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Negroes for Sale: the Slave Trade in Antebellum Kentucky

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Negroes for Sale: the Slave Trade in Antebellum Kentucky NEGROES FOR SALE: THE SLAVE TRADE IN ANTEBELLUM KENTUCKY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment for the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Benjamin Lewis Fitzpatrick _____________________________ Richard Pierce, Director Graduate Program in History Notre Dame, Indiana December 2008 NEGROES FOR SALE: THE SLAVE TRADE IN ANTEBELLUM KENTUCKY Abstract by Benjamin Lewis Fitzpatrick This cultural history examines slave trading in Kentucky from 1820 to 1860. I argue that instead of slavery declining in Kentucky during the antebellum period, the state’s system of intrastate slave speculation, which included the practices of slave hiring and slave catching, provided Bluegrass masters with a profitable and flexible system of circulating enslaved black labor throughout communities and within the state. Slavery in Kentucky existed in a diverse agricultural economy, not a cotton producing economy as in the Lower South and this type of slavery characterized by masters who possessed five or fewer slaves shaped the practice of slave speculation in Kentucky. White Kentuckians were involved in the slave market not just as professional flesh traders but also as hirers, auctioneers, executors, sheriffs, and slave catchers. This study of slave speculation in Kentucky expands our existing definition of slave trading in the antebellum South to include the practices of slave hiring and slave catching and also reveals how the speculation in human beings affected the potency of antislavery movements in the Upper South. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………iii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 2: “CASH FOR NEGROES”: KENTUCKY’S INTRASTATE SLAVE TRADE…………………………………………………………………………..25 CHAPTER 3: “PROUD AND NOBLE SPIRITED KENTUCKY”: SLAVE SPECULATION AND KENTUCKY’S ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT……………………………………………………………………68 CHAPTER 4: “THE LOCOMOTIVE TENDENCIES OF HUMAN PROPERTY”: BLUEGRASS RUNAWAYS AND THE “CATCHING BUSINESS”…………95 CHAPTER 5: THE IMAGE OF THE KENTUCKY SLAVE TRADE IN UNCLE TOM’S CABIN…………………………………………………………………………..146 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………178 APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………..181 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………183 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee for all of their support and feedback while writing this study. Gail Bederman, Richard Pierce, and Thomas P. Slaughter provided me with insightful comments at various stages of the writing process. I give special thanks to David Waldstreicher, who as my advisor for the dissertation was instrumental in my completing this work. My gratitude to David goes beyond the dissertation though. I will always be deeply indebted to David for his unwavering support and for sharing his keen historiographical observations with me. I also benefited greatly from the experience and expertise of the many archivists and librarians that I encountered. I would like to thank the special collections at the University of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, and Berea College for their assistance. I am also indebted to the archivists at the Kentucky State Libraries and Archives in Frankfort who helped me to locate circuit court cases and other records. I would like to thank the Filson Historical Society in Louisville for awarding me a Filson Fellowship, which I received at the early stages of writing the dissertation. I would like to especially give thanks to reference specialist Pen Bogert who shared his expertise and love of Kentucky history with me over lunch while I was a fellow at the Filson. I am also indebted to Mrs. B.J. Gooch special collections librarian at Transylvania University in Lexington. She guided me to court cases in the collections regarding diseased slaves that had either been underutilized or not used at all by previous historians. iii And last but not least I have to give a special thanks to my wife Penny and my son Jonathan. Although they had to often contend with an absentee husband and father through much of the dissertating, their love and support for me was indefatigable. iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation is a cultural history of slave speculation in Kentucky from roughly 1820 to 1860 and explores both formal and informal transactions in the flesh trade. The existing historical records—newspapers, court documents, letters, and speeches—indicate that the intrastate slave trade in Kentucky was a flexible system where white Kentuckians encountered the traffic as buyers, traders, hirers, auctioneers, executors, sheriffs, slave catchers, and sometimes, as opponents to slavery. People from all strata of Kentucky society, not just professional slave traders and masters, found themselves involved in the tangled web of the slave traffic. Readers may ask why should scholars be concerned with a study of the slave trade in a single state and why Kentucky? What made the flesh commerce in the Bluegrass state different than other southern states? An examination of the slave commerce in Kentucky is needed because in Kentucky slavery and the slave traffic existed in a diverse agricultural economy characterized by masters who owned five or fewer slaves. This scenario is in contrast to the dominant paradigm of the slave trade that is founded on the study of the culture and political economy of the Deep South. Large plantations and the production of cotton did not characterize slavery in Kentucky. Kentucky slaves resided in circumstances that were typical for the majority of slaves. Over half of southern slaves 1 lived on small farms with five or fewer slaves. If the cultivation of cotton helped to shape the practices of the interstate slave trade, then the particular economic conditions of Kentucky helped to shape the practices of intrastate slave speculation there. Michael Tadman, in his seminal Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South, argues that after the close of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, Kentucky and other states in the Upper South acted as a “stocking raising system” that supplied the markets of New Orleans and Natchez with excess slaves for cotton cultivation. Because of this incredible need for labor in the Lower South, slaves in the Upper South had a greater chance of ending up being sold down the river. Tadman asserts that nearly one out of every three slave children residing in the upper South in 1820 was sold away by 1860.1 However, an examination of the intrastate slave trade in Kentucky reveals a flexible slave market that allowed masters to profit from slave labor without selling excess slaves to the Lower South. Slave brokers from Lexington, Louisville, and other cities scoured the surrounding countryside searching for likely slaves to sell out of the state, but also to sell or hire within the state. By 1840, for Kentucky masters hiring out slaves to local entrepreneurs, rope manufacturers, steamboat operators, and railroad companies, was just as profitable as selling them down the river to New Orleans or Natchez. Newspaper editors, merchants, and even county officials acted as middlemen in the intrastate traffic facilitating the movement of slave labor in the community and across Kentucky. Kentucky’s black population experienced the slave trade simultaneously as 1 Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) 5, 45, 70, 122. 2 commodities and as human beings. Sometimes, blacks found themselves in the position as buyers either negotiating prices for their own freedom or of loved ones. Many Kentucky slaves who were allowed to hire out negotiated better lives for themselves and their families by finding more humane masters. Many black families felt the sting of the slave market as the demand for labor in both the Lower South and in Kentucky increased throughout the antebellum period. One scholar has calculated that at least half of all slave families in the Upper South were destroyed because of a sale of loved one through the interstate slave trade. If the number of slaves sold in the interstate commerce was taken into consideration then the preceding figure would surely be higher.2 Those slaves who fled for their freedom experienced the slave market from a different vantage--as fugitives. Although they were outside of Kentucky, fugitive slaves were still commodities in the state’s slave market just as their fellow slaves who were still in bondage. Kentucky masters acknowledged the importance of an effective system of catching runaways in maintaining the value of their slaves by demanding that neighboring free states such as Ohio establish laws to return accused blacks to Kentucky. With the laws stacked against them and the value placed on black bodies by slave markets in Louisville and Lexington, the freedom of many free blacks who resided in the Ohio River borderland in southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois was endangered by kidnappers and slave catchers. Despite being on the run, the rewards on their heads along with the system of spies, slave catchers, and government officials that vied for their retrieval verified their status as commodities. After 1830, as this study suggest, more often Kentucky slaves found themselves negotiating for wages, shelter, and other 2 Tadman, 146-54. 3 necessities in the slave market as hired out slaves rather than as fugitives or victims of kidnappers. As the fugitive narratives, runaway advertisements, and other sources reveal, black humanity could
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