Berea College Bibliography

Abolition, anti-slavery --thoughts, sentiment and writings of John Fee :Berea and Camp Nelson.

John G. Fee is a unique and rare figure in the antislavery movement, and he became the most important and influential reformer to wage war against slavery in the South. After Reconstruction, Fee added temperance, women, and African-American suffrage, free trade, government-issued currency, and the overthrow of oppressive monopolies to his repertory of reforms.

A major social and educational experiment in race relations was conducted in Berea, Kentucky, from 1866 to 1904. During those years Berea contained a community, school, and church which were all fully integrated: white people, mostly from the Kentucky Appalachian region, and black people, former slaves and their children, from the Blue Grass country, lived, worked, and studied together in an atmosphere designed to foster social equality. Sears demonstrates that integration and social equality among the races are not unrealizable ideals; at Berea in the second half of the 19th century these ideals were lived out in practical terms. The Berea project was killed by state and federal legislation, not by being intrinsically unworkable.

Contains many PRIMARY SOURCES!!

Camp Nelson, Kentucky, was designed in 1863 as a military supply depot for the Union Army. Later it became one of the country’s most important recruiting stations and training camps for black soldiers and Kentucky’s chief center for issuing emancipation papers to former slaves.


Richard D. Sears tells the story of the rise and fall of the camp through the shifting perspective of a changing cast of characters—teachers, civilians, missionaries such as the Reverend John G. Fee, and fleeing slaves and enlisted blacks who describe their pitiless treatment at the hands of slave owners and Confederate sympathizers. Sears fully documents the story of Camp Nelson through carefully selected military orders, letters, newspaper articles, and other correspondence, most inaccessible until now. His introduction provides a historical overview, and textual notes identify individuals and detail the course of events.

During the Battle of Perryville, fought in Kentucky in October 1862, participants experienced an unusual phenomenon known as an acoustic shadow: this peculiar combination of wind and terrain muffled the sounds of the fighting in such a manner that nearby soldiers were unaware that the battle was even taking place. As the editors of this pioneering collection of essays observe, a figurative acoustic shadow has long fallen on the study of the Civil War in Appalachia. Regional stereotypes, cursory generalizations, and a neglect of geographic context have too often replaced detailed analysis and innovative interpretation.Recent historiography has begun to present a fuller view of the war as it unfolded in the mountain counties of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The goals of this volume, the editors state, are to provide a useful introduction to the social history of Appalachia's Civil War, illustrating both the strengths and weaknesses of current historiography; to sum up where we have been and suggest where we need to go; and to point out the need to integrate Appalachian scholarship with studies of the Civil War and vice versa. Among the topics covered are the experiences of blacks in Appalachia, the war as it affected women, the breakdown of community, changing gender roles, disaffection and desertion, guerrilla warfare, perceptions of mountain life, and the early stirrings of industrialization. These essays demonstrate the rich variety of Appalachian sentiments and attitudes toward the war, dismantling familiar myths such as the view of Appalachia as a unionist monolith.Following the conflict from the secessioncrisis to the postwar period, these essays, taken together, provide what the editors call the closest thing historians have to a comprehensive history of the Southern Mountains at war.