Kentucky Ancestors, Volume 46, Number 3 - Kentucky Historical ...

Ft. Anderson, Paducah, Kentucky. (KHS Collection)
feelings about being enslaved; his secret thoughts,
and perceptions. He certainly was intelligent enough
to understand his situation. The metaphorical quip
of a cat with nine lives aptly fits my ancestor. His
resilience is symbolized by the ancestor star I wear
on my Daughters of the Union Veterans badge. How
did a man obtain the venerable age of ninety-eight 11
years and rise above a series of personal challenges?
Edmund Fauntleroy was a survivor of several slave
sales, the Civil War, and recurrent illness. Doubtless,
ironic tenacity and extraordinary persistence made
the man. Fauntleroy was courageous, pragmatic, and
chivalrous. He cared for a wife with special needs
for a half-century. I noted my great-grandmother’s
blindness in the 1870 U.S. census. Following
emancipation, Edmund became a landowner and
outlived both his wife and youngest daughter, my
grandmother.
Kentucky was a slave state on the border of
the North and South where divided loyalties
among civilians existed. The association of the
commonwealth with the industrialized North and
interstate slave trading in the lower South made it
unwilling to sever Union ties over the question of
slavery or the issue of state’s rights. Confederate
occupation of Columbus, Kentucky, 3 September
122 | Kentucky Ancestors
1861, prompted General Ulysses S. Grant to fortify
the river town of Paducah at the confluence of
the Ohio and Tennessee rivers on 6 September. 12
Preceding the Civil War, Paducah was one of the
points of departure for the southern slave trade of
Kentucky. 13 To safeguard Paducah, the U.S. Army
built Fort Anderson in 1861 from the Riverside
Lourdes Hospital 14 under the direction of Gen.
Charles F. Smith. 15 The seven-gun fortification was
manned by five thousand troops, and named for
Robert Anderson, the Kentuckian who defended Fort
Sumter 16 when the Confederates fired the first shots
of the rebellion in April. For the duration of the war,
Paducah was a strategic administrative supply center
and rail terminus for large numbers of troops and
provisions headed to campaigns in the lower South. 17
Paducah remained a stronghold of Rebel hostilities
during the war. Pro-Confederate sympathies were
especially high in 1864 when tensions between the
civilian population and Federal troops led to the
suspension of civil liberties. By securing the state
for the Union, the military worked to eliminate the
support for the rebellion by showing the Confederates
that “their property, their comfort and their personal
safety” were at stake because of their Confederate
loyalties. 18