1. Choose a Person and Setting. You can make up a person or research an actual person who lived in Kentucky before 1865. Either way you need to know where and when they lived. Use the history texts I've placed on reserve for you at the LCC Library: Thomas Clark's History of Kentucky, Marion Lucas's History of Blacks in Kentucky, Helen Deiss Irvin's Women in Kentucky, and James Wright's History of Lexington. You can also take The Virtual Tour of Lexington, compliments of the Lexington Fayette Urban County Government! Then, decide how old your subject is when telling this story, what are the living conditions, and who is in a key circle of kin and friends.
2. Prepare a biographical chronology (1-2 pages, 5 points pass/fail). Write out a time line on which you place important dates in your subject's life. These include events in which the person participated and events that were important to the person. The choronology should include both objective material (dates of birth, marriage, children's births, and information about occupation, education, public service, and military service) as well as subjective material (at least one national event that you have chosen for the subject to analyze, including dates of meetings with other people, travel, reading of a particularly influential book or article, listening to a speech, etc.). Use newspapers, pamphlets, historical monographs and your textbook to make sure you have a sketch of when/where/what your narrative will include. A chronology can be very detailed, but you must know what to omit as well as what to include! Attach a bibliography of your sources, and turn in by midterm (March 14th) for approval.
3. Write a narrative (5-8 pages typed). Using your subject's voice (whether a fictional or historical character), write a narrative that creatively describes how that person experienced life in this area of our country before 1865. This narrative is due during the scheduled final exam time.

Antebellum Kentuckians you've probably never heard about but who were famous during their lifetimes

• Elijah Anderson - He was described as the general superintendent of the Underground Railroad system in northwestern Ohio. He began his work before the enactment of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and continued until he was arrested and put in prison at Frankfort. He piloted over 1000 fugitives to freedom.
• Mary Beck - an Frenchwoman of culture and artistic talent, she settled in Lexington around 1800. With her artist- writer husband, George, she opened an "Academy for Young Ladies" in 1805 where dancing the the "graces" were taught along with science, logic and history. In 1813 she wrote, "The moral part must begin with the first rudiments, and be continued in such a manner as to interest the feelings, excite the curiosity, and awaken sympathy, benevolence, and generosity, which may easily be done by the assistance of the various publications judiciously selected by the tutor, and adapted to the capacity of the child." She made sure that prominent professional men served as judges at the semiannual oral examinations of the girls, and her school's prestige grew quickly. One of her tutors was Charlotte Mentelle who went on to form her own elite boarding school (one of her boarders was Mary Todd). Mrs. Beck died during the cholera plague of 1833.
• Henry and Melinda Bibb - Born in Shelby County in 1815, Henry Bibb was the son of a slave mother and a white father whom he never knew. While he was still quite young, he was taken from his mother to be hired out to a neighboring farmer in order to pay for the education of his master's son. While working for a man in Oldham County, he met and fell in love with Melinda, a slave belonging to William Gatewood. They were married and Bibb was sold to the Gatewoods. After the birth of his daughter, he decided to run away. Melinda was afraid to go with him so he promised to return for her later. He got to the Ohio River and bought passage on a steamer going to Cincinnati. Since his skin was very light and he was wearing fine clothes, no one suspected he was an escaping slave. Once he was captured and sold when trying to return for Melinda, but he again escaped. He heard that Melinda had begun living with another man, so he went north to help the abolitionist cause as a lecturer. But with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, he (with his new wife Mary) went to Canada to supervise the development of a colony for escaped slaves. He wrote a narrative of his life, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written By Himself, which was published in 1849. His narrative was so unbelievably horrifying that an investigation was conducted which proved he was telling the truth.
• Richard Bibb - A white Methodist minister and rich slaveholder. He believed slavery was wrong, but thought that he was taking care of people who were not quite human. He heard about a revolution started by the slave Nat Turner, and was scared it would happen in Ky. He freed 51 of 150 of his slaves, offering them a free ticket to Africa. Most of them went, but died of cholera before they got to Liberia. When he died all his slaves were freed and given $5000. They refused to go to Africa, and lived in their homes in an all-black community he had given them near Russellville.
• James Birney - The first presidential candidate for the Liberty Party, he was a white former slaveowner who organized the "Ky Society for the Gradual Relief of the State from Slavery" in 1833. He published an anti-slavery newspaper in Danville, but threats against his life forced him to move to Cincinnati. He continued to fight for emancipation for slaves, but he knew it would not come in his lifetime. He wanted slaves to be educated, including apprenticeships in skills, and recommended freedmen migrate to Africa.
• Robert J. Breckinridge - An active anti-slavery legislator who believed that slaves should gradually get their freedom, not all at once. He came up with the idea that slaves should not be imported into Kentucky, and that all slave children after a certain date would be born free. He formed a society whose members promised to free the future children of their slaves when they reached the age of 21. He was also a great reformer in education for white children, beginning the idea of public education for all whites.
• Margaretta Mason Brown, Elizabeth Cox Underwood - both well educated women who wrote astutely about the communities in which they lived. John Brown was a US Senator living in Frankfort; and Joseph Rogers Underwood married his 2nd wife (mentioned above who was from Georgetown) and served as mayor of Bowling Green among other political duties including terms in Congress.
• William Wells Brown - Born in Lexington in 1814, his mother was a slave who told him his father was a white slaveowner. He escaped in 1834 to Ohio where he became part of the anti-slavery movement. In 1849, he was sent as an American representative to a Peace Congress in Paris. He remained in England and France for the next five years. To tell others of his life as a slave, he wrote the Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave in 1847. Although he wrote both plays and novels, his most important books were histories such as The Negro in the American Rebellion, published in 1867.
• Charlotte - Known as "Aunt" Charlotte to the white Lexingtonians, this black freed slave lived on Vine Street and made her living selling homemade pies and gingerbread. When William Solomon, a white alcoholic vagrant, was sold at public auction to work off a debt, Charlotte bought him because she said a white man would have worked him to death. When the cholera epidemic hit Lexington in 1833, claiming hundreds of lives, many able-bodied townspeople fled -- Charlotte told Solomon to leave and offered him a ride in her cart, but he refused to go. Instead he worked two straight months without pause, except to drink whiskey, digging graves for the plague victims. He became the town hero, but it was Charlotte who made it possible.
• Cassius M. and Mary Jane Warfield Clay - A wealthy slaveowner-politician who supported the idea of gradual freedom for slaves, including the Breckinridge plan of not importing slaves into Kentucky after 1833. He thought slavery was destroying Ky.'s economy because white workers were not able to compete with the cheap labor provided by the slaves. He often got in fights with people who disagreed with him, including his wife who refused to live in the same house with him after he accepted his bastard son from Russia. Mary Jane left behind the huge estate, White Hall, that she had built up during the Civil War by profitably trafficking in mules for the U.S. Army. She took her children (including Laura Clay who later became the famous suffragist) to live as a divorced woman in Lexington. At 84 Cassius married a 15 year old orphan Dora Richardson but in 3 years they too had divorced. He died in 1903, three years after his first wife had died.
• Henry and Lucretia Hart Clay - A famous lawyer, politician and slaveowner who thought it would be evil to suddenly free slaves who (he was sure) would not be able to take care of themselves. As president of the American Colonization Society he raised money to send freed Blacks to Liberia in Africa -- this would keep slaves from seeing Blacks who were free to come and go and live as they pleased. And the program could reduce the numbers of Blacks in the American population and make everyone he knew more alike. His wife, Lucretia, was the daughter of the wealthy Col. Thomas Hart; they had married in 1799 and moved to his 600 acres, called "Ash Lands" for its many ash trees. It was she who managed the huge estate, Ashland (click here or here to see pictures), while he served in Congress for most of his life. The story of her 11 children is a sad one: 2 girls died in infancy, Lucretia (14) died at Ashland the same day eliza died enroute to Washington with her father, and Susan died of yellow fever shortly after her marriage. Only Ann lived to be 28. The 5 boys fared a little better, but one son died in 1869 after a head injury had confined him to the Asylum, and Henry Clay, Jr. died in battle during the Mexican War. Lucretia withdrew from active social and political life, but she was "at home" to such important visitors as Abraham Lincoln in the 1840s, and Presidents Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, and (after her husband's death) Chester A Arthur. She tended her own Merino sheep for their wool, oversaw 50 slaves, and sold eggs, butter and milk to the Phoenix Hotel (30 gallons a day from her blooded herd) -- a meticulous business woman. She outlived her husband by 12 years, dying at the home of her son, John. She is buried in a sarcophagus at right angles beside her husband in the Lexington Cemetery.
• George Dupee - George W. (Pappy) Dupee was born a slave in Gallatin County in 1826. He became a minister of the Pleasant Green Baptist Church. Hearing their preacher was to be sold, a delegation from the church asked a white minister, the Reverend William Pratt, to buy Dupee for them. They repaid Pratt on the installment plan. Each Monday morning members of the faithful congregation delivered the Sunday offerings to Pratt until the entire sum was paid. In 1858, he became pastor of Washington Street Missionary Baptist Church in Paducah where he served for thirty-nine years.
• Eliza - In May 1843 Eliza, only 1/64 African and the daughter of her former master was put on the Cheapside auction block where she was half-stripped to escalate the bidding. A young Methodist preacher named Calvin Fairbanks outbid a New Orleans slave trader at $1,485. He had been instructed to bid up to $25,000 to save her. He took her immediately to the court house to get her freedom papers and that night she was taken to the Ohio state line. As a free woman Eliza married and lived in Ohio for many years.
• Free Frank - Born a slave in up-country S.C., Free Frank migrated in 1795 with his master to the new KY Pennyroyal frontier. There he worked side by side with his white owners to develop a homestead. By 1810 he began hiring his own time and earned enough money to establish a successful saltpeter factory. This endeavor earned him enough profit to purchase first his wife's freedom in 1817 and then, two years later, his own. He propspered in Pulaski County as a manufacturer, land speculator, commercial farmer, and stockraiser. In 1830 he moved his family to Pike County, IL; and six years later platted, promoted and developed New Philadelphia -- the only known case of a town founded by a black man, according to his biographer (and descendant) Juliet E. K. Walker. After his death in 1857 the family was finally able to liberate the last of his kin still in chains in Kentucky.
• Benjamin and Marie Cecil Gist Gratz - (1797-1841), the daughter of Captain Nathaniel Gist and half-sister of Sequoia (who authored the alphabet for the Cherokees), married Benjamin Gratz, a brilliant young Jewish lawyer from Philadelphia. They became the center of cultural activities in Lexington, and in 1825 they entertained General Lafayette at Mount Hope. They had 6 children, and Marie died in 1841 at 44. Benjamin married Anna Marie Boswell Shelby 2 years later.
• Josiah Henson - Henson, his wife and two children escaped to Canada where he learned to read and write. He returned to Kentucky many times to lead other fugitives to the north. In one two week period, he led 30 Kentucky escapees to Toledo, Ohio. Henson often spoke at abolitionist meetings. In 1850 he was introduced to a Boston abolitionist, Edward Beecher, and his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. She used Henson as her model for the saintly and courageous Uncle Tom.
• Horace and Mary Austin Holley - Rev. Holley married Mary Austin soon after graduating from Yale. He was offered the presidency of Transylvania College in 1817 (where in 15 years only 22 had graduated). She entertained President Monroe, General Jackson, General Lafayette and the Earl of Derby; she took classes in languages while her husband lost favor due to his rejection of Puritan doctrines for the "God is Love" concepts of Unitarianism. Though over 600 students had graduated during his 9 years as president, he resigned in 1827 under a cloud of controversy and later died of yellow fever on a boat going to New York. Mary took a job as governess and worked on her Memoir to tell her husband's side of the story. Her 1831 Letters from Texas became the first book on Texas written in English, and brought world notice to the Texas Colony.
• Mary Jane Hawes Holmes - a schoolteacher-author from Mass. who lived for about a year in Versailles and then wrote many popular novels set in Ky, inc. The Homestead on the Hill and Lena Rivers.
• Mary Todd Lincoln - (1818-82) She came from two powerful central Ky families, the Todds and the Parkers. She was one of 14 children, and 12 years in Lexington schools (Ward's then Mentelle's) made her one of the best-educated white women of her era. She was a true belle of the Bluegrass with long-lashed clear blue eyes and bronzy hair, and was well trained in political discourse from an early age since Whig leaders such as Morehead, Letcher, Menifee and Crittenden often met in her father's home. She married Abe in 1842 and had four sons -- only Robert lived past his teenage years, and it was he who committed her to a private sanitarium in 1875 after a trial on her sanity. She was denied at first a widow's pension by a Congress that gave U.S. Grant three houses and $100,000. She went to live in France from 1876-80 but returned in time to be insulted by her husband's early law partner. William H. Herndon published his version of the Life of Lincoln in 1889 in which he introduced the fable of a young Abe's love affair with Ann Rutledge. Many other books have been written about her, and as many versions of her heroism and hysteria.
• Thomas R. Marshall - A professor of law at Transylvania College, he wanted stricter governmental control of newspapers and voting. He believed that slavery was good for Blacks since he believed that Africans were heathens and barbarians who were created by mistake -- they were naturally immoral and child-like in intelligence. He helped to put down abolitionists by saying public safety was more important that civil rights like the freedom of the press. His ideas were supported by mobs who would attack Lexington's free Blacks and any slaves who seemed to be not submissive or respectful to any whites.
• Samuel May - Built the oldest brick house in the Big Sandy Valley; the Friends of Samuel May House are working on getting more help to restore this part of our Kentucky heritage, so visit their web site at http://www.dmfsoftware.com/mayhouse/index.htm
• Francis Dallam Peter (Lexington), Lizzie Hardin (Harrodsburg), Mary E. Van Meter (Bowling Green) - these girls all wrote diaries about their lives and their communities during the Civil War, all are published.
• The Sisters of Loretto, Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming - as early as 1800 powerful Ky. women chose a religious setting in order to fulfill their ambitions: the first mentioned above is in Marion Co., the 2nd in Bardstown then at St. Catherine's in Washington Co.; the 3rd group is more popularly known as Shakers and relied heavily on women recruits.
• William Solomon - "King" Solomon was an alcoholic white vagrant whose labor was sold at public auction in 1833 to a black woman pie maker. He became a hero when the cholera epidemic hit the day after the auction and he began voluntarily digging the victims' graves. He died at the poorhouse (now Eastern State Hospital) on Nov. 22, 1854 and the whole community paid for a casket and later a monument.
• Ebenezer Hiram Stedman - Born in 1808 in Mass., Ebenezer Stedman (a white man) moved to Kentucky with his family in 1815 and settled in Lexington where they become part of the manufacturing boom. They moved to Georgetown to take over the historic Craig paper mill along the Royal Spring Branch, and he became an apprentice as a "lay boy." He met his idol, Richard M. Johnson (hero of the War of 1812 and vice president of the U.S. in 1837-41), at the Johnson mill at Great Crossings. Stedman and his brother developed a papermaking community called Stedmantown in Franklin County, along the banks of the main Elkhorn Creek, in order to provide paper for the state printers in Frankfort. He became sole operator in 1852, but the Civil War proved to be his demise: his helpers left him, his wife and son died, and the Confederate government failed to pay for the paper they had ordered. He left the state a bankrupt man, and the DuPonts bought the machinery in 1875. Like so many other Kentuckians, Stedman migrated to Texas to live with his daughter Nellie Cox and he died in 1885 shortly after.
• Caroline A. Turner - a member of a prominent Boston family she moved to Lexington with her retired jurist husband, Judge Fielding L. Turner. She was big, muscular and of such vicious cruel temper that her husband stated in his will that none of his slaves go to her. She is said to have killed at least six. Lexingtonians became so incensed with her brutality that she was committed to the Asylum for the Insane. But somehow she maneuvered a trial and was released. On August 22, 1844, she beat her slave Richard until in his agony he broke his chains and strangled her to death. He was tried, convicted and hanged for first degree murder the next month.
• Sallie Ward - The most famous Ky. belle, she was born in Scott Co. but grew up in Louisville. She was educated in Philadelphia at a fashionable finishing school, married four times, and was well known in European courts. She had frequent benefit balls for the poor, and this made her well loved by all. The only extensive history of her (yet) can be found in Thomas Clark's The Kentucky where he devotes a whole chapter to her intriguing life.
• Delia Ann Webster - a Vermont school teacher and principal of Lexington Female Academy, she joined up with Calvin Fairbanks a Methodist preacher and Underground Railroad agent. They were arrested in 1844 for taking a slave family from the Phoenix Hotel to Maysville for escape. Fairbanks pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Webster was sentenced after a 5 day trial but pardoned after 6 weeks and returned to her school on W. 2nd between Jefferson and Georgetown Streets, despite vigorous citizen opposition.
• Robert and Mary Owen Todd Russell Wickliffe - The "Old Duke" was the largest slaveowner in Kentucky, serving as Senator from Fayette County for many years. He belonged to the Ky. Colonization Society when it was first formed in 1829 and told people that the growing number of free Blacks would corrupt American society with their immorality and their inability to cope with freedom. His second wife was the heiress of pioneer-surveyor John Todd; she was one of the wealthiest people in Kentucky. Her only son died at 22, and a scandal arose when she transported light-skinned slave Milly and her white child, Alfred, to Liberia -- the rumor was that Alfred was her son's child.

Posted January 3, 1997; August 10, 2003
http://www.bluegrass.kctcs.edu/LCC/HIS/108/project1.html