Cecelia and Fanny: The Remarkable Friendship Between an Escaped Slave and Her Former Mistress

Chapter 6. Fanny: The CIvil War in Louisville

Fanny: The Civil War in Louisville As Cecelia moved south, Fanny stayed put. She continued to live in her father’s house on Walnut Street, devoting herself to her husband and children. In 1860, after Cecelia’s husband had died and when Cecelia herself was about to leave Canada, Fanny had four young children in Louisville. Her youngest son—Rogers Clark— was just two years old; Samuel was five; Abby, the only girl, was seven; and her oldest, Charles, was ten. Andrew was practicing law and managing his own—and Charles W. Thruston’s—real estate holdings. In 1860 the nation was about to tear itself in two over the issues of slavery, states’ rights, and the indissolubility of the Union. One of the frustrating things in writing about these years in the Ballards’ life, however, is that they left very little archival material behind reflecting on the war years. Through official records and other accounts , it is possible to discern the bare outlines of their life during the war, but it is most difficult to determine how they felt about the conflict or the issues that triggered it and followed in its wake. The small cache of archived letters from the family—written by Andrew Ballard to various descendants of the Jesup family, the relatives Fanny had visited before traveling to Niagara—overwhelmingly deal with land prices, rents, and other mundane business matters. The result is that their story relies heavily on context and logical supposition based on what is known about them rather than on direct documentary evidence. Putting what is known about their living situation together with what Louisville went through during the war allows some educated guesswork about the Ballards’ wartime Chapter 6 101  Cecelia and Fanny 102 experiences. It is an incomplete and perhaps unsatisfying portrait, but it offers a reasonable depiction of their lives. As the country hurtled toward sectional conflict and civil war, Fanny and Andrew probably believed that some sort of mutual understanding would be reached between the two sides. Surely the questions swirling around the rights of the Southern states to have chattel slavery could be finessed politically, as had been done in previous compromises. If the Ballards were like most Louisvillians— indeed, most Kentuckians—they wanted to have it both ways: they wanted the Union to be preserved, and they wanted slavery. The hardening positions on both sides that would force a choice between one or the other probably seemed to them irrational and extreme. Fanny was a churchgoing woman, and her views on the political conflict engulfing the country may have been influenced by the voice she heard from the pulpit of Christ Church Episcopal. The Reverend James Craik did leave behind a record of his views on the political questions of the day. In a well-circulated speech before the Kentucky House in December 1859, Craik lashed out equally at abolitionists’ meddling with slavery and at fire-eaters’ talk of secession . If abolitionism was a “stupid crime” in his eyes, rebellion against the government was a “more flagrant stupidity.” Craik branded abolitionist sentiment a “distempered fanaticism.” Abolitionist forces wanted to gain control of the national government in order to regulate “the supposed sins of their fellow-citizens.” This was unconstitutional nonsense, Craik insisted. The national government had no power to determine domestic relations in the states and no power to override property rights in the territories. The abolitionist argument for national action against slavery, Craik said, violated the foundational principles of the nation. “Now let us suppose the worst: That a controlling majority of the people become abolitionized,” continued Craik, “and determine to use the Federal government as the instrument of perpetrating their folly.” Even then, the solution was not to dissolve the Union. The solution was within the Constitution, which provided a remedy for an overreaching federal government. That remedy was the states. It was only within the Union that the balance between state sovereignty and 103 The Civil War in Louisville national sovereignty was maintained. That balance was the “foundation of American freedom.” Dissolve the Union and there was no restraint on federal power. Preserve the Union and the state sovereignty enshrined in the Constitution could check any threat posed by an ascendant federal government. The states’ powers to tax, to arm their people, and to form militias gave force and meaning to political positions based...