Stanley Harrold

For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War by Patrick A. Lewis (review)

In For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War, Patrick A. Lewis uses Benjamin Forsythe Buckner (1836–1901), a slaveholder who fought on the Union side, as a lens through which to understand proslavery Unionism in Kentucky. The book’s title suggests that it is a story of the Civil War years, but it also deals with the antebellum and postwar eras. Lewis emphasizes continuity, focusing on conservatism, paternalism, racism, and honor among members of the state’s economic and political elite, especially in the Bluegrass. The book’s strengths include the span of years it covers, the depth of research into complex issues, and its usually clear prose. The book’s great weakness is the paucity of information about Buckner, whose surviving personal writings are confined to letters he wrote to his fiancée between 1861 and 1863. Recently, several historians have challenged the long-held assumption that Kentucky and other border states chose to remain in the Union in 1861 because the institution of slavery had weakened there, showing instead that many slaveholders believed they had a better chance to keep their human property if their states stayed in the Union. Lewis’s first four chapters, which analyze the values and circumstances of the Kentucky master class, strengthen this new interpretation. As Lewis emphasizes, Buckner was one of many white Kentuckians who joined the Union army in 1861 to help preserve the Union and slavery. Buckner, like others in the border South, distrusted the Republican Party because of its ties to abolitionism and doubted President Abraham Lincoln’s ability to counter those ties. But Buckner, like many others, believed a short victorious war to preserve the Union could bring defeated secessionists back into Congress, where they could prevent the passage of antislavery measures. As the war dragged on and Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, Buckner began to despair for slavery and prepared to resign his commission. When he finally left the army in April 1863, he returned home to work with other proslavery Unionists and Confederate sympathizers to preserve slavery and white supremacy in Kentucky. Lewis calls the two chapters where he discusses Buckner’s experiences during the Civil War as “the heart of the book” (p. 9). In these chapters Lewis analyzes Buckner’s views regarding “honor, prestige, respectability, whiteness, masculinity, [and] political advancement” (p. 9). Lewis cannot do this in the book’s first two chapters. These cover the history of slavery in Kentucky and the increasing fear among the state’s master class that, as more slaves escaped northward, United States government protection would be required to maintain their economic and social system. In these chapters there are relatively few references to Buckner and his family. Similarly, Lewis is not able to focus on Buckner in the two chapters on the postwar period. As Lewis puts it, “the two postwar chapters have a different feel” (p. 10). Buckner appears only briefly as a state legislator, a locally prominent attorney and judge, and the successful defender of a racially motivated poll tax before the United States Supreme Court in 1875.

The Pearl : A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac (review)

The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac. By Josephine F. Pacheco. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. x, 307. Cloth,

Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War

29.95.)The struggle over slavery that preceded the American Civil War was marked by numerous scenes of conflict. In 1831, Southampton County, Virginia, witnessed a rebellion led by slave preacher Nat Turner; while in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, a proslavery mob killed abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy. In numerous cities across the North, biracial mobs forcefully resisted the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, while in Kansas Territory, antislavery and proslavery bands fought a guerrilla war beginning in 1856. But no location was more important than Washington, DC. As the nations capital, Washington hosted a debate between opposing sectional political forces. As a slaveholding city on the Souths northern periphery, it was vulnerable to slave escape and northern abolitionist interference. Perhaps most important, slaveholding and slave-trading Washington symbolized the power of slaveholders over the entire United States.In The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac, Josephine F. Pacheco provides a comprehensive account of an event that more than any other demonstrates the interplay of these three characteristics of Washington. The escape attempt of April 1848, involving seventy-six men, women, and children aboard the schooner Pearl, was the largest unsuccessful such undertaking in American history, surpassed only by the successful escape of 135 slaves aboard the brig Creole in November 1841. Although other crises soon eclipsed the Pearl in the public imagination, it was a riveting event that preoccupied Washington for weeks. Despite the failure, it frightened local slaveholders and southern politicians while encouraging slaverys opponents.As Pacheco points out, anticipation among slaves in Washington and its vicinity that they or their loved ones would be sold to traders and sent into the Deep South led to the escape attempt. Daniel Bell, a free black resident of Washington who feared for his enslaved wife and children, worked with northern white abolitionist William L. Chaplin to plan the escape. Chaplin, who reported on Congress for the Albany Patriot, chartered the Pearl to transport slaves to the North and freedom. Shortly after its arrival from Philadelphia, the ships crew of three white men, led by Daniel Drayton, took the escapees on board and sailed down the Potomac. Before dawn, however, a posse embarked on a steamboat from Georgetown, overtook the Pearl, capturing all aboard, and brought them back to Washington where they were paraded through the streets on their way to jail.Three days of rioting by angry white mobs and nearly a week of acrimonious debate between antislavery and proslavery members of Congress followed. At the center of the rioting was the office of the citys antislavery newspaper, the National Era, and the nearby home of its editor, Gamaliel Bailey. Rioters also threatened antislavery Congressman Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, who also became a focal point of debate in Congress. Meanwhile, angry masters sold the would-be escapees to traders, and prosecution of the would-be rescuers began. Drayton, convicted of transporting slaves and jailed indefinitely, never implicated Chaplin or other abolitionists involved in the escape attempt. …