APPALACHIANS
American Missionary Society tried to distribute thousands of Bibles and antislavery tracts in the South through colporteurs, religious men and women who traveled with suitcases and satchels full of what proslavery forces in the South termed “incendiary literature.” John G. Fee was very much associated with colporteurs in Central Kentucky. Eli Thayer and John C. Underwood are credited with pushing the American Missionary Society’s activity beyond colporteurs to promote and finance the concept of “northern emigrant communities.” This direct action placed Northern abolitionist Christians in the middle South and in the disputed western territories to model egalitarian societies so that slave owners could be shown how freedmen might act if they were educated and treated as citizens. The emigrant community established in Kansas in the 1850s, so much associated with John Brown and the Missouri raids, was the first attempt to test these ideas. The emigrant community established at Ceredo, W.Va., near Ashland, Ky., was a far more successful venture, focusing on mining and milling as a profit center. But in Kentucky the most famous and controversial of these abolitionist efforts was the failed community John G. Fee tried to establish in 1859 at Berea that also included a coeducational, integrated college. Located on lands granted by Cassius M. Clay, both the planned abolitionist colony and the college were immediately targeted by proslavery forces angered by John Brown’s October 1859 violent raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., and Fee and his colleagues were forced to flee across the Ohio River. Typical of the reaction in Kentucky to the expulsion of Fee and his associates was a resolution on January 21, 1860, at a meeting at Orangeburg in Mason Co., declaring: “No Abolitionist has the right to establish himself in the slaveholding community and disseminate opinions and principles destructive of the tranquility and safety.” Northerners, therefore, should look to their own salvation and leave Kentuckians alone. Antebellum newspapers in Northern Kentucky aligned with either the Whig Party or the Democratic Party and treated news about runaway slaves, slave uprisings, and Underground Railroad activities as crime stories. They also reported legislative acts of Congress concerning slavery and foreign news about the African slave trade and announced local meetings of abolition, proslavery, or colonization society meetings. In the 1840s and 1850s, Democratic newspapers took a decidedly antiblack position, running alarmist news stories about the Patrick Doyle slave revolt, Margaret Garner’s trial in Cincinnati for murdering her child, the Henderson slave revolt, runaway slave recaptures, and, whenever possible, examples of escaped slaves who returned to their masters voluntarily. The villains in these articles were always Northern agitator abolitionists. Free blacks were characterized as buffoons, criminals, or puffed up by self-importance and by “trying to imitate their betters.” In 1835 James Gillespie Birney, a slave owner who emancipated his slaves that year, and 40 others founded the Kentucky chapter of the American Anti-Slavery Society and announced plans for two
ventures: their newspaper, the Philanthropist, to be printed at Danville, and a postal campaign to send 1 million pieces of antislavery literature throughout the South. Danville literally ran Birney and his antislavery publication out of town. Ironically, Birney’s father had supported Rev. David Rice, a Presbyterian minister, in attempting to keep slavery out of Kentucky at the state’s 1792 constitutional convention. Undaunted, Birney published the first issue of the Philanthropist on January 1, 1836, at New Richmond, Ohio, opposite Campbell Co. He later moved the paper to Cincinnati, where an angry mob destroyed the press on July 30, 1836. Birney continued publication of a paper with widespread support among antislavery people in the northwest states. Editorially, the Philanthropist broke with William Lloyd Garrison’s emphasis on moral persuasion and actively encouraged political action. Birney founded the Liberty Party and ran for president in 1840 and again in 1844. Most of the leading antislavery people in the nation contributed articles to the Philanthropist. Northern Kentucky made its own contribution to the establishment and printing of an antislavery newspaper through William S. Bailey’s Newport News, which began publication in 1839 at Newport in Campbell Co. Editorially, Bailey was a oneman show, championing the economic interests of working-class people and claiming that slavery diminished their chances to earn decent wages. He was not at all interested in religious motivations to end slavery. As a result, abolitionists such as John G. Fee prevented the American Missionary Society from sending funds to Bailey after his newspaper press was burned out by arson. Bailey later traveled to New England and England seeking funds to restart his presses. Some of the national antislavery newspapers found a few subscribers in Kentucky, especially in the cities; most of their influence, though, was through the antislavery societies in Ohio and Indiana. The truth was that the Kentucky educational system was so poor in quality that few yeomen could read or write. Ironically, it was the landed gentry, the slaveholders, who educated their children. Even though Abraham Lincoln had been born in Kentucky, his candidacy for president in 1860, seen by his critics as being antislavery and antiSouthern, was immensely unpopular in Northern Kentucky. All three of the other candidates outpolled the Republican Lincoln in Kentucky. The old-line Whig constituencies tended to favor John Bell, the Constitutional Unionist from Tennessee, while the Democratic vote split in Kentucky: native-son John C. Breckinridge, the Southern Democrat, picked up the old Andrew Jacksonites, and Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the Northern Democrat, captured the national Democratic vote. Only in the urban communities of Covington and Newport did Lincoln poll respectable numbers in Northern Kentucky in the 1860 election. Just across the Ohio River, both Ohio and Indiana gave major support to the election of Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party ticket. Four years later in 1864, with Kentucky under military occupation,
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with rumors afloat that the Union Army was proposing enlistment of black slaves and freedmen, and with many Kentuckians serving in Confederate Army units, the total vote in the state was suppressed significantly. Differences within the region were exaggerated in the 1864 election. Although McClelland won Kentucky, Lincoln actually won in Kenton and Campbell counties, albeit with a suspicious and remarkable 107% of eligible voters in Campbell Co. By 1864 the overwhelming issues centered on the individual voter’s support for the Union or the Confederacy as well as resentment about Kentucky’s continued treatment as a hostile region under military rule. A vote in Kentucky for or against Abraham Lincoln now had more to do with current political issues; the importance of the antislavery movement in Kentucky had been eclipsed. Bryant, James C. Mountain Island in Owen County, Kentucky: The Settlers and Their Churches. Owenton, Ky.: Owen Co. Historical Society, 1986. Drummond, Dwight Lowell. Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1961. Harrison, Lowell H. The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky. Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1978. Howard, Victor B. The Evangelical War against Slavery and Caste: The Life and Times of John G. Fee. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 1996. LaRoche, Cheryl Jenifer. “On the Edge of Freedom: Free Black Communities, Archaeology, and the Underground Railroad,” PhD diss., Univ. of Maryland, 2006. Martin, Asa Earl. “Pioneer Antislavery Press,” Missouri Valley Historical Review 2 (March 1916): 510–28. Nowlin, William Dudley. Kentucky Baptist History, 1790–1922. Louisville, Ky.: Baptist Book Concern, 1922. Ripley, C. Peter, ed. The Black Abolitionist Papers. Vols. 3, 4, 5. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991. Shannon, Jasper B., and Ruth McQuown. Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 1824–1948. Lexington: Bureau of Government Research, College of Arts and Sciences, Univ. of Kentucky, 1930. Sparks, Elder John. The Roots of Appalachian Christianity. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2001. Spencer, J. H. History of Kentucky Baptists from 1769 to 1865. Lafayette, Tenn.: Church History Research and Archives, 1976. Tallant, Harold D. Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2003. Turner, Wallace B. “Abolitionism in Kentucky,” RKHS 69 (October 1971): 319–38.
Diane Perrine Coon
APPALACHIANS. Appalachians are people from Appalachia, which is currently defined by the federal Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) as a 200,000-square-mile region that includes 23 million people in 410 counties, encompassing all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The ARC definition does not include any of the 11 counties