The Widows of Highland Avenue: A Historical Novel

By Stan Billingsley

The author Stan Billingsley is a retired Judge, having served on the bench for 25 years. He graduated from Western Ky. University and the UK College of Law. He has worked for the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., served as an Administrative Assistant to Governor Edward T. Breathitt, was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the USAR, served as City Attorney for Carrollton, Kentucky and served in the Kentucky House of Representatives. He is a mediator and arbitrator of civil claims.


In 1995 he was honored by the Ky. Bar Association as the Outstanding Judge in Kentucky. Judge Billingsley is the co-author of several legal texts including Ky. Driving Under the Influence Law co-authored with Hon. Wilbur Zevely and published by Thomson-West, and Ky. Medical Malpractice Law co-authored with the Hon. Richard Lawrence and published by LawReader Books. He has authored two novels concerning
lawyers ethics issues: Alice VS. Wonderland and A Parliament of Owls.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499013542

Stan Billingsley

Stan Billingsley is a retired judge, having served in the District and Circuit trial courts. Before being elected a judge, he served as an Administrative Assistant to Gov. Edward T. Breathitt and later was elected to the Kentucky Legislature. He served on the Ky. Judicial Conduct Commission. In 1995 the Ky. Bar Association voted him the Judge of the Year. Judge Billingsley is Senior Editor of LawReader.com, a company that provides online legal research resources to the legal profession. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the law. He lives in Carrollton, Ky. near the Ohio River, with his wife Gwen.

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Copyright © 2014 by Stan Billingsley.

ISBN:      eBook         978-1-4990-1354-2

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Rev. date: 05/08/2014

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Contents

Prologue

1.   Early History Of Carrollton

2.   Wheeling Gaunt—September 15, 1860

3.   The Carrollton Tea Society

4.   The Underground Railroad

5.   Mrs. Lucretia Beauregard— The Highland Witch

6.   The Clean Get-A-Way

7.   Lincoln Elected To The Presidency-November 1860

8.   Even The Confederate Battle Flag Was A Fraud

9.   The Anaconda Plan For Union Victory

10.   George Nicholas Sanders Implicated In Lincoln Assassination

11.   Alice Scott Visits General Butler— February 12, 1861

12.   Alice Scott—Visitors

13.   Adoption Of The 13th 14th And 15th Amendments

14.   The South Ignored The Growing Abolition Of Slavery Throughout The World

15.   The Carrollton Bank Robbery August 21, 1863

16.   The Great Poker Game

17.   Confederate Attacks On Carrollton And Ghent 1864

18.   Women’s Suffrage—Susan B. Anthony

19.   Slavery In America

20.   Where Are The Monuments To The Sacrifices Of Slaves Who Built This State?

21.   Slave Codes

22.   Effects Of The Civil War On The South (Wikipedia)

23.   Cassius Marcellus Clay 1863— Kentucky’s Unsung Hero

24.   Henry Watterson

25.   General John Hunt Morgan

26.   The Legacy Of Wheeling Gaunt

27.   The Legacy Of General William Orlando Butler

28.   The Legacy Of Alice Scott

29.   The Civil War’s Effect

References Used In This Book

Disclaimer

This historical novel is based on the lives of Alice Scott, Wheeling Gaunt, General Orlando Butler, and George Nichols Sanders all of Carroll County, Kentucky.

Other characters including Gen. Whitaker, General Cassius Marcellus Clay, General John Hunt Morgan and Henry Watterson. They were all actual contemporaries of Wheeling Gaunt, Alice Scott, George N. Sanders and General William Orlando Butler. Lucretia Beauregard and Troll Giltner are fictional characters based on many characters like them who did exist.

The citizens who helped African-Americans flee from slavery were at great personal risk if their actions were revealed, therefore their names were concealed and their history was suppressed. We generally don’t know the names of those who were involved, but we know the Underground Railroad existed in Carroll County, that up to 200,000 slaves fled from the South, and it is time that history recognized their heroic efforts. The format of a novel, grants us leave to imagine what really happened.

Wikipedia is an internet library which has been relied upon liberally. Authorities were double checked against dozens of historical sources regarding issues and events that occurred before and during the American Civil War.

The issue of what to call the African-Americans is a confusing issue. At the time of this book they would have been called, colored, negro, niggra or the hated N-word. We find this issue unsettling, and I hope our language is appropriate. The term black didn’t arise to the 1960’s.

Any resemblance of these characters to any person living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my beloved wife, Gwendolyn. She is the best historian I know. The idea for this book came from my wife. Her knowledge of the lifestyles and events in the 1800’s has been essential. She knows more history about Kentucky than most Kentuckians, even though she is from the free state of Ohio. Many times I have been lost and she has come to the rescue. Without her assistance and advice this book would not exist.

SPECIAL THANKS

I wish to thank to the many people of Carrollton who have provided information and inspiration for this book. I especially appreciate the efforts of the widows on and near Highland Avenue who have provided information and who have encouraged me in this project and to my neighbor and old classmate Calvin Vaught and his beautiful wife Lourdes. My long time friend Helen Mumphrey, gave me excellent insight into several important issues.

My process in writing and proofing a book has been greatly assisted by the fine ladies at STAPLES Office Supply store in Florence, Kentucky. They have always attended to my copying and binding requests in mere minutes. Their work is fast and flawless.

I appreciate the dozens of people who have allowed me to run issues and theories past them, and who have given me direction in my work. I appreciate the free public dictionary of Wikipedia which allows writers to use their material without charge.

I wish to thank Robert Mihalek, Robert Hasek, Suzanne Szempurch of the Yellow Springs News (Ohio), Scott Sanders, and the Xenia Public Library for their information and assistance. We appreciate the people of Yellow Springs who have honored Wheeling Gaunt by continuing his flour trust for over a century. Someday his hometown and state may recognize his achievements.

In 1849, Henry Bibb, a fugitive Kentucky slave, described his restless yearning for freedom in his autobiography.

Sometimes standing on the Ohio River bluff, looking over on a free State, and as far north as my eyes could see, I have eagerly gazed upon the blue sky of the free North… . that I might soar away to where there is no slavery; no clinking of chains, no captives, no lacerating of backs, no parting of husbands and wives; and where man ceases to be the property of his fellow man.

Bibb believed that he  . . . was in a far worse state than Egyptian bondage; for they had houses and land; I had none: they had oxen and sheep; I had none: I was surrounded by opposition on every hand. My friends were few and far between. I have often felt when running away as if I had scarcely a friend on earth.

PROLOGUE

The town of Carrollton, Kentucky in Carroll County in inhabited by a large middle class. It has been the home of veterans, several generals, merchants, farmers, teachers, factory workers, professional men, and occasionally a scoundrel. This book tells the story of Alice Scott the daughter of a Governor of Kentucky Charles Scott, General William Orlando Butler, Wheeling Gaunt a slave, who was named after his white father Alfred Gaunt. Alfred Gaunt fathered Wheeling by his slave housekeeper the same year he fathered a white, and free, son by his wife.

This story includes one scoundrel, George Nichols Sanders, who was a Confederate spy during the Civil War (1861-1865). George Nichols Sanders was from a hardworking and prominent family. Their family farm, called Grass Hills, was frequently visited by the Great Compromiser Henry Clay from Lexington and other notables with whom the Sanders family did business. Shortly after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the new President Andrew Johnson, issued a $25,000 bounty for George Nichols Sander’s arrest for his alleged participation in the conspiracy to kill President Lincoln. Many families have a scoundrel somewhere in their history. Other Kentuckians of the times include the bandit General John Hunt Morgan, the Confederate editor Henry Watterson. Also discussed is the greatest unsung hero of the civil War, Cassius Marcellus Clay. He was a general, publisher, abolitionist and successful ambassador to Russia. His efforts prevented England and France coming to the aid of the Confederate states and assured the failure of the rebellion.

These interesting people were all contemporaries and their lives crossed in this beautiful river port town of Carrollton on the south bank of the Ohio River, half-way between Cincinnati, Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky. Most of these people at one time or another stopped at the port of Carrollton while traveling from Cincinnati to Louisville. These people were born before the Civil War and they all lived in troubled times. The Civil War reached Carroll County and more than a few citizens of Carroll County fought and died in the Civil War. Kentucky troops were present at General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.

Secession from the Union and slavery were the overriding issues in the Civil War era. These two issues were finally resolved after great expenditure of blood and treasure. Kentucky like many other states had divided public support for secession and slavery. Some citizens were for secession and slavery, some were against secession but supported the institution of slavery, and some were against both secession and slavery.

There has developed in this country a myth, some call it The Great Magnolia Myth. Some advance this myth with claims that slavery was good for the African-Americans who were happy with their lot, and that there would have been no Civil War had not troublemakers from the North came south to stir up unrest and to call for the abolition of slavery.

The proponents of the myth speak even today of the romance of the ante-bellum years. These myth proponents paint a false picture of the times where in their minds, all southern women were educated, beautiful, wore hoop skirts and attended fancy balls. They speak of brave young men who wore handsome uniforms and road off to perform acts of gallantry to preserve the state’s rights and ignore that the war was to preserve the cruel institution of slavery. They seem to believe that everyone in the South was on the guest list of Scarlett O’Hara. (They seem to believe that Margaret Mitchell’s great novel Gone With the Wind was an actual portrayal of the life of the average white woman.) They refuse to acknowledge the poverty in the South that was observed and discussed by Kentuckian Cassius Marcellus Clay in his articles opposing slavery.

Their actions reveal that eighty years after the end of the American Revolution, which ended with the creation of a democratic nation free of the influence of the British, the secessionists wanted to reverse the American Revolution and reinstate an aristocracy class. The mythologists of the post-bellum years longed to create a new Southern aristocracy to replace the British monarchy. They deluded themselves into believing such a Southern aristocracy would include all those poor southern farmers who marched barefoot from Mississippi to Gettysburg to challenge a much larger and better equipped Union Army. Everyone dreamed of being a Lord or a Lady and none ever considered that they might end up as serfs and vassals if the aristocracy was formally re-instituted in the United States.

The mythologists argue that Kentucky was a secessionist state. They argue that the Confederate states were only one more battle away from winning the war. Some continue to fly Confederate flags on their homes, place bumper stickers on their pick-up trucks, and express in the foulest hate language, their continuing hatred of a democratic and unified America.

The Magnolia Myth proponents still refuse, 153 years after the beginning of the Civil War, to admit that this was a war for the benefit of only a relatively few wealthy plantation owners in the American south who calculated that they could win a war with a Union which was much larger and richer than the Confederacy. They believed that that could beat the North only on their gallantry. They suggest that Confederate Generals were smarter, their infantry was braver, and their horses faster, than those of the Union Army. They refuse to admit that in every battle many soldiers (Confederate and Union) went missing which is a euphemism for desertion. They have failed to explain how one-third of all casualties who died of disease is romantic and gallant.

Cities in the south have mostly ignored the contributions of slaves to the civilization of the wilderness in Kentucky, the west and the south. Rebel secessionists are honored by memorials, statues, and road sign markers. Due to their myths they have been able to rationalize the attempt of the southern states to repeal the constitution and to ignore their shame for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives that resulted from their civil rebellion.

It is time that the myth of the romance of their Romantic Lost Cause be examined through the lives of the people who lived in this era. It is now time that history should begin to honor those who carved this Commonwealth from the wilderness under the lash of their slave owners.

In 2009, Antebellum History reviewed a book by a slavery apologist who continues to advance the Great Magnolia Myth. The author of the book, whose family had owned slaves wrote:

African-Americans were just like little children, and had to be enslaved for their own good because goodness knows, they’d never be able to take care of themselves.

Antebellum History wrote: (Southerners) . . . weren’t wealthy in the sense of holding large amounts of cash, they were wealthy in the sense that they held assets (a plantation and enslaved people) that were valuable. The plantation, obviously, would be difficult to convert into ready cash, it was not a liquid asset. Enslaved human beings were nearly a liquid asset, requiring one to merely sell off a few at the nearest slave market, or to the slave traders who came through the upper south collecting lots of human beings to sell in the Cotton Kingdom.

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Madeline Abramson

Judge Billingsley crafted a fascinating and thought provoking tale of life in 1860’s Kentucky, a turbulent era which deserves our continued study and exploration.—Madeline Abramson is the wife of Ky. Lt. Gov. Jerry Abramson

*     *     *

Madeline Abramson has a passion for public service. Over the years, she has served as a leading community volunteer in organizations dedicated to the arts, social services, health care, young people and education.

Madeline currently serves as chair of the Kentucky Commission on Women as well as board chair of the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts and has twice served as chair of the board at Maryhurst, a Louisville-based organization that offers residential and treatment programs for young women who have experienced abuse and neglect. She continues to serve on Maryhurst’s board and executive committee. Her efforts also include serving on the boards of the state Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence and Jewish Hospital/St. Mary’s Foundation. She has been granted an Honorary Doctorate in Public Service from Spalding University; and the Family Scholar House Lucy Award for her commitment to post-secondary education and equality for women. She is a former chair of the Board of Directors for the American Red Cross, Kentuckiana Chapter, and continues to serve on its board and executive committee.)

CHAPTER ONE

Early History of Carrollton

In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, there were less than 200 residents in Kentucky. When Kentucky became a state in 1792, the eastern side of the Kentucky River basin became Woodford County, and in 1799 a later division formed Gallatin County with Port William (now Carrollton) as the county seat. In 1838, Carroll County was formed from the western section of Gallatin. Carrollton became the county seat of the new county. The county was named for Charles Carroll of Maryland, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

The first white man to visit the mouth of the Kentucky River was James McBride, who in 1754 came down the Ohio River with a canoeing party from Pittsburgh. Twenty years later, the area was surveyed by Hancock Taylor of Virginia, and two thousand acres were awarded to Colonel William Peachy for his services in the French and Indian Wars.

Two subsequent attempts at settlement of Carrollton were made. In 1784 by a man named Elliott, who was killed by Indians, and later by a Captain Ellison, who was driven away. These were followed in 1790 by General Charles Scott, who built a blockhouse at the mouth of the Kentucky River as a base for his Kentucky Volunteers, a militia organized as a defense against the Indians. With this protection, settlers began to arrive, and in 1792 Colonel Peachy sold the site of 613 acres to Benjamin Craig and James Hawkins, who laid-out the town of Port William and sold lots for development.

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The Ky. River (left) flows into the Ohio River at Carrollton, Kentucky. This is where General Scott’s blockhouse was built.

The Kentucky General Assembly passed the Act of Incorporation in December, 1799 and named a group of residents as the first town trustees. These settlers included, Thomas Montague, Jeremiah Craig, Richard Masterson, John Van Pelt, and Simon Adams. A few other family names from the rolls of the early townspeople were: Bailey, Barker, Scott, King, Dean, Cull, Lowe, Price, Darling, Jett, Waller, Goddard, Grimes, Marsh, Hawkins, Jamwa, Wells, Osborne, Baute’, Gatewood, Lee, Todd, Thomas, Carraco, Harris, Diuguid, Ellis, Chappell, Miller, Wheeler, Webster, Glauber, McBurney, Stout, Fishback, Hayden, Fothergill, Brindley, Graham, Riley, Wilhoite, Kipping, and Garmer.

Kentucky was a border state of key importance in the American Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln recognized the importance of the Commonwealth when he declared I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky. In a September 1861 letter to Orville Browning, Lincoln wrote, I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of the capital.

Kentucky, being a border state, was among the chief places where the brother against brother conflict was prevalent. Kentucky was officially neutral at the beginning of the war, but after an unwise invasion of Kentucky by Confederate General Leonidas Polk in violation of Kentucky’s professed neutrality, the legislature quickly petitioned the Union for assistance, and thereafter became solidly under Union control.

Kentucky’s citizens were split regarding the issues central to the Civil War. In 1860, slaves composed 19.5% of the Commonwealth’s population, and many Unionist Kentuckians saw nothing wrong with the peculiar institution. The Commonwealth was further bound to the South by the Mississippi River and its tributaries, which were the main commercial outlet for her surplus produce, although railroad connections to the North were beginning to diminish the importance of this tie. The ancestors of many Kentuckians hailed from Southern states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, but many Kentucky children were beginning to migrate toward the North. (Wikipedia)

In a book titled, The History of Woodford County, originally published in 1938, William E. Railey demonstrates the romantic deference paid by Kentuckians to their glorified ancestors from Virginia. Railey like many other southern authors found it important to have some Virginia blood in their line. This bowing and scraping to their Virginia ancestors helps to support reports that southerners before the Civil War sought to install an European style noble class to be the rulers over the underclass of merchants and owners of small farms.

In his book William Railey mentions Wheeling Gaunt and suggests he obtained his business skills from his white father. (Genetic science now declares that a male child receives most of his intelligence from his mother. http://drkeithwitt.com/males-inherit-more-intelligence-from-mothers-63/ The idea that a black man could not be a good businessman without white blood is an example of the racism that existed in Kentucky during Wheeling’s life, and which unfortunately continues today.)

Kentucky never passed laws criminalizing the teaching of slaves to read and write. Kentucky never prohibited owners from freeing their slaves, and never forced freed slaves to leave the state. Other southern states imposed such restrictions on slaves via slave codes.

In the pre-war South, many poor whites were illiterate as there was almost no public education before the war. In 1880, for example, the white literacy rate was about 75% in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia; and only 67% in North Carolina. This compares with the 91% national literacy rate. The African American rate of literacy rate was only 30% in the South. The Southern Slave codes generally forbade the education of African-Americans. By 1900, however, the majority of African Americans had achieved literacy. (Wikipedia)

Early travelers to Kentucky in the 1750s and 1760s brought their slaves with them. As permanent settlers started arriving in the late 1770s, they held slaves in the settlements, organized around forts. The first Kentucky settlers, chiefly migrants from Virginia, continued to rely on slave labor as they established permanent farms. Early Kentucky settlements were built on the labor of slavery, and it was an integral part of the state. From 1790 to 1860 the slave population of Kentucky was never more than 20% of the total population, with lower percentages after 1830, as planters sold slaves to the Deep South.

Slave populations were greatest in the central bluegrass region of the state, which was rich in farmland. The farmers of Western Kentucky employed many slaves. East Kentucky citizens rarely owned slaves, and were indifferent to the need for slavery in Kentucky. In 1850, 23 percent of Kentucky’s white males held enslaved African Americans.

Planters who grew hemp and tobacco made the greatest use of slave labor, as these were labor-intensive crops. Subsistence farming could be done without slave labor. Some owners also used enslaved African Americans in mining and manufacturing operations.

Farms in Kentucky tended to be smaller than the plantations of the Deep South, so ownership of large numbers of slaves was uncommon. Many slaves had to find spouses on a neighboring farm, and often fathers did not get to live with their wives and families. A family member could be sold by his slave master to anyone. Many families were separated and parents and children, husbands and wives never saw each other again.

Politically, the Commonwealth has produced some of the country’s best known leaders; President Zachary Taylor (elected as the 12th president of the United States in 1849, former U.S. Vice-Presidents John C. Breckinridge (1857-1861), Richard M. Johnson (1837-1851, and Alben Barkley (1949-1953) all of whom hailed from the Bluegrass state, as did the Great Compromiser Senator Henry Clay and future president Abraham Lincoln. Of course Confederate President Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky. Interestingly Jefferson Davis was married