History of slavery in Kentucky
The history of slavery in Kentucky dates from the earliest permanent European settlements in the state, until the end of the Civil War.
Most enslaved people were concentrated in the cities of Louisville and Lexington and in the hemp- and tobacco-producing Bluegrass Region and Jackson Purchase.
Relatively few people were held in slavery in the mountainous regions of eastern and southeastern Kentucky, where they served primarily as artisans and service workers in towns.
Its farmers included independent, hardscrabble white farming families as well as plantation owners like those of the Deep South.
Kentucky had southern economic, cultural, and social ties to slavery and plantations, and engagement with northern free-state industrialism and also western frontier ethos.
[1] Ellen Scott was raised enslaved in Owensboro, in Daviess County, Kentucky, as property of a planter named Albert Ewell.
On the occasion of Lincoln's birthday in 1930, she recalled to a newspaper reporter her emancipation at age 12: "We could not feel the joy that folks think we felt.
"[2] Prior to 1792, Kentucky formed the far-western frontier of Virginia, which had a long history of slavery and indentured servitude.
After 1830, as tobacco production decreased in favor of less labor-intensive crops, much of the planter class in the central and western part of the state sold enslaved Africans to markets in the Deep South, where the demand for agricultural labor rose rapidly as cotton cultivation was expanded.
It was lucrative for slave owners to sell the people they enslaved to the deep south, shipping approximately 80,000 stolen Africans southward between 1830 and 1860.
[1] Kentucky's enslaved population was concentrated in the "bluegrass" region of the state, which was rich in farmland and a center of agriculture.
Fluctuating markets, seasonal needs and widely varying geographical conditions characterized Kentucky slavery.
[1] The enslaved people were a key part of the settlement of Kentucky in the 1750s and 1760s, as permanent settlers started arriving in the late 1770s, especially after the American Revolution, some brought slaves to clear and develop the land.
Early settlements were called stations and developed around forts for protection against indigenous peoples such as the Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Osage, with whom there were numerous violent conflicts.
[citation needed] Early farms in Kentucky tended to be smaller than the later plantation complexes common in the Deep South, so most slaveholders had a small number of slaves.
Beginning in the 1820s and extending through the 1840s and 1850s, many white families migrated west to Missouri, south to Tennessee, or southwest to Texas.
David Cobb of Lexington, Kentucky, and James Gray were hired to convey the crew down the Ohio River.
[9] As a result of the altercation, around 40 of the escaped slaves fled to the woods while the rest, including Patrick Doyle, were arrested.
[9] The slaves were subsequently returned to their enslavers while Doyle was sent to a state penitentiary for 20 years by the Fayette Circuit Court.
Conservative emancipation, which argued for gradually freeing the slaves and assisting them in a return to Africa, as proposed by the American Colonization Society, gained substantial support in the state from the 1820s onward.
While the convention was convened by anti-slavery advocates who hoped to amend the constitution to prohibit slavery, they greatly underestimated pro-slavery support.
In the turmoil following John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Fee and his supporters were driven from the state by a white mob in 1859.
When Union military lines moved into areas previously held by Confederates, slaveholders often fled, leaving property and enslaved people behind.
[15] The Kentucky legislature considered a conditional ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, to deny freedmen and other blacks constitutional rights and require them to leave the state within ten years of freedom.
