Difficult Issues (Like Slavery) that Complicate Teaching and Learning about Famous Kentucky Christians

Stories about past Kentucky Christians make history and faith come alive for our students. They also expose controversies and ideologies that are difficult for us modern Americans to reconcile with how we think a Christian should behave and what we think a Christian should believe. The most obvious of these difficult issues is slavery. Today, even people who argue that slavery was a necessary evil for its time do not hesitate to call it evil. Denominations formed and others split prior to the Civil War over abolition and slavery.  White Christians were on both sides of the issue. Some African American Christians were enslaved and some emancipated. 

Elisha Green was enslaved from birth until he purchased his own freedom. When he was sixteen, his owner, a Christian pastor, baptized him in a creek after he made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ (Elisha Green. 1888). Alexander Cross was an enslaved man who was purchased and then emancipated by the North Street Christian Church of Hopkinsville. This was so that he could be sent, with his free wife, Martha, and son, James, to Liberia as missionaries (Jennifer P. Brown. 2001). Alfred Russell was emancipated by his grandmother-owner to be sent to Liberia also. Eventually, he became the tenth president of Liberia (Liberia Info). While the emancipation of Alexander Cross and Alfred Russell may seem good, even godly, the Kentucky Colonialization Society (NKAA) was a veiled strategy to rid Kentucky of freed slaves- in fact, the 1850 Kentucky Constitution prohibited freed slaves from living in the commonwealth. 

Margaret "Peggy" Smith Taylor, First Lady of the United States, and her husband, Zachary Taylor owned hundreds of enslaved individuals. They even, as did eleven presidents before them, brought slaves to the White House, housing them in the attic (Walt Bachman, 2018). Peggy Taylor was a woman of faith. She gave herself to prayer, preferring to delegate her daughter as the host for the gala affairs of State.

Does the fact that Elisha Green was owned by a pastor or that Peggy Taylor owned slaves at the White House diminish the possibility that the pastor or the First Lady were sincerely people of faith? How do we talk about these difficult issues with our students? Can we separate a person's flaws from the Christian message that says no one is good but God alone (Matthew 19:17)? Is it possible for a Christian to hold convictions or to behave in ways that are determined by some later standard to be not good? 

These are the topics that public historians refer to as difficult heritage. There will always be controversies and disagreements even within the Christian community. Some of these issues will be serious enough to cause divisions and even wars. What an educator or a historian should do is explain the issues and present the questions according to the historic context and then, perhaps, trace how the conflict continued, impacted the individuals and the culture, or became resolved. Not all questions that a teacher poses to a student or that a student asks a teacher can or should have easy answers. Some questions may just need to be left uncomfortably unanswered on the table. It can seem easier to judge the individuals from the past than to apply the necessary humility to consider that we may be as guilty of something as grievous as slavery but which we have yet to gain the perspective of hindsight.  

By Lesley Barker, PhD. c. 2021

Works Cited

Walt Bachman. The Last White House Slaves: The Story of Jane, President Zachary Taylor's Enslaved Concubine. 2019.

Jennifer P. Brown. "Church Paid for Slave's Freedom" in Kentucky New Era. ONLINE at https://www.kentuckynewera.com/article_8b681ff0-e111-5a01-a7d4-ca07c905e09c.html ACCESSED 9/8/2021.

Elisha Winfield Green. The Life of Rev. Elisha Green. 1888.

“Kentucky Colonization Society,” Notable Kentucky African Americans Database, accessed September 8, 2021, https://nkaa.uky.edu/nkaa/items/show/744.

LiberiaInfo. "Alfred F. Russell". ONLINE at http://liberiainfo.co/prd/presidents/alfred-f-russell/ ACCESSED 9/8/2021.