Kentucky Rising by James A. Ramage

Author:James A. Ramage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

11

The Experience of Slavery

Harriet Beecher Stowe studied slavery in Kentucky for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and one reason the book was a best seller and the drama based on it played to overflow crowds in the North was that she brought to life in fiction the most heartbreaking aspect of Kentucky slavery—the breakup of families when slaves were sold and taken away to the Lower South, many of them chained in coffles. The story begins on the Kentucky farm of Mr. Shelby, a kind master who loves his slaves and treats each one with respect. But the fictional Mr. Haley, a slave trader, comes to purchase slaves—many slave traders came to Kentucky from 1830 to 1860 to purchase slaves and take them South—and Shelby owes Haley money and is forced to sell Uncle Tom, a Christian family man with a wife and children and the leader of the slaves on the plantation. Haley takes Tom away, and, eventually, he is beaten to death by Simon Legree, an evil slave owner, in Texas. Stephen Collins Foster recognized the pathos in the story, and, from the point of view of Uncle Tom longing to return to his home in Kentucky, he wrote the song Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night, with the chorus:

Oh good night, good night, good night

Poor Uncle Tom

Grieve not for your old Kentucky home

You'r bound for a better land

Old Uncle Tom.

Foster later changed the lyrics and renamed the song “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” In 1928, Kentucky adopted it as the state song.1

Slavery was part of Kentucky society from the earliest beginnings. When

the first white settlers entered the area, they brought slaves with them. In 1773, when Daniel and Squire Boone attempted to settle several families in the Bluegrass region, they brought an unknown number of slaves. By the turn of the nineteenth century, there were 40,343 slaves, or 18.3 percent of a total Kentucky population of 220,955, and there was a steady increase in the number of slaves to 225,483 in 1860. However, the percentage of slaves in the total population reached a high in 1830 at 24 percent. A decline in slaves as a percentage of the population began at that point and continued until the end of slavery in 1865.2

With regard to slavery, Kentucky adopted Virginia law and practice, which viewed slaves as chattel property. A slave code was adopted in 1798 to regulate the activities of slaves with their masters and the wider community. However, these codes were not always enforced. Laws concerning slavery were added throughout the first half of the nineteenth century to include the right of owners to emancipate slaves in a will, the provision that owners were to be compensated for slaves executed for capital crimes, and the prohibition of sales of alcohol to slaves and free blacks. Slaves were prohibited from owning property, moving throughout the community without a pass, owning a firearm, and congregating. Kentucky law did not recognize slave marriages, and the children of a female slave were the property of her owner.

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