Black History: Plantation Politics in the Civil War

By Greg Guma

About 15 years ago I was asked by Kentucky State Senator Georgia Davis Powers to help research and write a book about her great aunt Celia Mudd, who was born into slavery but ultimately inherited the Lancaster property in Bardstown and became a prominent local philanthropist. During the project I visited the farm, toured the house and old slave quarters, and tried to unravel what had happened there. Here is some of what I learned, chapter one of a family saga, presented here as historical fiction but based on family and court records.

A House Divided: Picking Sides and Cashing Out

“Stay ahead of the curve.” That was his motto, and in September 1862, as far as Robert Lancaster was concerned, it meant welcoming the Confederates when they took over Kentucky. 

It seemed inevitable to him. Lexington and Frankfort had fallen, forcing the Union government into an embarrassing retreat, and the formidable, some said infamous, General Braxton Bragg was marching his battle-weary rebels north from Chattanooga. He was less than a hundred miles south of Bardstown, primed to link up with thousands more advancing through the Bluegrass.

“It’s a stampede,” Robert erupted as he paced the living room in an expensive new suit. “At some point you just have to accept reality. We’ll have a new state government in less than a month. I’m just saying we have to be reasonable.”

“Don’t see you joinin’ up,” snapped his brother Sam after pulling off his mud-caked brogans. Sam was hot and sweaty after pitching hay for hours, and had stopped only when Emily rushed out to say that Massa Robert had arrived, unannounced, for a visit. The winsome housemaid made it sound like a warning.

Not that Sam needed any encouragement to be on guard. He had suspected for some time that his younger brother’s sympathies had more to do with cash than commitment. Robert looked at most matters, even the war’s bloody battles, as if they were business opportunities. Why should today be any different? As Robert obviously knew, trade had been brisk for the past year despite Union restrictions on exports. The southern states needed war materials, and prices were good for lucky farmers with crop surpluses to sell. The state’s debt situation had also improved. In fact, the US owed Kentucky almost two million dollars.

Robert wasn’t the least shy about his attitude. “At least I’m not living in the past,” he said with contempt. “In case you haven’t heard, neutrality is over. It’s time to pick a side in this thing.”

Sam had to admit that his brother was right about neutrality. Governor Magoffin’s plan to sidestep secession had obviously fallen apart. Armed neutrality, he called it. After the legislature accepted the idea, the governor warned both sides to leave Kentucky out and advised citizens to stay home. But Lincoln ignored him and set up border recruitment centers. Both North and South were soon flirting with invasion. Officially, the end of neutrality had arrived a year ago, with the legislative decision – over Magoffin’s objection – to expel all Confederate troops.

That led directly to the creation of a provisional Confederate government headed by a wealthy farmer with a harebrained scheme to end the war. George Johnson’s notion was that “evening” the fight would stop it from going further, a theory that quickly proved both wrong and fatal. By April Johnson was dead, after being wounded on the first day of battle at Shiloh.

Like it or not, Kentucky was in the fight.

But on what side? That remained the question. Sam Lancaster had no use for Northern arrogance. As far as he was concerned, the war was not about freeing slaves but rather the plans of the elite for the country: a factory system of mass production and using money to make money. The hypocrisy was infuriating. Lincoln’s talk about the injustice of slavery was largely expedient in his view, an excuse to impose a new industrial order that would destroy the world he loved.

Change was inevitable, Sam accepted that. Slavery would have to go. Someday. Just not at the price of becoming servants to Yankee masters. But secession was equally unacceptable. The Union was sacred, to be preserved at any price. He had to agree with “Dishonest Abe” about that.

“So, is that why you’re here,” he asked, scratching his jaw through his curly, light brown hair. “Sign us up with the Stars and Bars?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. We just need to be sensible.” That had become one of Robert’s big words, along with “reasonable” and “prudent.”

“Sensible,” Sam spat. “Is that what you call it when someone makes decisions based only on how much it puts in his pocket? In case you haven’t noticed, this farm is no longer yours, and we’re doing fine.” It was an overstatement. They were barely holding on. But he was hardly going to admit it.

Robert had sold his interest in the family property to his brothers two years back, supposedly to finance his entry into banking and speculation. But there were other reasons. Farm work never held much appeal. He deeply disliked getting up before dawn to work long hours in every kind of weather. Having grown up without a father the siblings had assumed responsibility early. But Robert was never happy getting his hands dirty. More to the point, at 24 years old he saw the war coming, and along with it a chance to get ahead.

What nerve, Sam thought. He deserts his family, yet thinks he knows what’s good for us.

“Samuel, your brother is just trying to help.” Ann Lancaster spoke softly, trying not to take sides. Things were bad enough without a battle breaking out between her sons. Sitting in a favorite parlor chair, clutching her bible, she bowed to silently recite a short prayer for harmony.

Robert saw her comment as a chance to make a point. “That’s right,” he said. “You know, Bragg is already pretty mad about what’s going on around these parts. In Louisville the Federals are drafting niggers for a spade and shovel brigade.”

All of them knew something about that. Since March, Union officers had been grabbing slaves to build roads, chop fuel wood for trains, and cut timber for new bridges. Loyal owners were compensated, but those considered sympathetic to the south got nothing. Instead, the money went directly as wages to the slaves, who rarely returned to their owners. Now the Provost Marshall was emptying jails, even rounding up blacks to work on fortifications.

“No different than what the other side did last winter,” Sam shot back. During the occupation of southern Kentucky the previous autumn thousands of slaves were pressed into work, from the Mississippi to Mill Springs. “It has nothin’ to do with us.”

“Is that what you’re gonna tell the general when he gets here?”

“The man’s a beast. A tyrant who shoots his own men just to make a point about discipline – and has the whole army watch. They hate him, and you know it.”

“It’s war, not a popularity contest. Next thing you’ll say, we should let our niggers work for the Union. How would that be, Matt? Just send them up to Cincinnati.”

Matt Lancaster was caught off guard, but put down his drink and thought it over for a second, surprised to be asked. Normally when his brothers got to arguing they went on like he wasn’t even in the room. 

“Well then,” he managed, “at least that way we’d get paid.”

He meant it as a joke. No one found the remark the least bit amusing. Ann was especially offended. “I don’t approve of such talk one bit,” she said sternly. “These people are our responsibility. You know how I feel about it. They are Christians and God’s Children and part  of this family.”

She smiled down at Celia, the young black child crouched at her feet. “We don’t sell our kin for money,” she said. “Like it says in the Bible, in Ezekiel, ‘the people of the land have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and the needy.” This has got to stop.”

It was hard to argue when Ann Lancaster started quoting scripture, but Robert gave it a try. “Mama, you don’t understand. You think the Yankees care what happens to this girl, or any of them. They just want more workers for their factories. If we don’t support the other side soon, nothing will be left of this place when the fighting is over.”

“Hogwash,” Sam snorted.

“No, facts. The Federals will strip us bare, and our darkies will be working for wages up north. If you think otherwise you’re a damned fool.”

“Stop it, both of you.” Ann’s body trembled as she rose. “And listen. You know the  slave block, down in the square in town. A few years back the Roanes, a good God-fearing family, had to use that terrible place to pay their mortgage. They had colored folks too then, like we do. But they put their people on the block one day, and the first one that went up was a close family servant. I don’t recall her name, but what I do recall is that when she went up she was carrying little Sally Roane in her arms. You know Sally. At that time she was about the same age as this child here. Well, the auctioneer had just started when someone remembers that, according to law, any child on the block with a slave gets sold along with her.”

“But Sally Roane is white,” Matt broke in. He was often the last to get the point.

“Didn’t matter, that’s the law. One man even shouted, ‘Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re selling your own daughter?” But it was too late. Not even her father could stop it. The great-granddaughter of Patrick Henry, sold like a piece of furniture.” She shook her head and dropped into the seat. “Now, I know some people say that is the way it’s always been. Just a question of property. But when you treat human beings like that it’s surely a sin. Doesn’t matter what color we’re talking about.”

Until that moment Celia didn’t understand most of the conversation. At three years old she vaguely sensed it had something to do with her, but that was about it. Still, the intensity of Ann’s outburst and the simplicity of her belief etched itself into her young mind. The old white woman had shared something so powerful that even the intimidating Robert could think of no clever reply.

Matt was the first to break the silence. “So what happened to Sally?”

“A family friend outbid the rest, so in the end she and her nurse got to go home. But when you talk about selling our people, you think about what that means. We’re not talking about hogs or horses, no matter what the law says. We’re talking about human beings, with feelings and family of their own. They make this life possible. We don’t abuse them and we don’t sell them for profit.”

Sam was no abolitionist. An abrupt end of slavery seemed almost as destructive to him as waging war to preserve it. Despite his Catholic upbringing he wasn’t certain he still shared his mother’s faith. But he did feel the pull of the moral code she had instilled since childhood. As a result he was pleased when Lincoln suggested a gradual and compensated emancipation. If Kentucky had just accepted that proposal, freeing all slaves within 20 years, how much simpler life might have been. Rather than dividing the nation, the federal government would have given each owner $400 for every slave set free. 

The problem was that too many of their neighbors clung to the belief that slavery was the only relationship possible between the nine million whites and more than three million blacks whom God or fate had put side by side in the south.

For Robert the issue wasn’t either morality or the innate inferiority of the Negro race. The rights of southern states had simply been violated for too long by a central government in the control of envious northerners. It should all have been settled Dred Scott, he thought. The Supreme Court had spoken: a slave did not become free just because he ended up in free territory, and Congress had no right to intervene. But what the devious North had been unable to accomplish with the law it next attempted through rebellion. By this he meant the secret financing and arming of John Brown for his raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Why, some even claimed that Buchanan’s cabinet was involved. Before Robert E. Lee arrived with the Marines, Brown’s rebel band had killed the mayor and take 60 hostages. If they hadn’t been stopped the war might have started right then.

In November 1859, while John Brown was awaiting execution in Virginia and Celia Mudd was less than a year old, Robert Lancaster approached his two brothers with an offer to sell his interest in the family farm. Pressed for a reason, he claimed it was to start his banking career. What he did not share was his sense that Harper’s Ferry represented the opening shot in a battle that would split the country in two. Hanging would make Brown a martyr and war would become unavoidable. He had no desire to be caught in the middle.

Over the next few years, despite such dire predictions, the Lancaster family farm had fared better than Robert expected. Sam turned out to be a decent manager, and had gained wide local respect. None of their slaves ran off, and Nelson Country had been spared the worst, so far. At times he regretted his decision. But now that the Confederates were making their big push he felt vindicated. Like every other place touched by the fighting, Lancaster land seemed destined to be ravaged.

As little Celia listened to the family feud that steamy September afternoon, she had no notion of what was at stake. Words like slavery, secession and emancipation sounded like gibberish. But even at three she sensed that big changes were afoot. She knew because the usually cheerful Boss Sam was so very angry with his brother, and because Missus Anne was crying and yelling at everyone. Only many years later would she realize what she had seen and heard that day and how it changed her life.

Chapter Two:  Masters and Slaves

Chapter Three: Unhealed Wounds

Chapter Four: Obstructed Justice