The Forbidden Love of a Southern Belle

On a warm, moonlit night in mid-June 1865, three days prior to Beau and Carlotta Wells's scheduled departure, an unsigned note was attached to a door at the main entrance to the vigilance committees' headquarters in a small community called Quiet Creek, located about fifteen miles west of Pine Grove City, Kentucky. The note asserted that a fugitive slave named Beau Wells had returned to the plantation that he'd run away from in 1860, purchased the farm, married his former master's widow, an...