1910 Lucy dies of pneumonia at home in Lexington. She is buried next to her husband.
Notes
Introduction
1. Philip Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 375.
2. See Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 98–105.
3. See Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), for an in-depth discussion of the establishment and emergence of slavery in North America and in the European colonies.
4. See John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 126–44; David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010).
5. Quoted from the constitution of the Kentucky Abolition Society in Lowell H. Harrison, The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1978), 18–37.
6. Henry Clay, Speech of the Hon. Henry Clay before the American Colonization Society, in the Hall of the House of Representatives, January 20, 1827 (Washington, DC: American Colonization Society, 1827), 7–8.
7. See David Walker and Peter Hinks, eds., David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World [1831] (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2000).
8. George Moses Horton, The Hope of Liberty: Containing a Number of Poetical Pieces (Raleigh, NC: Gales and Son, 1829), 8–9. http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/horton/horton.html.
9. Delany argues that the founding fathers chose to place people of African descent at the bottom of the political hierarchy because that group was identifiably different from those of European ancestry:
The United States, untrue to her trust and unfaithful to her professed principles of republican equality, has also pursued a policy of political degradation to a large portion of her native born countrymen, and that class is the Colored People. Denied equality not only of political but of natural rights, in common with the rest of our fellow citizens, there is no species of degradation to which we are not subject.
Reduced to abject slavery is not enough, the very thought of which should awaken every sensibility of our common nature; but those of their descendants who are freemen even in the non-slaveholding States, occupy the very same position politically, religiously, civilly and socially, (with but few exceptions,) as the bondman occupies in the slave States.
In those States, the bondman is disfranchised, and for the most part so are we. He is denied all civil, religious, and social privileges, except such as he gets by mere sufferance, and so are we. They have no part nor lot in the government of the country, neither have we. They are ruled and governed without representation, existing as mere nonentities among the citizens, and excrescences on the body politic—a mere dreg in community, and so are we. Where then is our political superiority to the enslaved? None, neither are we superior in any other relation to society, except that we are de facto masters of ourselves and joint rulers of our own domestic household, while the bondman's self is claimed by another, and his relation to his family denied him. What the unfortunate classes are in Europe, such are we in the United States, which is folly to deny, insanity not to understand, blindness not to see, and surely now full time that our eyes were opened to these startling truths, which for ages have stared us full in the face.
Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, ed. Toyin Falola (1852; reprint, New York: Humanity Books, 2004), 44–45.
10. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
11. Joy Degruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Milwaukee: Uptone Press, 2005).
12. See Ed Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America's First National Sport (Rocklin, CA: Forum Prima Publishing, 1999).
13. See the following texts for discussions of notions of black inferiority and imagined racial destiny: W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2002); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Racial Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic Civitas, 1998); and Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
14. Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, Delivered at the Unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1876,” in Foner, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, 619–20.
1. Into the Bluegrass
1. For an in-depth examination of the numerous slave rebellions and revolts throughout American history, see Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 86–87; Charles Johnson and Patricia Smith, Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998), 94–96; John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 77–78.
2. See Kenneth P. Bailey, The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792: A Chapter in the History of the Colonial Frontier (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1939).
3. See Marion B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760–1891 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 2003), xi; Richard H. Collins, Annals of Kentucky or Important Events in the History of Kentucky, 1539–1874 (Covington, KY, 1874), 15. Gist's survey and his contact with the Indians on behalf of the Ohio Land Company would be one of the root causes of the French and Indian War (1756–1763). The French believed, correctly, that the English were attempting to claim the territory and disrupt their relationship with the Ohio Valley Indians.
4. See William E. Foley, Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004); Landon Y. Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); Robert B. Betts, In Search of York: The Slave Who Went to the Pacific with Lewis and Clark (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1985).
5. Clark mentions York in his journal, but the entries are not related to what York observes, feels, fears, or dreams. However, based on Clark's records, we can deduce that York was a very capable man. Poet Frank X Walker has written an imaginative account of the life of York in his book Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004).
6. This style of hunting took hunting parties away for weeks or months at a time. Thomas D. Clark explains: “A party of forty hunters from the Yadikin Valley in North Carolina…were called ‘Long Hunters’ because of their long stay in the Kentucky wilderness.” Thomas D. Clark, A History of Kentucky (Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1988), 31–34.
7. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 8. Also see Michael Lee Lanning, African Americans in the Revolutionary War (New York: Citadel Press Books, 2000), 32; Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 131.
8. Edward Braddock to Robert Napier quoted in Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 8.
9. Benjamin Quarles, “The Colonial Militia and Negro Manpower,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45, no. 4 (March 1959): 644.
10. Steven Channing, Kentucky: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 8–9.
11. See Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), for an in-depth discussion of how Kentucky changed.
12. According to historians, it was future president George Washington who set the land rush in motion in 1770, with his land claim in the Big Sandy Valley.
13. Clark, History of Kentucky, 33–40; Aron, How the West Was Lost, 64–70; Channing, Kentucky, 9–16.
14. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 25.
15. The father of future U.S. Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan was one of the explorers in Harrod's party. James Harlan, along with his brother Silas, traveled with Harrod and settled near the Salt River, where the brothers constructed a house from the local stone. See Loren P. Beth, John Marshall Harlan: The Last Whig Justice (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 8–9.
16. Zachariah F. Smith, The History of Kentucky (Louisville: Courier Journal Job Printing Company, 1886), 29. See also Clark, History of Kentucky, 34–38; Channing, Kentucky, 16; John E. Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 413–15.
17. Virgil A. Lewis, History of the Battle of Point Pleasant (Charleston: Tribune Printing Company, 1909).
18. Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 8.
19. Philip Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), 2:15–19.
20. The Intolerable Acts have been defined as the laws implemented by England to pay for its wars with Spain, France, and the native peoples of North America.
21. W. B. Hartgrove, “The Negro Soldier in the American Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 1, no. 2 (April 1916): 119.
22. See Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 35–48.
23. Channing, Kentucky, 6.
24. Clark, History of Kentucky, 42.
25. See C. W. Webber, Romance of Natural History; or, Wild Scenes and Wild Hunters (Philadelphia: Lippincott and Grambo, 1852), 213–47; Lewis, History of the Battle of Point Pleasant, 118–19.
26. See J. Winston Coleman, Slavery Time in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), and Lucas, History of Blacks in Kentucky, for a discussion of the Captain John Cowan's census of the settlers at Fort Harrod, which found ten slaves over the age of ten and seven Negro children younger than ten years old.
27. George Washington Ranck, Boonesborough: Its Founding, Pioneer Struggles, Indian Experiences, Transylvania Days, and Revolutionary Annals (Louisville: John P. Morton, 1901), 10–13.
28. Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 55–57.
29. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 71.
30. Ibid., 68.
31. Channing, Kentucky, 32.
32. David Rice, Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy (New York: Samuel Wood, 1812), 7.
33. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 92; Clark, History of Kentucky, 65; Kleber, Kentucky Encyclopedia, 116–17; Ellen Eslinger, ed., Running Mad for Kentucky: Frontier Travel Accounts (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 36–37.
34. John Catanzarti, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 27:270–71.
35. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 95.
36. See Francis Fredric, Slave Life in Virginia: A Narrative by Francis Fredric, Escaped Slave (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2010), 19–31.
37. Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820–1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 3.
38. Henry Clay, Speech of the Hon. Henry Clay before the American Colonization Society, in the Hall of the House of Representative, January 20, 1827 (Washington, DC: American Colonization Society, 1827), 4.
39. David Walker and Peter Hinks, eds., David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World [1831] (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), 71.
40. Born in slavery to an African mother on Benjamin Turner's farm in Southampton, Virginia, on October 2, 1800, Nat Turner was recognized as a child with a special calling whose life was intended for some great purpose. Throughout his youth, Turner was frequently reminded of his special status by other blacks in his community and even by some whites, who recognized his uncommon intellect and thoughtfulness.
Like a majority of enslaved African Americans, Turner's religion played a significant role in his development as an individual and a community member. Moreover, his recognition and acceptance of the traditions of his community were necessary to the survival of memories of the past connected to Africa, to notions of freedom, and to a life filled with possibilities based on long-held traditions. His acceptance of the rituals and beliefs handed down and across generations allowed Turner to expand his faith in things unseen, which helped him understand how whites used slavery to justify their treatment of African Americans as brutes and human chattel. What is more, his growing knowledge of all things biblical and his increasing awareness of the world around him gave Turner visions of the violence to be committed under his leadership and how his actions would be embedded in the collective memory of both the oppressed and the oppressor. In The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), Turner recalls being divined by his community as a leader:
It had been said of me in childhood by those by whom I had been taught to pray, both white and black, and in whom I had the greatest confidence, that I had too much sense to be raised, and if I was, I would never be of any use to any one as a slave. Now finding I had arrived to man's estate, and was a slave, and these revelations being made known to me, I began to direct my attention to this great object, to fulfill the purpose for which, by this time, I felt assured I was intended. [Quoted in Scott French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 291.]
After a series of visions (and quite possibly a reading of David Walker's Appeal), Turner set out to pursue justice for abused and degraded blacks by ridding the world of those he deemed responsible for their torment: whites. On August 21, 1831, Turner and six other men of African descent marched across Southampton, leaving in their wake fifty-five dead white men, women, and children. No one was spared. By the time Turner and his band of self-appointed executioners were captured by the local militia, their numbers had increased to almost sixty. Turner escaped, but after three weeks of hiding in the woods surrounding Southampton, he surrendered without incident to Benjamin Phipps, a local farmer.
At his trial, Turner pled not guilty to charges of “making insurrection, and plotting to take away the lives of divers free white persons & co. on the 22nd of August, 1831.” Turner never wavered in his belief that his actions were both right and sane. After a short deliberation, Turner was sentenced to hang by his neck until dead, and that punishment was carried out on November 11. What happened next can only be attributed to the same institution that drove Turner to act in the first place. Local doctors claimed Turner's body and proceeded to dissect and dismember it. After their examination, they sold his skin to artisans, who fashioned it into money purses and wallets; his flesh was processed and sold as grease for various industrial uses; and his skull was displayed and studied as a curiosity.
African American historians would recognize Turner's efforts to avenge past abuses as heroic. He is considered one of America's most important freedom fighters.
41. U.S. census data, 1830.
42. Coleman, Slave Times in Kentucky, 142–47.
43. See Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 177–78; George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 88; Albert Bushnell Hart, The American Nation: A History, vol. 10, Slavery and Abolition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906), 124.
44. Jennie Holliman, Americ
an Sports 1785–1835 (Durham, NC: Seeman Press, 1931), 107–9.
45. Among the most noteworthy American gentlemen farmers was George Washington, who maintained a stable of quality horses at his Mount Vernon farm and at his home in Virginia. Prior to the Revolutionary War, Washington was one of many wealthy colonists who had the means to purchase blooded animals and establish a reputation as a breeder of fine stock. During the war, General Washington used his exceptional ability on horseback to lead the colonial forces against the British regulars. After the war, Washington began to improve his stock by purchasing whatever reasonably priced blooded animals he could find. Along with slaves to work his extensive farmlands, Washington needed the muscle of horses and mules to plow his lands, pull wagons and carriages, carry grain and feed to market, move supplies from one location to another, and provide basic transportation. In a letter dated December 30, 1792, Washington addresses the management of his Mount Vernon farm:
My horses too [in the management of which he professes to have skill] might derive much benefit from a careful attention to them; not only to those which work, but to the young ones, and to the breeding mares: for I have long suspected that Peter, under pretence of riding about the Plantations to look after the Mares, Mules, &ca; is in pursuit of other objects; either of traffic or amusement, more advancive of his own pleasures than my benefit. It is not, otherwise to be conceived, that with the number of Mares I have, five and twenty of which were bought for the express purpose of breeding, though now considerably reduced from that purpose, alone; should produce not more than six or eight Colts a year.
George Washington, The Writings of George Washington, vol. 12, 1790–1794, comp. and ed. Worthington Chaucey Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1891), 279.
46. South Carolina Jockey Club, History of the Turf in South Carolina (Charleston, SC: Russell and Jones, 1857), 16.
47. William Preston Mangum II, A Kingdom for a Horse: The Legacy of R. A. Alexander and Woodburn Farms (Louisville: Harmony House, 1999), 8; Dennis Domer, “Inventing the Horse Farm,” Kentucky Humanities, October 2005, 3–12.
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