Appalachian Figures
On the last day of 1862, a Knox County native who had grown up along the Wilderness Road sat in Washington and wrote to the president. Green Adams of Barbourville had been a Whig, a circuit judge, and twice a congressman from Kentucky’s Sixth District. He was also a slaveholder who had just watched the federal government abolish slavery in the nation’s capital and prepare to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
Yet in that moment he told Abraham Lincoln that “the good men of Kentucky will stand by you in every effort to crush the rebellion,” words that would later be quoted on a Kentucky highway marker about emancipation.
Green Adams’s life ran from a log courthouse town in the Cumberland foothills to a fashionable cemetery outside Philadelphia. It threads Appalachian Kentucky into the larger story of slavery, Unionism, and state power in the mid nineteenth century.
Barbourville beginnings
Green Adams was born on August 20, 1812 at Barbourville in Knox County, a frontier county seat that had grown up along the old Wilderness Road and the Richland Creek crossing.
Early biographical sketches and the official Biographical Directory of the United States Congress agree on the bare outline. Adams pursued preparatory studies, read law, and was admitted to the bar before establishing a practice in his native town.
Barbourville and the surrounding counties were part of the early eastern and southeastern Kentucky legal circuit. William C. Kozee’s Early Families of Eastern and Southeastern Kentucky places Adams among the region’s political figures and repeats the congressional biography’s summary of his education and early career.
In these years Adams moved through a world of small brick academies, county courts, and rough mountain roads. Later reminiscences from the local bar capture him as an energetic young lawyer. In an 1898 memoir preserved in a genealogical compilation, attorney David Yancey Lyttle recalled defending a man named Howard in Harlan in 1844 while “Green Adams was prosecuting.” After the argument, an older observer praised Adams’s speech, only to be answered that the young defense lawyer had “overmatched him.”
The story is secondhand and written decades after the fact, but it hints at a competitive legal culture in which a Barbourville lawyer already stood out across the mountains.
From Frankfort to Washington
Adams entered politics early. He represented Knox County in the Kentucky House of Representatives in the 1839 session, part of a cohort of young Whigs who looked to Henry Clay and the American System.
By 1844 he had risen high enough in party circles to serve as a presidential elector on the Whig ticket of Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen.
Two years later voters in Kentucky’s mountainous Sixth District sent him to Washington. Adams won election as a Whig to the Thirtieth Congress and served from March 4, 1847 to March 3, 1849.
Like many midcentury congressmen he returned home for a time and then came back. After serving as a state judge in the 1850s he was elected again from the Sixth District to the Thirty sixth Congress, this time running with the Opposition or American Party coalition that gathered former Southern Whigs who refused to join the Democrats.
His two non consecutive terms meant that southeastern Kentucky sent the same Barbourville lawyer to Washington first as a classic Clay Whig and then as part of a fragile Unionist coalition on the eve of secession.
Judge Adams on the mountain circuit
Between his congressional terms, Adams sat as judge of the Kentucky circuit court from 1851 to 1856. Official rosters of the state judiciary and later scholarship on Kentucky courts place him on the circuit based at Barbourville, riding through Knox, Whitley, Laurel, and surrounding counties.
A report in the Kentucky Court of Appeals offers a rare direct glimpse of Adams in his judicial role. In The Auditor v. Green Adams, 52 Kentucky 150, the commonwealth’s highest court considered a mandamus suit in which Adams, described as “a circuit judge of this commonwealth,” challenged the state auditor’s decision to deduct fourteen dollars and fifty eight cents from his salary.
The amount was small, but the case shows a mountain judge with enough confidence in his office to take the state to court over what he believed was a wrongful reduction in judicial pay.
His chambers in Barbourville also became an informal law school for the next generation of lawyers. The Civil War Governors of Kentucky project notes that London attorney Robert Boyd “read law with Judge Green Adams, in Barbourville, Kentucky, in 1855” before becoming clerk of the Whitley Circuit Court and later a prominent lawyer in London.
Eastern Kentucky genealogical sketches echo this picture of Adams as a formidable prosecutor and mentor. In one reminiscence from Clay and Harlan County, the author remembered a trial in which “Green Adams was prosecuting” and treated his performance as a benchmark for younger attorneys who hoped to measure themselves against him.
A Barbourville Whig in the Oregon debates
During his first term in Congress Adams entered the national record with a published speech on the Oregon territorial bill. On July 27, 1848 he addressed the House in a speech later printed as a sixteen page pamphlet, Speech of Green Adams, of Kentucky, on the Oregon Bill.
The pamphlet’s index of “common terms and phrases” hints at the themes that shaped Adams’s political world. It associates his speech with debates over the Wilmot Proviso, the Missouri Compromise, “the institution of slavery,” “slave property,” and the “power of Congress” to legislate for the territories.
Although the full text of the speech is brief, later historians note that Adams lined up with other Southern Whigs who opposed congressional restrictions on slavery in the territories while still trying to hold the Union together through compromise and constitutional argument rather than outright secession.
For readers in Knox, Clay, and Harlan counties, the Oregon speech meant that a familiar name from the local bar was weighing in on slavery and expansion hundreds of miles away, in debates that would soon reshape their own communities.
Slaveholder and Unionist
Modern researchers have confirmed that Green Adams was a slaveholder. The Washington Post’s database of slaveholding members of Congress lists him among the roughly eighteen hundred legislators who enslaved Black people at some point in their adult lives.
The most detailed evidence comes from the Civil War Washington project’s edition of his petition dated May 9, 1862. Writing from Washington, where he was then serving as Sixth Auditor of the Treasury, Adams identified himself as “of Barbourville, Knox County, Kentucky” and claimed compensation for two enslaved people, George and Martha, who had been freed under the District of Columbia Emancipation Act. He explained that he had acquired George through the estate of James Renfro and Martha as a gift from his father, Randolph Adams, and he described both as loyal and valuable servants.
That petition, filed with the federal government as a property claim, starkly illustrates the world from which Adams came. It confirms that he belonged to the slaveholding elite of southeastern Kentucky and that he carried at least part of that wealth in human beings from Knox County to the capital.
At the same time, scholars such as Richard Franklin Bensel have used Adams as an example of a border state slaveholder who nonetheless supported the use of federal coercion to preserve the Union.
His voting record in the Thirty sixth Congress, preserved in the Congressional Globe and analyzed through datasets like Voteview, places him alongside other Kentucky Unionists who tried to stave off disunion by supporting measures to maintain federal authority even while resisting abolitionist pressure.
Letters to Lincoln
Adams’s relationship with Abraham Lincoln brings his Appalachian story directly into the heart of Civil War policy.
In September 1861, still a Kentucky politician with deep ties to the state’s conservative Unionists, Adams joined James Speed and other leaders in protesting General John C. Frémont’s emancipation order in Missouri. Educational materials on “Abraham Lincoln and Kentucky” note that Adams and his colleagues feared such unilateral military emancipation would drive Kentucky out of the Union.
Within a year the landscape had shifted. On April 16, 1862, Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia. That summer and fall Kentucky clung to the Union while guerrilla warfare raged in its countryside.
On December 31, 1862, the day before the final Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Adams wrote directly to Lincoln. The letter survives in the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress and in the “House Divided” digital edition.
There Adams assured the president that “the good men of Kentucky will stand by you in every effort to crush the rebellion,” and insisted that they would support him “in every effort to maintain the authority of the Government.”
He was still a slaveholder who had recently filed a compensation claim for George and Martha in Washington. Yet on the eve of the Proclamation he presented himself as a loyal Kentucky Unionist willing to back Lincoln’s wartime measures if they could be framed as necessary to save the nation rather than as an attack on the state’s social order.
Lincoln read and remembered these communications. Later volumes of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln and related endorsements show the president summarizing Adams’s requests about Kentucky military matters and weighing his views against those of other border state Unionists.
Adams’s letters therefore give us a rare, direct Appalachian voice in the struggle over emancipation and Union policy.
From Sixth Auditor to Capitol Hill clerk
When the Civil War began in earnest, Adams left the bench and reentered the federal government in a different role. On April 17, 1861 he was appointed Sixth Auditor of the Treasury Department, a position he held until October 26, 1864.
As Sixth Auditor he handled accounts related to the Navy, a post that required close work with federal departments in the capital while his home remained in Confederate threatened Kentucky. The Biographical Directory and related summaries note that after leaving the auditor’s office he practiced law in Philadelphia.
Adams’s federal career did not end there. In the later 1870s he returned to Capitol Hill as a senior House employee. Congressional directories from 1881 list “Chief Clerk Green Adams” with an address on S Street Northwest in Washington, and related reference works identify him as a leading clerk or disbursing officer of the House between the mid 1870s and early 1880s.
His nephew George Madison Adams, a Civil War veteran and congressman in his own right, served as Clerk of the House in this same period. Biographical sketches of George emphasize that he was “the nephew of Kentucky Congressman Green Adams,” making the pair part of a small Kentucky political family whose influence stretched from Barbourville to Washington.
For Appalachian history, this federal service matters because it shows how a lawyer trained in a Knox County courthouse could end up managing the flow of money and paperwork in the national legislature while still identifying himself as a man of Barbourville.
Final years and a grave at West Laurel Hill
Adams spent his last years in Philadelphia, continuing to practice law while maintaining ties to Washington. He died in Philadelphia on January 18, 1884, at the age of seventy one.
Modern cemetery guides and the Political Graveyard site record his burial in West Laurel Hill Cemetery at Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, an elite garden cemetery across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia where many prominent nineteenth century figures are interred.
Find A Grave’s memorial for “Greenfield Adams (1812–1884)” includes photographs of his monument and notes his identity as a United States congressman and federal auditor.
For a man born in a small Knox County town, the obelisk among the marble and autumn leaves of West Laurel Hill marks a striking final resting place. Yet the inscription on his grave and the official biographies that repeat the line still link him back to Barbourville and the Kentucky mountains.
Remembering Green Adams in Appalachia
Green Adams rarely appears in popular histories of the Civil War or of Kentucky politics. When he does, it is often in passing as a name in a roster of congressmen or judges.
Taken together, the primary sources scattered across congressional records, Civil War petitions, local reminiscences, and cemetery lists offer a richer picture.
He was a mountain lawyer who helped shape the bench and bar of Knox, Whitley, Laurel, Clay, and Harlan Counties. His clerk Robert Boyd carried Barbourville legal culture to London and Whitley County, while later attorneys remembered measuring their oratory against his in murder trials on the Harlan courthouse square.
He was a slaveholder who treated George and Martha as property valuable enough to claim from the federal treasury, yet he also became one of the Kentucky Unionists who backed Lincoln’s effort to “crush the rebellion” and maintain the authority of the national government.
He rode the circuit in an Appalachian region that would soon become coal country, then spent the war years inside the Treasury Department as the Union state built up the financial machinery it needed to win.
And he ended his life as part of a small Kentucky political dynasty, sharing the Capitol’s back offices with his nephew George Madison Adams while burial records in Pennsylvania and reference works in Washington continued to label him “of Barbourville, Kentucky.”
For Appalachian history, Green Adams is a reminder that the region’s nineteenth century story does not run only through timber camps and coal mines. It also runs through law offices on the town square, through the floor of Congress during debates over slavery and expansion, and through the ledgers and petitions of a federal government that reached into the lives of enslaved people from Knox County to the District of Columbia.
Sources and further reading
Adams, Green. Speech of Green Adams of Kentucky on the Oregon Bill: Delivered in the House of Representatives, July 27, 1848. Washington City, J. T. Towers, 1848. Google Books+1
Congressional Globe, Thirtieth and Thirty sixth Congresses, House of Representatives. Debates, roll calls, and indexes listing “Green Adams” among the yeas and nays for key measures relating to territorial organization and sectional conflict. Political Graveyard+1
“Petition of Green Adams, of Barbourville, Knox County, Kentucky, 9 May 1862.” Civil War Washington, edited digital edition, based on Treasury Department records in the National Archives. Civil War Washington
Green Adams to Abraham Lincoln, 31 December 1862. Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; transcript in “House Divided” digital project, Lincoln Studies Center. hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu
The Auditor v. Green Adams, 52 Kentucky 150. Kentucky Court of Appeals decision involving Adams’s suit over circuit judge salary deductions. vLex
Robert Boyd biography, Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition. Notes that Boyd “read law with Judge Green Adams, in Barbourville, Kentucky, in 1855.” fromthepage.com
“Adams, Green.” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress and U.S. House of Representatives History, Art and Archives profile, summarizing his Barbourville birth, legislative service, judgeship, federal appointments, and burial at West Laurel Hill Cemetery. quillproject.net+1
“Green Adams.” Wikipedia entry synthesizing the Biographical Directory and scholarship by Richard Franklin Bensel on Adams as a slaveholding supporter of federal coercion against seceded states. Wikipedia
William C. Kozee, Early Families of Eastern and Southeastern Kentucky and Their Descendants. Strasburg, Virginia, 1961. Contains a concise sketch of “ADAMS, GREEN” drawing on the Biographical Directory and placing him among eastern Kentucky political families. Internet Archive
Kurt X. Metzmeier, “Judges of the Kentucky Circuit Courts, 1831–1861,” Kentucky Ancestors 43, no. 1 (2008). Provides rosters that locate Adams as a circuit judge based in Barbourville and outline his circuit. SSRN
“Kentucky and the Emancipation Proclamation” historical marker, Historical Marker Database, and related educational material “Abraham Lincoln and Kentucky” from Abraham Lincoln’s Classroom / Gilder Lehrman Institute. Discuss Adams’s letters and Kentucky Unionist reactions to emancipation policy. WeRelate+1
Julie Zauzmer Weil et al., “More than 1,800 congressmen once enslaved Black people. This is who they were, and how they shaped the nation.” Washington Post interactive database of slaveholding members of Congress, listing Green Adams as an enslaver. The Washington Post
Find A Grave memorial and cemetery records for “Greenfield Adams (1812–1884)” at West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, documenting his death date, burial location, and identification as a congressman and federal official. Find a Grave
Late nineteenth century reminiscences of attorney David Yancey Lyttle and local biographical sketches of Robert Boyd and others, preserved in genealogical compilations and reprints, which recall “Judge Green Adams” as a leading figure in the bar at Barbourville, Harlan, and surrounding eastern Kentucky courthouses. Geneanet+2RootsWeb+2