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

Chapter 8. Fanny: Postwar Trials

Fanny: Postwar Trials Andrew’s post as court clerk and Louisville’s deliverance from wartime devastation had enabled the Ballards to pass the war years with their lifestyle relatively intact. Their family house was unscathed ; their income was steady and adequate; their sons—too young to join the fight—had been spared the horrors of combat. Indeed, owing to the inheritance from Charles William Thruston, Fanny’s father, the Ballard family emerged from the war somewhat better off financially than it had been when the war began. The Ballards’ lives probably changed more in the aftermath of the war. With the Union victory, Louisville and Kentucky both began a process of “readjustment” that changed the city and the state significantly from their antebellum selves. The standard historical term for the period after the Civil War is, of course, Reconstruction . But Kentucky never went through Reconstruction. Since it never seceded from the Union, it was not subject to the Reconstruction Acts passed by Congress to rehabilitate the South. Instead, Kentucky historians refer to a period of “readjustment” after the Civil War, as Kentuckians struggled to reconcile themselves to the end of slavery, the defeat of the Confederacy, and the rise of a new industrial age.1 It is difficult to know exactly how Fanny and Andrew viewed the end of slavery. They had gone through much of the war with their own slaveholdings more or less intact. In 1864, according to Andrew ’s state property tax return, he still owned eight slaves valued at $1,800. It seems likely that they continued to own these slaves Chapter 8 142  143 Postwar Trials through the end of the war and possibly even longer, waiting until the law explicitly forbade slaveholding. The final destruction of slavery within Kentucky and within the nation at large occurred only with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. On a practical level, the Ballards no doubt felt emancipation as an inconvenience. They lost ownership of their eight slaves and, from their perspective, $1,800 worth of personal property. This was hardly devastating, not when compared to the fate of some Kentucky plantation owners who, with most of their wealth tied up in black bodies, found themselves transformed into poor men when those bodies were liberated. For the Ballards, emancipation simply meant they would now have to find household servants to replace those slaves who chose to depart.2 Not all the former slaves chose to do so. Some older slaves stayed with the family even after emancipation. Rogers Clark recalled the case of his grandfather’s personal servant Jack. The old slave and his wife, Susan, cared for the aging Charles Thruston until his death in 1865 and then stayed on with the family. After emancipation, Fanny and Andrew offered the old slave couple a home and cared for them until the servants’ own deaths in the 1870s. Likewise, Chloe—a “noted cook and faithful slave” of Julia Churchill, Fanny’s maternal aunt—stayed on after emancipation as a Churchill family servant.3 Nonetheless, it is clear that the end of slavery meant a change in the composition of the Ballard household. Fanny still had four children at home—the oldest, Charles, was fifteen in 1865 and Rogers Clark was but seven—and doubtless felt that she needed help. Instead of slaves, she needed to hire domestic servants. While black women —most of them former slaves—dominated the ranks of household servants in Louisville during the last third of the nineteenth century, immigrant women, who had never been warmly welcomed before the war, now competed for open slots in the city’s well-to-do households . Sure enough, the 1870 census showed two white domestics living in the Ballard house—both of foreign parentage.4 On a broader level, the end of slavery forced a rethinking of relations between blacks and whites in all aspects of life. Overall, whites in Kentucky had a very difficult time accepting their former bond- Cecelia and Fanny 144 men as their political and economic equals. In many instances, whites used violence, intimidation, and discrimination to maintain their superior social and economic position; in other cases, blacks were simply cast loose to fend for themselves, the cash nexus of the employer/employee relationship replacing the life-encompassing control of the master/slave relationship. When blacks, hobbled by decades of slavery, lack of education, and...