The Murder of Peter Banford and the Campaign against the Freedmen’s Bureau in Kentucky’s Bluegrass Region Rand Dotson (bio) On a bitter-cold February morning in 1866, five U.S. Army veterans from Garrard County, Kentucky, traveled by horseback from their homes to the town of Danville, in neighboring Boyle County.1 The men were bound for Danville to file the forms necessary to secure their military bounties for Civil War service. James W. Poor was among them. He was a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor, who, until enlisting in Thomas Bramlette’s Third Kentucky Infantry in the fall of 1861, worked his entire life on his father’s Garrard County farm. Poor served for three years, qualifying him for a bonus payment of $100, an amount in 1866 equal to around one-fifth his yearly income. The war was arduous for him—nearly 30 percent of the men in his company, many of them friends and neighbors, died in the conflict. Poor was semi-debilitated from injuries he suffered in the Atlanta campaign, during which he was wounded twice, the second time grievously enough to require several months of hospitalization. Not long after convalescing, he mustered out of the army, returned to Garrard County, and settled in the hamlet of Bryantsville, near his parents’ farm. A couple of the men with Poor on the trip to Danville that day were veterans of his company; two of the others were former Union [End Page 447] cavalrymen, one of whom was married to Poor’s younger sister. After completing their bounty paperwork, the men spent the day drinking in a saloon before departing for home on Danville & Pleasant Hill Pike. By then, according to several witnesses, Poor was not only severely intoxicated but also casually brandishing a large pistol. He was drunk and still miles from home when the group reached two Black laborers repairing a wooden fence fronting William H. Banford’s farm. As they passed by, Poor drew his pistol—a Colt Navy revolver—took aim at the head of one of the men, pulled the trigger, and sent a lead ball into his skull, killing him instantly. The gunshot and gore stunned Poor’s intoxicated companions, all of whom fled with him into Mercer County. William Banford, whose employee Poor shot, reported the murder to the Mercer County sheriff. Banford previously enslaved the victim—a recently freed slave named Peter Banford. George Banford, the man working alongside Peter Banford that afternoon, was also a former Banford family slave and a soldier in the 114th United States Colored Infantry at home on leave to visit his relatives. After taking William Banford’s statement, the sheriff arrested Poor and placed him in the county jail in Harrodsburg. The following day, deputies delivered him to the courthouse for his preliminary trial. George Banford was not present, nor would his attendance have mattered since laws that originated in Kentucky’s slave code prohibiting Black testimony against whites remained in effect after emancipation. With Banford unable to testify, Poor and his lawyer expected the judge to exonerate him or at worst to require a small bond for a trial that would never take place. Had the district’s Freedmen’s Bureau agent, Captain William Goodloe, not learned of the murder, that is assuredly what would have transpired. Instead, Goodloe summoned a detachment of heavily armed United States Colored Troops (USCT), halted the proceedings, and ordered Poor transported in irons to the military prison at Camp Nelson, a sprawling army base in nearby Jessamine County. Although troubled and confused by the Bureau’s confiscation of their prisoner, Mercer County officials did not attempt to stop Goodloe. Bewildered by what [End Page 448] he had seen, the sheriff reported the incident to Poor’s former commander, Kentucky Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, and asked him “what to do” since Poor was a civilian and the murder had occurred in a region not under the military’s control.2 [End Page 449] The killing of Peter Banford by James Poor, while horrifying and senseless, was not aberrant or particularly shocking in Kentucky in early 1866. Although the details of Banford’s murder may have been...