Perhaps Freeman had made his way to Clay County because it was both industrial and rugged. The salt makers presented opportunities to earn money that were not available elsewhere, yet Clay’s frontier isolation limited the reach of outside authority. In the wilderness no one could tell him who he was or what he could do.
The presence of large numbers of slaves tempered the liberty of life in the hills. Free people of color saw firsthand how fragile their lives were, and whites were continually reminded that people with dark skin were different and that society depended on maintaining that difference. If the everyday experience of slavery were not enough, a series of laws constricted the lives of free blacks like rope around a wrist.
When Kentucky became a state in 1792, its laws were suffused with ideals of the revolutionary age. Like many other states, Kentucky made it relatively easy for owners to free their slaves, and most of Clay County’s free blacks had been emancipated there. At least initially there seemed to be no legal distinction between free blacks and every other free person in the commonwealth. Within a decade, however, the legislature had driven a wedge between liberty and equality, as the enthusiasm for revolutionary notions of universal liberty gave way to a society structured around slavery.9
In order to justify treating free blacks differently from whites—to rethink the core idea that “all men are created equal”—whites started describing blacks as congenitally inferior. Equality would lead to intermarriage, which in turn would, one South Carolina congressman warned in 1786, “stain the blood of the whites by a mixture of the races.” In Kentucky and elsewhere, north and south, advocates for forcibly resettling blacks outside of the country justified their cause in the name of protecting the purity of white blood. The harshness of this emerging understanding of race was unnecessary when most people with dark skin were slaves and the everyday practice of bondage and mastery kept blacks and whites separate. But the prospect of freedom required a new vocabulary of inequality, and a new set of laws followed.10
In 1806 Virginia required blacks to leave the state within a year of being freed or else forfeit their liberty. Within two years Kentucky’s legislature prohibited free blacks from entering the state, decrying the “very serious evil . . . likely to be produced by the emigration of emancipated slaves from different parts of the Union to this state.” Free blacks had to register for certificates of emancipation at county courts. They could not vote. Nor could they “keep or carry any gun, powder, shot, club, or other weapon whatsoever”—an enormous burden in the mountains, where families survived the lean times by eating wild game and where farmers often had to hunt their free-grazing cows and pigs. A black man or woman faced thirty lashes “on his or her bare back” for so much as lifting a hand in self-defense against a white person.11
These statutes—and the sentiments that they represented—made freedom resemble slavery. Most of Clay County’s free people of color were desperately poor. Some did jobs for the saltworks. Others were laborers or tenant farmers. None of the children went to school. Only one member of the black population was literate. While poor whites could borrow money to buy property, blacks had little access to credit, and the number of black landowners could be counted on one or two hands.12
Despite the legal and practical limitations of liberty, blacks in Clay County continued to value their freedom. Slaves negotiated for it over years of working closely with their owners, securing emancipation in their wills. Periodically they ran away, moving deeper into the hills or rafting down the Kentucky River to the Ohio and the North. And in the 1840s nine slaves sued their owner, a salt manufacturer. After years of litigation, they established that they were being unlawfully held in bondage. They retained a lawyer who was a member of another salt-making clan, using the business rivalry to leverage themselves into freedom.13
George Freeman’s very presence in Clay County embodied the resilience of the idea of liberty. Even though the state legislature had banned free blacks from moving in, Freeman had come through the Cumberland Mountains from Virginia. Raised in the hills near the Kentucky line, Freeman could appreciate the relative freedom of frontier life. As a slave in the mountains, he would have lived in close quarters with his owner, a man named Joseph Spencer, possibly Freeman’s father. They probably worked side by side. Freeman had been born when the Constitution was a year old, and when he was twenty-four, Spencer emancipated him. In 1814 the country had been fighting its second great war with England and rekindling its sense of what liberty and democracy meant. The deed that made Freeman a free man repeated words that were common in the initial wave of emancipations that followed the Revolution. “Freedom,” his master declared, “is the natural right of every human being.”14
By the time he was thirty, Freeman had a wife and four daughters. Their life sprang almost entirely from their own calloused hands. Families in the Clay County hills lived in cabins built from logs that they had hewn and mud that they had quarried. They built their own beds and slept on mattresses that they had sewn and stuffed themselves. They turned forest to farmland, fenced in vegetable and flower gardens, and grew Indian corn and wheat from seed. They sewed their own clothes from wool that they had sheared and spun and with flax that they had woven into stiff linen that softened in time. They could go days without seeing anyone else.15
For many mountain families, the outside world did not have to exist. They could survive on what they produced or hunted and could trade corn, eggs, honey, or pelts for just about anything else. The area had little that resembled a cash economy, beyond the wealthy families who controlled the salt industry. When farmers left their hollows to work for salt makers and others, their earnings were usually forfeited to their employers for food and clothes and other necessities of life, things they might have made themselves if they had not been working for someone else.16
George Freeman, however, was able to move beyond subsistence in the 1830s. By 1832, with seven children to feed, he had enough money to pay $200 cash for fifty acres of land. Soon other free blacks and even some whites were turning to him for small loans. If the law did not recognize Freeman’s equality with whites, the men indebted to him would have to.17
Moving upward was a feat that required unyielding health, constant strength, and tireless toil. Undoubtedly Freeman’s wife and children had been doing some of the heavy labor on the farm. It was also possible that a young man named Jordan Spencer was living with the family and assisting with their work. Spencer had been born around the time of Freeman’s emancipation. Years later some of Spencer’s children would remember that he had come from Virginia, while others figured he was from Kentucky. He may have been Freeman’s son or brother or other kin. Perhaps, like Freeman, he had been a slave emancipated by the Spencer family, or he may have adopted the last name after hearing Freeman talk about his former owner. Jordan had long hair and shaded his face with a wide-brimmed hat. It was a point of pride that no one worked harder than he did.18
Freeman owned his land outright. During the long stretches that he worked without ever seeing anyone who was not his kin, he might have fancied himself the master of his mountain hollow. But he was never truly alone. Under a ten-year-old statute, the justices, sheriffs, and attorneys of Clay County were obliged to give the court monthly reports of the “poor children of colour who are free, and whose parents ... they shall think are incapable of supporting and bringing them up in honest courses.” If the court deemed it “right,” the children would be bound out as apprentices to anyone the court chose. Boys would be released from service at age twenty-one, girls at eighteen. Although the law guaranteed apprentices “wholesome meat and drink, suitable cloathing,” and instruction “to spell and read, so as to read the New Testament with facility,” they lived at the mercy of their masters. The courts and their informants had so much discretion to act that they could take children from just about any black family they wished. Freeman was free, but his children could be enslaved.19
Freeman had been working his land for
several years when two men took some of his children away. In December 1836 Thomas Strong petitioned the Clay County court to force two of Freeman’s sons, Washington and Hiram, to become his apprentices, “to learn the art and mystery of farming.” At the same time Strong’s brother-in-law Edward Davidson asked the court to bind Freeman’s “infant child” Elizabeth to him, “to learn the art and mystery of spinning and weaving.” Each petition yielded a onesentence order from the judge, turning Freeman’s children into servants.20
The men who petitioned the court for Freeman’s children came from farming families that owned thousands of acres of land on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. The Strongs and Davidsons had a long history of feuding with some of the local salt-making clans, starting in 1806 with pitched gun battles over cattle rights and periodically reigniting, generation after generation, for nearly a century afterward. Thomas Strong’s father had been a county leader and justice of the peace. They were powerful people—the state worked for them.21
Perhaps Freeman had offended Strong and Davidson in routine business dealings, was allied with one of their enemies, or had been too conspicuously successful a free man of color in Clay County. Whatever the reason, Strong’s and Davidson’s actions were devastating to Freeman. Not only were the apprenticeships a personal affront—taking his children away as if they were on the auction block—but they also threatened his basic aspiration to rise in life. A large family was an economic engine. With sons and daughters working on the farm, Freeman could produce more corn and eggs and wool and timber, raise more cows and sheep and pigs, make more money, and buy more land. By taking his children, Strong and Davidson were turning Freeman’s labor force into their own, increasing their wealth and power at his expense.22
Kentucky’s laws were designed to keep Freeman—and all free blacks—poor, and the local court was actively enriching Clay County’s wealthiest citizens. Freeman could easily have deferred to the status that the legislature had fixed for him or shied away from a fight with two men from powerful families who held grudges. Instead, he found a lawyer fifty miles outside the county to appeal the court’s ruling.
Freeman’s lawyer, James S. Henderson, did not challenge the wisdom or fairness of the apprenticeship law—that would have been a losing proposition, given the general hostility toward free blacks that prevailed in Kentucky. Rather, Henderson focused on the procedures that the county court had followed, arguing that the judge’s ruling had been too informal. In order to establish the court’s jurisdiction over Freeman, Henderson asserted, the decision would have had to record a series of specific findings, among them that the children were poor, that Freeman and his wife could not care for them, and that Freeman had been given the opportunity to appear in court and contest the apprenticeship petitions. Even if the judges agreed with the substance of the apprenticeship law, they might balk at lax procedure, which could harm whites just as easily as blacks.23
A little more than a year later the Kentucky Court of Appeals agreed that “the record is altogether too meagre” to support the decisions to bind out Freeman’s children. “These orders,” wrote the chief justice, “tested by the record alone, as they must be by this Court, are clearly erroneous.” Strong and Davidson did not retain a lawyer to argue their side. Apprentices were supposed to be cheap labor, so it made little sense to spend money on litigation over them. They could always petition the court for custody over other children, children whose families lacked the money or the will to hire an attorney.24
Although Kentucky law forbade Freeman to raise a hand in self-defense against a white person, he still found ways to defend himself. He could not challenge the broad injustices he faced because the law classified him as a free man of color, but the simple act of mounting an appeal, however narrow and technical, boosted his status. Just by hiring a lawyer, Freeman showed that he was not too poor to care for his children. The law defined Freeman as something less than a full citizen, but his ability to litigate protected him and his family from the world beyond their fifty acres of hillside. The Kentucky high court’s decision was short and crisp. It made no reference to Freeman’s color.
WOMEN IN THE HILLS might marry at age twelve and live through ten or even fifteen childbirths, not to mention malaria and dysentery and typhoid. They spun and wove clothes for the family, weeded the cornfields, rooted for ginseng, foraged for herbs, and milked cows that roamed freely in the forest. They cooked and cleaned and carried water from the spring to their cabins. “Only the lowest peasantry of Europe can show anything to parallel it,” wrote anthropologist Ellen Churchill Semple at the end of the nineteenth century. “The mountain woman . . . at twenty-five looks forty, and at forty looks twenty years older than her husband.”25
Travelers marveled at how isolated Appalachian women were from the world outside their mountain hollows. Many never ventured more than a ridgeline or two from home through their entire lives. “They are as rooted as the trees,” wrote Semple. But Clarissa Centers had walked and ridden thousands of miles before she was twenty-five. Clarsy had been born in the western hills of South Carolina, but her family soon moved to North Carolina, then eventually up through the Cumberland Gap, where Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky meet.26
The Centers family was not alone in their journey. In the decades after 1830, exhausted soil, declining tobacco and cotton prices, and financial panics drove tens of thousands of people west—on northern routes stretching from Ohio to Minnesota, along southern routes to Louisiana and Texas, and through mountain passes into Kentucky and Tennessee. From North Carolina and Georgia, an entire nation of dispossessed Cherokees was making its way toward Oklahoma. The routes could be crowded with people, carts and carriages, and horses, cows, pigs, and sheep. Often they were “more like the leading avenue of a great city,” wrote one observer, “than a road through rural districts.” Families slept under canvas tents on roadsides and in fields. Travelers drank and fought and gambled and conned and killed. Great and small, educated and ignorant, good and wicked—old distinctions mattered little on the road west. Everyone was traveling the same path, in search of new lands, new luck, and new lives.27
The Centers family reached Clay County shortly before 1840. Although she was still traveling with her parents and siblings, Clarsy Centers was no longer a girl. She was in her early twenties and had a baby boy on her hip. A child born out of wedlock was hardly uncommon on the frontier. At the very least, the boy showed that Clarsy was fertile, and with only one child, she remained relatively young and strong for her age. If her situation carried any disgrace, she could have devised a story of widowhood, and no one in her new community would have been the wiser.28
By 1841, Clarsy and her son had moved into George Freeman’s cabin. She was twenty-five and pregnant with his child. George was twice her age. His first wife was probably dead. Eleven people lived with him, some of them his grown daughters—right around Clarsy’s age—with children of their own. His family was becoming a clan.29
Although Freeman and Centers were not married, that fact in itself would have merited little comment in their hollow. Many others in the wilderness had dispensed with such formalities. Having children and struggling through life together made them man and wife. Even if they had wanted to, however, they could not have married. While George Freeman was a man of color, Clarsy Centers was white. Kentucky law prohibited their union.
Freeman and Centers were not the only ones in Clay County breaching the color line. Several free black women were living with white men. It was less common, however, for black men to have families with white women, and their relationships were perceived as a far greater threat to the social and racial order. After all, the mixed-race children of black women became, more often than not, pieces of property, markers of wealth, for their owners. But the children of slave men and white women were free under Kentucky law, and they blurred the physical distinctions that made racial status conceivable and enforceable. As a result, all such relationships were subversive, even t
hose involving free men.30
Moreover, the control that white men had over their families, something that approached ownership under the law, helped maintain the idea that all white men were equal citizens in a country increasingly stratified by wealth, where the salt barons of Clay County could buy and sell the typical small farmer hundreds of times over. That control was undermined when white women had children with black men. From seventeenth-century Virginia onward, politicians, planters, and other groups of white men had publicly fretted about sexually aggressive blacks and expressed “honest indignation,” as ten North Carolina men wrote in 1825, at the prospect of black men making “any approach towards a connection with a white woman even by her consent.”31
At the same time white communities did not always respond to these relationships with reflexive deadly violence. They were capable of tolerating difference or pretending it did not exist. Across the South in the early decades of the nineteenth century, black men and white women were forming families and living in peace.32
Clarsy Centers gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1841, and would have nine more children with Freeman over the next dozen years. While anthropologists years later would dismiss relationships between husbands and wives in the mountains as “very elemental, betray[ing] little of the romantic spirit,” Clarsy’s situation likely fell closer to that of the woman who would marry Centers’s nephew a generation later. Asked why she married him, she responded, “Just like all other people do, because I liked him.”33
George’s rise in the world required strength, intelligence, and will. He offered Clarsy security after a life of wandering. His grown daughters and their children were nearby; Clarsy had women her age to talk to and would not have to raise her babies alone. The fact that Freeman had brown skin or had once been a slave was of little consequence. In Clarsy’s home state of South Carolina, the high court ruled in 1835 that a person’s status “is not to be determined solely by the distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man ... [A] man of worth, honesty, industry and respectability should have the rank of a white man.” The judge could have been describing Freeman. If his emancipation papers listed him as “mulatto,” whites in Clay County were also dark after lives spent working in the sun.34
The Invisible Line Page 6
