The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  1 William Elsey Connelley, Eastern Kentucky Papers: The Founding of Harman’s Station (New York: Torch Press, 1910), pp. 51-52; Fred E. Coy et al., Rock Art of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), pp. 143-44.

  2 Connelley, Eastern Kentucky Papers, pp. 51-52.

  3 Ibid., pp. 81-86.

  4 Spencer v. Looney (Va. 1912), No. 2012, Virginia State Law Library, Richmond, trial transcript, pp. 62, 66.

  5 Ibid., pp. 65, 116; Tommy Ratliff, interview by author, October 25, 2005, Paintsville, Ky.

  6 See 1860 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.; 1870 U.S. Census, Johnson County; 1880 U.S. Census, Johnson County.

  7 On cornhusking in eastern Kentucky in the early nineteenth century, see Daniel Drake, Pioneer Life in Kentucky (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1870), p. 54.

  8 Ratliff interview; Drake, Pioneer Life; Donald Edward Davis, Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), p. 137; John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 118-19; Nicholas P. Hardeman and Linda M. Steele, Shucks, Shocks, and Hominy Blocks: Corn as a Way of Life in Pioneer America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), pp. 174, 212.

  9 C. Mitchel Hall, Johnson County: The Heart of Eastern Kentucky (self-published, 1928), p. 1:130; Davis, Mountains, pp. 137-38; Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992), pp. 77-79.

  10 See Abrahams, Singing the Master.

  11 Fletcher Douglas Srygley, Seventy Years in Dixie (Nashville, Tenn.: Gospel Advocate Publishing Co., 1893), p. 152.

  12 Deed Book B, August 9, 1854, pp. 435-36, Johnson County Courthouse, Paintsville, Ky.; 1850 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.

  13 On women’s labor on Appalachian farms, see Wilma A. Dunaway, Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 142-43. Dunaway disputes the “myth of male farming.” See also Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 64; “Clever,” Dictionary of American Regional English, ed. Frederic G. Cassidy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 1:684.

  14 1860 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky. The Spencers lost two baby boys to scarlet fever almost exactly a year apart, in September 1853 and 1854. Both were named James. Kentucky Death Records, 1852-1953, Ancestry.com.

  15 Johnson County Historical Society, Johnson County, Kentucky: History and Families (Paducah, Ky.: Turner Publishing Co., 2001), p. 10.

  16 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 123; William Ely, The Big Sandy Valley (Catlettsburg, Ky.: Central Methodist, 1887), pp. 76-79.

  17 Ely, Big Sandy Valley ; J. K. Wells, A Short History of Paintsville and Johnson County (Paintsville Herald for the Johnson County Historical Society, 1962), p. 14 (map of Paintsville, 1850); 1850 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.; 1860 U.S. Census, Johnson County; 1850 U.S. Census Slave Schedules, Johnson County; 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedules, Johnson County.

  18 Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 151; J. Winston Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), pp. 206, 208, and n31.

  19 Coleman, Slavery Times, pp. 196ff and 321-22; see also Harold D. Tallant, Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003).

  20 Tallant, Evil Necessity.

  21 H. B. Bascom, Methodism and Slavery (Frankfort, Ky.: Hodges, Todd & Pruett, 1845), p. 46; Congressional Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess. (1854), p. 73; Coleman, Slavery Times, pp. 302ff; Tallant, Evil Necessity.

  22 Quoted in David L. Smiley, Lion of White Hall: The Life of Cassius M. Clay (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), p. 56.

  23 Lowell H. Harrison and James C. Klotter, A New History of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), p. 176; Coleman, Slavery Times, pp. 318-19; Ely, Big Sandy Valley, p. 294.

  24 See, e.g., Deed Book D, p. 191, Johnson County Courthouse, Paintsville, Ky.

  25 Ibid.; Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 115-16.

  26 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 78; Williams, Appalachia, pp. 98-99. See also Deborah Vansau McCauley, Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

  27 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 60, 121.

  28 Ibid., pp. 71, 137; Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 111-39; William Harlen Gilbert Jr., “Memorandum Concerning the Characteristics of the Larger Mixed-Blood Racial Islands of the Eastern United States,” Social Forces 24 (1946), p. 438; Edward T. Price, “The Mixed-Blood Racial Strain of Carmel, Ohio, and Magoffin County, Kentucky,” Ohio Journal of Science 50 (1950), pp. 281-90; Calvin L. Beale, “An Overview of the Phenomenon of Mixed-Racial Isolates in the United States,” in A Taste of the Country: A Collection of Calvin Beale’s Writings, ed. Peter A. Morrison (University Park: Penn State Press, 1990), pp. 33-41.

  29 Lewis Shepherd, “Romantic Account of the Celebrated ‘Melungeon’ Case,” Watson’s Magazine 17 (1913), pp. 34, 39, quoted in David Henige, “Origin Traditions of American Racial Isolates: A Case of Something Borrowed,” Appalachian Journal 11 (1984), pp. 201, 202; Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell; see also N. Brent Kennedy with Robyn Vaughan Kennedy, The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People, rev. ed. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997); John Shelton Reed, “Mixing in the Mountains,” Southern Cultures 3 (1997), p. 25; William Byrd, The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover, ed. Kevin Berland et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), sec. 173, pp. 139-40; Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860,” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007), pp. 592, 610, and n72.

  30 On the phenomenon of millions of Americans claiming to have “Cherokee grandmothers,” see Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), pp. 172-74. Many Americans “without an actual Cherokee grandmother claim one,” says Thornton. “There are also explanations for this. Such ‘lineage’ might be from another, non-Cherokee tribe or it might be totally non-Indian.” See also Calvin Beale, “Notes on a Visit to Hancock County, Tennessee,” in Beale, Taste of the Country, pp. 42-52; 1860 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.

  31 James Weir, Lonz Powers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1850), p. 1:242, quoted in Otto A. Rothert, A History of Muhlenberg County (Louisville, Ky.: John P. Morton & Co., 1913), p. 171. Although Lonz Powers is a novel, its author was a frequent participant in muster-day activities in Muhlenberg County in south-central Kentucky; Rothert describes his fictional account as accurate (p. 170).

  32 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 18; “The Hunters of Kentucky, or Half Horse and Half Alligator” (n.d), a song published in Boston and popular in the 1820s; Hall, Johnson County, pp. 90, 93-94.

  33 Rothert, History of Muhlenberg County, pp. 165, 168.

  34 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 139.

  35 Ibid., p. 127.

  36 Weir, Lonz Powers, pp. 243-44, quoted in Rothert, History of Muhlenberg County, pp. 172-73.

  CHAPTER SIX: WALL: OBERLIN, OHIO, SEPTEMBER 1858

  1 Jacob R. Shipherd, comp., History of the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1859), quotes from the testimony of Anderson Jennings and closing argument of Rufus Spaulding on pp. 19, 20, 77. See also Nat Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War (New York: Dell, 1990), p. 54.

  2 In 1850 Jennings owned seven people: an old man, a baby girl and boy, and two boys and two girls in their teens. Over the course of the decade, six more children were born on Jennings’s property, including two mixed-race babies. 1850 U.S. Census,
Mason County, Ky.; 1850 U.S. Census Slave Schedule, Mason County; 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedule, Mason County. See also Shipherd, Oberlin- Wellington Rescue, pp. 17, 101. According to the Consumer Price Index, $1,500 in 1858 is the equivalent of approximately $40,000 today. For that calculation as well as ones using other economic indicators, see http://www.measuringworth.com.

  3 James Harris Fairchild, Oberlin: Its Origin, Progress, and Results (Oberlin, Ohio: R. Butler, 1871), pp. 4-5, 29; James Harris Fairchild, Oberlin: The Colony and the College, 1833-1883 (Oberlin, Ohio: E. J. Goodrich, 1883), pp. 21-22, 25-27.

  4 Fairchild, Oberlin: Its Origin, p. 30.

  5 See generally Act of September 18, 1850, 9 Stat. 462-65; Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857).

  6 See Brandt, Town That Started, pp. 122-23; William E. Bigglestone, They Stopped at Oberlin: Black Residents and Visitors of the Nineteenth Century (Oberlin College, 2002), pp. 206- 10; Shipherd, Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, p. 42.

  7 Bigglestone, Stopped at Oberlin, p. 207; see also E. J. Hobsbawm and Joan Wallach Scott, “Political Shoemakers,” Past and Present 89 (1980), pp. 86-114.

  8 1850 U.S. Census, Warren County, Ohio; 1850 U.S. Census, Clinton County, Ohio.

  9 See Hobsbawm and Scott, “Political Shoemakers.”

  10 William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-1865 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 170, 176; Minutes of the State Convention, of the Colored Citizens of Ohio (Columbus, Ohio: E. Glover, 1851), pp. 6, 11.

  11 Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight, pp. 251-54.

  12 John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1894), p. 158; Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight, pp. 254, 278.

  13 Carol Lasser, “Enacting Emancipation: African American Women Abolitionists at Oberlin College and the Quest for Empowerment, Equality, and Respectability,” in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Steward (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 319-45; Frank U. Quillin, The Color Line in Ohio: A History of Race Prejudice in a Typical Northern State (Ann Arbor: George Wahr, 1913), p. 32; 1850 U.S. Census, Hamilton County, Ohio; Amanda Wall, September 18, 1867, U.S. Freedmen Bank Records, 1865-1874, Ancestry.com.

  14 Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight, pp. 260, 296; Brandt, Town That Started, pp. 45-46.

  15 Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight, p. 278; Langston, From Virginia Plantation, pp. 126-27, 158-59; 1860 U.S. Census, Lorain County, Ohio.

  16 Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 302-5; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 120-21; Brandt, Town That Started, p. 75.

  17 Brandt, Town That Started, pp. 52, 54; William C. Cochran, The Western Reserve and the Fugitive Slave Law: A Prelude to the Civil War (Cleveland, Ohio: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1920), pp. 118-57.

  18 Cochran, Western Reserve, p. 121; Shipherd, Oberlin- Wellington Rescue, p. 242; Brandt, Town That Started, pp. 51-52, 113-14.

  19 Brandt, Town That Started, p. 51; Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight, p. 283.

  20 Brandt, Town That Started, p. 54.

  21 Shipherd, Oberlin- Wellington Rescue, pp. 16-17; Brandt, Town That Started, pp. 6-7.

  22 Shipherd, Oberlin- Wellington Rescue, pp. 101, 242; Brandt, Town That Started, p. 55.

  23 Shipherd, Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, p. 21.

  24 Ibid., pp. 19, 35.

  25 On drapetomania, see Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” DeBow’s Review of the Southern and Western States 1 (1851), pp. 331ff; George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 57.

  26 Shipherd, Oberlin- Wellington Rescue, p. 16; Loren Schweninger, “Counting the Costs: Southern Planters and the Problem of Runaway Slaves, 1790-1860,” Business and Economic History 28 (1999), pp. 267, 272.

  27 See, e.g., “The Captured Slaver—Three Hundred and Eighteen Africans On Board,” Daily Ohio Statesman, September 1, 1858, p. 3; Hobsbawm and Scott, “Political Shoemakers”; 1860 U.S. Census, Lorain County, Ohio.

  28 Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight, pp. 278, 297.

  29 Minutes of the State Convention, of the Colored Citizens of Ohio, p. 11; Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight.

  30 Cochran, Western Reserve, p. 123.

  31 Brandt, Town That Started, p. 50; Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight, p. 317.

  32 Shipherd, Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, p. 35.

  33 Ibid., p. 99; Brandt, Town That Started, pp. 57-58.

  34 Brandt, Town That Started, p. 58.

  35 Ibid.; Shipherd, Oberlin- Wellington Rescue, p. 19.

  36 Shipherd, Oberlin- Wellington Rescue, p. 22; Brandt, Town That Started, p. 65.

  37 Brandt, Town That Started, pp. 65-66.

  38 Shipherd, Oberlin- Wellington Rescue, p. 29.

  39 Brandt, Town That Started, p. 67. The other young man walking with Lyman by the Pittsfield graveyard, Seth Bartholomew, had little interest in helping John Price. Shipherd, Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, p. 22.

  40 Brandt, Town That Started, p. 65.

  41 Ibid., p. 79.

  42 Richard Winsor, “How John Price Was Rescued,” in The Oberlin Jubilee, 1833-1883, ed. W. G. Ballantine (Oberlin, Ohio: E. J. Goodrich, 1883), p. 251.

  43 Shipherd, Oberlin- Wellington Rescue, p. 22.

  44 Ibid., p. 20.

  45 Ibid., p. 18.

  46 Ibid., p. 24.

  47 Ibid., pp. 23, 121-22.

  48 Ibid., p. 177.

  49 Ibid., p. 100.

  50 Ibid., p. 102; Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight, p. 132.

  51 Shipherd, Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, p. 24.

  52 Ibid., p. 100.

  53 Winsor, “How John Price,” pp. 251-55.

  54 Ibid.; Shipherd, Oberlin- Wellington Rescue, p. 18.

  55 Langston, From Virginia Plantation, p. 185.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: CIVIL WAR: WALL, GIBSON, AND SPENCER, 1859-63

  1 Jacob R. Shipherd, comp., History of the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1859), p. 89; Nat Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War (New York: Dell, 1990), pp. 160-61. See also William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1989), pp. 329-35.

  2 “The Politics of the Jury,” Daily Cleveland Herald, April 19, 1859; Brandt, Town That Started, pp. 140-41.

  3 Shipherd, Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, pp. 113, 175. After the Civil War, misnomer provided frequent grounds for dismissing charges against newly freed slaves in the South. See Christopher Waldrep, “Substituting Law for the Lash: Emancipation and Legal Formalism in a Mississippi County Court,” Journal of American History 82 (1996), pp. 1425, 1445-46.

  4 Shipherd, Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, p. 42; “The Rescue Cases: Sixth and Seventh Days,” Daily Cleveland Herald, April 12, 1859.

  5 Cheek and Cheek, Langston and the Fight, p. 329; Brandt, Town That Started, pp. 132-33, 196-99.

  6 Brandt, Town That Started, pp. 199-200.

  7 Ibid., pp. 191-92. A version of the image appeared on the front page of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1859.

  8 Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, December 9, 1861, GLC 4501.013, Gibson Archive, Gilder Lehrman; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, 2003), p. 393. See also Federal Writers’ Project, Kentucky: A Guide to the Bluegrass State (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939), p. 325; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1885), vol. 1, in Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters (New York: Library of America, 1990), pp. 1:1
87ff; and Mary Gorton McBride with Ann McLaurin, Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana: Confederate General and New South Reformer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), p. 73.

  9 Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, December 9, 1861, Gibson Archive, Gilder Lehrman. Among those traveling with Gibson were Gen. Benjamin Franklin Cheatham, a Nashville planter; Col. James Camp Tappan, an Arkansas lawyer and Yale graduate; and Capt. George Norton, a New Orleans cotton merchant.

  10 R. L. Gibson, “Our Federal Union,” DeBow’s Review 29 (July 1860), pp. 31-42; see also McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, p. 61.

  11 See Mary G. McBride and Ann M. McLaurin, “Sarah G. Humphreys: Antebellum Belle to Equal Rights Activist, 1830-1907,” Filson Club History Quarterly 65 (1991), pp. 231, 238; McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, pp. 52-60, 66.

  12 McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, pp. 68, 91.

  13 New Orleans Picayune, August 2, 9, September 6, 1903, quoted in John McGrath, “In a Louisiana Regiment,” Southern Historical Society Papers 31 (1903), p. 103; McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, pp. 68-72; Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, December 2, 1861, GLC 4501.012, Gibson Archive, Gilder Lehrman; Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, December 19, 1861, GLC 4501.014, Gibson Archive, Gilder Lehrman.

  14 Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, December 9, 1861, Gibson Archive, Gilder Lehrman; Grant, Personal Memoirs, pp. 185, 187; McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, p. 73; William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), pp. 62-63.

  15 Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, December 9, 1861, Gibson Archive, Gilder Lehrman; McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, p. 72; Grant, Personal Memoirs, pp. 177-86.

  16 Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, December 9, 1861, Gibson Archive, Gilder Lehrman.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Ibid.

  19 George Washington Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds (Hazel Green, Ky.: Spencer Cooper, 1912), p. 11; Robert Perry, Jack May’s War: Colonel Andrew Jackson May and the Civil War in Eastern Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee, and Southwest Virginia ( Johnson City, Tenn.: Overmountain Press, 1998), pp. 14-15; John David Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 2008), pp. 52-71; James M. Perry, Touched With Fire: Five Presidents and the Civil War Battle That Made Them (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), p. 75.