The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  1 On use of the spring pole, see R. B. Woodworth, “The Evolution of Drilling Rigs,” Bulletin of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, November 1915, pp. 2247, 2250-55.

  2 John Adams Bownocker, “Salt Deposits and the Salt Industry in Ohio,” in Ohio Geological Survey, 4th ser., bull. 8 (1906), p. 15; John F. Smith, “The Salt-Making Industry of Clay County, Kentucky,” Filson Club History Quarterly 1 (1927), pp. 134, 136; John E. Stealey III, The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), p. 15; Augustus Beauchamp Northcote, “On the Brine-springs of Cheshire,” London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 4th ser., vol. 14 (1857), pp. 457, 462; Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 61-78.

  3 Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, pp. 65-70.

  4 Ibid., p. 209.

  5 Ibid., p. 77. John F. Smith recalled, “Some years ago I talked with an ancient African whose task, when a young man, was to clean the furnaces at one of the principal works. He told me of the darkness, the cramped working space, the constant fear that he might get hung in a tight place”; in “Salt-Making Industry,” pp. 138-39.

  6 Stealey, Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business, pp. 142-44; Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, pp. 210-11.

  7 “Color in Kentucky is generally considered prima facie evidence of slavery”: Commonwealth v. Johnson, Mason Circuit Court, Order 32, p. 129 (October Term 1837), quoted in J. Winston Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), pp. 201, 205. On the lives of subsistence farmers in Clay County, see Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, pp. 157-84.

  8 Deed Book 3, p. 20, Lee County, Va., quoted in Manuel Ray Spencer, comp., The Descendants of Joseph Spencer, 1735-1836 (self-published, 1996), pp. 7-8, 325. For a description of free blacks jailed or sold as slaves, see Coleman, Slavery Times, pp. 206-7. See also Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, p. 211; and James B. Murphy, “Slavery and Freedom in Appalachia: Kentucky as a Demographic Case Study,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 80 (1980), pp. 151, 162.

  9 See Juliet E. K. Walker, “The Legal Status of Free Blacks in Kentucky, 1792-1825,” Filson Club History Quarterly 57 (1983), pp. 382-95.

  10 Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 544-45; Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860,” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007), pp. 592, 644.

  11 Walker, “Legal Status of Free Blacks.”

  12 Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, pp. 219-23, 226 and table 6.5.

  13 Ibid., pp. 213-14.

  14 Spencer, Descendants of Joseph Spencer; see also Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 60-62.

  15 1820 U.S. Census, Clay County, Ky.; see also James S. Brown, Beech Creek: A Study of a Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood (1950; reprint Berea, Ky.: Berea College Press, 1988), pp. 5-6. Years later descendants of the family recalled leading similar lives. Freda Spencer Goble, interview by author, August 29, 2005, Paintsville, Ky.

  16 Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, pp. 82-86.

  17 Ibid., p. 229.

  18 See George Spencer Death Certificate, April 1, 1912, Johnson County Death Certificate No. 10477, Kentucky Bureau of Vital Statistics, Ancestry.com; Lydia Margaret Ratliff Death Certificate, September 1, 1938, Johnson County Death Certificate No. 20096, Kentucky Bureau of Vital Statistics; Spencer v. Looney (Va. 1912), No. 2012, Virginia State Law Library, Richmond, trial transcript, pp. 61, 66, 73, 77, 81; Goble interview.

  19 Acts Passed at the First Session of the Thirty-Fourth General Assembly for the Commonwealth of Kentucky (Frankfort, Ky.: Holeman, 1825), chap. 146, pp. 137-38; and Walker, “Legal Status of Free Blacks,” p. 392. Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 99-103; Bynum describes how North Carolina courts’ apprenticeship rulings “sometimes crippled the tenuous economic base of a fatherless or free black family” (p. 101) and how apprenticeship was “an instrument of racial control” (p. 99).

  20 Freeman v. Strong, 6 Dana 282 (Ky. 1838); Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, pp. 110, 376n23.

  21 Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, pp. 108-9.

  22 Brown, Beech Creek, pp. 72-73.

  23 On Henderson, see 1840 U.S. Census, Rockcastle County, Ky.; Kentucky State Register for the Year 1847, ed. Taliaferro P. Shaffner (Louisville: Morton & Griswold, 1847), p. 15; An Act to Authorise the Establishment of a Library in Rockcastle County, Acts Passed at the First Session of the Forty-First General Assembly for the Commonwealth of Kentucky (183 3), c. 137, pp. 115-16.

  24 Freeman v. Strong, 6 Dana 282 (Ky. 1838).

  25 Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” Geographical Journal 17 (1901), pp. 588, 594, 596. See also Wilma A. Dunaway, Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 140-46.

  26 Semple, “Anglo-Saxons,” p. 591. Information on Clarissa Centers has been compiled online by a descendant at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jude/index.htm.

  27 Contemporaneous accounts are quoted in John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), pp. 35, 47-48. On westward expansion generally, see D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800-1867 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993).

  28 Dunaway, Women, Work, p. 249.

  29 1850 U.S. Census, Clay County, Ky.

  30 Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, pp. 214-15; see also Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 4.

  31 Hodes, White Women, Black Men, pp. 62-63. See also Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, pp. 51-52.

  32 Hodes, White Women, Black Men, p. 3.

  33 1850 U.S. Census, Clay County, Ky.; Semple, “Anglo-Saxons,” p. 594; Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 151.

  34 State v. Cantey, 20 S.C.L. (2 Hill) 614 (S.C. Ct. App. 1835). On skin complexion in frontier America, see Conevery Bolton Valenčius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 230, 244; and Martha Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” American Historical Review 108 (2003), pp. 84, 99.

  35 1850 U.S. Census, Clay County and Knox County, Ky.

  36 1850 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.

  37 On overpopulation in Clay County and its effect on agricultural production, see Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, pp. 194-99.

  38 Ibid., p. 229.

  39 See Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript.

  CHAPTER FOUR: GIBSON: NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, 1850-55

  1 Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 44-45, 57; Chauncey Jerome, History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years (New Haven, Conn.: F. C. Dayton, 1860), pp. 134-39.

  2 Rollin G. Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 243.

  3 Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, May 25, 1850, box 1, folder 1, Gibson Papers, Tulane; Hart Gibson to William Preston Gibson, October 10, 1850, box 29, folder 10, Pettit Collection.

  4 Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, December 13, 1848, box 1, folder 1, Gibson Papers, Tulane; Tobias Gibson to Randall Lee Gibson, November 15, 1849, box 18, folder 128, Weeks Papers; S
amuel L. Cartwright, Treatment Instructions, May 10, 1850, ser. 2, folder 2, Gibson and Humphreys Papers; Sarah Thompson Gibson to Randall Lee Gibson, January 1850, Grigsby Collection.

  5 Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven, pp. 313-16; Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, September 19, 1848, box 1, folder 1, Gibson Papers, Tulane; Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, November 20, 1850, Gibson Papers, LSU.

  6 Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg, Four Years at Yale (New Haven, Conn.: Charles C. Chatfield & Co., 1871), pp. 298-99; Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven, p. 255. Randall Gibson’s Yale career is detailed in Mary Gorton McBride with Ann Mathison McLaurin, Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana: Confederate General and New South Reformer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), pp. 27-44.

  7 “Cattle Show and Fair,” Connecticut Herald, August 31, 1850, p. 3; Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White (New York: Century, 1905), pp. 1:27-29.

  8 Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven, p. 268; Charlton Thomas Lewis, “Poem,” in Poem by Charlton Thomas Lewis; and Valedictory Address, by Randall Lee Gibson, Pronounced Before the Senior Class in Yale College, June 16, 1853, p. 8, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library; Arthur Marvin Shaw, William Preston Johnston: A Transitional Figure of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943), pp. 35-36, 42; Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 215; Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, October 7, 1849, Gibson Papers, LSU.

  9 Calliopean Society Papers; Diary, 1843-1852, of James Hadley, Tutor and Professor of Greek in Yale College, 1845-1872, ed. Laura Hadley Moseley (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 266.

  10 Josiah Stoddard Johnston, Yale Diary, p. 1:59, Johnston Papers; Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, October 7, 1849, Gibson Papers, LSU; McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, pp. 43-44; George W. Smalley, “Randall Gibson,” Deke Quarterly 11 (1893), pp. 26, 27.

  11 Smalley, “Randall Gibson,” p. 27.

  12 White, Autobiography, p. 30; Calliopean Society Papers.

  13 Smalley, “Randall Gibson,” p. 26; Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), p. 1:71; Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociology (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854), pp. 239-40. On Southern proslavery ideology, see Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 2:93 8-92.

  14 Smalley, “Randall Gibson,” pp. 26-27; Bagg, Four Years at Yale, pp. 221-23; Calliopean Society Papers; McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, p. 41.

  15 Smalley, “Randall Gibson,” p. 28; White, Autobiography, p. 68; McBride, Gibson of Louisiana , p. 38; Randall Lee Gibson, “Valedictory Address,” in Poem, pp. 33-34.

  16 John Albert Granger, “Col. Hart Gibson,” p. 5, Hart Gibson Alumni Records; Tobias Gibson to Randall Lee Gibson, December 26, 1848, box 17, folder 121, Weeks Papers; Tobias Gibson to Randall Lee Gibson, April 16, 1854, box 29, folder 216, Weeks Papers; Tobias Gibson to Randall Lee Gibson, January 5, 185 [4], box 25, folder 179, Weeks Papers. See also McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, pp. 29-30.

  17 Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, October 10, 1852, Gibson Papers, LSU; Randall Lee Gibson to Tobias Gibson, July 22, 1850, Gibson Papers, LSU.

  18 See McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, p. 9.

  19 Ibid., pp. 13-15; Brabston v. Gibson, 50 U.S. 263 (1850); Tobias Gibson to Alfred Shelby, July 3, 1830, Grigsby Collection; “Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana,” Commercial Review of the South and West 2 (February 1850), pp. 146, 149; Clay Lancaster, Antebellum Architecture of Kentucky (1991), pp. 209-10. See also J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1953).

  20 McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, pp. 19-21; “Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana,” Commercial Review of the South and West 2 (February 1850), pp. 146, 150.

  21 McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, p. 25. Randall Lee Gibson’s Yale valedictory address echoes his father’s sensibility; see Gibson, “Valedictory Address,” in Poem, p. 26: “Not that educated men are expected to embrace every new-fangled notion, simply because recommended by novelty; and so on the other hand they are expected not to adhere to every old custom and notion on the ground merely that they are venerable with the dust of antiquity, but while subjecting every theory to the closest analysis, they are required to hold to what is true and discard what is false . . . The true and the good are at least as likely to be found in the present, as in the past.”

  22 William Winans, Funeral Sermons of Rev. Randal Gibson and Mrs. Harriet Gibson (183 8), pp. 13-14, 20, Houghton Library, Harvard.

  23 J. M. Gibson, Memoirs of J. M. Gibson: Terrors of the Civil War and Reconstruction Days, ed. James Gibson Alverson and James Gibson Alverson Jr. (n.p., 1929, 1966), p. 6; see also Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 95; McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, pp. 10-12.

  24 Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, ser. 2, folder 3, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.

  25 Ibid.

  26 Granger, “Col. Hart Gibson.”

  27 Calliopean Society Papers; McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, p. 41; W. P. Bacon, comp., First, or Septennial Meeting of the Class of Fifty Eight, Yale College (New Haven, Conn.: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1865), p. 89; Randall Lee Gibson to Hart Gibson, April 22, 1854, Gibson and Humphreys Papers; Shaw, William Preston Johnston, p. 41; Granger, “Col. Hart Gibson.” On Hart Gibson’s fashion sense, see Hart Gibson to William Preston Gibson, October 10, 1850, box 29, folder 10, Pettit Collection: “They have some of the strangest fashions I ever heard of at N.Y. Every little fellow that can walk alone wears a standing collar up to his ears & a gold watch with a chain almost to his knees. I of course have to conform in some degree to the fashion. I should think I would look quite strange in Lex[ington] with a collar about a foot long, nevertheless I wear these here & think nothing about it.”

  28 Randall Lee Gibson to Hart Gibson, April 22, 1854, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.

  29 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Self-Reliance and Other Essays (1841; reprinted Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1993), pp. 19, 26; Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.

  30 Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.

  31 Ibid.; Randall Lee Gibson to Hart Gibson, October 21, 1853, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.

  32 Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, Gibson and Humphreys Papers; Edward E. Atwater, ed., History of the City of New Haven to the Present Time (New York: W. W. Munsell & Co., 1887), p. 251; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 281; Theodore Parker, The Nebraska Question (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey & Co., 1854), pp. 50, 65; Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006), pp. 226-29; Cassius Marcellus Clay, The Life of Cassius Marcellus Clay (Cincinnati: J. Fletcher Brennan & Co., 1886), p. 209.

  33 Appendix to Congressional Globe, April 20, 1848, 30th Cong., 1st sess., p. 502; Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.

  34 Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, Gibson and Humphreys Papers; “New Publications,” Liberator, March 6, 1857, p. 38; see also Harvey Wish, George Fitzhugh: Propagandist of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943), pp. 200-201; C. Vann Woodward, “George Fitzhugh, Sui Generis,” introduction to George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (1857; Woodward ed., 1960; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (1969; reprint, Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988).

  35 O’Brien, Conjectures of Order; George Fitzhugh to George Frederick Holmes, March 27,
1855, Holmes Letterbook, Special Collections, Duke University; George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South (Richmond, Va.: A. Morris Publisher, 1854), pp. vi, 21, 88, 253-54, 257.

  36 Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, Gibson and Humphreys Papers; Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven, pp. 280, 317.

  37 Thomas A. Kinney, The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 174; “People’s Lectures,” New Haven Daily Palladium, March 15, 1855, p. 2; Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.

  38 New Haven Daily Palladium, March 22, 1855, p. 2; see also Wish, George Fitzhugh, pp. 132-35.

  39 New Haven Daily Palladium, March 22, 1855, p. 2.

  40 Ibid.; Conway, Autobiography, pp. 224-25; Fitzhugh to Holmes, March 27, 1855, Holmes Letterbook, Special Collections, Duke University.

  41 Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.

  42 New Haven Daily Palladium, March 23, 1855, p. 2.

  43 Ibid.; Wish, George Fitzhugh, p. 140; Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, Gibson and Humphreys Papers; Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 150-54.

  44 New Haven Daily Palladium, March 23, 1855, p. 2.

  45 Hart Gibson to Tobias Gibson, March 26, 1855, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.

  46 Wish, George Fitzhugh, pp. 140-42; Moncure D. Conway, Addresses and Reprints, 1850- 1907 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), p. 113; George Fitzhugh, “Wealth of the North and the South,” DeBow’s Review 23 (1857), pp. 587, 592, 593.

  47 Charles Sumner, Freedom National; Slavery Sectional: Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, on His Motion to Repeal the Fugitive Slave Bill, in the Senate of the United States, August 26, 1852 (Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1852), p. 15; Randall Lee Gibson to Hart Gibson, April 22, 1854, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.

  CHAPTER FIVE: SPENCER: JORDAN GAP, JOHNSON COUNTY, KENTUCKY, 1855