2 ABOLITIONISTS emancipation of slaves with compensation to their owners, and colonizationists, who promoted sending freed slaves to Africa. The religious basis for early abolitionism came directly from Quakers such as Arnold Buffi n, Elihu Embree, and Charles Osborne and was well established by 1830. The evangelical basis for national abolitionism began in 1833 with the founding of the American Antislavery Society by William Lloyd Garrison, Lewis and Arthur Tappan, Thomas Weld, and many others. Disagreements emerged among these abolitionists relating to the constitutional framework of the United States and how it pertained to slavery. Garrison and others argued that the U.S. Constitution favored slavery and must be overthrown through civil disobedience; James G. Birney and many others countered that political action by amending the U.S. Constitution would achieve the purpose of eliminating slavery. Garrison was adamantly against political action, believing it would diff use the religious and moral foundation of the antislavery movement. The Liberty Party ran Birney as an antislavery candidate for president in 1840 and 1844, and Gerrit Smith in 1848, but by then the emerging Free Soil Party had absorbed most of the antislavery abolitionists. Those abolitionists favoring direct action against slavery encouraged boycotting Southern goods and ser vices, aiding runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad, and running antislavery candidates for state and national offices. The Tappan brothers were credited with much of the financing of the Underground Railroad and for helping to place its agents along the Ohio River. By the mid-1850s, the American Missionary Association had begun direct confrontation on the issue of slavery by placing colporteurs throughout the South, by giving Bibles to slaves, and by distributing antislavery tract materials to slave owners and yeoman farmers. Southern slaveholders retaliated against abolitionists by employing their political power in the U.S. Congress and by direct action to mount posses, pay for detectives, extend the patroller system, and increase the rewards for returning runaway slaves. Once the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was passed, Kentucky slave owners vigorously challenged Underground Railroad operators in federal courts, either winning large judgments or having large fines levied against these operators for the slave owner’s lost slave properties. In 1849 slaveholders in Kentucky won a huge political battle: they sent an overwhelming majority of delegates to the Kentucky Constitutional Convention and to the Kentucky legislature, who rolled back whatever antislavery legislation and protection free blacks had achieved over the previous 50 years. The abolitionists in Kentucky were defeated, demoralized, and in disarray. John G. Fee’s autobiography cites many cases in which proslavery mobs targeted the remaining few white abolitionists in Kentucky and drove many of them out of the state. By the 1850s it appeared to abolitionists in the North that their moderate tactics had not worked; slave states had aggressively expanded slavery into Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri and threatened to take it to Kansas. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act
repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30; thus all federal territories were opened up to the possibility of slavery. With the passage of the KansasNebraska Act, abolitionists could no longer trust that the U.S. Congress would rectify the matter of slavery. Likewise, they lost hope in the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in the 1857 Dred Scott decision (Scott v. Sandford), declared the Missouri Compromise invalid, made any congressional attempts to prohibit slavery in the territories unconstitutional, and regarded slaves as property protected by the U.S. Constitution. With seemingly no recourse left to legislative or judicial action, the war of words erupted into armed aggression. John Brown’s antislavery raids in Kansas and his attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., in October 1859 were the first large-scale overt abolitionist confrontations, and they helped to divide the nation’s opinions on slavery into opposing camps. Passive support to aid runaway slaves now became active tactics, emboldening even more slaves to escape from the South. From 1836 to 1840, antislavery societies espousing political, economic, and direct action against the institution of slavery spread throughout Ohio and Indiana. Slave losses from the river counties of Kentucky and the state’s Bluegrass region mounted significantly during the late 1840s and 1850s. Each time a Kentucky posse went into Michigan, Indiana, or Ohio to retrieve runaway slaves, it was met by angry abolitionists determined to wrest the evil of slavery from the nation. Furthermore, abolitionist “agitators” from these and other Northern states began reaching down into Kentucky with greater frequency. In his 2005 book Bound for Canaan, Fergus Bordewich points to the 1852 death of Isaac Tatum Hooper in New York City as the end of the early period of the abolitionist movement, a period characterized as one in which humble and religious friends of fugitives were simply aiding other human beings. In Northern Kentucky, one might mark the watershed of this change to 1847, when armed mobs rebuffed the slave-catcher Francis Troutman and his Carroll Co., Ky., posse at Marshall, Mich.; or when Rev. Benjamin Sebastian and George W. Brazier’s posse from Boone Co., Ky., was confronted at Cass Co., Mich., and summarily dispatched from the state. The change was further displayed in the dramatic incursions of Elijah Anderson and John Fairfield into Boone Co., taking dozens of slaves out of the county. Northern abolitionists who resorted to aggressive strategies sometimes used military terms and tactics. They also sent spies and colporteurs into the South deliberately to confront slaveholders, and they routinely accosted any “Southern kidnappers” coming into Northern antislavery states to capture runaway slaves. The new contemporary popular faces of the abolitionist movement included the talented black orator Frederick Douglass and the soon-notorious John Brown. The continuous uproar from antagonistic abolitionist tactics was not received well in Kentucky. Conservative antislavery leaders, and even Cassius Clay, disavowed both the abolitionist leaders of
this period and their tactics. The few abolitionists remaining in Kentucky were easily targeted for reprisal. John G. Fee and his tiny coterie living in Madison, Lewis, and Bracken counties during the 1850s were particularly vulnerable, because they acted openly and confronted deeply held local prejudices. Even across the Ohio River in Ripley, Ohio, a number of leading citizens were opposed to the overt abolitionist actives of such locals as Rev. John Rankin and John Parker. According to an overwhelming majority of Kentucky’s citizens, the despised abolitionists were agitators from the North who interfered with Kentucky’s state’s rights; who enticed and stole slaves from decent, law-abiding citizens; and who broke national, state, and local laws. In the view of most newspapers in Kentucky, it was these abolitionists who confronted Kentucky posses lawfully trying to retrieve “lost slave property” in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. It was also these zealot abolitionists who persisted in destroying the national unity of the Methodist Episcopal and the Presbyterian denominations by their activities. Moreover, it was these radical abolitionists who forced President Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865) to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 and to accept Negro troops to fight for the Union. Kentuckians may not have been united on many issues during these difficult times, but they were, generally speaking, united in their abhorrence for the white abolitionists. Kentucky’s abolitionists who were white were easy to spot and few in number. Black abolitionists, in contrast, were numerous and were concentrated into the state’s large urban areas—Louisville, Lexington, Frankfort, and Northern Kentucky—and across the river in Cincinnati. They also congregated in small separate rural slave churches and were spread out geographically as individuals still in bondage across the hundreds of plantations in the north central and Bluegrass regions of Kentucky. Although black preachers were suspected of abolitionist leanings, and isolated free blacks certainly were among the first to be accused of aiding fugitive slaves, few slave owners actually thought their own slaves might be abolitionists who were providing direct help to runaway slaves. As their slave losses mounted, slave owners in Kentucky took action against the abolitionists in their midst and also crossed the Ohio River. Bounties were set for people like John Carr, John Fairfield, Rev. Charles Ide, and other white abolitionists active in the Underground Railroad. Author Ann Hagedorn tells of several attacks on abolitionists in Brown Co., Ohio, led by Mason Co., Ky., slave owner Col. Edward Towers. In late fall 1844, his posse inflicted more than 100 whiplashes on Harbor Hurley, a longtime free black at Sardinia, Ohio; attacked and killed Robert Miller; lynched a runaway slave; attacked Absalom King and several who were helping to defend him; and burned Miller’s and King’s homes. The Georgetown, Ohio, sheriff appeared unable to stop the marauding Kentuckians. The most celebrated attacks by Kentucky slave owners were associated with a secretive organization of slave owners established in Covington in 1846, modeled after the Western Horsemen’s As-