GHENT
tered at Covington in July 1864. This squad of untrained infantry was sent to protect recruits obtained for the 5th U.S. Colored Cavalry (USCC) among slaves and free people of color in Carroll, Gallatin, Grant, and Owen counties. The officers of USCT and USCC units were white. Indiana native Frederick Seward had completed two years of service with Company E, 9th Minnesota Regiment, before his promotion to lieutenant. About August 22, the USCT squad arrested James Southard, a leading Confederate sympathizer and ferryman at Ghent, Gallatin Co. Southard owned land along the Ohio River that formed the Ghent landing. His brother notified Colonel Jesse, who was in Henry Co., that James Southard had been taken by USCT troops. Jesse’s cavalry caught up with the USCT squad at the plantation of Lucien C. Gex, just outside Ghent, on August 29, 1864. According to eyewitness Virginia Craig, that night the USCT unit had been separated into two groups of six each; one group was fed dinner at the farm of her father, and the other group was fed at an unspecified nearby farm. Jesse’s men surprised and captured the USCT soldiers, and in their first engagement with the enemy, the Union troops were scattered across the farms of Albert and John A. Craig. The CSA troops rescued Southard at John A. Craig’s farm. There were casualties among the USCT troops, but the exact number of them is unknown. Over the next day or so, several different accounts of the incident were recorded, and thus the tale of the Gex Landing Massacre was established. On August 30, 1864, Union lieutenant colonel Thomas B. Fairleigh, at Louisville, requested aide from J. Bates Dickson, assistant adjutant at Lexington: “Last evening [Confederate colonel] Jesse with 150 men captured a squad of eight or ten colored troops at Ghent and murdered them. Other squads are in the country where he is hunting. Can’t you send some men there?” Virginia Craig, daughter of Albert Craig, recorded in her diary of August 30, 1864, that six of the USCT soldiers were fed at her house and were surprised and captured by rebel soldiers who had searched the house. She said that Southard was being held at her cousin John’s house and was rescued. According to her diary, one USCT soldier had been killed and subsequently buried on Albert Craig’s lower farm, two wounded USCT soldiers had been put on the packet steamer Rowena bound for Cincinnati, and the rest were captured, including a white recruiter. A Cincinnati newspaper, the Commercial Dispatch, carried the story within the week, claiming that one of the two wounded USCT soldiers had died in transit on the Rowena. This story further claimed that there had been 60 USCT and 100 CSA involved in the incident at Ghent. A highly partisan version of the “massacre” was carried in the August 31, 1864, issue of the Louisville Daily Journal, generally a pro-Union newspaper. There it was stated that Jesse’s troops had massacred unarmed Negro troops, “shooting them like wild beasts.” The next day the Louisville Daily Journal reported that Jesse’s troops had destroyed
Lock No. 1 on the Kentucky River and had “proclaimed vengeance against all Negro soldiers and recruits. It will be [Jesse’s] policy to murder all that may fall into his hands. His recent massacre of the blacks at Ghent shows that his words [are] not simple idle bombast.” Two days later, the newspaper corrected its earlier story: “Jesse did not murder negroes at Ghent— none killed except in attack. His men urged him to murder entire party but he refused the barbarous act.” Then on September 5, the newspaper reported that “seven of the colored soldiers reached Owenton [Ky.] from Port Royal [Ky.] on Wednesday last where released . . . one a Sgt., two wounded, fifteen captured, eight remained with rebels voluntarily . . . no bad treatment by Jesse.” As if the story were not confused enough by the presence of two different black units at the skirmish, in November 1864 elements of the 5th U.S. Colored Cavalry were assigned to patrol duty at Ghent and Warsaw. Local citizens apparently made no distinction between the USCT and USCC units. In December 1864, the 117th USCT, stationed at Camp Nelson in Jessamine Co., was folded into the 25th Union Brigade, and white regiments in the brigade were transferred. The 117th regiment under the 25th Corps saw action at Richmond and Appomattox in Virginia and in the final Texas campaign. Compared to these other battles, the Gex landing skirmish was insignificant. The official regimental records of the 5th USCC state that at the Ghent skirmish one soldier was killed, six were captured but later escaped, and five returned to their unit. The story was embellished further during the early 1900s when A. L. Gex, the son of Lucien Gex, found three graves churned up by a cyclone (tornado) and reported seeing “foot bones in perfectly preserved shoes.” The wide discrepancies concerning the numbers involved in the Ghent incident can be attributed to wartime hysteria and to newspaper reporting that was dependent on local sources for its news coverage. The presence of both cavalry and infantry units among the black troops and recent recruits of slaves from the region added to confusion about the number of deaths and about those who were released or remained with the Confederates. From the family letters exchanged during the Civil War, it appears that the Gex and Craig families originally supported Kentucky’s neutrality but were bitterly opposed to the formation of USCT units and the military draft. By 1865 these families had affi liated themselves totally with the Conservative Democrats, a political faction that tipped the balance in the Kentucky legislature toward a pro-Southern position following the Civil War. Abbett, H. J., Warsaw, to A. G. Craig, July 18, 1865. Craig Papers, King Library, Univ. of Kentucky, Lexington. Carroll Co. Deed Book 2: 157, 196; 17: 119; 20: 2, Carrollton, Ky. Cincinnati newspaper clippings, September 1864, made by Lucien Gex. Craig Papers. Craig, Virginia. Diary excerpt, King Library, Univ. of Kentucky.
397
Gex, A. L., son of Lucien Gex, embellished narrative, ca. 1900. Craig Papers. Harrison, Lowell H., and James C. Klotter. A New History of Kentucky. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1997. Louisville Daily Journal, August 31, September 1, 3, 5, 1864. Prichard, James. “Colonel Jesse,” typed manuscript, privately held by James Prichard, Kentucky Libraries and Archives, Frankfort, Ky.
Diane Perrine Coon
GHENT. The town of Ghent in Carroll Co., a thriving Ohio River port throughout the 1800s, began with Benjamin Craig’s 1794 settlement of McCoull’s Bottom, a 1,000-acre tract purchased from Ann McCoull, widow of Neil McCoull of Fredericksburg, Va. The property had originally been granted to the heirs of Ann’s brother, Theodosius McDonald, who died in the French and Indian War. The McCool’s Creek settlement provided overland access to the Ohio River for several surrounding counties. A ferry soon linked it to Vevay, Ind., which was settled by Swiss immigrants as early as 1802. In 1810 John and Samuel Sanders purchased from Benjamin Craig, who was their uncle, a 300acre tract, upon which Samuel Sanders laid out a town of eight streets and 108 lots in 1816. It was called Ghent, and the legend persists that Henry Clay, a signer of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, suggested the name. Benjamin Craig sold 200 acres east of the Sanders’s tract to his brother, noted Indian fighter Jeremiah Craig. This acreage stretched from Jerry Craig’s Creek (now Black Rock) to Ferry St. in Ghent, marking where Jeremiah Craig operated the ferry for his nephew Samuel Sanders. Sanders’s Tavern was a popu lar stopping place in the early 1800s, as was the America House, a nearby hotel. Much of Jeremiah Craig’s tract was acquired by Rev. John Scott and continues to be owned by Scott descendants today. Scott-Land Gardens, a road house with tourist cabins, operated there during the early 1900s. In 1814 the “mother church” for the area’s Baptist churches relocated to the settlement and built a new brick sanctuary along Ferry St. in 1843, on land donated by John Scott. It is now known as the Ghent Baptist Church. “Reformers” split off to form the Ghent Christian Church in 1836, and the two congregations hosted Baptist evangelist T. J. Fisher and Disciples of Christ publisher Ben Franklin in a religious debate at the Baptist Church in 1857. The debate was transcribed and published as a book. In 1843 Samuel Sanders’s nephew George N. Sanders organized a political meeting at Ghent, calling upon prospective presidential candidates to declare their position on the annexation of Texas. The response of little-known speaker James K. Polk launched his successful candidacy and led to the Mexican War. It also marked the beginning of George Sanders’s controversial political career, which ended in exile because Sanders was a suspect in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.