Appalachian Figures
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the public square at Monticello in Wayne County could feel very far from the marble floors of the United States Capitol or the brick corridors of the Confederate Congress in Richmond. Yet for more than twenty years one lawyer from that square tried to move comfortably in all three worlds.
James Stone Chrisman was a Wayne County attorney, a slaveholder, and a gifted stump speaker who carried the politics of the upper Cumberland into some of the biggest constitutional crises of his age. He helped write Kentucky’s 1850 state constitution, served one term in the United States House of Representatives, contested a bitter election on the eve of secession, sat on the “Council of Ten” that advised Kentucky’s pro Confederate provisional government, and then represented Kentucky’s Fifth District in the Confederate House of Representatives.
Today, Chrisman survives in scattered federal records, the journals of two rival congresses, a Wayne County history, and a bar memorial recorded after his death. Taken together, they tell the story of a border state politician who never quite found a comfortable home in the Union he had served or the Confederacy he ultimately chose.
Monticello beginnings
The standard biographical sketch published by the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress gives the bare outline. Chrisman was born near Monticello on 14 September 1818, read law, and was admitted to the bar before settling into practice in his home county.
Augusta Phillips Johnson’s A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky fills in more of the local memory. Writing in 1939, she described the young James Chrisman at mid century as thirty one years old, “handsome, brilliant, and an able lawyer” whose talents on the stump quickly made him one of Wayne County’s leading public men. According to Johnson, he “ardently espoused the rights of the slave holder” in a county where slavery was important, yet not universal, and where even some slave owners had doubts about the institution.
In that tension between economic reality and moral unease, Chrisman staked out an aggressively pro slavery position that still tried to present itself as moderate. Johnson notes that he believed the slavery question should not “obscure all others” when Kentuckians gathered to debate a new constitution. That posture would shape his public life for the next three decades.
The 1849 constitutional convention
When Kentucky called a convention in 1849 to revise its state constitution, Wayne County voters chose Chrisman to represent them at Frankfort. The official stenographic Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Kentucky preserves his motions and speeches among those of older, more established figures.
Convention historians point out that the proceedings quickly turned into a battle between emancipationists and pro slavery delegates. Chrisman aligned with the latter. The Wayne County history emphasizes that he was impatient when veteran politicians tried to silence younger men and was ready to push back when he thought his section’s interests were ignored.
The constitution that emerged in 1850 strengthened protections for slave property while modestly reforming state institutions. Chrisman had secured what he believed to be the rights of slaveholders in Wayne County and across south central Kentucky. It would not be the last time he tried to anchor a fragile political order by defending slavery in the name of constitutionalism.
To Washington City
In the next congressional election, voters in Kentucky’s Fourth District sent Chrisman to Washington as a Democratic representative in the Thirty third Congress, serving from 1853 to 1855. The Congressional Globe records his participation in debates over internal improvements and sectional disputes that were already straining the Union.
He served only one term. When he sought reelection in 1855 he lost to William C. Anderson in a close and bitter contest. Chrisman refused to accept the result. Drawing on his experience as a lawyer, he compiled an eight hundred page memorial, Kentucky Contested Election: Memorial of James S. Chrisman, Contesting the Election of William C. Anderson, of the Fourth Congressional District of Kentucky.
The memorial and the related House papers form an enormous primary source on how elections actually worked in rural Kentucky. Chrisman and his attorneys walked precinct by precinct and county by county through poll books, viva voce voting, and sworn testimony. Witnesses described who stood near the polls, who handed out tickets, and whether voters had been pressured by employers or local officials. A House index to the Congressional Serial Set lists not only Chrisman’s complaint but Anderson’s response, and the committee on elections eventually reported its findings to the full chamber.
The United States House ultimately upheld Anderson’s claim and left Chrisman without a seat. For a Wayne County attorney who believed he had the district behind him, the decision fed a sense that national institutions were stacked against pro Southern Democrats.
Crisis, neutrality, and the road to Richmond
The late 1850s and 1860 brought more strain. Even as Chrisman returned to law practice, national debates over slavery in the territories and the fate of the Union reached into Monticello’s streets and courtrooms.
When secession swept the Deep South after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, Kentucky tried to chart a course of so called neutrality. That stance pleased neither side. Pro Union leaders feared it was a screen for secession. Pro Southern politicians seethed at any delay in joining the Confederacy.
In the fall of 1861, Confederate leaning Kentuckians convened at Russellville to set up their own provisional state government. Johnson records that Wayne County joined sixty four other counties in sending delegates and that James S. Chrisman took his seat at the gathering.
The Russellville convention declared Kentucky a member of the Confederate States and created an executive “Council of Ten” to advise the provisional governor. A modern biographical sketch by the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project lists “James Stone Chrisman (Wayne Co., Ky., Prov gov council member, Rep (CSA), attorney)” among that body’s members. The council redrew Kentucky into twelve Confederate congressional districts and scheduled elections in counties controlled by Confederate forces. When the votes were counted, Chrisman had been elected as a representative to the Confederate Congress at Richmond.
In the Confederate Congress
The Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America and related archival guides place Chrisman in the Confederate House from 1862 to 1865 as the nonpartisan representative for Kentucky’s Fifth District. On roll calls he usually lined up with other border state and Upper South members who tried to balance states rights rhetoric with the demands of a new central government fighting a vast war.
Henry Putney Beers’s Guide to the Archives of the Government of the Confederate States of America notes that Chrisman sat on the Special Committee on War Tax, appointed in August 1862 to consider “just and equitable compensation” for local tax collectors. This assignment reminds us that his congressional work was not only about fiery speeches but also about nuts and bolts fiscal policy for a government under siege.
Confederate rosters compiled from the Journal confirm his presence among the dozen Kentucky representatives in Richmond. At the same time, a Union veteran’s postwar essay on Kentucky neutrality observed that Kentuckians like Chrisman who joined the Confederate Congress stood in deliberate opposition to the state’s official government in Frankfort and to those federal representatives from Kentucky who continued to sit in Washington.
Chrisman’s votes contributed to legislation that tightened conscription, managed war taxation, and wrestled with the central question of how far the Confederate state could reach into the lives and property of its citizens. Later scholars of Confederate political development, working from the same journals he helped fill, have argued that such measures built a stronger central authority than many Southern politicians had ever envisioned before 1861.
Slaveholder politics in a divided county
Any Appalachian biography of Chrisman has to reckon frankly with his status as a slaveholder. Modern lists of members of Congress who owned enslaved people include him among the House representatives, and Johnson’s narrative makes clear that he defended the interests of Wayne County slave owners at the 1849 convention.
Wayne County itself was deeply divided. Johnson describes “hot tempered Rebels,” steadier Union men, and neighbors who wanted only to be left alone. Her chapter on the Civil War years in Wayne County moves from Chrisman’s political work to company rosters for Confederate cavalry regiments and the equally determined Unionist organizations that opposed them. In that landscape, allegiance to Chrisman could place a family on one side of very real local feuds.
Chrisman’s own choice for the Confederacy did not erase his earlier service in the United States Congress or his role in shaping Kentucky’s state constitution. Instead it highlighted the way border state politicians tried to hold multiple loyalties at once until war made that balancing act impossible.
Home again and a second public career
When the Confederacy collapsed in 1865, Chrisman returned to legal practice in Monticello. Federal disfranchisement policies and the bitterness of civil war might have ended his public life. Instead, like several other former Confederate officeholders in Kentucky, he eventually reentered state politics.
The Biographical Directory records that he served in the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1869 as a member from Wayne County and again in the early 1870s, after many wartime disabilities had been lifted. Minutes of the House and state legislative journals, which track bills, committee work, and roll calls, show him participating in Reconstruction era debates over schools, taxation, and internal improvements in a state still struggling with the aftermath of emancipation and war.
Locally, he resumed his place as one of the county’s leading attorneys. A long essay on the Wayne County bar, reproduced in Johnson’s history, lists “J. S. Chrisman” alongside other prominent lawyers of the Green River and lower Cumberland region and notes that many of that generation “have gone hence,” their names preserved largely in local memory.
Death and remembrance in Wayne County
James Stone Chrisman died at his home near Monticello on 29 July 1881. The Biographical Directory gives that date and notes that he was buried in the family burial ground near his birthplace.
Wayne County’s official remembrance took the form of a bar memorial entered into the county court records and later reprinted by Johnson. The resolutions, drafted by fellow attorneys and judges who had practiced with him, praised his “strong ambition and restless activity” and recalled that he had been a member of the 1849 constitutional convention, twice a member of the Kentucky legislature, a representative in the United States Congress, and a member of the Confederate Congress. They described him as an advocate of more than common ability, “impetuous” in eloquence and “fiery” in opposition, with personal integrity “above reproach.”
Those words say as much about Wayne County’s legal culture in the early twentieth century as they do about Chrisman himself. In a county that had produced both Union and Confederate leaders, public men who had taken opposite sides in the war could still be honored primarily for their courtroom talents, work ethic, and personal sociability.
Chrisman’s legacy in an Appalachian borderland
What, then, do we do with James Stone Chrisman in the twenty first century, standing at the intersection of Appalachian and national history
He was a local attorney whose legal papers show up in county minute books and family genealogies, a congressman whose speeches appear in the Congressional Globe, and a Confederate representative whose name is scattered through the journals and committee reports of a government built on slavery.
He worked hard to defend the rights of slaveholders in a county where enslaved people were a minority but a powerful one. He built a career on constitutional argument and electoral law, then cast his lot with a breakaway government that raised armies against the United States whose constitution he had sworn to uphold. He fought a meticulous legal battle over a contested election in 1860 that reveals how democracy functioned in small Appalachian communities, yet his later service in Richmond helped support a regime that tried to put some of those same communities beyond the reach of the federal ballot box.
For Wayne County and the Appalachian plateau, his life is a reminder that the region’s political history does not fit neatly into simple narratives of mountain Unionism or Lost Cause romanticism. The same courthouse square could send men to both armies and produce a lawyer who took his oath first in Washington, then in Richmond, and finally again in Frankfort.
To study James Stone Chrisman is to study the way a small-town Appalachian attorney tried to navigate the collapse and remaking of American governments in the age of slavery and civil war. His story forces us to ask how people in places like Wayne County understood loyalty, law, and justice when nearly every institution around them was up for debate.
Sources and further reading
Kentucky Constitutional Convention (1849). Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Kentucky. Frankfort, 1849. Official stenographic record of the convention where James S. Chrisman sat as delegate from Wayne County, preserving his motions and speeches alongside those of other pro slavery and emancipationist delegates. UKnowledge
James Stone Chrisman. Kentucky Contested Election: Memorial of James S. Chrisman, Contesting the Election of William C. Anderson, of the Fourth Congressional District of Kentucky [with Additional Evidence in Behalf of James S. Chrisman. Brief of Contestant]. Washington, 1860. Eight hundred plus page memorial and evidence file submitted to the House of Representatives in the contested election that followed Chrisman’s 1855 defeat. Google Books+1
United States Congress, House of Representatives. Miscellaneous Documents of the House of Representatives for the First Session of the Thirty Sixth Congress. Washington, 1860. Includes indexed references to the papers in the contested election of James S. Chrisman versus William C. Anderson and Anderson’s formal response. GovInfo+1
Congressional Globe, Thirty third Congress. Official record of debates and proceedings during Chrisman’s term as a Democratic representative from Kentucky’s Fourth District, revealing his positions on sectional questions before the war.
United States War Department. Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865. Washington, 1905. Seven volume edition of the Confederate congressional journals documenting Chrisman’s service as representative from Kentucky’s Fifth District and his participation in roll calls, committee work, and debates. Internet Archive+1
Henry Putney Beers. Guide to the Archives of the Government of the Confederate States of America. Washington, 1968. National Archives guide that identifies surviving Confederate congressional records and notes Chrisman’s service on the Special Committee on War Tax in 1862. Internet Archive
Augusta Phillips Johnson. A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky, 1800–1900. Louisville, 1939. Especially chapters 7 and 5 as transcribed at Genealogy Trails, which trace Chrisman’s role in the 1849 convention, the Russellville Confederate convention, and the Confederate Congress, and reprint the Wayne County bar memorial recorded after his death. Genealogy Trails+1
Legislative journals of the Kentucky House of Representatives, 1869–1873. Official records detailing Chrisman’s postwar service as a member from Wayne County, including his committee assignments and votes in the Reconstruction era. The Huntington
Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. Biographical entry for “James Stone Chrisman,” noting his work as a Wayne County attorney, member of the provisional government’s Council of Ten, and representative in the Confederate Congress, with links to related documents. Civil War Governors
“CHRISMAN, James Stone.” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Concise reference biography providing dates of birth and death, outline of his legal and political career, and key printed sources on the contested election case. Bioguide+1
“List of Confederate Representatives from Kentucky.” Wikipedia, citing the Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States and standard Confederate reference works for the roster of Kentucky members in Richmond, including James Chrisman of the Fifth District. Wikipedia
Henry Putney Beers. Guide to the Archives of the Government of the Confederate States of America. National Archives publication used here not only for committee information but also for its overview of Confederate legislative record keeping and surviving sources. Internet Archive+1
Modern scholarship on the Confederate Congress, Kentucky’s 1849 constitutional convention, and antebellum election contests often draws on the same journals and memorials that preserve Chrisman’s career. Studies of the American ballot box in the mid nineteenth century, for example, use the Chrisman–Anderson case as a window into how rural voters and party challengers negotiated identity and eligibility in local precincts. resolve.cambridge.org