Slaves, Slaveholders, and a Kentucky Community’s Struggle toward Freedom by Elizabeth D. Leonard

Abstract

Reviewed by: Slaves, Slaveholders, and a Kentucky Community’s Struggle toward Freedom by Elizabeth D. Leonard Jeffrey Thomas Perry (bio) Slaves, Slaveholders, and a Kentucky Community’s Struggle toward Freedom. By Elizabeth D. Leonard. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2019. Pp. 196. $50.00 cloth) Elizabeth D. Leonard’s Slaves, Slaveholders, and a Kentucky Community’s Struggle toward Freedom is “a narrative micro-history” of a “small group of closely connected white and Black Kentuckians” from Breckinridge County. She argues that such an approach allows us to better understand “what the war meant to actual human beings who inhabited interlocking worlds on the border between slavery and freedom” (p. xi). Over three parts, Leonard examines how two very different men, entwined by the South’s “peculiar institution,” each worked in their own way to defeat the Confederacy, secure emancipation, and navigate the postwar era. In part one, Leonard focuses on Joseph Holt, a prominent Kentuckian who briefly served as James Buchanan’s secretary of war and later as Abraham Lincoln’s judge advocate general. Coming of age in Breckinridge County, Holt was a slaveholding Southern Democrat—an acolyte of Andrew Jackson who believed the Union to be indivisible. As the sectional crisis deepened during the 1850s, Holt maintained his fierce Unionism and denounced abolitionists and “Black Republicans” as threats to the social order, rabble-rousers intent on race war. Even still, an ambivalence toward slavery that first appeared during his college years reemerged during the secession movement. By the war’s outbreak, Holt shifted the blame for secession to “white slaveholding firebrands,” some of whom were his relatives. Holt’s unwavering defense of the Union soon transformed into an early and sustained demand for the end of slavery and an insistence on Black equality (p. 35). [End Page 489] Part two shifts gears, examining the experience of Sandy, an enslaved man acquired in his mid-teens by Holt, and who for over two decades lived and worked at Holt’s home in Breckinridge County known as “Holt’s Bottom.” When Holt moved to Washington D.C. to work in the Buchanan administration in 1857, he sold or transferred much of his slave property—including Sandy—to his brother, Thomas. In 1864, Sandy fled Holt’s Bottom and joined Company A of the 118th United States Colored Troops (USCT). Sandy’s unit took part in Grant’s Petersburg-Richmond campaign, and saw little action but rigorous, dangerous labor and poor living conditions. Leonard admits that illuminating Sandy’s Civil War experience is difficult. Since Sandy never received a formal education and was illiterate, there are few records of him or his fellow troops in Company A. Leonard makes do, however, with army medical records—through which she describes the myriad sicknesses and unpleasant deaths of Sandy’s cohorts—postwar pension requests, and military service records to highlight the important role the 118th USCT played in securing Union victory. Centered on postwar Kentucky, part three describes the challenges freed Blacks faced in securing freedom and equality. As elsewhere in the former slaveholding states, violence marked Kentucky’s Reconstruction years. Despite the Thirteenth Amendment’s ratification, many whites argued that since their state stayed loyal to the Union, their slaves remained in bondage. The return of thousands of whites who fought for the Confederacy compounded the problem, while state and local laws denying Blacks their civil and political rights made it even more difficult for former slaves to assert their freedom fully. Nonetheless, Leonard’s collective biography of Sandy Holt and his Company A comrades charts their postwar marriages and growing families, including their movements, pension applications, and deaths as best as the records allow. Leonard’s book successfully traces the intersecting lives of Joseph Holt and his one-time property, Sandy, during the transformative era of the Civil War. At times the microhistory lens blurs the broader [End Page 490] national context, so this book may be best for persons with a background knowledge of the sectional crisis, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Leonard’s brevity and her skillful use of primary sources, however, makes this an excellent addition to an undergraduate or graduate Civil War seminar. Jeffrey Thomas Perry JEFFREY THOMAS...