During this era of exploration and expansion into western Kentucky, enslaved black men contributed to the development of settlements from Boons-borough to Louisville. Given what we know about the brutality of frontier life and the interdependence between slaveholders and their slaves, it is safe to say that many enslaved African Americans fought and died alongside their masters not so much to defend their owners from Indian aggression but to protect themselves. When confronted with the choice to intervene against Indians bent on killing whites or to live another day in pursuit of freedom from bondage, some decided to save their own lives. For example, Adam, a slave owned by William Russell, was traveling with Daniel Boone's son James, five other whites, and another slave named Charles on a mission to retrieve supplies from other settlements. When the group was ambushed by a band of Indians, Adam managed to escape to the river, where he hid under some driftwood. Adam watched as James Boone and young Henry Russell were tortured and killed by one of the Indians they knew. Eventually, Adam worked his way through the woods and returned to his home at the Castle's Wood settlement, where he described the attack in detail to his master and to Boone.28 Clearly, narratives such as this demonstrate African Americans’ ability to serve their own self-interests, regardless of their exclusion from the publicly defined and endorsed ideal of American manhood and masculinity that white men claimed only for themselves.
Within five years of the establishment of the Harrod and Boone settlements, Kentucky became the destination for Virginians. Governor Thomas Jefferson proposed to give landless whites access to the rich valley through the Land Act of 1779, which provided settlers with up to 400 acres for a lower fee than that charged to absentee owners or nonresidents. Settlers who made improvements to the land could claim up to 1,000 acres. Unfortunately, the act's flexibility allowed individuals with no intention of occupying the land to build cabins and then sell to migrating settlers or speculators.29 In the same year the Land Act was instituted, a group of twenty-five frontiersman led by Colonel Robert Patterson journeyed north from Harrodsburg, across the Kentucky River, and through the uninhabited but hostile land to build a garrison to protect the pioneers moving to central Kentucky. To a large degree, their primary objective was to scout out and secure a portion of the fertile valley for themselves, while creating a shelter for those brave enough to venture into the wilderness. The names of these men from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina still resonate throughout the Bluegrass region: Simon Kenton, Michael Stoner, John Haggin, John and Levi Todd, John Maxwell, Hugh Shannon, James Masterson, William McConnell, and Isaac Greer. As a gesture of respect for those who had lost their lives on April 19, 1775, at the Battle of Lexington, they chose the name Lexington over the traditional self-aggrandizing practice. The settlement became more than a memorial to those who died in support of the freedom movement being perpetuated by the Continental Congress and its delegates. The name would forever connect the intent of the founding fathers, the institution of slavery, and the perpetuation of white male power as the foundation of America. By 1779, Lexington represented America's capitalist future as well as its ultimate challenge, based on the singular notion that freedom and liberty can be found in the suppression and use of others as a source of profit and power.
With central Kentucky as the focal point of westward migration among those in search of tillable land, financial opportunity, and freedom from tyranny, its waterways and overland dirt roads became swollen with a multitude of hopeful Americans in search of a promised land. Indeed, after the war, news spread of the fertile lands beyond the Blue Hills and the Cumberland Gap. Young white men, excited by the possibility of acquiring land and gaining a foothold in the future development of America and influenced by the twice-told tales of Daniel Boone's wilderness exploits and his heroic hand-to-hand confrontations with so-called savages, sought adventure-filled lives in the backwoods of Kentucky. Early on, narratives of a bountiful and beautiful Far West awaiting the bold and the brave attracted those living in unhappy circumstances. Settlers by the hundreds poured into the Bluegrass region in pursuit of prosperity, bringing with them all their worldly possessions and extended family members. Unfortunately, the lie of universal opportunity would eventually force the naïve and ill prepared to return home to North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania or to move farther into the wilderness, chasing the elusive dream of independence.
In reality, commoners, displaced Tories “deprived of their lands or otherwise mistreated by overzealous Patriots,” poor whites, and immigrants of English, Scots, Scotch-Irish, and German origin were denied access to the choice lands claimed by men of affluence and influence. The wealthy landed gentry, speculators, and individuals with connections in Virginia secured thousands of acres through legal means and forced hundreds of powerless migrants off lands they believed they owned based on “ancient cultivation law” and the concept of “preoccupancy.”30 The Bluegrass region became the primary destination for Virginians who were second sons, gentlemen farmers, and wealthy politicians looking to advance their power through land acquisition. In taking possession of the most fertile land in Kentucky, Virginia's elite classes extended their dominance and control over the developing body politic of America and its social, political, and economic future.31 The future of Kentucky would be shaped in part by the abundance of land and the need for exploitable labor, reflecting both the inevitable growth of the nation and the development of early capitalism. As we shall see, the wielding of power by the politically connected rather than the morally right, struggles over the definition of citizenship, and limited access to freedom and democracy for those marginalized and abused based on the fiction of race would lead to a “second American Revolution,” laying bare the contradictions festering at the country's core.
Woven into this disparate population of white migrants were free and enslaved African American men and women. By the turn of the nineteenth century, more than 40,000 slaves were part of the laboring class, charged with performing a majority of the tasks required to transform the rough and rugged wilderness into paradise personified. This could be accomplished only through the use of black bondmen as human chattel. These individuals—mostly men—were the single most important factor in the Bluegrass region's development. These quasi-Americans underpinned the social, political, and economic ambitions and accomplishments of Old Dominion families who desired to reproduce the Virginia lifestyle they were accustomed to. Clearly, slavery's rapid spread into Kentucky County was based on the movement of these affluent settlers, whose main purpose in acquiring fertile lands in the West was to increase their wealth as well as their social, political, and economic standing in the new Republic. Toward this end, they brought along those who would be the most responsible for carrying out the deed.
In the spring of 1792 these same men struggled with other pioneers over the use of slave labor. In April forty-five elected delegates from the nine counties of the state descended on the township of Danville, thirty-eight miles south of Lexington, for the tenth constitutional convention. By all accounts, the “distinguished citizens” who made up the august body of representatives wielded their power and privilege to influence the outcome of the convention in their favor. Most owned land, cattle, horses, and slaves, and all sought to protect their future investments. The delegates’ primary concern was protecting their right to own human chattel, not the ethics of owning human beings, which antislavery advocates considered the more important debate to have. Of the 11,944 African Americans that made up more than 16 percent of Kentucky's 1790 population of 73,077, only 114 were free. Out of 61,133 white inhabitants, more than 22 percent of white landowners held slaves, with concentrations of black bondsmen in Fayette, Woodford, and Jefferson counties.
By June 1792, delegates in favor of the institution of slavery had convened to argue what they believed to be in the best interest of the state, based on the need for inexpensive labor and the so-called natural condition of the Negro. The large landowners and planter classes that had inve
sted heavily in the county's agricultural development sought to benefit financially from their land speculation and the potential productivity of their right to own human property. In support of this right, the state of Virginia granted permission for the new state of Kentucky to be created, with the stipulation that the institution of slavery would not be disturbed. Still, antislavery supporters challenged the morality of the institution and its effect on whites as a whole. Choosing to endorse and perpetuate the bondage of people of African descent was believed to be inconsistent with the principles of Christianity and the intent of the Declaration of Independence. Furthermore, because it promoted idleness in whites, slavery was argued to “sap the foundations of moral, and consequently of political virtue; and virtue is absolutely necessary for happiness and prosperity of free people.” To many, the expansion of slavery into the new state of Kentucky and across the continent was like a “building being erected on quicksand, the inhabitants of which can never abide in safety.”32 The prophetic vision of the antislavery advocates would come to pass in subsequent years, as slave insurrections and rebellions increased, taking the lives of both whites and blacks, as the institution expanded throughout the Deep South. Debates over the definition of citizenship, the use of African Americans as labor, and states’ rights to choose their own paths to prosperity would divide the country and eventually lead to the Civil War.
The first generation of Kentucky's powerful elite families, with recognizable surnames such as Todd, Breckinridge, Clay, Alexander, and Hunt, would have a significant influence on the state's social, political, cultural, and economic future. All depended on slave labor in some form to build their massive fortunes, which would be passed down from one generation to the next. When prominent Virginia lawyer John Breckinridge decided to move his family to Kentucky, he sent twenty slaves and an overseer out to secure his land claim and construct all the necessary accommodations in preparation for the move. In 1793 the Breckinridge family arrived at their Cabell's Dale plantation near Lexington, where they raised Thoroughbred horses and crops of the local variety.33 Thomas Jefferson, a personal friend, endorsed Breckinridge's nomination as Kentucky attorney general in 1795. Breckinridge would greatly influence Kentucky's second constitutional convention in 1799, which secured the right of the slaveholding gentry to possess human property without penalty or abuse.34 Slave labor was central to the development of Kentucky's agricultural and manufacturing industries. The Bluegrass region developed into the state's crown jewel, thanks to the muscle, sweat, and blood of black bondsmen, whose contributions were much more significant than history has recorded. The curving landscape with its fertile fields teeming with livestock, hundreds of farmhouses, and thousands of acres of hemp, flax, wheat, rye, oats, barley, tobacco, and corn generated tremendous capital for the powerful few.
Considered the “Athens of the West” due to its rise as the center of culture, education, and wealth west of the Allegheny Mountains, Lexington also bloomed into one of the most important manufacturing centers for the production and exportation of rope, burlap, and other goods throughout the region and the United States, especially to the South during the cotton boom. Indeed, as suppliers of finished products and raw materials to consumers as far away as New Orleans, New York, and the emerging markets of the Far West, Lexington businessmen and farmers became influential, to say the least. The new state constitution removed any future obstacles to the expansion of slavery and denied free blacks access to the franchise.35 Plainly, African American slaves were a source of prosperity. They tilled the fields and harvested the crops; they worked in factories, producing goods for the marketplace; and on the racetrack, they provided the means for the white elite to display the quality of horseflesh they owned.
By 1800, the number of blacks in Kentucky had increased to 41,084, or 18 percent of the population. The number of free blacks had also increased, from 114 to 741, since 1790. Even though they had been denied the franchise by the 1799 constitution, black men and their families came to the state looking for the same opportunities sought by European immigrants: land and an opportunity to live free. Kentucky's image as a paradise fat with wild game and fertile soil and as a gateway to the West attracted a range of settlers, from the well-to-do to the subsisting poor. All were determined to pursue the social, political, and economic advancements available to them.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the new nation was still exhausted from the Revolution, and the founding fathers were still struggling with the language intended to shape the country's future. In states such as South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the domestic slave trade kicked into high gear with Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin. Whitney's horse- and hand-driven machinery was capable of cleaning more than 400 times the amount of cotton the average slave could handle. With the demand for raw cotton increasing in the Northern states and in Europe, the demand for slave labor grew as well. Before the 1808 ban on the international slave trade, thousands of Africans were imported into the United States and put to work in the South planting tobacco, rice, and cotton. Others were sold to slave drivers and landowners moving west to the new Kentucky territory, and with the 1821 Missouri Compromise, the institution found another stronghold, increasing the demand for land by the southern slavocracy and the expansion of “King Cotton.”
It is more than likely that all of Isaac Burns Murphy's grandparents, black and white, were part of the wave of free and enslaved African and African American emigrants that arrived in Kentucky between 1800 and 1820. On the farms, in the fields, and eventually in the factories, relations between blacks and whites were tested and refined as Kentuckians worked to craft an identity based on their relationship to the land as well as to one another. Sex between blacks and whites was considered taboo, by all accounts, except when white men used their power to gain access to what they wanted—that is, black women.
By 1830, Kentucky's overall population had grown to 687,917. The mass migration of Virginians, North Carolinians, Pennsylvanians, and European immigrants, as well as the enslaved Africans and African Americans brought to clear and work the land, increased the number of people dispersed throughout the state. Some of these new Kentuckians came eagerly, willing to traverse the wilderness in search of paradise; others were forced to travel across the rocky slopes of the Allegheny Mountains into unknown territory, leaving their families behind to meet the challenges awaiting them on the other side as the nation transformed itself into a juggernaut of capitalism.36 Poor pioneers lived off the land and secured a stake for themselves and their families by taking advantage of the resource-rich woods and waterways of the state. In contrast, the affluent concentrated on expanding agricultural development and increasing their economic prosperity in the Bluegrass region by acquiring the most fertile lands and exploiting black slave labor through the protected institution of slavery.
Indeed, from Maysville to Louisville, farmers, pioneers, and wealthy planters could be found in small communal farm towns, where common folk eked out a living, and in the developing agricultural and urban industrial environments, where the “texture of life of the Negro” was determined by the marketplace and by the whims of a powerful white patriarchy. As the nation continued to grow, so did the need for food and durable goods, and Kentucky became an important factor in that growth. Farmers increased their production of staples such as livestock, wheat, rye, oats, barley, tobacco, and corn. To meet the demands of the growing cotton industry in the Deep South, Kentucky farmers grew hemp, which was used to manufacture cordage and coarse cloth, as well as the rope and bagging materials needed to ship raw cotton to domestic and foreign manufacturers. Kentucky farm products generated immense wealth for those with large landholdings, manufacturing plants, and a workforce capable of harvesting and processing raw products for consumption at home and abroad. There is no doubt that the domestic demand for Kentucky goods and raw products led to the importation of many enslaved African Americans into the state; their numbers pea
ked at 165,213 in 1830, with bondsmen accounting for 24 percent of the overall population. These men, women, and children provided labor for the large farms and factories throughout the Bluegrass region. Indeed, the blood, sweat, and tears of black labor were at the foundation of all industry and development in Kentucky and in other states where blacks performed the bulk of “domestic drudgery” in the name of freedom, liberty, and democracy.37 Still, those black slaves who witnessed the birth of American democracy and the maturation of American capitalism became collateral damage of the “New American”: a white man whose insatiable appetite for wealth, power, and status could never be satisfied.
As early as 1815, outspoken opponents of slavery began to argue for a program that would abolish the institution, emancipate blacks, and free the United States from the evils associated with human bondage. While progressive groups with good intentions sought to establish colonies in West Africa where slave owners could voluntarily send their emancipated blacks, others wanted to exile free blacks because of the threat they posed to the stability of the institution of slavery, which had proved itself vital, if not necessary, to western expansion and the future of capitalism. For some, sending free blacks out of the country was a way to silence subversive African Americans in the North who undermined the system that slaveholders believed to be their right in the eyes of God and the destiny of the black and white races. Kentucky slaveholders were not among those who refused to part with their human chattel; many endorsed the option of colonizing free blacks in Africa.
The Prince of Jockeys Page 4
