I don’t envy any commander in the western theater the complexities of dealing with the situation in Kentucky. However, when the demand for return of a slave who made it into Union lines came from a Confederate, I suspect that, in the Union camp, it was somewhat mindboggling to have a Confederate, especially an officer, baldly assert a right under a flag and Constitution which he was bearing arms against. It rather reminds me of the definition of chutzpah-A man murders his mother and father and then pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. The once popular idea of the slave passively waiting for enlightened white men to remove their shackles has been thoroughly discredited. The slaves’ actions in freeing themselves clearly forced the issue. However, I’ve never totally bought that the idea that this self-help was the but-for factor that FORCED the government to deal with it. The governments, first British and then US, had worked very hard to ignore them in the nearly 250 years between the first purchase of slaves for Jamestown and the issuance of the provisional and final EPs. The US government then did a formidable job in ignoring blacks for nearly a century after Reconstruction ended, even when many black people were living in the quasi-slavery of peonage in the Deep South. IMHO, in the Civil War, the pro-slavery forces, in a stunning example of the law of unintended consequences, created, through secession, the point where it became in free whites’ best interests NOT to ignore the concerted efforts of people of color, be they enslaved, escaped, free or freed, to be free.