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295 30 Slavery, the Underground Railroad, and Hemp Production Before the Civil War Kentucky’s enslaved population was concentrated in the prime agricultural counties—the limestone lands of the Bluegrass and central and western Pennyroyal, and the alluvial river plains along the Ohio River near Owensboro.1 In 1790 Kentucky counted 11,830 slaves, who accounted for about 16 percent of the state’s total population. Only 114 free African Americans lived in the state at that time. By 1860, the eve of the Civil War, the state’s enslaved population had increased to 225,483, or 19.5 percent, while the free black population was 10,684, or less than 1 percent of the total population.2 Large Bluegrass farms, often settled and operated by migrants from Virginia or Maryland, produced tobacco and hemp as commercial cash crops, together with corn, wheat, oats, and market-garden crops as well as beef cattle, horses, and mules. The labor requirements for tobacco and hemp were seasonal, and although their production was punctuated by concentrated periods of work, such as the harvest, they were not as labor-intensive as rice, cotton, and sugar cane, the traditional lowland South plantation crops. Some Bluegrass farmers with surplus slaves rented them to neighbors to work as laborers by the day or the season. Periodically, slave dealers collected slaves from several owners and then marched them as a group, or coffle, to area slave markets. Buyers or dealers then transported slaves into the South for resale to the sugar cane plantations of south Louisiana or the cotton plantations on the fertile chalk 61,133 179,871 324,237 434,644 517,787 590,253 761,413 919,484 White 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 Year 114 741 1,713 2,759 4,917 7,317 10,011 10,684 African American Free 11,830 40,343 80,561 126,732 165,213 182,258 210,981 225,483 African American Slave 0.95 1.80 2.08 2.13 2.89 3.86 4.53 4.52 of African American Free as Percentage 16.19 18.26 19.82 22.46 24.02 23.37 21.48 19.51 Slave as Percentage of Total Population 73,077 220,955 406,511 564,135 687,917 779,828 982,405 1,155,651 Total Population Kentucky's Population, 1790–1860 296  The Maysville Road: A Landscape Biography lands of Alabama and Mississippi, where the Black Belt plantation district developed in the 1830s and 1840s.3 The Reverend Elisha W. Green, a slave in Mayslick in the 1820s, witnessed slaves being moved in this manner. “I saw in Mayslick another company of forty or fifty men, chained. . . . There were some five or six wagons loaded with women and children. The foremost man looked to be about seventy years old, and he was singing: ‘Hark from the tomb.’ Mrs. Ann Anderson, a white woman who was sitting at the window, could not help crying. Indeed it was enough to have moved a heart of stone. It was a scene upon which I looked with horror.”4 A two-story log building thought to have been used as a slave holding pen was discovered on a farm west of Maysville in Mason County in the 1990s. A slave market operated at Cheapside on the courthouse square in Lexington, and slaves were also sold in other area towns. Encouraged by a largely anonymous group of abolitionist activists living in Kentucky and north of the Ohio River in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, slaves from Kentucky and other southern states sometimes attempted escape. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 permitted slaveholders to reclaim their human property in any state—slave or free. The law also prohibited anyone from aiding fleeing slaves.5 Despite the law and concerted efforts by slave owners to prevent or deter slaves from trying to escape to the north, thousands of slaves from across the South, especially in the border states, The Reverend James Dickey witnessed a slave coffle passing through Paris in Bourbon County. About forty men chained together led the procession, followed by thirty women who were tied hand to hand. As though in mockery, the leading two men were forced to play violins, the second two had to wear cockaded hats, and “near the centre waved the ‘Star-Spangled Banner!—the Flag of the ‘Model Republic,’ carried literally in chains!” (The Coffle Gang, from Anon., The Suppressed Book about Slavery [New York: Carleton...

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