African American Faces of the Civil War: An Album by Ronald S. Coddington

Author:Ronald S. Coddington [Coddington, Ronald S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), United States, General, Civil War Period (1850-1877), Photography, Subjects & Themes, Portraits, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies
ISBN: 9781421406251
Google: Ke74Q57UusAC
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2012-08-20T23:57:56.949262+00:00

Pvt. Allen W. King, Company B, 122nd U.S. Colored Infantry

Tintype by unidentified photographer, before 1881. Collection of National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Sold into Substitution

POPULAR HUMORIST MARK TWAIN WROTE NUMEROUS stories about the war, including an account of his own brief experience as a Confederate soldier. The story of his cousin, Kentucky physician John Clemens,509 is little known.

Dr. Clemens decided not to join the Union army after the government drafted him in 1863.510 Recently widowed and left with a young son, he elected to pay for a substitute to take his place, a legal option exercised by many men across the North.511 The brother of his late wife, attorney Ed Russell,512 arranged the deal. Russell contracted with Kentucky farmer Pete Walkup513 to buy one of his slaves, a young man named Allen, to stand in for John Clemens.514

Walkup had owned Allen for seven years. “He was about eleven years old when I bought him, and he was about 18 years old when I sold him. It was toward the close of the war, and the negroes were running away, and I took a small price for him, as he was threatening to leave.”515

After the sale closed, Allen went to Louisville. On October 1, 1864, he enlisted in the army in place of Dr. Clemens and joined the 122nd U.S. Colored Infantry. Although he enlisted as Walkup, the name, perhaps misheard, was recorded as Walker. He would later change his last name to King, in honor of his father, Beverly King.516

The regiment left Louisville for Virginia in early 1865 and served various duties during the final months of the war. Allen did not accompany his comrades. Plagued by ailments, including acute rheumatism, he spent almost a full year in military hospitals in Louisville and just across the Kentucky border in New Albany, Indiana. He rejoined the regiment on November 5, 1865. By this time it had been redeployed to Texas. Six days after he arrived, his term of enlistment expired and he mustered out of service.517

Allen returned to Kentucky and settled in Columbia. He worked several jobs, including as a servant at a boarding house. The establishment owner remembered Allen King as a “rather small spare made man,” and noted, “He was one of the quickest most active men I ever saw.”518

In 1882, King met Joannah Morrison, an unwed mother of four. The couple fell in love and left Kentucky for Illinois in search of a better life.519 There they married and started a family that grew to include three girls and a boy. In the mid-1890s, King’s health fell into decline due to heart and kidney disease. He passed away in 1898 at about age fifty-five.

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