John G. Fee and the Trials of Kentucky Abolitionism

It is often too true that deserving people of the past do not always receive the historical attention that they warrant. Since its founding, the Emerging Civil War blog has served as somewhat of a corrective to this unfortunate reality. Here, readers frequently learn about numerous individuals who have previously not had much of a spotlight.

If you’ve never heard of Kentuckian John Gregg Fee, don’t worry, you have plenty of company.  Not among those who usually get mentioned when discussions turn to abolitionists, Fee remains largely in the shadows compared to well-known figures like Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, William Still, and Charles Sumner. Yet when one considers that Fee was one of the few abolitionists who was working for the end of slavery within the borders of a slaveholding state, and that he suffered significantly for his beliefs and actions on behalf of his calling and cause; then, if basing his inclusion on those factors, Fee should find himself standing shoulder to shoulder among the most recognized in the anti-slavery community.

Fee was a child of the religious awakenings that had a great influence on the reform movements of the first half of the nineteenth-century. Born in 1816 in Bracken County, Kentucky, Fee’s father was a small slaveholder in this Ohio River border county, and he grew up all too familiar with the institution.

Fee’s views on slavery evolved as he added to his education. First studying at the local Augusta Academy, then at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Fee returned to Augusta to finish his studies and then in 1842 informed his family he was going to attend Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati to become a minister. Lane fractured in 1834 over the slavery question after a series of student debates. The more radical students left the school and went to newly founded Oberlin College in northern Ohio, which became the first interracial, coeducational college in the United States. It was during his time at Lane that Fee became an unconditional and immediate abolitionist.

One of Fee’s first missions was attempting to convert his father to the anti-slavery camp. Being unsuccessful on the home front, a still determined Fee turned his attention to other slaveholders in Kentucky and started preaching in churches against slavery and delivering antislavery tracts. He initially based his ministry in Lewis County, Kentucky, but ranged all over northeastern part of the state spreading the word of God’s forgiveness to those that repented from the sin of slavery. On several occasions Fee was threatened, mobbed, and beaten for his efforts.

In the late 1840’s Fee became acquainted with Cassius Marcellus Clay of Madison County, Kentucky. Clay, a distant cousin of famous statesman Henry Clay, had tried his hand at publishing an anti-slavery newspaper in Lexington, but strident community opposition forced him to move the operation to Cincinnati where it went out of business. Clay was a politically ambitious man that wanted to see the end of slavery in Kentucky. However, unlike Fee, Clay was not an abolitionist, he was an emancipationist. Clay wanted slavery ended gradually so poorer whites would not have to compete against slave labor for jobs. He felt that his best chance to attain high office was to appeal to the non-slaveholding majority of whites in Kentucky. Fee wanted slavery abolished because he thought that owning a man or placing oneself above another in any form was a sin against God’s law. This higher authority was what ruled Fee’s thinking and would cause a rift between Free and Clay in the late 1850s. Fee’s anti-caste thinking was abhorrent to most white Kentuckians’ sense of an ordered, hierarchical society.

In 1854, Clay convinced Fee to move to Madison County to start a school to educate the youth of the area by giving him a tract of land. Fee accepted and brought missionary friends that he had met through the American Missionary Association (AMA) with him. Many of these missionaries were Oberlin graduates and were just as radical in their thinking on race and class as Fee. The following year Fee started Berea school.

A document now in the collections of the Library of Congress explains some of the persecution that Fee endured in his abolitionist efforts. Directed at “The Citizens of Rockcastle County, Kentucky, and posted in the summer of 1857, Fee opened it by stating that for the past three year he had been exercising his “constitutional right, and performing a religious duty, in preaching to a portion of you the Gospel of Christ, as I understand it.” The Bible and Christ’s example told him, “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you do ye even so unto them.” Fee acknowledged that if this Golden Rule was applied to one’s life it “would destroy Slavery and oppression in all its forms.”

Fee then related a recent mobbing incident that he endured: “I have recently, by a portion of your citizens, on the Sabbath day, in the midst of a discourse, by superior force, been torn from the house of worship. By this lawless conduct, my clothes were torn and my person abused. I was then – under threats and weapons, part of the time still drawn – driven, like a manacled slave, some eight or nine miles into an adjoining county.” Why was he abused so? Because he had the backbone to claim that slavery would end if people only followed Christ’s example.

The Kentucky abolitionist claimed that if things did not change and this vigilante terrorism did not end, it would only hurt the prosperity of the state. “Property will sink in value because of like insecurity. One of the pubic journals of Louisville announces the fact that millions of dollars have recently been lost to that city because of recent mobs there [nativist violence on “Bloody Monday,” two years earlier]. Business men will not come, nor the capitalist stay, where there is such insecurity and turmoil. Land will depreciate in value, because few will want to occupy it. All kinds of business must stagnate, as in Western Missouri during the reign of Border-Ruffianism [Bleeding Kansas]. Population will soon become sparse. Schools and churches will die out for want of patronage. Ignorance, vice, and barbarism follow as necessary results,” Fee expounded.

What then did Fee want? “But I may ask of you equal protection by law in the expression of my sentiments. This is my natural and constitutional right. If I have in any wise violated law, I refuse not to come before legal or constitutional tribunals. But so far as I know, my enemies do not pretend that I have violated law. They openly say I have not. I have maintained that Slavery is a violation of the law of God—the law of love; that this, like all other sins, should be repented of immediately, and that without expatriation or forcible colonization—because the latter would be a violation of Christ’s ‘golden rule,’ and is, as I believe, inexpedient. This expression of opinion is my constitutional right and religious duty.”

Fee deftly attempted to play the native card to convince his enemies of his sincerity. “I am an native-born citizen. You have often said if Northern men would let you alone you would soon put away Slavery. I now come to you as a native-born, law abiding citizen, entreating you now to begin the work. You mob me, and treat me as bad as you do Northern men.” Fee pointedly asked, “Can you thus convince the world that you are sincere in your professions of willingness to put away Slavery?”

Touching on other subjects that related to slavery, he claimed he was not a “hireling,” but that he was working on his own conviction. He appealed that he did not promote amalgamation (race mixing), but rather, that the institution of slavery encouraged sinful relations between enslavers and the enslaved. “Emancipation would avert, to a very great extent, the thing you say you dread,” Fee reasoned.

Fee ended his pleas with some probing and empathetic questions. “Must I suffer longer? Must my wife and friends be roused at the hour of midnight to go and search for my body, perhaps mangled and torn by a drunken and infuriated mob? Must virtue-loving women and venerable fathers be further disturbed in religious devotions, cursed and abused, with weapons of death over them?” Finally, Fee closed, “Will not the lovers of virtue and domestic security speak out, act timely, and in the spirit of love restore order and peace, and wipe out what otherwise will be eternal disgrace? I want not revenge, but protection.”

That protection would not be forthcoming. Along with John A. R. Rogers, who came to Berea in 1858, their school started to flourish, probably in large part to it being one of the only schools in the area. Fee’s efforts in Madison and Rockcastle counties met great resistance from local slaveholders. He and his associates were often harassed and mobbed, and forcefully encouraged to leave, but they continued to persevere in their mission to end slavery in the Bluegrass State. The school would be short lived as in the aftermath of John Brown’s militant raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the Bereans were forced to leave Kentucky. Many proslavery men in the area believed that Fee and his fellow missionaries were possibly just radical enough to attempt a Brown-like action. While Fee had been asked to leave the state before, the stakes after Brown’s raid were too high to remain in Kentucky. He established residence in the Cincinnati area and waited for the opportunity to return. Fee’s chance came in 1863, when the United States army opened Camp Nelson in Jessamine County, Kentucky. In 1864, the army base transformed into a recruiting and training center for African American soldiers and Fee and some of his associates went there to help freed families and provide an education to many of the formerly enslaved.

Fee continued his work at Camp Nelson until the war ended, when he returned to Berea and restarted the school, and eventually the college that is there to this day. Fee was finally able to fully offer his services of an anti-prejudice, anti-caste, integrated education to youth from across the area.

Living until 1901, Fee fortunately would not have to witness the passage of the “Day Law” in 1904, which legally segregated Berea’s campus until 1950, despite it being a private institution.

Unfortunately, Fee has largely remained a hidden historical figure outside of Berea and the commonwealth of Kentucky. His story is one of love for his fellow man regardless of color or social position. He worked diligently so that the principles of the Declaration of Independence might be realized and experienced by everyone. Unlike other abolitionists that sought an end of slavery from the largely (although not always) safe confines of the Free States, Fee worked to end slavery in a slave state that was determined to keep it so. His belief in the equality of man was just as strong as John Brown’s—a very rare thing for a white man to express in the mid nineteenth-century—but his tactics for ending slavery differed significantly.

The principles that he espoused in the 1850s and 1860s are what many aspire to today. And although considered radical in his times, by standing to his convictions and maintaining his faith he made a difference in the lives of many people, yet another admirable attribute that many of us aspire to today.

Sources:

John G. Fee. “An Address to the Citizens of Rockcastle County.” Berea, Madison County, Kentucky, July 30, 1857. Library of Congress.

John Gregg Fee. Autobiography of John G. Fee, Berea, Kentucky. National Christian Association, 1991.

Victory B. Howard. The Evangelical War against Slavery and Caste: The Life and Times of John G. Fee. Susquehanna University Press, 1996.

Richard D. Sears. A Utopian Experiment in Kentucky: Integration and Social Equality at Berea, 1866-1904. Praeger, 1996.

Richard D. Sears. The Kentucky Abolitionists in the Midst of Slavery 1854-1864: Exiles for Freedom. Edwin Mellen. 1993