BY ED FELIEN
The American party was a brief offshoot of the splintered and collapsed Whig party, and its two most virulent centers of power were in Louisville and Cincinnati. The Whigs had split over the issue of slavery, and the Free Soil party in the North represented the anti-slavery wing. Eventually, the factions agreed that their differences were not as important as beating the Democrats, so they united in the new Republican party. They both agreed on the preservation of the Union.
Lincoln skillfully danced the tightrope separating these two factions in his party. His Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, while the Civil War was well underway, carefully declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” Slaves within Kentucky would remain slaves. Lincoln, of course, understood that once slaves were freed in the South there was no way slavery could be maintained in the border states. The Emancipation moved the process along, articulated the cause northern Republicans had been fighting for, without unduly aggravating the Know Nothings in Louisville and the border states.
But the Unionists who owned slaves felt betrayed by the abolitionists. When Lincoln stationed Union troops in Kentucky in 1861 and 1862, he effectively ended slavery there. After the war, when Confederate soldiers returned to Louisville they took political control of the city. It was said by many, “Louisville joined the Confederacy after the war.”
The Ku Klux Klan has gone through three distinct historic phases. The first was right after the Civil War. It lasted until 1874 when the Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forest dissolved it.
There was some evidence of the Klan in Kentucky, but the power elite didn’t trust the radical populism of the Klan and preferred to keep things under control with their own leadership.
Kentucky had regulators to preserve the white social and political order.
In September of 1879 Judge Lynch declared an “end to lawlessness.” The next month, on Oct. 20, 200 of Judge Lynch’s regulators took two “alleged” criminals out of the Elliot County jail in Sandy Hook (163 miles east of Louisville) and hanged them. By 1880 the movement spread to neighboring counties. On March 17, 1880, they hung two more, and they started breaking their buddies out of county jails. Finally, the governor intervened. He offered an executive pardon for all the past crimes of the regulators if they agreed to disband. Of course, they agreed, and 200 of them surrendered and were, therefore, forgiven their past sins. And, of course, they continued to enforce their notion of justice in their own way with their same gang of friends and former Confederate soldiers. They just didn’t call it “regulating.” Masked vigilantism continued in Kentucky until well into the 20th century. As long as it was kept quiet and didn’t look like an uprising, the authorities were quite willing to turn the blind eye and the deaf ear. That was the understood relationship between the power elite and the angry mobs. They needed and they understood each other. And it didn’t have to be talked about. And it didn’t need to be written down.
From 1882 to 1930 there are recorded 118 lynchings of black men by white mobs in Kentucky. At least 60 of those men were lynched in the 20th century.
Ohio had 16 blacks lynched from the period 1882 to 1968.
Cincinnati had a conflicted history during the Civil War. Ohio was a northern state, and George C. McClellan, a prominent Cincinnati citizen, was the leader of the Union forces from 1861 to 1862. He was relieved of that command after the Great Skedaddle of his men facing the stonewall of Andrew Jackson’s troops. The Democratic Cincinnati Daily Times openly supported the South, and McClellan ran against Lincoln as a Democrat in the 1864 election. But Cincinnati voted heavily for Lincoln in the election.
