History of slavery in Kentucky facts for kids
The history of slavery in Kentucky began when the first European settlers arrived and continued until the end of the American Civil War. Kentucky was known as an Upper South or border state. By 1830, about 24% of its population were enslaved African Americans. This number dropped to 19.5% by 1860, just before the Civil War.
Most enslaved people in Kentucky lived in cities like Louisville and Lexington. They also lived in the rich farmlands of the Bluegrass Region and the Jackson Purchase area in Western Kentucky. These areas were big producers of hemp and tobacco. Many enslaved people also lived in counties along the Ohio River, where they often worked in skilled jobs or as house servants. Few enslaved people lived in the mountainous eastern and southeastern parts of Kentucky. Those who did usually worked as artisans (skilled craftspeople) or service workers in towns.
Kentucky was a border state, located between free states to the north and other slave-owning states to the south. It had strong economic and cultural ties to slavery, similar to the Deep South. However, it also had connections to northern industries and a frontier spirit shared with states like Tennessee and Arkansas.
When Kentucky joined the United States, it was deeply divided over slavery. The state faced conflicting pressures from its northern economic ties, westward expansion, and its support for slavery and southern-style plantations. This caused many Kentuckians to be unsure about slavery before, during, and right after the Civil War.
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Slavery in Early Kentucky
Before 1792, Kentucky was the far western part of Virginia. Virginia had a long history of both slavery and indentured servitude (where people worked for a period to pay off a debt).
In early Kentucky, slavery was a big part of the state's economy. However, how much slavery was used varied a lot across the state's different regions. From 1790 to 1860, enslaved people never made up more than a quarter of Kentucky's total population. After 1830, tobacco farming became less common, and less labor was needed. Because of this, many plantation owners in central and western Kentucky sold enslaved Africans to markets in the Deep South. There, the demand for farm workers grew quickly as cotton farming expanded. Selling enslaved people to the Deep South was very profitable for slave owners. About 80,000 enslaved Africans were sold southward between 1830 and 1860.
Kentucky's enslaved population was mostly in the "bluegrass" region. This area had rich farmland and was a center for agriculture. In the less populated, mountainous parts of Kentucky, where many independent farmers lived, owning enslaved people was much less common. In 1850, about 28% of white families in Kentucky owned enslaved African Americans. Only 5% of slave owners had 100 or more enslaved people. In Lexington, there were more enslaved people than slave owners: 10,000 enslaved people were owned by 1,700 slave owners. Lexington was a main city for the slave trade in the state. About 12% of Kentucky's slave owners enslaved 20 or more people, and 70 white families enslaved 50 or more. The use of slavery in Kentucky changed with markets, seasonal needs, and different geographical conditions.
Enslaved people were very important to the settlement of Kentucky in the 1750s and 1760s. When permanent settlers began arriving in the late 1770s, especially after the American Revolution, some brought enslaved people to clear and develop the land. Early settlements were called "stations" and grew around forts for protection against Native American groups like the Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Osage. There were many violent conflicts with these groups. Most early settlers came from Virginia, and some relied on enslaved labor as they built larger, more permanent plantations.
Plantation owners who grew hemp and tobacco needed a lot of workers, so they owned more enslaved people. Smaller farmers who grew different kinds of crops had fewer enslaved people. Farming just enough to feed your family could be done without any enslaved labor, though some subsistence farmers did own a few enslaved people and worked alongside them. Some owners also used enslaved African Americans in mining and factories, for work on riverboats and along the waterfront, and in skilled trades in towns.
Early farms in Kentucky were usually smaller than the large plantations common in the Deep South. Because of this, most slaveholders had only a few enslaved people. This often meant that enslaved people had to find spouses on neighboring farms. Many African American men had to live apart from their wives and children.
It was common for enslaved people to be "hired out." This meant they were temporarily leased to other farmers or businesses for seasonal work. This practice was common across the Upper South. Some historians believe that 12% of enslaved people in Lexington and 16% in Louisville were hired out.
Kentucky also had small but important communities of free Black people. By 1860, about 5% of Kentucky's Black population was free. Some free Black people even owned enslaved people. In 1830, this group held enslaved people in 29 of Kentucky's counties. In some cases, free Black people would buy their spouse, children, or other enslaved relatives to protect them until they could free them. After the 1831 Nat Turner's slave rebellion, the state government passed new rules against manumission (freeing enslaved people). Now, a special act from the legislature was needed to gain freedom.
Kentucky sold more enslaved people to other states than most other states did. From 1850 to 1860, 16% of enslaved African Americans were sold out of state. This was part of a larger forced displacement of over a million African Americans to the Deep South before the Civil War. Many enslaved people were sold directly to plantations in the Deep South from the Louisville slave market. Others were transported by slave traders along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to slave markets in New Orleans. This is where the saying "sold down the river" (meaning betrayed) comes from. Kentucky had more enslaved people than it needed because local farming changed, and many white families moved out of the state.
From the 1820s through the 1840s and 1850s, many white families moved west to Missouri, south to Tennessee, or southwest to Texas. The larger slave-holding families took enslaved people with them. These factors together made life for enslaved families in Kentucky more unstable than in some other areas.
Escaping Slavery
Since Kentucky was separated from free states only by the Ohio River, it was relatively easy for an enslaved person from Kentucky to escape to freedom. Famous people who escaped from slavery in Kentucky include Henry Bibb, Lewis Clarke, Margaret Garner, Lewis Hayden, and Josiah Henson. James Bradley, who was formerly enslaved, legally left Kentucky this way.
On September 17, 1826, in Bourbon County, slave traders Edward Stone and his nephew Howard Stone were among five white men killed. This happened when about 75 enslaved people were being taken downriver on a flatboat. Edward Stone had kept his enslaved people chained and shackled under his house in Bourbon County. In September 1826, a group of these enslaved people were marched to Mason County, where they boarded the flatboat headed to the Mississippi slave market.
David Cobb from Lexington and James Gray were hired to take the crew down the Ohio River. The boat stopped in Louisville, where a white man named Davis boarded. The boat had gone about 100 more miles when the enslaved people revolted. They killed the five white men and threw their bodies overboard. The 75 enslaved people, including men and women of different ages, tried to escape into Indiana. Indiana had become a state in 1816 with a constitution that banned slavery, though it still had both free Black people and some enslaved people.
There were also active Underground Railroad stations in Indiana. Two of these were along the Ohio River, bordering Kentucky and near Breckinridge County. In 1824, Indiana passed one of the earliest fugitive slave laws. This law meant that enslaved people who had escaped were considered property that could be taken back. Fifty-six of the enslaved people from the flatboat were captured and returned to Kentucky. They were held in the Hardinsburg (Breckinridge County) jail. A Baltimore newspaper reported that some of the enslaved people were taken to Maryland and sold. Three of them supposedly admitted taking part in the revolt. Nothing is known about the 19 enslaved people who escaped and made it to freedom. Five of the captured enslaved people were hanged: their names were Jo, Duke, Resin, Stephen, and Wesley. Another enslaved person named Roseberry's Jim was mentioned in a newspaper. According to the article, five enslaved people were hanged, forty-seven were sold, and the rest were brought back to Bourbon County.
Later, in August 1848, a group of 55 to 75 armed enslaved people ran away from Fayette County and nearby areas. This was one of the largest planned slave escape attempts in American history. A white man named Patrick Doyle was thought to have agreed to guide them to freedom in Ohio for money from each person. The enslaved people traveled through Kentucky until they reached Bracken County. There, they were stopped by about 100 armed men led by General Lucius B. Desha.
During the fight, about 40 of the escaped enslaved people ran into the woods. The rest, including Patrick Doyle, were arrested. The enslaved people were returned to their enslavers. Doyle was sent to a state prison for 20 years by the Fayette Circuit Court.
Ending Slavery
The movement to end slavery started in Kentucky by the 1790s. At that time, a Presbyterian minister named David Rice tried to include a ban on slavery in Kentucky's first two constitutions (written in 1792 and 1799), but he was not successful. Baptist ministers David Barrow and Carter Tarrant formed the Kentucky Abolition Society in 1808. By 1822, this group began publishing one of America's first anti-slavery newspapers.
A different idea, called "conservative emancipation," gained a lot of support in Kentucky from the 1820s onward. This idea suggested slowly freeing enslaved people and helping them return to Africa. This was proposed by the American Colonization Society. Cassius Marcellus Clay was a strong supporter of this view. His anti-slavery newspaper was shut down by an angry crowd in 1845. However, another anti-slavery newspaper, the Louisville Examiner, was successfully published from 1847 to 1849.
Politics and Slavery
In Kentucky, slavery was not as central to the economy as it was in the Deep South. Much of Kentucky had small farms, so enslaved labor was not as critical for profits as it was for the labor-intensive crops like cotton, sugar, and rice in the Deep South. However, Louisville became a major slave market, which brought in a lot of money.
Controversial laws in 1815 and 1833 limited the bringing of enslaved people into Kentucky. These were some of the strictest rules of any slave state. The Nonimportation Act of 1833 banned bringing any enslaved people into the state for commercial or personal reasons. However, this ban was often ignored, especially in counties near the Tennessee border.
Slavery was the main issue that led to Kentucky's third constitutional convention in 1849. Anti-slavery supporters hoped to change the constitution to ban slavery. But they greatly underestimated how much support there was for slavery. The convention ended up being filled with delegates who supported slavery. They wrote what some historians consider the most pro-slavery constitution in United States history. It even removed the ban on bringing enslaved people into the state.
After this defeat, abolitionists lost political power during the 1850s. Anti-slavery newspapers were still published in Louisville and Newport. But support for slavery was widespread in Louisville. Thousands of households in Louisville owned enslaved people, and the city had the largest enslaved population in the state. Also, for years, the slave trade from the Upper South had helped the city grow and become wealthy. Through the 1850s, Louisville sold 2,500-4,000 enslaved people a year to the Deep South. The trading city grew quickly and had 70,000 residents by 1860.
John Gregg Fee started a group of abolitionist schools, communities, and churches in Eastern Kentucky. This was where the fewest slaveholders lived. After John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Fee and his supporters were forced out of the state by a white mob in 1859.
Slavery During the Civil War
Kentucky did not officially end slavery during the American Civil War, unlike the border states of Maryland and Missouri. However, during the war, more than 70% of enslaved people in Kentucky were freed or escaped to areas controlled by the Union army. The war weakened the system of slavery. Enslaved people quickly learned that the Union army offered authority and protection. When Union military lines moved into areas previously held by Confederates, slaveholders often ran away, leaving their property and enslaved people behind. Most of these abandoned people immediately considered themselves free. The war broke down the control that slave owners had over enslaved people. By 1862, it was common for enslaved people in Kentucky to ask for wages for their work. If they were refused, they often ran away. Enslaved people also joined the Union army, which gave them the rights of free men. By the end of the war, Kentucky had sent 23,703 Black soldiers into federal service.
The Kentucky legislature thought about approving the Thirteenth Amendment (which would end slavery) with a condition. This condition would deny freedmen and other Black people constitutional rights and require them to leave the state within ten years of gaining freedom. Instead, Kentucky rejected the Amendment. Even after the Civil War ended and the Confederacy fell, slaveholders in Kentucky continued to believe that slavery would still exist. They continued to hold and trade enslaved people through most of 1865. Slavery legally ended in the U.S. on December 18, 1865, when the 13th Amendment became part of the Constitution. Kentucky did not officially approve the 13th Amendment until 1976.
See also
In Spanish: Historia de la esclavitud en Kentucky para niños
