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.

A Homeschool Lesson about the Tenth President of Liberia - Alfred Francis Russell (a Kentucky Christian)

 

This homeschool lesson about Liberia and its tenth president (who was from Kentucky) can be adapted for use by students in the fourth grade and above. It includes map skills, computer and internet skills, math, history and writing. Use some or all of the suggestions. The activities can be spread over several lessons.

Introduce the lesson with a brief biography of Alfred Francis Russell (bill hours to history)

From Wikipedia: Alfred Francis Russell

Alfred Francis Russell was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1817 where he and his mother were slaves. His father, a white man, was the son of Russell’s owner. When Russell was sixteen, in 1833, his mistress (who was his grandmother) emancipated him and paid for him to join 200 other freed slaves to move to Liberia, Africa. There, he became a Methodist minister and later, an Episcopalian priest. He farmed sugarcane and coffee. He became active in politics, was elected senator and then vice president of the country. When the elected president resigned, Russell became the tenth president of Liberia. He served for one year.

Pose some questions to evaluate how much knowledge the students already have

Where is Liberia?

Guess how far you think it is from Lexington, Kentucky is Liberia and, in 1833, how would someone get there.

In the United States, the president must have been born here. Russell was not born in Liberia yet he became its president. How was that possible?

Show where Liberia is on the globe and follow up by assigning some activities using maps (bill hours to geography or map skills)

Download and print an outline map of Africa with the names of today’s countries. A good one is located at http://www.georgethegeographer.co.uk/Base_maps/PDFs/Africa_b&w_named.pdf. Direct the students to find Liberia and to color it in. Have them label the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Ask the students to describe the location of Liberia in terms of north, east, west and south. 

Download and print an outline map of the world such as this one: http://www.georgethegeographer.co.uk/Base_maps/PDFs/World_b&w_unnamed.pdf .  Instruct the students to find Africa and to put an X at the approximate location of Liberia. Ask the students to locate North America. Then ask them if North America is east or west of Africa. Direct them to label the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Then tell them to put an X at the approximate location of Kentucky.

Use the internet to research some facts (bill hours to computer science, history or geography)

Tell the students that they must use the internet to find the capital of Liberia (Monrovia). Then see if they can find out who it is named to honor (President James Monroe). Find out when Liberia became a nation. Does this correlate with James Monroe’s time as the president of the United States?

Talk about what questions would be good to put into a Google Search to find the distance from Lexington, Kentucky to Monrovia, Liberia (5,061 miles).

Discuss how travel has changed since 1833 (bill hours to history, technology or math)

Calculate how many years it has been since Alfred Russell traveled from Lexington to Liberia? (Ask students to set up and solve the math problem that will answer this question: 2021 – 1833 = X ).

Ask how we would travel to Liberia from Lexington today and how much it will cost? Use the internet to figure out what airlines fly this route as well as the cost of the flights.

Tell the students that Alfred Russell took the brig, Ajax, to Liberia in 1833. This means he had to first travel to an ocean port like New Orleans, New York or Philadelphia using river boats, horses and wagons because this was before the railroad had been built. A simple explanation of what a brig looked like can be found online here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brig .

Discuss why Liberia was formed (bill hours to history or political science)

Explain that two African nations, Sierra Leone and Liberia, were created as places for former American slaves to be resettled. Sierra Leone belonged to England and was used to relocate American slaves which had fought with the British in the American Revolutionary War. Liberia was formed by the United States as a place where emancipated American slaves could move. So, the first Liberian citizens were emancipated American slaves. This is how Alfred Russell could become the president of Liberia. Use this website to learn more about Alfred Russell: http://liberiainfo.co/prd/presidents/alfred-f-russell/ .

Have the students show what they have learned (bill hours to writing, art or communications)

Assign the students to use what they have learned to respond to the following question by writing an essay, drawing a comic strip or preparing a presentation. Imagine that you are a sixteen year-old enslaved person living in Kentucky in 1833. Suppose that you were offered your freedom if you agreed to travel across the ocean to build a new home in a new country and that you would probably never be able to return to Kentucky where you have relatives and friends, what would you do and why? 

By Lesley Barker PhD ©2021