About education and amusements
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| Early Bourbon County Schoolhouse |
Mary and her kin were better educated than most. In 1840, well after Mary had completed her schooling, only one out of seven white children in Kentucky had attended school during the prior year.55 From 1850 to 1900, national census figures reveal that only about half of school age children had attended class, a figure not much improved until well into the twentieth century. The school year was short, often less than three months, and many rural children dropped out once they gained some grasp of the Three Rs.56
A strong back and nimble fingers were of more value to a family than abstract book learning, but for those with the resources, education was not restricted to the basics. An inventory of the estate of Mary's eldest brother, Dr John Sandidge Bristow, who died in 1820, listed a library containing Greek and Latin classics and contemporary histories, as well as the medical reference works to be expected.57
The Bible and religious books formed the core of Mary's library, but she and her family also read for more earthly reasons. Newspapers flourished, even in small towns, where four-page sheets came out once a week or so to chronicle local goings-on and news of national events to eager readers. (Mary's sister Sally married a young newsman.) Novels, by both British and American authors, were widely read, and poetry collections were popular.58 Mary also was fond of biographies.59 Books were traded and given as presents.60 Mary loved singing hymns, and often quoted her favorites, but whether her musical taste extended to other forms of musical performance we do not know.
Although professional entertainers — dramatic troupes and musicians — did make appearances from time to time in the larger towns, amusements were largely self-generated. Conversation was cultivated as an art, though the brash Americans could never equal — nor did they want to — the exquisite subtleties of the Europeans. Accomplished story tellers who could spin a yarn filled with humor and invention were always popular. Some, like Artemus Ward and Mark Twain, went on to gain national fame. Mary records several gatherings among friends and family, some impromptu, others on holidays or special occasions. General Leonard Stephens' home, Beech Woods, gained a reputation as a center of hospitality where visitors were always welcome if they could contribute to discussion on the topics of the day.61 If family tradition is correct, the most famous visitor to Beech Woods was the Marquis de Lafayette, who paused for refreshment on his way to Covington from the Bluegrass, 18 May 1825, during the Revolutionary hero's tour of the United States.62
Mary's only mention of a sport — and that with marked disapproval — is made when her baby brother Anselm saddles up the buggy horse for a try at fox-hunting.63 Although residents of the Bluegrass started their love affair with the horse early, Mary ignores the subject of racing completely.64 She likewise says not a word about another Kentucky icon — Bourbon whiskey.65
About social life
Beyond the day-to-day encounters with neighbors, civic and commercial life offered Kentuckians many opportunities for social intercourse. Drawing on Virginia precedents, County Courts met quarterly to dispense justice and conduct the business of local government.66 Although women had no official role, unless they were party to a case, court days were chances for the whole family to meet people from distant parts of the county. Also, neighbors and relatives would gather at the auction of a deceased person's estate to combine sympathy with bargain-hunting. "As I passed by Mrs Cleek's I was astonished by the number of horses waggons & buggies hitched. It was the day of sale of her husband's property. . . . A good many of our members attended the sale."67
Although Mary does not mention the subject, many towns had regular market days for selling stock and produce. By mid-century the County Fair was well established, a special occasion.68 Again we turn to Leonard Stephens for a view:
There is quite a scene going on at Florence. The Boone & Kenton Fair commenced there today & is to continue the ballance of the week or four days in all. It is for the purpose of shewing Agricultural implements all kinds of stock Ladies articles of domestic manufacture & I suppose that Widowers, Widows, Old Maids, & Young Maids, Old Batchelors, & young men will all shew up to the best possible advantage.69
Mary recounts making visits to her relatives in Bourbon County and receiving extended visits from cousins living in Illinois and Missouri. Even though she did write of intended journeys beyond the Ohio and Mississippi we have no evidence that she ventured much further than Covington or Cincinnati. She offers many examples of trips being made more difficult or impossible by muddy or frozen roads.70
In spite of the generally poor state of the public roads, Americans were a footloose people. European visitors were struck by their mobility and lack of roots. In his mid-sixties Leonard Stephens made two trips back to his birthplace in Orange County, Virginia, the first in 1855 by horse and buggy, the second, two years later, by the newly-completed Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. On both journeys he went out of his way to visit natural and manmade attractions, including hot springs and the New River Gorge in the mountains of Virginia and the incomplete Capitol in Washington
City. 71
The fascination with the curious and the grand is nothing new.
Even when personal contact was ruled out by distance, Mary's active correspondence served to freshen the bonds of friendship and kinship. She delighted in "holding converse with absent friends," many of whom had scattered to newer states.72 Postal service improved throughout her life, prepaid stamps appearing in 1847 and home delivery in cities in 1863.73 Mary contributed to the volume of letters posted, which had grown from a little over a million in 1801 to more than 184 million on the eve of the Civil War.74
About religious life
For a large segment of society, major social activities centered on the church. Mary's writings offer not only a sketch of a particular segment of one denomination but also some sense of the religious ferment of her time. Mary's family were participants in the second of the periodic waves of religious enthusiasm which swept through the American populace. The first, known as the "Great Awakening," began in New England in the 1730s and rolled south through the colonies.75
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| Southern Camp Meeting |
Religious ardor had cooled somewhat by the time of the Revolution, when popular energies were directed to more secular ends. Political independence led to the disestablishment of official, state-sponsored churches and the rapid proliferation of fiercely independent sects.76 The "Second Awakening" began in 1787 with "outbreaks of religious fervor at two small Virginia colleges" in the Shenandoah Valley and was centered on the frontier where a kind of religious anarchy prevailed. The (formerly) established churches, such as the Congregationalists and Episcopalians, were slow to follow the westward migration, leaving the initiative to Methodist circuit riders and self-appointed preachers, mostly Baptist but encompassing a wide range of nominally Christian thought.77
Among the crop of new religious groups drawn to the frontier were a variety of utopian and chiliastic movements, which sought to create heaven on earth while awaiting the Second Coming. The Shakers, founded by Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784), established a colony in 1805 at Pleasant Hill on the Kentucky River near Harrodsburg.78 They were followed to the new lands a decade later by the adherents of George Rapp (1757-1847), who founded a short-lived community at New Harmony, Indiana. Both Shakers and Rappists practiced a celibate authoritarianism. Another group expecting the millennium suffered a setback when the Second Coming did not happen on schedule in 1843; the followers of William Miller (1782-1849) eventually became known as Seventh Day Adventists. Most of these new movements suffered some degree of hostility — as did Roman Catholics — from suspicious members of more popular groups, who often enlisted the power of the state to harass or suppress the new sects. Even the Shakers were persecuted, but the pogroms against the Mormons showed how well intolerance could flourish in the Land of the Free.79
All this preaching and proselytizing did have an effect, transforming what had been a largely unchurched if not irreligious society to one in which organized religion played a major role. Church membership doubled, increasing according to one generally accepted estimate from "one out of every fifteen persons in 1800 to one out of eight in 1835."80 Churches attracted a wider audience than these figures might suggest. Services were often attended by three to five times as many people as were actual members.81
Mary's mother was caught up by the Great Revival of 1801 in Kentucky.82 The high point was a remarkable gathering in August of that year at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, a few miles from the Bristow farm, in which as many as twenty-five thousand people gathered from all parts of the Commonwealth to hear relays of preachers exhort them to seek salvation.
A cacophonous clamor of shouted sermons, chanted hymns, ecstatic hosannas, and mournful wailing filled the air already thick with the smell of smoke, sweat, and excitement. 'The noise was like the roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm.' Perched atop stumps, standing among the limbs of half-fallen trees, or astride wagons, ministers were warning of the judgement day to come with an emotional pitch proportional to the size of the assemblage.83
The meeting also popularized some of the more ecstatic forms of religious expression, ranging from dancing, falling and rolling to "barking" and "jerking," activities which were either praised as genuine manifestations of the spirit or condemned as unseemly and embarrassing displays of man's degraded nature. Cane Ridge became famous throughout the country, lauded as self-evident proof that the Lord was at work on the frontier. Though the size of the meeting at Cane Ridge was never equaled, its success inspired similar gatherings throughout the frontier South.84
Mary, her mother, and two of her brothers were members of Sardis Church at Union, in Boone County, a congregation identified as a "Particular" Baptist Church, part of a group known to those who did not share their beliefs as "Primitive" or "Hard Shell" Baptists. James Bristow, Mary's father, had shared his wife's faith until about 1830, when, "he, not dreaming of evil, used some wrong expressions on the subject of Absolute Predestination for which he was excluded" from the church.85 His questing mind found the more liberal doctrines of Thomas and Alexander Campbell more congenial, and he became a "reformer," as the followers of the Campbells were known. Mary was torn; she was attracted by several doctrines and for a time she embraced Campbellism, but returned to the Baptist fold and joined Sardis Church in October of 1836, at the age of 27.86
The Campbellites did have some success contending with the Baptists. Some Baptist congregations lost half their members, who in many cases were excluded, like Mary's father, for lack of orthodoxy.87
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| Thomas Parker Dudley |
The members of Sardis joined with like-minded Baptist congregations in northern Kentucky and the Bluegrass in the Licking Baptist Association, named for the river draining the eastern Bluegrass. The differences between the Licking Association and the "Regular" Baptists of the Elkhorn Association appear to have been in part doctrinal and in part due to the clash of strong personalities. The rupture arose from a dispute beginning about 1808 between Jacob Creath and Thomas Lewis involving a contract for a slave.89 Almost two centuries later it is neither possible nor useful to sort out the charges and countercharges that so exercised the congregations of north central Kentucky. By 1810, Ambrose Dudley and several hundred followers had left the Elkhorn Association to found the competing Licking Association, which numbered at its height 21 churches with 913 members. The two groups covered the same geographical area, and sometimes used the same buildings for their meetings.90
As the individuals most concerned passed on to their rewards and the intensity of religious feeling abated, the Particular Baptists of the Licking Association became less particular, and the descendants of the founders drifted back to other, less exclusivist denominations. The congregation of Sardis dwindled in numbers, and the church ceased to exist by the 1880s, its members migrating to the Union Baptist Church, which inherited the Sardis baptismal pool on Fowlers Creek, south of town.91
About slavery
Kentucky lacked large-scale agriculture; the state's geography did not favor the development of large, single-crop plantations with their attendant masses of field hands to be found in the deep South.92 In mid-century Kentucky, only one family in four held any slaves, and those who did held an average of 5.4.93 Compared to their neighbors in Boone and Kenton Counties, the Bristow family were large-scale slave-owners. In 1850 Jane Bristow's household included 13 slaves, and in 1860 19, well above the average for Boone County, which was 3.9 slaves per owner. Reuben Bristow had five slaves in 1860, his father-in-law, General Leonard Stephens, twelve, and Mary's Clarkson uncles and cousins also had large numbers of slaves.94
Mary hired out her slaves who were not required on the farm, but we have no evidence what kind of work they did nor the circumstances under which they toiled. Probably most were employed as farm hands or domestic servants, but some may have had mastered crafts such as carpentry or smithing. Although some slaves were employed in industrial pursuits, especially in cities such as Lexington, it seems unlikely that any of Mary's labored in factories. A description of contracts for farm labor comes from the British novelist, Anthony Trollope, who was touring the Bluegrass in 1861:
The price paid for a negro's labor at the time of my visit was about a 100 $, or 20 lbs., for the year; but this price was extremely low in consequence of the war disturbances. The usual price had been about 50 or 60 per cent. above this. The man who takes the negro on hire feeds him, clothes him, provides him with a bed, and supplies him with medical attendance.95
The details of their existence are hard to come by. Mary mentions eight slaves by name, but even for most of these we know little more.96 Of the other dozen or so we know almost nothing. Although slaves were enumerated in 1850 and 1860 by age and sex, their names were not recorded. Incomplete vital statistics reports, filed for a brief period in the 1850s, supply a few names. Earlier court papers recording mortgages by family members do list individual slaves by name, but I have found nothing for the years covered by Mary's Record.
That Mary and her fellow slaveholders were not completely at ease with the "peculiar institution" is revealed by the fact that neither Mary nor Leonard Stephens ever referred to their slaves by that term. They preferred to speak of "servants" or "people" or "negroes." At times she seems to bemoan the responsibilities of slave ownership, but she never questions the morality of the system. Both her place in society and the teachings of her church confirmed her belief in the rightness of her views.97 Two of her uncles had freed their slaves in their wills,98 but Mary gives no indication she ever considered such a course, and she was very hostile to the abolitionists, whom she characterized as "fanatical bigots . . . pouring their pernicious treason into our halls of legislation, year after year, by their petitions on the subject of slavery."99
Evidence has recently come to light that Mary's brother Anselm was involved along with a dozen or so of their neighbors in an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve some runaway slaves who had taken the underground railroad to freedom in the north. In the summer of 1847 Thornton Timberlake of Erlanger led a group of Kentuckians, many with family ties to one another, over two hundred miles north of the Ohio River into Cass County, Michigan, were they seized nine Negroes, who had settled among the Abolitionist Quakers in the area. The raiders were confronted by angry abolitionist crowds who prevented them from departing with their captives, forcing them instead to go to the county seat. There the Kentuckians were charged with a variety of offenses, including kidnapping and trespass. Although the fugitive slave laws of the time in theory put them in the right, their lawyer advised that there was no possibility that they could win their case. Their captives were freed and the raiders returned to Kentucky empty-handed. Six months later several of the aggrieved Kentuckians brought suit in Federal Court in Detroit for damages due to the loss of their property; the case dragged on and eventually resulted in a hung jury, and a modest out of court settlement.100
One account of the raid lists a Moses Bristow, a black man living on the farm of Stephen Bogue, a white Quaker residing in Cass County (and one of those sued by the Kentuckians). Moses refused to come along meekly with the Kentuckians and was "struck with the butt of a riding whip, cutting his ear and the side of his head severely." Moses may have been one of the three slaves charged to Anselm Bristow in the 1844 Kenton tax lists. If he was one of the Bristow family's former "servants" who gained refuge in Michigan, that fact would have given Anselm a personal stake in the venture.101
Mary's diaries give the impression that Anselm probably lacked the gumption for such a bold adventure. Mary, on the other hand, was vehement in her condemnation of the abolitionists, and had she not been constrained by poor health and the restrictive gender roles of the time might well have taken some direct action to protect what she saw as her rightful interests. Perhaps her strong feelings arose at least in part from her little brother's experience.
As some people were "land poor" — having all their capital tied up in real property — Mary could be said to have been "slave poor." It is difficult to put a dollar amount on her holdings. In 1860 the personal property of the family had an estimated value of $19,800. Allowing $680 listed for livestock, and another couple of hundred for home furnishings, etc., yields a rough total of $18,900 or just under $1000 per person, a not unreasonable figure.102 The Thirteenth Amendment, which brought nation-wide Emancipation, stripped her of her assets: "Congress has at last freed all the negroes. I am by this act of theirs left almost wholly dependent."103
About the war
The central historical event of Mary's life, chronicled in her Record, was the Civil War. Her efforts to make sense of the bloody conflict and its outcome still command our sympathy. The Bristows, like many families in the Border States, were divided in their loyalties. Mary's cousin, Francis Marion Bristow, had been a pro-Union, "Peace Democrat" in Congress. His son, Benjamin Helm Bristow, commanded a Union regiment and later served in Grant's administration.104 Mary's personal situation predisposed her to support the Confederacy, and once some of her friends and kin became directly involved in the great struggle, her passions were aroused. When she heard that her nephew Jerome Bristow was a prisoner of war, she confessed, "A demon could not have had more deadly venom in them than there was in my heart."105 The sufferings of her kinfolk in chaotic, war-torn Little Dixie in Missouri, magnified by rumor and propaganda, confirmed her antipathy toward Lincoln and the Federal government.106
Many of Mary's neighbors seemed to have shared her outlook. Although Confederate records are notoriously incomplete, enough information survives to indicate that Boone County was a prime recruiting ground for the CSA. The rolls of Jerome's unit, Company I, 2nd (Duke's) Kentucky Cavalry, include some familiar names: John M. Wilson, Frank Kendrick, Joseph Marshall
Cleek.107
Some prominent citizens, including Dr J. J. Dulaney, were arrested for giving aid to the rebels or being too outspoken in their Southern
sympathies.108
One of Mary's nieces, Nancy Ellis Breckenridge, considered going to Canada with the family of her son-in-law who had run afoul of Union military
authorities.109
Two of Jerome's sisters married Rebel soldiers, and another grandniece, Nannie Dickerson, wed a former Confederate officer, who parlayed his rank into political office, as did many veterans.
I found it curious that as much as she despised Lincoln, whom she labeled a usurper and tyrant, Mary had nothing to say when he was cut down by an assassin's bullet. Perhaps New Testament charity overcame Old Testament retribution.
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Notes:
[Click on footnote number to return to text.]
53 Perrin, History of Bourbon, 139. The Clarkson cousins could have filled a one-room schoolhouse by themselves.
54 13 Oct 1861. The reluctance of Kentuckians to provide adequately for public education is traced in Clark, Agrarian Kentucky, 94-114.
55 Kentucky figures were in line with most southern and border states, where attendance was below 20 percent. Only in New England did the rate exceed 50 percent. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876, 161 (Fig. 5.1).
56 About one out of every ten white adults in ante-bellum America could neither read nor write. The number of marginally literate persons must have been much higher. Cremin, 491.
57 Bourbon Wills F: 373.
58 Morris, 599, 603; 15 Jul 1859.
59 13-14 Dec 1862; 7 Dec 1864.
60 For example, 8 Dec 1864.
61 See his obituary in the Covington Journal, 15 Mar 1873, p. 2.
62 Although contemporary records are silent on the details of the day in question, the story of the visit is plausible, even likely. The Stephens home, one of the first brick residences in the area, was about a mile east of the Lexington Pike (now known as the Dixie Highway, US 25) and about an hour from Covington. The numerous Stephens family, headed by the patriarch Benjamin Stephens, Sr. (1754-1839), were leading citizens. Leonard Stephens, though not yet a general, was a member of the state legislature.
His wife, Catherine Sanford, was the niece of the late Thomas Sandford, Congressman from northern Kentucky. It would have been quite natural for General Lafayette to pause in his progress at Beech Woods before undertaking the last stage of his journey to the Ohio. Such a polished figure would have bestowed appropriate compliments on the assembled children, and he may even have singled out the blond curls of the infant Marion Stephens for comment, as one rendition of the tale has it. I wonder what was his reaction to being presented with three children named for the Bonapartes (Napoleon, Statira, and Lucien, aged 10, 7, and 5). For known details of Lafayette's American visit, see Ida Earle Fowler, "Log of Lafayette's Journey," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 27: 652 and Edgar Ewing Brandon, Pilgrimage of Liberty, 315. One version of the stop at Beech Woods is recounted in R. S. Tate, "The Grass Roots of Kenton County," Papers of the Christopher Gist Historical Society, 5: 45, Kenton County Public Library.
63 14 and 22 Jan 1858.
64 Perrin notes that a store at Clintonville later owned by E. H. Parrish, "in early times . . . was the scene of a great deal of horse-racing. The wealthiest men of the neighborhood would often come out to witness the fun barefooted with their breeches rolled up nearly to their knees." History of Bourbon, 140.
65 The invention of this indispensable social lubricant, often dispensed as a token of Kentucky hospitality, is credited to Elijah Craig, a Baptist preacher, who set up his distilling equipment at the Royal Spring in Georgetown in the 1780s.
66 Robert M. Ireland's County Courts in Antebellum Kentucky gives a clear view of the institution, which combined legislative, administrative and judicial functions.
67 3 Dec 1864.
68 The earliest documented fair in Kentucky was held 25 Jul 1816, at Lewis Saunder's farm, near Lexington. In spite of recurrent efforts to form Agricultural Improvement Societies, such gatherings were sporadic for several decades. Clark, Agrarian Kentucky, 37-39. Mary's brother Reuben was the first President of the Kenton County Agricultural Society in 1856.
69 To William Stephens, 10 Oct 1854. Stephens Letters, 28. Florence is a town just west of the line dividing the two counties, more or less centrally located.
70 For example, January 1858 and 3 Dec 1864.
71 The General's travel notes, with my annotations are on another section of this site. They can be found also on microfilm at the Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky and through the LDS Family History Library.
72 Some of the letters she transcribed appear in the first chapter. Unfortunately we lack the other half of the correspondence.
73 Letters originally had been sent postage-due, and the adressees had to go down to the post office to collect them. Cullinan, 69-71; 85. Of course if a person was not expecting a letter, she would not know to go ask for it, and lists of persons who had unclaimed mail were a standard feature of early newspapers.
74 Cullinan, 44, 80. Catalogs, books and parcels entered the mail stream after the war, aided by use of the postal money order.
75 George C. Bedell, et al., Religion in America, 136 ff. Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America, 59-82.
76 Disestablishment began in the southern states in 1776 and was slowest to take effect in New England, where the Puritan theocracy proved reluctant to release their hold on power. Morris, 582.
77 Bedell, 155-156.
78 The buildings of the colony have been restored and are now operated as a living museum.
79 Hudson, 184-197.
80 Hudson, 129.
81 Hudson, 130. Membership in a church was not a casual matter. It was often restricted to a core of those whose commitment, devotion, and character met strict standards. For example, Mary's sister-in-law, Martha Jane, did not join the Sardis Baptist Church until August 1866, when she was 32, even though her parents and husband had been members for decades and she had been going to meeting for most of her life.
82 17 Dec 1859.
83 John B. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787-1805: the Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind, 65. He gives a comprehensive account of the events at Cane Ridge in chapter 5.
84 The original log meeting house of the host congregation has been enclosed within a masonry structure. The stands of cane which gave the neighborhood its name have disappeared, however, along with the vast flocks of passenger pigeons they once sheltered.
85 17 Dec 1859.
86 A Relation of My Experience.
87 William Dudley Nowlin, Kentucky Baptist History 1790-1922, 45, 90.
88 See 17 Dec 1859; 21 May 1848; Nov 1850; and 16 Sep 1863.
89 J. H. Spencer, History of Kentucky Baptists, 1: 550. Some modern writers have seized upon the fact that a slave was involved to assert that the Licking Association opposed slavery and its members held views that were emancipationist if not abolitionist. Mary was far from subscribing to either view, and since most of those identified as members of Sardis Church owned slaves and were strongly Confederate in their sentiments during the Civil War, such a view is clearly not justified.
90 Spencer, History, 1: 580; 2: 240.
91 See Mary Belle Noe, 100 Year History of Union Baptist Church, 1887-1987. Kentucky Historical Society, Boone County file (churches). (The author was Mary's grand-niece, Anselm's granddaughter.)
92 J. Winston Coleman, Jr., Slavery Times in Kentucky, 45.
93 Lowell H. Harrison, The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky, 3.
94 See Boone and Kenton Slave Schedules for 1850 and 1860, as well as earlier census returns. Judging by census records, of the 13 individuals tallied in 1850, maybe 9 were still in the Bristow household a decade later. Reuben's eldest son Julius, farming in Bourbon County had 18 slaves.
95 He goes on to compare housing conditions, etc. favorably with those of English agricultural laborers, which says less about the benevolence of Bluegrass landowners than it does about horrendous conditions in Britain. Anthony Trollope, North America, 380.
96 Mary mentions the names of Simeon, Jess, Ann, Celia, Calvin, Lucy, Henry, and Sallie. The Bristows reported the birth of another slave, Rachel, on 1 Jul 1856. Sim took the family name, moved to Covington, and remained in contact with the family until his death in 1902. Annie Bristow died in Covington in 1908, a widow aged about 80 and senile. What became of the others is unknown, but many may have moved across the Ohio River into Ohio or Indiana. See Paul Tanner, "Slavery in Boone County, Kentucky (And its Aftermath)", 19, which records that the black population of Boone County decreased by almost half by 1870, compared to prewar figures.
97 Her attitudes were shared by many. Southern churches of all denominations, responding at least in part to the preaching of Northern abolitionists, found ample justification in the Scriptures for slavery. See Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South. (I find the arguments on both sides tortured and disingenuous.) For other first-hand accounts by Southern women, see Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.
98 Her Uncle John Bristow in his will of 2 Nov 1835 freed his slaves Elijah and Thirsay and their families and Stephen and provided funds for the purchase of land and for their migration to "Libera." (Clark Wills 9: 437) Her Uncle Archibald Bristow on 2 Aug 1837 provided that his slave Judith was to be freed upon execution of the will and that two others, William and John, were to be free at age 35. He also stipulated that they receive $10 a year. (Clark Wills 11: 123.) Some of the descendants of the persons so freed remained in Todd County at least through 1880. None ever made the journey to Liberia. The African Colonization movement is discussed in Coleman, Slavery Times, chapter 11.
99 1 Jan 1861.
100 The raid was brought to my attention by a note from Professor Debian Marty of California State University Monterey Bay, who is researching the affair. An account of the raid and its aftermath from a Northern perspective can be found in the 1882 History of Cass County, which erroneously indicates that the raiders were from Bourbon County, but most of those identified were actually from Boone and Kenton Counties. Among them was a Baptist preacher, referred to as "A. Stephens" — who I suspect was actually Edmund Stephens, whom Mary tangled with about this time over Masonry, and whose sermons she found wanting. (See 21 May 1848 and Aug 1866.) Also involved was Hubbard Taylor Buckner (1827-1903), who married Lucy May Sanford (1829-1889), a distant cousin of Statira Stephens Bristow. Thornton Timberlake (1795?-1857) was one of the founders of Erlanger and served with Leonard and John Stephens on the board of the Lexington and Covington Turnpike Company. According to articles in the Licking Valley Register, he had been active since at least 1841 in rousing support to reclaim escaped slaves. He was Hubbard Buckner's uncle.
101 E-mails from Debian Marty, quoting H. S. Rogers, A History of Cass County, from 1825-1875 (Cassopolis, 1875), 137-138, 140. Transcripts of court records show that Anselm Bristow was arrested by the Cass County sheriff 20 August 1847 on charges of assault and battery on the complaint of William Merriman (also known as Davis), who had taken refuge along with the Eubank family at the farm of Josiah Osborn. Merriman/Davis was identified as having been a slave of Gen. Stephens, Statira's father. All criminal charges against the raiders were dismissed on the 23rd. Kenton County tax records for 1844 indicate that Anselm Bristow owned three slaves -- one over 16 yrs -- valued at $800.
102 Slave prices had risen in the decade before the war. See Harrison, Antislavery Movement, 6.
103 25 Dec 1865. Legislation implementing the Thirteenth Amendment had gone into effect a week before. It is worth pointing out that — contrary to popular misunderstanding — Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued almost three years earlier, had no legal effect in northern Kentucky, which was never (officially) in a state of rebellion.
104 John Walton, "Politicians and Statesmen: The Bristows in American Government," Genealogies of Kentucky Families from the Filson Club Quarterly, 80-81. Benjamin Helm Bristow may have been the only honest man in Grant's cabinet.
105 1 Jan 1862.
106 See, for example, 20 Mar and 12 Dec 1862.
107 Basil Duke noted that in September 1862, "Just before General Heath [sic] came down into that country (Covington) 15 young men of Boone County who had long wished to join Morgan banded together and attacked a train guarded by 51 Federal Soldiers, dispersed the guard and burned the wagons. This party with some 25 of their friends then equipped themselves and set out to join us. They were assigned to new Company I." History of Morgan's Cavalry, 241. A roster (probably incomplete) of the unit is found in Abner Harris, Report of the Adjutant General of Kentucky: Confederate Volunteers, 580.
108 Jack Rouse, The Civil War in Boone County, Kentucky, which is a thorough compilation of information about residents of Boone (and a few from Kenton) who served on both sides. See also William A. Fitzgerald, ed., Boone County in the Civil War, 35.
109 See below, 6 Oct 1864.
