During the Civil War, the Catlettsburg Riverfront became the site of one of the largest group escapes of freedom seekers in Kentucky history – the 1862 flight of the Piketon 59. Their escape was made possible through the convergence of the anti-slavery convictions of key Union officers, shifting federal policy and the strategic geography of Catlettsburg as a Civil War supply base on the Ohio River.
James A. Garfield Portrait
Catlettsburg as a Union Base
In December 1861, Colonel James A. Garfield, future US president, launched his Eastern Kentucky Campaign, designating Catlettsburg as his brigade’s supply and communications hub. Catlettsburg’s secure Union position and river access at the confluence of the Big Sandy and Ohio Rivers, made the town a natural staging ground for Garfield’s operations, while affording the Piketon 59 a safe passageway from slave holding Kentucky and toward freedom in Ohio.
The Piketon 59: Freedom Denied
Despite their manumission by will, the Slone and Johnson families, living some 90 miles upriver from Catlettsburg, the Slone and Johnson families continued to face relentless legal challenges.
After James B. Slone died in 1848, his will emancipated all his enslaved people, but his heirs challenged their freedom. Yellow Jim’s case became the most protracted, requiring five years of litigation before the Kentucky Court of Appeals affirmed his liberty in 1853. When Slone’s widow died that same year, she left her remaining $9000 estate to the formerly enslaved Slones, prompting another legal battle. By 1857, the sixteen emancipated Slone slaves had spent nearly all their resources defending their rights, leaving them financially strained and unable to leave Kentucky.
The Johnson family faced even greater obstacles. Barnabus Johnson owned a substantial amount of land and was the largest slave holder in Pike County at the time of his death in 1861. He freed all his enslaved people and left them most of his estate, but the Civil War halted Pike County’s courts, delaying the will’s recording until 1867 and leaving the Johnsons legally exposed. Johnson’s executor, John Dils Jr., was arrested by Confederate forces and confined in Libby Prison, preventing him from arranging their legally required removal from Kentucky. To complicate matters further, a distant Johnson relative moved onto the plantation and claimed both the property and the enslaved people.
Kentucky’s Political Landscape
Kentucky was a slaveholding border state with divided loyalties. The primary concern in the fall of 1861 was to keep the State in the Union. Because Lincoln believed losing Kentucky would endanger the entire Union war effort, he ordered his generals to avoid any action that might alienate pro-Union slaveholders. Federal commanders were instructed to respect Kentucky’s laws and “domestic institutions,” meaning the Union Army was not to interfere with slavery except when military necessity required it.
When Union forces under General William “Bull” Nelson advanced into the Big Sandy Valley in November 1861, the Slone and Johnson families saw an opportunity to gain their freedom. At Piketon (modern-day Pikeville), they built a raft, loaded their worldly goods on it, and floated down the Big Sandy River. When they reached Prestonsburg, General Nelson had them arrested, cut their raft to pieces, and sent them back to Piketon. Commanders like Nelson, a Kentuckian whose parents were slave owners, had wide latitude in how they treated freedom seekers. Their personal beliefs often shaped policy on the ground more than federal directives.
Garfield’s Arrival and a Shift in Federal Policy
Garfield held strong anti-slavery convictions which were shared by his staff. He understood the constraints of operating in Kentucky but had to be morally conflicted by these policies. He was a disciplined officer, bound by orders, who would not have openly defied his commanding officers, but may have chosen quiet resistance instead, by interpreting orders as narrowly as possible or by avoiding proactive enforcement. Garfield’s presence signaled hope to enslaved people in the region.
His staff included two committed abolitionists – Jacob Heaton, Commissary of Subsistence and Ralph Plumb, Brigade Quartermaster. Both had deep ties to the Underground Railroad. Heaton had sheltered more than 200 freedom seekers at his home in Salem, Ohio, while Plumb had been indicted in the famous Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Their control over transportation and supplies—boats, wagons, and river logistics—gave them the practical means to assist freedom seekers discreetly.
Capt. Milton Kennedy
Milton Kennedy, a prominent Portsmouth, Ohio abolitionist and UGRR conductor, worked closely with Jacob Heaton and Ralph Plumb. His steamboat, the Piketon, with Kennedy as Captain, transported troops, supplies, and key communications on the Big Sandy River. Kennedy’s partnership with Heaton and Plumb would play a decisive role in making the Piketon 59’s flight to freedom a reality.
In March 1862, Congress addressed the lack of federal policy toward freedom seekers who were escaping into federal by passing An Act to Make an Additional Article of War, which prohibited Union officers from returning freedom seekers. Approved on March 13, it marked an early federal move toward emancipation and laid the groundwork for Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The Act directly affected Garfield’s command by overturning the orders he had been required to enforce, legally protecting him if he sheltered freedom seekers, and bringing federal military policy into line with his own antislavery beliefs. Garfield later wrote that he would not obey any order violating this law. This shift created the legal and moral opening needed for the Piketon 59’s passage to freedom.
The Flight of the Piketon 59
By late March 1862, Garfield was preparing to leave Eastern Kentucky, transferring command at Piketon to Colonel Jonathan Cranor. Knowing Garfield’s departure removed their strongest protection, the Piketon 59 immediately asked of Captain Heaton, “the privilege of using a push boat to transport the family down the river,” for which they received consent. On March 27, 1862, the Piketon 59 gathered together, “the old and young, men and women and children, numbering fifty-nine souls, and started down to the river … and proceeded to the river where they boarded two flatboats moored at the landing.”
However, shortly after their departure from Piketon, Cranor had them arrested and ordered them back. “One of his own officers represented to him that these people had an order for the boats from General Garfield, and, becoming alarmed, he let them go upon their way.”
Attack at Buffalo Shoals
Soon after Garfield’s own departure from Piketon, Colonel Cranor granted passes to a group of pro-Southern men to pursue the Piketon 59 down the Big Sandy. The pursuers overtook them at Buffalo Shoals in Johnson County, levelled their rifles and ordered the boats to lie-to.
The Piketon 59 took shelter in a hut on the riverbank, waiting to rendezvous with a government steamer which was expected to pass the next day. During the early morning hours of March 29, 1862, two of the armed pursuers forced their way toward the hut, and opened fire, wounding the group’s leader and two children before fleeing under return fire. Shortly afterward, Kennedy’s steamer Piketon, carrying Garfield and staff, arrived. Taking the freedom seekers onboard, Garfield, with Kennedy at the helm, ensured the group’s safe passage to Catlettsburg.
Life in Ohio
On April 1, 1862, after a two-day layover, the Piketon 59 departed Catlettsburg on the Piketon, and arrived at Portsmouth, Ohio, with “fifty-five negroes, represented to be free.” While 59 members of the Slone and Johnson families started on their journey to freedom from Pike County, Kentucky, only 55 of the group arrived at Portsmouth. The four missing members were likely casualties of the Buffalo Shoals attack.
On April 16, 1862, the escape of the Piketon 59 drew sharp criticism from Senator Lazarus W. Powell, former governor of Kentucky, during a speech on the floor of the US Senate. Powell would claim that the enslaved individuals had escaped from “loyal masters,” whose human property was then unlawfully “taken in a Government steamboat which passed Catlettsburg, in Kentucky, to Ohio.”
Senator Powell’s outrage centered on the fact that their escape had occurred “by order of those in command of the post somewhere on the Big Sandy” – a reference, though unnamed, to James A. Garfield – highlighting both the role of the Union Army and, crucially, the determined actions of the freedom seekers themselves in transforming the Big Sandy River Valley into a landscape of self-emancipation within the larger national conflict over slavery.
Upon their arrival in Portsmouth, Ohio, the Piketon 59 were placed onboard the Scioto and Hocking Valley Railroad and transported to Jackson, Ohio. By 1863 they had moved on to neighboring Pike and Ross Counties. Several members of the Piketon 59 enlisted in the Union Army and saw Civil War service. By 1870 most of the Piketon 59 were making their home in Pike County, Ohio, in Jackson Township, where some of their descendants still live today. Others settled in Portsmouth, following the War, and lay buried in the city’s Greenlawn Cemetery.
Their remarkable story of hope, courage, and determination marks one of Kentucky’s largest successful group escapes, and their legacy endures in the Appalachian region’s history of resistance to slavery through escape and flight.
This site is part of the Appalachian Freedom Heritage Tour, funded by an ARC POWER Grant and developed by the Lawrence Economic Development Corp.
