The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School The College of the Liberal Arts HOUSEHOLDS BUILT ON SHIFTING SANDS: SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION IN THE LOYAL WESTERN BORDER STATES A Dissertation in History by Anne Y. Brinton © 2011 Anne Y. Brinton Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2011 The dissertation of Anne Y. Brinton was reviewed and approved* by the following: William A. Blair The College of the Liberal Arts Research Professor Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Anthony E. Kaye Associate Professor of History Nan E. Woodruff Professor of History Lovalerie King Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies and Director of the Africana Research Center David G. Atwill Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii ABSTRACT This dissertation engages with recent scholarship on the slaveholding household and on struggles over the terms of labor as slavery underwent its internal collapse. Slavery stood at the crux of Border State political economies and political identities on the eve of Civil War. Vigorous markets in hiring and sale distributed widespread access to enslaved labor, disrupted black familial and social life, and stood as a terrain of struggle across which both white and black identities were articulated. Border State emancipation, no less traumatic than its Confederate counterpart(s), nonetheless took a different path. Recent scholars have observed that in much of the Confederacy, wartime emancipation was neither secure nor absolute. In the loyal Border States, it was more fraught yet. Slaves and ex-slaves struggled to navigate the overlapping terrains of federal policy, civil law, and the market in their labor as they began to lay the material and ideological foundations of free households. Long experience with hiring markets and geographical mobility gave Border State freedpeople valuable tools in the post-war economy. Nonetheless, many remained enmeshed in ongoing relations of coercion and dependence with the former master class, and still others found that waged labor required hard, often agonizing choices, once again compelling the separation of husbands from wives and children from parents in order to ensure the survival of all family members. iii Table of Contents Introduction Page 1 Chapter I: At the Crux of Identities: The Slaveholding Household in Missouri and Kentucky Page 11 Chapter II: The Flexible Household: The Production and Reproduction of Slavery in Missouri and Kentucky Page 42 Chapter III: The View from Within the Household: Enslaved Men and Women Encounter the Civil War Page 102 Chapter IV: “On the terms proposed”: Border State Markets in Enslaved Labor Page 154 Chapter V: “The consequences of it are too awful to contemplate”: The Master Class Confronts Emancipation Page 198 Chapter VI: “No trouble findin’ work to do”: The Making of the Free Black Household in the Border States Page 240 Bibliography Page 279 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to my advisor, Bill Blair, and to Tony Kaye and Nan Woodruff, for much support and sound advice. Thanks as well to LeeAnn Whites of the University of Missouri at Columbia, and to Joye Bowman at the University of Massachusetts. Without generous funding from the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, the McCourtney Fellowship, a Department of History and Religious Studies Program dissertation release, the Filson Historical Society, and the Kentucky State Historical Society, this project would have been exponentially more difficult. Thanks as well to the staff at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, the Filson, the KHS, the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives. v Introduction This dissertation explores the decline and eventual collapse of slavery in the loyal western Border States of Missouri and Kentucky. These slave states were among the four that remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War and which were, as a result, exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation. I contend that the factors which have been typically considered an index of slavery’s decline or diminishing salience in the Upper South—among them smallholdings, mixed agriculture, and, most importantly for this project, the robust and multi- layered market in enslaved labor(ers)—both enabled the institution to survive as long as it did, and helped to facilitate—albeit not without cost— former slaves’ navigation of the post-war market in free labor. A notion characteristic of slavery’s post-war apologists, Dunning-school academic historians, and their contemporaries, the idea that Border State commitment to slavery was waning on the eve of the war has dogged subsequent generations of scholars.1 Slavery was flourishing on the eve of the Civil War, and it endured, despite what Lincoln termed the “friction and abrasions” of war2, beyond the last year of the conflict. This project takes issue with those scholars who have presumed that slavery was declining in the Border States in the late antebellum period and that indeed this decline explains why secession with the rest of the Upper South in the aftermath of the Fort Sumter crisis and Abraham Lincoln’s call for troops ultimately came to naught. Although Missouri brought an end to slavery with its new state 1 These factors, among others, have led some scholars to conclude that slavery itself was on the decline in the western Border States. Edward Conrad Smith contends that by the secession crisis, slavery had become an issue of only secondary importance. Although careful to note that the border region, one of many “Souths” rather than part of a monolithic single South, was hardly antislavery, William W. Freehling suggests that the region’s demographics and geography left its residents less committed to ensuring slavery’s perpetuity than their counterparts elsewhere. And Ira Berlin argues that Kentucky and Missouri (as well as some eastern districts in the Upper South) had largely “devolved from slave societies to societies with slaves.” See Smith, The Borderland in the Civil War, 1; Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 17; Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 162; as well as Egnal, Clash of Extremes, and others. 2 Abraham Lincoln, Address to Border State Representatives, July 2, 1862, ALP. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html. 1 Constitution in January of 1865, slavery endured in Kentucky for nearly a year longer, or until the ratification of the 13th Amendment. The market in enslaved bodies and enslaved labor had been central to slavery’s development, and continued to be central in ensuring its profitability.3At the same time, the market also created the fault lines along which slavery eventually fractured. Several scholars have explored the salience of the market in southern slave society. While earlier historians outlined the market’s financial scope and reach, focusing on professional slave brokerage firms, auction houses, and traders, others have explored the market as a social phenomenon. An institution of robust profitability, it nonetheless occupied an unsettling position in the southern mind. The sale and purchase of human beings stood in stark contrast to slaveholder pretensions to humanitarian values and paternalist obligations. Moreover, as at least one historian has argued, in the professional business practices required of the successful trader in flesh, the slave trade best embodied the market revolution as it most dramatically affected the South. For numerous reasons, then, in the person of the professional slave trader were condensed the anxieties of an entire class. Even hiring, which has only more recently come under serious historical scrutiny, proved troublesome. In rendering enslaved bodies into individual units of production and exchange, it too troubled the values of a society which prided itself on ostensibly non-capitalist values.4 This project seeks to expand and deepen the historical understanding of the slave market, not simply as a place, but as an idea, as a nexus of relationships, and as a terrain of struggle. Only when we begin with the household as an analytical framework and a container of human 3 See Frederic Bancroft’s Slave-Trading in the Old South for a detailed discussion of importation and exportation of slaves to and from the western Border States before the Civil War. Even before 1820, he observes, Kentucky supplied considerable numbers of slaves to the Natchez and New Orleans markets, and the trade became yet more vigorous following the annexation of Texas. Missouri, too, by the 1830s supplied hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of human property to Deep South markets (124-144). 4 Johnson, Soul by Soul; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves; Berlin, Generations of Captivity. 2 relationships do we uncover the networks of local and informal transactions which by-passed the public terrain of the slave market. Much scholarship has focused on public marketplaces, but has often elided the many private, hidden transactions which may, in fact, have made up the majority of the trade in the Upper South. More than one historian has estimated that, although the figures can never be known with certainty, many more slaves were exchanged privately or informally than in the public sales which loom so large in the historical imaginary.5 This market, among other factors, would enable the slaveholding household to expand and contract in response to market stimuli, family need, and the exigencies of slave management itself. Paying serious attention to the public and private transactions through which enslaved bodies were transferred from white household to white household, and in the interstices of which enslaved men and women struggled to determine the course of their lives, forces us to reevaluate the scholarship of the household as well as that of the market. Close attention to private markets helps to restore white women of the slaveholding classes to the historical narrative, as they bought, sold, hired, and otherwise exchanged the bodies and domestic labors of enslaved women, girls, and boys.