Slavery's Borderland by Matthew Salafia

Author:Matthew Salafia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

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Following his escape, former Kentucky slave Henry Blue explained that “some poor, ignorant fellows may be satisfied with their condition as slaves, but, as a general thing, they are not satisfied with being slaves.” With this pithy comment, Blue made a careful distinction between the idea and the practice of slavery. He articulated how slaves both rejected the legitimacy of bondage and tolerated their conditions as slaves. Certainly, being well fed or properly clothed did not convince enslaved African Americans that slavery was preferable to freedom. Thus to African Americans freedom and bondage were about more than living conditions. Nonetheless there was a relationship between living conditions and slave/free status. Henry Bibb, when offering an account of his motivations for escape, wrote to his former owner, “You had it in your power to have kept me there much longer than you did. I think it is very probable that I would have been a toiling slave on your plantation today, if you had treated me differently.” Bibb rejected the legitimacy of bondage; yet he admitted that his living conditions, and most importantly changes in those conditions, affected his personal motivations for rebellion. Historians have devoted thousands of pages to explicating the methods African Americans employed both to reject and to endure their bondage. In the borderland, where geography intermingled with slaves’ personal motivations, the reasons for and methods of tolerating slavery were both unique and profoundly ordinary.9

As a slave in Madison County, Kentucky, south of Lexington, Lewis Clarke hired his own time, provided for his own room and board, and enjoyed considerable geographic mobility. In order to retain his liberties as a hired slave, Clarke denied his desire for freedom. As he later explained, “Now if some Yankee had come along and said ‘Do you want to be free?’ What do you suppose I’d have told him? … Why, I’d tell him to be sure that I didn’t want to be free; that I was very well off as I was. If I didn’t, it’s precious few contracts I should be allowed to make.” Clarke certainly wished for freedom, but he also wanted to remain in Kentucky because his close proximity to the border made gaining freedom a tangible possibility. So he put on the mask of a happy slave in order to protect his current situation. Only the threat of sale to the Deep South prompted Clarke to make his escape in 1841.10

During his flight, Clarke encountered a Baptist minister who suspected that he was a runaway and, according to Clarke, attempted to “read [his] thoughts.” In order to allay the minister’s suspicions, Clarke emphasized his favorable situation as a slave, noting, “I wondered what in the world slaves could run away for, especially if they had such a chance as I had had for the last few years.” This apparently satisfied the minister, who believed that a slave who enjoyed so many privileges would not run away. Clarke closed this tensely comic conversation by adding, “I do very well, very well, sir.

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