiction, but the True Story of a Struggle (Oxford, OH: n.p., 1918).
40. See Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: The History of the 54th Massachusetts, 1863–1865 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995); Corporal James Henry Gooding, On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier's Civil War Letters from the Front (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991); James M. McPherson, The Negro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted during the War for the Union (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965); Andrew Ward, River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (New York: Penguin Group, 2005); John Cimprich, Fort Pillow: A Civil War Massacre and Public Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2005); Joint Select Committee on the Conduct of the War, April 21, 1864, Fort Pillow Massacre (Evansville: Adena, 2005).
41. Letter from Colonel Cicero Maxwell, Commander of U.S. Forces in Southwestern Kentucky, to General J. T. Boyle, Commander of the District of Kentucky, December 5, 1863, in Berlin et al., Freedom, 594–95.
42. Ibid.
43. U.S. Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations, vol. 13 (Boston, 1866), 6–11.
44. Berlin et al., Freedom, 21.
45. For information on Warren Viley, see William Preston Mangum II, A Kingdom for a Horse: The Legacy of R. A. Alexander and Woodburn Farms (Louisville: Harmony House Publishers, 1999), 41.
46. Affidavit of Patsy Leach, March 25, 1865, reproduced in Sears, Camp Nelson, 187; Ira Berlin, ed., Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 268–69.
47. Hundreds of recruits, including Jerry Skillman, converged on Camp Nelson in 1864, but it is unclear whether their families followed. However, evidence shows that a majority of men who volunteered to fight brought their families along with them to secure their freedom as well. These women and children, as well as the elderly seeking refuge at the camp, created shortages of food and accommodations. At Camp Nelson, from April to July 1864, an average of three children and one woman died each day as a result of disease and malnutrition. Sears, Camp Nelson, iii; Lucas, History of Blacks in Kentucky, 160–62.
48. Sears, Camp Nelson, 83–86.
49. Ibid., 86.
50. Ibid., 84.
51. Lucas, History of Blacks in Kentucky, 154.
52. Sears, Camp Nelson, xxxvii.
53. Elijah Marrs, Life and History of Elijah P. Marrs, First Pastor of Bear-grass Baptist Church (Louisville: Bradley and Gilbert, 1885), 17–18.
54. Hine and Jenkins, Question of Manhood, 46.
55. Sears, Camp Nelson, 87.
56. Ibid.
57. See Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War, 220–24.
58. Quoted in McPherson, The Negro's Civil War, 187.
59. See Sears, Camp Nelson, 125.
60. See Sears, Utopian Experiment in Kentucky, 5.
61. Letter from Fee to Jocelyn, August 8, 1864, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 110.
62. Ibid., 116.
63. W. Stephen McBride and Kim A. McBride, Seizing Freedom: Archaeology of Escaped Slaves at Camp Nelson, Kentucky (Nicholasville, KY: Camp Nelson Civil War Heritage Park, 2009), 12–15.
64. Sears, Utopian Experiment in Kentucky, 10, 12.
65. “From Kentucky: Cruel Treatment of the Wives and Children of U.S. Colored Soldiers,” New York Tribune, December 2, 1864, 1.
66. Quoted in Sears, Camp Nelson, 135–36.
67. Captain Hall to Captain Dickson, November 26, 1864, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 136.
68. Dickson to Major General S. G. Burbridge, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 137.
69. Several books and essays examine the U.S. military's reluctance t
o officially acknowledge the impact of African American soldiers on the outcome of numerous battles and the overall victory over the Confederacy. For example, see William Glenn Robertson's essay in Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era, ed. John David Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 169–99.
70. See U. S. Grant, Personal Memories of U. S. Grant, vol. 2 (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1886), 334.
71. “The Casualties and the Incident,” Boston Herald, October 4, 1864, 2.
72. U. S. Grant to Henry W. Halleck, August 1, 1864, in War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 40, pt. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892), 17; hereafter cited as WROR.
73. Robin Smith and Ron Field, Uniforms of the Civil War: An Illustrated Guide for Historians, Collectors, and Reenactors (London: First Lyons Press, 2004), 135.
74. Godfrey Weitzel, Entry of the United States Forces into Richmond, VA, April 3, 1865: Calling Together of the Virginia Legislature and Revocation of the Same (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Historical Society, 1965).
75. Ibid., 53.
76. Garland H. White, Chaplin, Twenty-Eighth U.S. Colored Infantry, Richmond, VA, April 12, 1865, in Congressional Record, April 22, 1865; Edwin S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 175.
77. G. W. to Colonel E. W. Smith, “Swift Creek,” April 13, 1865, in WROR, series 1, vol. 46, p. 739.
78. “One Petersburg Letter,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 20, 1865, 3.
79. For black soldiers’ influence over former slaves, see General Order No. 11, April 24, 1865, in WROR, series 1, vol. 46, p. 932.
80. John J. Peck to Edward M. Stanton, April 15, 1865, ibid., 782.
81. U. S. Grant to Major General Halleck, April 30, 1865, ibid., 1016.
82. Halleck to Ord, May 1, 1865, ibid., 1062.
83. Weitzel to Lieutenant Colonel T. S. Bowers, May 16, 1865, ibid., 1160.
4. From the Silence and the Darkness
1. Charles S. Peirce, “Chronology, Eclipses, and Tides,” in The Atlantic Almanac (Boston: Tickner and Fields, 1869), 62.
2. “The Eclipse,” Quincy Whig, August 7, 1869, 4; “The Solar Eclipse,” Public Ledger, August 7, 1869, 2.
3. Peirce, “Chronology, Eclipses, and Tides,” 62.
4. “The Approaching Eclipse,” The Mystic Star: A Monthly Magazine, Devoted to Masonry and Its Literature (Chicago: Hanna and Billings, 1869), 181; “The Solar Eclipse,” New York Times, July 6, 1869, 3.
5. Reporting his findings to the Royal Astronomical Society in London, Morton wrote, “Forty-one perfect photographs were taken during the eclipse, and five of these…were taken during totality which lasted with us 2m 42s.” Quoted by Alfred Mayer, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 11, no. 82 (1869): 204–8.
6. George W. Ranck, History of Lexington, Kentucky: Its Early Annals and Recent Progress (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1872), 402.
7. See John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Vintage Books, 2006); W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1992).
8. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 671.
9. Ibid.
10. See Victor B. Howard, “The Black Testimony Controversy in Kentucky, 1866–1872,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 2 (April 1973): 150; Lowell H. Harrison and James C. Klotter, New History of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 218.
11. Brian R. Eades, Slaves to Soldiers: A History of the Black Community at Camp Nelson, Jessamine County, Kentucky (Camp Nelson, KY: Camp Nelson Preservation and Restoration Foundation, 1995), 14.
12. See Richard D. Sears, Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 339–47; Marion B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760–1891 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 2003), 193; Victor B. Howard, “The Struggle for Equal Education in Kentucky, 1866–1884,” Journal of Negro History 46, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 309.
13. See the letter from Abisha Scofield to Rev. Strieby and Whipple, Secretaries of the AMA, December 14, 1866, regarding the violence unleashed on Camp Nelson once Federal troops left the military encampment. Sears, Camp Nelson, 354–58.
14. Ronald E. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 15.
15. George C. Wright, Life behind the Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky 1865–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 47.
16. 1860 U.S. census data; John Kellogg, “Negro Urban Cluster in the Postbellum South,” Geographical Review 67, no. 3. (July 1977): 314.
17. James Duane Bolin, Bossism and Reform in a Southern City: Lexington, Kentucky 1880–1940 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 4.
18. John D. Wright Jr., Lexington: Heart of the Bluegrass (Lexington: Fayette County Historic Commission, 1982), 21.
19. Ibid., 72–73.
20. Ibid., 98; Bolin, Bossism and Reform, 7; Herbert A. Thomas Jr., “Victims of Circumstance: Negroes in a Southern Town, 1865–1880,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (July 1973): 256.
21. See the biography of William C. Goodloe in Ranck, History of Lexington, 389.
22. Wright, Lexington: Heart of the Bluegrass, 98.
23. John Kellogg suggests that the housing created for African Americans outside of Lexington lacked the gathering places found in the city, such as grocery stores and barbershops. The primary social organizations in these outlying areas were churches: four in 1860, and eleven in 1881. John Kellogg, “The Formation of Black Residential Areas in Lexington, Kentucky, 1865–1887,” Journal of Southern History 48, no. 1 (February 1982): 49.
24. Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 17.
25. The 1870 U.S. census clearly indicates the changes resulting from the Civil War and emancipation, such as the number of African Americans moving from rural areas of Kentucky to cities such as Lexington.
26. Bolin, Bossism and Reform, 6.
27. “Ike Murphy's Real Name,” Daily Inter Ocean, July 28, 1891, 3.
28. Tax records between 1868 and 1869 show one fewer child in the household, and Isaac Murphy's obituary mentions that “America moved with Isaac and a little sister, who died in childhood, into Lexington where [they] lived with her father Green Murphy.” Llewellyn P. Tarleton, “Isaac Murphy: A Memorial,” Thoroughbred Record, March 21, 1896.
29. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 60–76.
30. Lucious H. Holsey, “The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church,” in African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 254.
31. Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 41.
32. Rev. C. H. Parrish, ed., Golden Jubilee of the General Association of Colored Baptists in Kentucky (Louisville: Mayes Printing Company, 1915), 268–72; John H. Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists from 1769 to 1885 (Cincinnati: J. R. Baumes, 1885), 653–74; Alice Allison Dunnigan, The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and Traditions (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1982), 133–34; L. H. McIntyre, One Grain of Salt: The First African Baptist Church West of the Allegheny Mountains (Lexington: L. H. McIntyre, 1986), 1–11; Lucas, History of Blacks in Kentucky, 121–22.
33. McIntrye, One Grain of Salt, 15–17.
34. Biography of London Ferrill, Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Colored Persons, Lexington, KY (Lexington: A. W. Elder, 1854), 7.
35. Ibid., 8. Jeremiah Murphy's history in Lexington began in the early part of th
e century, around 1803. In 1804 Murphy was granted permission “to keep a tavern at his dwelling house in Lexington, for one year.” In 1834 Murphy sold a tract of land to the owners of the Kentucky Association's racetrack and added to the original purchase. J. Winston Coleman Jr., Stage Coach Days in the Bluegrass (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 55. Also see Ranck, History of Lexington, 131.
36. Spencer, History of Kentucky Baptists, 657.
37. “Narrative of the Life of General Leslie Combs of Kentucky,” American Whig Review, February 1852, 142–55.
38. Wright, Lexington: Heart of the Bluegrass, 43–45.
39. Lucas, History of Blacks in Kentucky, 123–24.
40. To defend white supremacy and oppose Reconstruction and racial mixing, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan formed to intimidate blacks and their supporters and gain social, political, and economic control of the South. See John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 150–69; Foner, Forever Free, 134–35; George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1990), 40–44.
41. On the development of an education system for blacks during Reconstruction and the role of the black church, see Howard, “The Struggle for Equal Education in Kentucky,” 305–28.
42. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, 11.
43. See letter from Rev. Edward P. Smith to M. E. Strieby, Secretary of the American Missionary Association, October 4, 1865, in Sears, Camp Nelson, 269–71.
44. Ibid.
45. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, 7.
46. See McIntyre, One Grain of Salt, 38; Spencer, History of Kentucky Baptists, 656.
47. The AMA supported the freedmen in developing black churches and attracting “a better educated and competent ministry” that would be able to meet the demand for enlightened black religious leaders in the latter part of the nineteenth century. American Missionary Association, The Twenty-Third Annual Report of the American Missionary Association (New York: American Missionary Association, 1869), 58.
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